Tag Archives: Pakistan

Using Data to Find Bin Laden

Where they thought he was and where he was. Great piece — Geographers Had Predicted Osama’s Possible Whereabouts – ScienceInsider (thanks Daily Kos- Geographers predict Osama’s location) which tells the story of Thomas Gillespie, a UCLA geographer who, along with colleague John Agnew and a class of undergraduates, authored a 2009 paper predicting the terrorist’s… Read More »

Osama bin Laden’s Death on Twitter

(Updated timeline to include subsequent accounts) There was, by all accounts, no Internet or phone access to Bin Laden’s compound. Had there been, might he have known about the attack in advance from social media? This depends on what was being said on twitter, and when. Although lots of people in Pakistan are on Facebook,… Read More »

The Missed Call: The Decade’s Zeitgeist?

By Jeremy Wagstaff (this is a longer version of an upcoming syndicated column.) When people look back at the last decade for a technology zeitgeist they may choose SMS, or the iPod, or maybe even Facebook. Me? I’d choose the cellphone call that rings, briefly, and then is silent. It’s one of those social phenomena… Read More »

Time to Give the Telephone Back to the Cellphone?

Was interviewing a guy intimately involved in the mobile phone industry the other day, and we were comparing the various features of our sophisticated smartphones, when he suddenly leaned over and said, “Off the record, but this is my favorite phone.” And he showed me this: Nokia 1100, photo Mobile Phones UK The Nokia 1100,… Read More »

Don’t Turn the Poppy Into a Stick

Nothing to do with technology this, but it is to do with racism, multiculturalism, and my old country, Britain. A recent piece by Carol Gould of FrontPage magazine: The First Step to Britishness Is Your Poppy The poppy is a symbol of the terrible loss of life in World War I in the fields of… Read More »