In order to bring more justice into the American criminal justice system, we may all need to point cameras at each other. That’s where a lot of the conversation is going in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting, which of course led to the days-long crisis in Ferguson, Missouri. The thinking goes that if police officers are all equipped with cameras that record every interaction with civilians, we may actually get better results from both ends of those interactions.... Read more
I work from home, but not because I wanted to stay home with the kids. At the time of the arrangement, I had just moved to Maine, this position opened up, and my employers were willing to give the idea of my staying in Maine and working remotely a shot, and it worked out. I’ve been very glad and grateful for it. While I know there are a lot of benefits to in-person interaction with one’s coworkers, and that there... Read more
If you use the Internet in a particular state in India, you might be jailed for pre-crime. I wish I was being overly dramatic, but it really does seem to be the case that a law amended earlier this month assumes authorities in the Indian state of Karnataka to have Minority Report-like precognitive powers, allowing them to arrest someone who they think might at some point violate their Information Technology laws. Let me back up a bit. What first caught my... Read more
There’s a lot of hand-wringing that goes on over the idea that smartphones are making turning us all into heartless, distracted bastards. There’s no activity more popular on the Internet than finding things to feel morally superior about, so you get silly, haughty videos like this one or people shaking their heads in disgust at parents looking at their phone while at the playground with their kids. How awful. I’d never do that. Pfft. We deal with it in our... Read more
Twitter has a lot of problems. It doesn’t seem to have the wherewithal to deal with abuse and harassment on its platform, it’s managed to antagonize the developer community by limiting anyone’s ability to make new apps and interfaces to the service, and, oh yeah, it still doesn’t really know how to make money for itself. But the core service is something truly valuable and truly simple, and in that simplicity it has been – dare I say it? Yes... Read more
I think that iMortal should have a podcast. The subject matter of the site is ripe for conversational exploration, and I have a number of friends and colleagues who would be great to talk to about the various topics that fall under this site’s (admittedly pourous) umbrella; technology, humanism, media, and culture. I feel that as the site’s author, I can better elaborate on my own thoughts, and explore new ones with guests and panelists. Less nobly, I am (or... Read more
In American counties considered the easiest in which to live, cameras, iPad apps, and jogging are among the subjects that residents are googling for. In the hardest counties to live in, it’s diabetes, guns, and the Antichrist. This is according to an analysis by the New York Times which used its own metrics to determine what the easiest and hardest places to live were, and then partnered with Google to determine what search terms correlated most strongly. Some of the... Read more
If Facebook’s algorithm is a brain, then Twitter is a stream of conscience. The Facebook brain decides what will and will not show up in your newsfeed based on an unknown array of factors, a major category of which is who has paid for extra attention (“promoted posts”). Twitter, on the other hand, is a firehose. If you follow 1000 people, you’ll see more or less whatever they tweet, at the time they tweet it, at the time you decide... Read more
The idea of Apple as a “cult” or “religion” is often expressed somewhat derisively, but there’s no doubt that for many, many people the company represents something beyond the products it produces, particularly when referring to Steve Jobs’s Apple in particular. When Jobs died, I wrote about how the grieving wasn’t exclusively about the loss of a man, but of an ethos, a way of thinking and working. Here’s John Gruber explaining that ethos back when Jobs resigned in 2011,... Read more
The Facebook algorithm, the “brain” which decides what content to feature, what content to bury, and what content to put in front of you, is being tested mightily of late. One writer tried to game the Facebook brain by disguising his posts as major life events in hopes of seeing them rise to the top. Another tried to overwhelm the brain (and himself) by clicking “like” on literally everything he saw. Elan Morgan had a different idea altogether. Instead of... Read more
iMortal
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In