A worrying number of science “journalists” are woefully incompetent when it comes to knowledge of the basics of the scientific methods they report. Sadly, the majority appear to be fond of uncritically reproducing press releases without reference to the original research. As we wouldn’t accept a political journalist who couldn’t point to China or India on a map of the world, so we shouldn’t accept such obliviousness to subject matter from our science journalists.
If you have an iPhone and use a case, take it off for a second. Just hold it ‘naked’ for a second, and remember how it’s supposed to feel.
Count me firmly in the No Case camp.
AV, incarnate via Optional Preference Voting, is a very important and positive potential change to the way the UK is governed. So I’m going to bug you all about it; feel free to ask questions by email.
tl;dr: You should vote Yes to AV because AV is fundamentally a better way of producing a parliament that reflects the country’s opinions than FPTP, which only works well with two candidates. AV produces more representative, engaging governance by removing the need for tactical voting.
Since I bought an iPod Touch in 2007, stashed away at the back of my mind has been an intention to make this site better on small screens. Finally, over the past week I’ve done this, partly to get a bit more of an idea about responsive design.
As we’ve created ever more devices able to access the “full web”—rather than the constraints of basic HTML or, god forbid, WAP—it’s become more and more obvious that designing for the typical desktop browser creates a decidedly sub-optimal experience for those on other devices, in particular phones with their dramatically smaller screens. This site has been fairly unpleasant to use on a phone for a long time.
Ars Technica reports the results of a study into students’ feelings on the morality of downloading music from p2p vs stealing a CD from a shop under the headline, Students: shoplifting CDs worse than downloading music via P2P.
Overall, the sample agreed that shoplifting a CD was morally wrong, they were socially influenced not to do it, and they felt a high obligation to obey the law. Comparatively, the students ranked downloading music from the Internet as much less severe on nearly every scale—their respect for the music industry was largely the same as the shoplifting scenario, but the rankings indicated that students feel significantly less deterred from stealing online, that it’s not as morally wrong, there’s virtually no social influence not to, and they feel no obligation to obey the law.