Mozilla Festival is many things to many people. For me, it’s mainly encapsulated by a feeling. That feeling is passion for sharing joy in technology, tempered by a sense of responsibility to curate the web as a community space. I find trying to explain the festival in any more detail than that makes the description … Continue reading
Tag Archives: technology
Events: Think, Drink, Do and the London Quarterly Technolgy Briefing
I went to two tech events this week and I thought you might like to know a little about them. On Monday I attended Think, Drink, Do run by an innovation agency called Paper. The idea is to get together of an evening and do a little of all three. There were three talks to … Continue reading
Global Moves Word Cloud
These are word clouds based on my book Global Moves! Designed with Wordle, they’re not just keywords arranged in a pretty pattern: they also provide a visual representation of the frequency of terms in the text. I wasn’t really surprised by the results but some things came out much more clearly than I expected–and other … Continue reading
Sounds Like It to Me: Am I a Woman in Tech?
While I was at yet another Women in Technology event last night (this one called “Tech Shouldn’t be a Boys’ Club”, a panel discussion aimed at getting women interested in Entrepreneur First), I was struck again by how many women either don’t think they have the chops to be in technology or (like me) are … Continue reading
Showing You the World: Data Visualization
Data visualization isn’t something most people get all het up about. This is a pity, though, because we live in a world that is swimming in a sea of data. More than at any time in the past, massive amounts of information are being collected, sorted, collated and used. Where is it getting used? Governments, … Continue reading
Proceed with Caution: the Dark Side of Data
So recently my life is full of tech talks. First I went to this Girl Geek Dinners Social and Economic Development Through Technology series of talks. I was a little nervous about going, actually, because it’s geared towards women in technology and I thought I might not be enough of a programmer to fit in. … Continue reading
The Colossus
It’s hard to imagine, now, a life before the internet. Of course I do in fact remember a life before the internet–I remember getting our very first home computer, setting it up out of the box. I remember the sound of the modem as we connected. Nothing like now–and that was less than 20 years … Continue reading
Offloading Memory
A few weeks ago, an article in Science on how search engines are changing the nature of memory became very popular in the news. Specifically, if people know that they can easily look answers up instead of remembering them by rote, their recall of the answers themselves declines while their memory of where to find … Continue reading
Computing Anthropology
Lately I’ve been spending a LOT of time at the computer. The vast majority of my life, in work and entertainment, has revolved around this screen recently, in exactly those kinds of scenarios that writers like Faranheit 451 and Brave New World and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? got all worked up about. This … Continue reading
Sampling London’s Delights
So my mum and my aunt came for a visit from the States. This was my aunt’s first time overseas, and she was very excited to see London. However, imagine my surprise when I worked out what their favourite part of the visit was. My mum brought her Apple laptop over with her, and I … Continue reading
In a Merry Hour: Caitlin E McDonald 