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Posts Tagged academia

Stumbling onto human computation

I have recently become a big fan of StumbleUpon. With a single click, you can transported to wild and wonderful things on the Internet based on recommendations from other web surfers. Using this service, I stumbled on this amazing video on human computation. After watching the video, I realize that StumbleUpon itself […]


Facebook fund: Amazing!

Today, Facebook made an amazing announcement: it will be giving away $10 million as small grants to individuals and start ups in order to fund the development of application for their site. Facebook is a social networking site that started life for college students only but has been continuously opening up. A few […]


Celibacy and “The Selfish Gene”

I have just finished Richard Dawkin’s “The Selfish Gene.” It was necessary reading, since I have argued the unpopular position that the limits to the theory of evolution are more significant than many care to acknowledge. (See how I got sucked into this debate here.) In a nutshell, I often find that evolution […]


“SLOPs” and the unintended irony of “freeps”

SLOPS were originally “self-selected listener opinion polls” and now often refer to today’s ubiquitous “self-selected online polls.” As I found out in today’s roundup on techpresident.com, Ron Paul’s supporters are defrauding every SLOP that they can find. They’ve been excluded from one straw poll for their antics, and succeeded in winning a different […]


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