2012 is the year that Europe shuts down its proto-Internets. First, the BBC announced that teletex was getting the axe and today France is shutting down the Minitel x.25 network. These technologies, both started in the late 1970s, were ahead of their times and, in many ways, may still be.

Small errors of history presented in this Guardian article sum up to a government-directed, top-down history of diffusion, learning & innovation. In any history of the British adoption of microcomputers, Sinclair should earn top billing for popular influence, so why was it ignored in favor of the BBC Micro?

A side-by-side textual comparison between the Terms of Service for DropBox, the Google Drive, and Microsoft SkyDrive, reveals that they are not materially different in the licenses granted, rights claimed or uses permitted.

I thought I’d follow-up ngram.sh: a script for extracting Google Ngram data with data sources for Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg ngrams. The ngram.sh script can easily be modified to extract your keywords from these databases too. Wikipedia Ngram data Title: Tagged and Cleaned Wikipedia (TC Wikipedia) and its Ngram Author: [...]

What is ngram.sh? The Google Ngram Viewer is a database browser used to chart the relative frequency of words or phrases. The data source is the Google Books database (sort of) and the graphic engine is Google Charts. It’s cool. It’s pretty. It’s hard to use for academic work because [...]

This is a short HowTo document for making a Facebook page and inserting an iFrame from your website into that page.

This article describes the use of a simple AJAX-powered webpage to display a (near) real-time feed from Twitter.

Aaaaarg.org is a human-generated index of pirated academic works popular among graduate students. This document is an introduction to how to use the system.

BBS Servers The BBS Corner’s Telnet BBS Guide is an online directory of dial-up and telnet accessible Bulletin Board Systems, updated and published monthly (the map below is generated from the September 2010 list. The Synchronet BBS List is published by one of the last remaining BBS-software vendors, and only [...]

In a recent post entitled “Open letter to anti-vaccinationists“, at the Disease of the Week blog, immunology researcher Thomas Tu sought to open dialogue by telling his personal story. Based on Tu’s premise that with vaccination opponents are rational and reasonable, and in recognition of the movement’s emphasis on doing [...]

Teaching Assistants (TAs) frequently trade tips for discovering plagiarism in the papers they grade. While google has made it easy to catch the lazy copy-paste form, many of us recognize that cheaters with financial resources can buy term papers. The following chat occurred on TopMarkEssays.com, an essay mill which as “among the premier essay writing companies in the world”.

How to opt-out of Facebook ‘Instant Personalization’ and why you might want to. This is a death watch for the anonymous Internet, unless we seize back our relationships and decentralize social networking. \o.O/

Contra the claims that American birthright citizenship derives from a “misinterpretation” of the 14th amendment, I find more evidence in US Supreme Court rulings, before and after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, to support birthright citizenship than to support the right of citizens to vote, or the right of transnationals to own private property.

A qualitative study using Social Network Analysis to investigate the social relations and the political economy of Network Neutrality.