Unlike the past when technology eliminated some jobs but created others, the trend today is toward job elimination, according to writer Geoff Colvin. (“In the Future, Will There be Any Work Left for People to do?” by Geoff Colvin, Fortune, June 16, 2014, pgs. 193-200.)  The chang

Academia is busily stirring another tempest in a tea pot as it attempts to assimilate technology into the teaching of humanities.  The new approach is called digital humanities and the first problem is how to define it.  At the moment the term includes everything from transcribing l

Most of my travels on the internet involve research for my writing, my blog in particular.  Women’s rights issues interest  me, so I often find myself reading material about the Middle East.  Knowing about big data as I do, I shouldn’t have been surprised when one day an ad for

By now, the NSA has disabused us of the notion that an individual has a right to personal privacy.  To be honest, most of us already give it away through blogs like mine or the comments we make on social networks.  The Web is so much a part of our lives that we sometimes forget we a

Last week I had coffee with a contemporary.  She’s been a journalist for many years and though she’s in her 70s, she keeps current on trends.  Even so, she’s uncertain about whether or not she can get comfortable in a world without personal privacy. “I’m not sure I regret

One defense people make for big government is that it serves as a counterweight to big business.  Unfortunately, the last tax-payer bailout of the automobile and bank industries gives little support to that argument.  What’s more, recent revelations in Luke Harding’s new book, T

Writer Evgeny Morozov has given thought to the way collecting personal data on the internet has changed marketing strategies.  Based on our web searches, we consumers are targeted with messages that encourage us to spend more and more. (“The Mall,” by Evgeny Morozov, The New Repu

When Senator Diane Feinstein expressed her outrage at Edward Snowden because he’d failed to take his concern about the NSA through the proper channels and reached out to the press,  she was guilty of short term memory loss. In 2001, William Binney, a 30 year-old veteran of the agen

Edward Snowden’s revelations about our government’s indiscriminate spying has rekindled the debate about research and ethics.  Tom Leinster, a mathematician who teaches at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland challenges the opinions of some of his colleagues when they insist t

I admit I don’t understand much about software or how it connects us to the internet though I use my computer daily. That’s why I paused in my day to read an article by Neil Gershenfeld and J P Fasseau in which the authors predict that one day the virtual and the real world will m