Group items tagged

Jonathan Jones, physics professor at Oxford University and self-confessed "climate change agnostic", used freedom of information law to demand the data that is the life's work of the head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones. UEA resisted the requests to disclose the data, but this week it was compelled to do so.

Graham gave the UEA one month to deliver the data, which includes more than 4m individual thermometer readings taken from 4,000 weather stations over the past 160 years. The commissioner's office said this was his first ruling on demands for climate data made in the wake of the climategate affair.

an archive of world temperature records collected jointly with the Met Office.

Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. Similar efforts are currently proliferating under the broad rubric of “digital humanities,” but Moretti’s approach is among the more radical. He advocates what he terms “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.

People recognize, say, Gothic literature based on castles, revenants, brooding atmospheres, and the greater frequency of words like “tremble” and “ruin.” Computers recognize Gothic literature based on the greater frequency of words like . . . “the.” Now, that’s interesting. It suggests that genres “possess distinctive features at every possible scale of analysis.” More important for the Lit Lab, it suggests that there are formal aspects of literature that people, unaided, cannot detect.

Distant reading might prove to be a powerful tool for studying literature, and I’m intrigued by some of the lab’s other projects, from analyzing the evolution of chapter breaks to quantifying the difference between Irish and English prose styles. But whatever’s happening in this paper is neither powerful nor distant. (The plot networks were assembled by hand; try doing that without reading Hamlet.) By the end, even Moretti concedes that things didn’t unfold as planned. Somewhere along the line, he writes, he “drifted from quantification to the qualitative analysis of plot.”

Although the atmosphere at the Troxy was very genial, and Žižek generally enthusiastic about WikiLeaks (as he was in the London Review of Books article he published about it), there was a distinct tension between the rather standard Enlightenment rhetoric employed by Assange (more facts, a more complete historical record, better educated journalists)  and the significantly more radical conclusions the philosopher was drawing. This is why - whilst it should no doubt be read in a similar light as Žižek’s own remarks on his position during the conversation (I feel now like that Stalinist commentator: the leader has spoken, I provide the deeper meaning) - the ventured analogy nevertheless contains a kernel of truth beyond its bombast: defining the emancipatory significance of phenomena should not be left to the actors alone.

in response to Goodman's initial question on the significance of the Iraq war logs, Assange primarily emphasized the concrete revelations WikiLeaks had provided. He mentioned the 400.000 cables leaked, 15.000 previously unreported deaths revealed, a video of an American helicopter mowing down civilians, and so on. In contrast, Žižek went far enough to say that even if WikiLeaks had not revealed a single new thing, it should be considered game-changing. Why? Because of the very way it functions. For the philosopher, our democracies not only have rules regarding what can be revealed, but also rules which regulate the transgression of those first rules (the independent press, NGOs, etc). The contention then is that WikiLeaks operates outside both these sets of rules, and that there is the source of its power.

the reply was firmly anchored in the key trope Žižek has championed since his first major work in English: that ideology in today's "post-ideological" world is not dead, but rather more powerful than ever - alive not so much on the level of knowledge but in the ways it structures social reality itself.

Sony has worked to strengthen its information security systems, 'placing our highest priority on ensuring the security of our customers' personal information, and regaining their trust.' The Japanese electronics and entertainment giant has faced a series of cyber attacks and said more than 100 million accounts have been affected, making it one of the largest data breaches in the history of the Internet. Analysts say costs associated with the breach could be as much as US$1 billion (S$1.24 billion), but deeper damage to Sony's brand image could undermine efforts to link its gadgets to an online network of games, movies and music.

occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech. It’s a way of making sure the reader understands the point that (say) Gideon Levy wants to make as clearly as possible, while retaining the directness of the interview.

if somebody interviewed me and asked my views of Martin Amis, instead of quoting me as saying “Um, I think, you know, he got the figures for, uh, how many Muslims there are in Europe upside down”, they could quote instead what I’d written more cogently about him a month before, as a more accurate representation of my thoughts. I stress: I have only ever done this where the interviewee was making the same or very similar point to me in the interview that they had already made more clearly in print.

after doing what must be over fifty interviews, none of my interviewees have ever said they had been misquoted, even when they feel I’ve been very harsh on them in other ways.

What they found is that more than half the NAI member companies did not remove tracking codes after someone opted out.

At least eight NAI members promise to stop tracking after opting out, but nonetheless leave tracking cookies in place.

I take that to mean that the other 25 companies never actually said they would remove tracking cookies, it’s just that they belong to a fellowship that wishes they would. On the positive side, ten companies went beyond what their privacy policy promises (say that three times fast) and two companies were “taking overt steps to respect Do Not Track.”