stuxnet

There is a brilliant article by Ed Barnes at FoxNews: ‘Mystery surrounds cyber missile that crippled Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.’ When I first read it, at the least when a third into the text, I would have thought it to be fiction, hadn’t I heard about ‘Stuxnet‘ before … and Wikipedia’s entry on it cites all in all 82 sources. It seems to me, that Barnes is a fan of William Gibson’s writing, that’s the one thing. The other thing is, that nobody can deny anymore that we are living in a cyberpunked world. Have two quotes, the first one … Continue reading

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timestamp

The basic text-editor which comes with Windows sports a, maybe little known, feature which can be put to good use. My daily routine of doing thick participation online involves the creation of a flat text-file for every day’s fieldnotes and -diary. The editor can do a bit of the documentation work for you. Open up “editor” and write “.LOG” as the first line. Now write into your text-file, save and close. If you reopen the file you will find a timestamp in the line beneath what you have written. Now write something more, save, close, reopen, and hey presto, another … Continue reading

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social sciences software licence madness

  The day before yesterday an ↑entry called GABEK was posted to ↑ethno::log announcing a new qualitative research method, additionally a link was placed to ‘the method’s website’ gabek.com. It was stated that the method could well be of use for the practitioners of sociocultural anthropology, and the readers were wished to have fun in learning more about the method at said website. Marked as a ‘plus’ it was said that ‘we’ could invite the method’s creator for giving a lecture at ↑my institute. At first glance this kind of posts is an instance of what the blogosphere is good … Continue reading

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visualcomplexity

  Graphical visualization of data is definitely ↵something I am fond of. For aesthetical reasons, but for pragmatic ones, too—sometimes. Anyway, ↑visualcomplexity is a great resource:  VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field. ↑[…] via entry at knowledging across life’s curriculum … Continue reading

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community express 2.0

Rex thankfully has pointed us at a piece of software written by his friend John Burton:  […] The program knows more about demographics than I do (the intricacies of birth spacing, for instance) and, most critically for me, the program understands the distinction between residence and descent, so you can do genealogical work that integrates with a regular household census. Perfect those pesky societies—which is to say every society—where people move around and live in different places. […] Read more about the program in ↑Rex’s post on Community Express 2.0 over at ↑Savage Minds. Then download it from ↑communityexpress.info—as I … Continue reading

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world wind add-ons

↑World Wind (see ↵world wind works) was released by NASA as Open Source Software, and quite naturally a ↑world wind community emerged, generating add-ons. See ↑The unofficial unofficial add-ons list, which includes download-links. There is much which can be put to good use, and things beyond. For example the ↑WorldWind 1.3 Deathstar addon—like Skall, the creator, said: “Useless, but somebody had to do it !” That’s absolutely right. … Continue reading

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world wind works

There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm’s length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns-all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff. Hiro has been thinking that in a few years, if he does really well in the intel biz, maybe he will … Continue reading

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