During my commute home I like to listen to podcasts. The London School of Economics has a regular lecture series which it is gracious enough to record and podcast. The lectures are consistently interesting - although of inconsistent audio quality - and offer a fascinating glimpse into the minds of its speakers. Last night, the crackly audio gave way to a familiar voice; Nelson Mandela. In this …
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This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, all of the photos have fallen down the memory hole. So use your imagination. One of our missions in The Lab is to introduce the ideas of prototyping and rapid innovation into the business. That's a fairly hefty systemic change for any company - so how do we go about doing it? Paper aeroplanes. Yup.…
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I'm sure that the Word Of The Year for 2014 will be Polinfographic - a hideous portmanteau I've just constructed of "Political" and "Infographic". Infographics are the content-lite, citation-free, colour-heavy spurts of marketing jizz which have replaced the sound-bite as the political parties' weapon of choice. Voters, apparently, can't remember such complex ideas as "Education education…
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I don't like spam. I'm very careful always to tick the "do not pass my details on to 3rd parties" box on forms. So, when I do get SMS spam, I like to know who has been flouting the rules. See my previous investigation. A few weeks ago, I received this rather annoying message: I'm not a gambler - and I've never had a business relationship with Coral. So why are they sending me this tripe? …
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Just the look of those permissions is enough to break me out in a cold sweat! According to Lookout - the leading security solution for Android - it's a payware scam. No doubt ready to send a barrage of Premium SMS to drain my phone's credit. It's quite upsetting that a company like Yahoo would allow adverts like this on its networks. I understand that they have to look at millions of adverts …
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I don't often play games - and I rarely pay for Android apps. Blackbar got me to spring a couple of quid based on a single screenshot. That's it. Read a letter, type in which words have been redacted. If you get it right, you're rewarded with the next letter. I can't understand why this game hasn't been made before. There's literally nothing to have stopped this game being developed on…
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The UK has the notion of a "strict liability" law. If you are caught with a picture of child abuse - you're guilty of a crime. It doesn't matter if it was sent to you unsolicited, or misaddressed. Possession is the crime and there are no mitigating circumstances. On that cheery note, let's consider Twitter's new image embedding functionality. If your friends post a photo onto Twitter, you…
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A few days ago, I posted this animated gif that I'd created from the 3D Doctor Who Special. I created that gif manually, but I wondered if it was possible to create such an animation in an automated fashion. Turns out, it's pretty easy! This relies on ImageMagick - which is a powerful image manipulation tool. All of these scripts work on Ubuntu - and they should work on any GNU/Linux disto…
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I loved the latest episode of Doctor Who. What made it even better was the fantastic use of 3D. It had just enough "wow" moments to make the use of technology worthwhile - without totally overdoing it. I watched the episode live at home on my Panasonic TX-L37ET5B. After the broadcast, I wanted to watch it again. That's where the problems started. First, a quick lesson on how 3D TV…
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The horror of the quantified audience The cinema is on the deserted outskirts of Pinewood Studios. It's a wet and windy day — not unusual for England in late summer — and I'm here to take a look at the future of audience test screenings. My friend, Ross, has asked me to take a test drive of his company's newest way of destroying artistic integrity helping movie studios connect better with their …
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Earlier this year, I went to the annual "Ada Lovelace Day" lectures at Imperial College. There, a succession of impressive ladies demonstrated that women are perfectly capable of participating in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths/Medicine) careers. We all nodded dutifully - and applauded the women who had pushed back the boundaries of science and science communication. All was…
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Imagine, just for a moment, that the Government wanted to keep a record of everyone's sexuality. They need to know this detailed demographic data because it will be highly useful in civic planning. It will help them work out what provision needs to be made for sexual health services, how many children are likely to be born, how many schools to build, etc. You trust the Government, you voted…
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