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Category Archives: Science/Technology

SEO: Google’s Hummingbird algorithm from a content strategist’s perspective

Posted on 2013.11.27 by winterSmith 12 comments

Marketing and Search aren’t different things anymore, if they ever were. Google recently implemented their new “Hummingbird” organic search algorithm, perhaps the company’s most significant overhaul in more than a decade. Thomas Claburn at Information Week explains that Hummingbird is an expansion of Google’s Knowledge Graph, which was “introduced last year as a way to help its search engine understand

PowerPoint is making us dumber and damaging our businesses

Posted on 2013.11.24 by winterSmith 13 comments

Yes, PowerPoint sucks. Here’s why, plus some suggestions about how to fix the problem. Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly

Our psychopath Congress

Posted on 2013.10.17 by winterSmith 7 comments

Government shutdown, debt crisis reveal how much GOP has in common with other sociopaths… Is this to be an empathy test? Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil. Involuntary dilation of the iris? I believe Philip K. Dick had it right in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Technology had, in that not-so-distant future, created androids that were

The New Constitution: comprehensive statement of principles (draft)

Posted on 2013.08.29 by winterSmith 4 comments

The original plan when we began this project was to offer the amendments individually, invite discussion, then produce a final document. The course of the process, though, has made a couple things clear. First, there needs to be a period to discuss the entire document in context, and second, while the original “Bill of Rights” approach perhaps had a certain

HobbyWeek: The Denver Garden Railway, Colorado’s coolest railroad

Posted on 2013.07.14 by winterSmith 4 comments

WikiPedia’s List of Hobbies page is a long one – over 170 entries. Included are some you’d expect: cooking, birdwatching, knitting, stamp collecting, all manner of sporting activities, etc. There are also some you may not have thought of. For example: Chainmail making Conlanging (artificial language construction – think Esperanto and Klingon) Locksport (the sport or recreation that aims to

ArtSunday: You can take the boy out of the working class, but can you take the working class out of the boy?

Posted on 2013.05.12 by winterSmith 2 comments

As I’ve noted before, I grew up working class in the South. My neighborhood, my school, my family and friends, it all oscillated between “redneck” and “white trash,” and yes, there’s a difference. I wrote not long ago about the challenges facing those of us trying to climb the socio-economic ladder when nothing in our upbringing had taught us which fork

The new Mailbox app for iPhone and iPad: so far, a waste of time

Posted on 2013.03.20 by winterSmith 14 comments

Like many of you, I had been hearing about this new app called Mailbox. The buzz said it was a killer mobile app that was in nearly every respect superior to the default e-mail program in iPhone and iPad. So I went to the App Store and signed up, only to be told that I was in line behind a

Google Glass: Welcome to the end of privacy

Posted on 2013.03.11 by winterSmith 37 comments

If you haven’t yet seen Mark Hurst’s piece on Google Glass over at Creative Good, you need to. You really, really need to. A lot of times cool new gadget and service roll-outs mainly just affect the manufacturers and the people with the cash to buy them. Sure, there can be collateral damage – World of Warcraft widows, for instance –

What must the world’s data growth curve look like?

Posted on 2013.01.24 by winterSmith 2 comments

Vertical, pretty much? In 1993, during my first semester of doctoral work at the University of Colorado, we had a guest speaker from one of the federal administrations in a class talking about this newfangled thing called “the Internet.” (There are a number of US agencies in Boulder, and I can’t remember which one he was from. NIST, maybe.) The

Has NASA discovered life on Mars? If so, what are the implications?

Posted on 2012.11.21 by winterSmith 26 comments

Something is up with the Curiosity rover mission. Except nobody will tell us what it is. But they’re sure acting like it’s a big deal. It seems NASA and the Curiosity rover have found something exciting and nerd-tastic on Mars, but the space agency’s scientists are holding back for now, despite how painful it appears to be for them. NPR

The most important lesson we should all learn from the 2012 election

Posted on 2012.11.13 by winterSmith 8 comments

“You idiot! Get back in there at once and sell, sell!” As we set about the process of compiling and canonizing the 2012 election post-mortem, one thing we keep hearing over and over is how utterly stunned the Romney camp was at their loss. Republicans across the board apparently expected victory – the conservative punditry seemed certain of it – and

Elections are educational! 14 things we wouldn’t have known without Campaign 2012

Posted on 2012.10.23 by Bonesparkle 3 comments

Everybody seems to be so negative about campaign season. They hate the ads, they hate the mudslinging, they hate the lying, they hate the candidates. Not me – I LOVE campaign season. Why? Because it’s an opportunity to learn stuff that not only didn’t I know before, but that I’d never learn any other way.

Changing science fiction, changing the world: Scholars & Rogues honors William Gibson

Posted on 2012.10.10 by winterSmith 32 comments

I have been known to say that William Gibson is arguably the most important author of the past 30 years. That’s a mouthful of an assertion, especially since we’re talking about a genre writer, I know. But even if I’m wrong, I’m not off by much. The man who more or less invented Cyberpunk, then abandoned it as quickly as he

How digital is transforming politics: a special report from Mashable that’s well worth a look

Posted on 2012.10.09 by winterSmith Leave a comment

Unless you’ve been off-world for a few years, it’s not news that electronic media technologies are exerting a dramatic impact on our political sphere. However, being generally aware of the fact and having a more detailed understanding of the hows and whys, that’s another thing. Our good friend Josh Catone and his colleagues over at Mashable have just released a

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind….

Posted on 2012.08.25 by winterSmith 2 comments

It was July 20, 1969. I was eight years old and, as I recall, I was supposed to be in bed. But my grandparents got me up and sat me down in front of our little black and white television. Watch this, they said. This is important. Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon, is dead at