Tag: information processing

don’t make me raise my voice!

For years there have been jokes about whether computers are male or female. (There are many variations on the theme, this link shows just one.) But has anyone ever actually tested a computer’s response to the different kinds of violencia de género (gender violence) as the Spanish insist on calling domestic violence?

Yes, computers are delicate mechanisms, and, if you physically mistreat one, it will no doubt break down eventually. But what about verbal abuse?

At last we have a – partial – answer:

You have been warned: don’t shout at your computer (or at least, don’t shout at your disk drive).

Fortunately, I think it’s still all right to make snide remarks.

books to look cool

According to a story on the BBC website, Don’t be 404, know the tech slang,  new words and expressions are entering the language, driven by modern technology such as Oyster cards, the internet, mobile phones and “textese”.

This probably won’t come as much of a surprise to many of us already happy to include abbreviations like b4, u, @ and wld in our msgs in an attempt to keep the costs down, even if we baulk at l8r and draw the line at ur, wat or y?.
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journalism for beginners

Yesterday I mentioned the 1939 Spectator diarist’s fear of what might happen when the newly invented cheap ball point pen got into the hands of the “inexpert and frankly incompetent”. Of course we’ve gone way beyond that now.

Now, anyone who owns a digital camera thinks he is a photographer; anyone with a computer is a journalist and anyone with a mobile phone is an on-the-spot reporter. And very few of us have any professional training in journalism.
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e-phemera

While designing course content recently, I’ve been looking at some of the implications of email and blogging. One thing that particularly strikes me is the lack of realisation among most people that what is written on-line is automatically archived long term, perhaps even permanently.

I’ve been posting to usenet news groups for nearly ten years now, and one of my initial concerns was the fact that my thoughts and ideas could appear on millions of screens around the world. Fortunately, that thought bothered me a lot, Continue reading “e-phemera”

reflections on inflections

A Spanish friend was telling me about an email he’d received from his ex.

What I heard – Dijo que intente perdonar lo que pasó – was a lot different from what he actually said – Dijo que intenta perdonar…

I (mis)understood that she was asking him to try to forgive her, and thereby apparently taking responsibility for what happened, whereas in fact she was saying she was trying to forgive him, but laying the blame squarely at his door.
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