We've recently been told quite a lot about the activities of the US National Security Agency in monitoring internet communications. Much of it could be described as "stuff you might have feared, but that's a bit depressing to have confirmed". For people outside the US, one perhaps surprising thing is that the US government seems… Continue reading “It didn’t violate the First Amendment because Americans weren’t among the people targeted”
Tag: uk
iPads in schools
Fraser Spiers remarks, in a review of the Google Nexus 7 tablet: My experience with two years of iPad in school is that the iPad can cover 99% of everything we want to do with a computer in school... the iPad can replace the computer suite I think the radical nature of his observation has… Continue reading iPads in schools
Hyvästi, Sibelius
This week saw the sad news that the UK office responsible for development of the music score-writing software Sibelius is to be closed down. Maintenance of the software will be moved elsewhere, at least according to its owners Avid, the former video-editing software company that expanded madly throughout the professional audio and video world during the 2000s and… Continue reading Hyvästi, Sibelius
Journalist’s First-Person Plural
Mark Easton for the BBC: Do we have a completely mistaken view of what our landscape is like? ... The lesson might be that we need to celebrate the truth about our green and pleasant land. Or perhaps it simply tells us we really should get out more. This is a great example of what… Continue reading Journalist’s First-Person Plural
Software Carpentry
Elsewhere on my tour of the north-east, I've been helping out this week at the Software Carpentry boot camp at Newcastle university. These events are aimed mostly at postgraduate research students who need to write software for research. They try to provide just enough training in real-world software development techniques to get people started with… Continue reading Software Carpentry
Phew!
I'm delighted to be able to say I completed the first Marathon of the North in Sunderland yesterday. I hinted at this in my previous post, but midweek before the race I was feeling terrible—I'd had colds and aches; my last training run on Thursday was stereotypically awful, with bad cramps and a sore right… Continue reading Phew!
The Breakfast Post 