A new company, Booktrack, is devising book-length soundtracks for novels and non-fiction. Is it a good idea? Or do we risk losing the serendipitous soundtracks that already accompany our reading?

Da kommt die jährliche Extremdosis an inspirierenden Eigenartigkeiten der Ars Electronica gerade recht. Das Linzer Festival für Computer, Kunst und Gesellschaft hat sich dem verschrieben, wofür die Engländer ein wunderbares Wort haben, das sich lose (und jugendfreundlich entschärft) mit Gehirngeschlechtsverkehr übersetzen lässt.

Rhythmisches Auflockern der Hirnwindungen ist Aufgabe und Anliegen der verspielten Vordenker des Digitalen, die in Linz ihre künstlerischen Arbeiten präsentieren. Denn positive Veränderungen brauchen die Chance, zu entstehen. Und wie man dies fördern kann, will das Festival heuer erforschen. Ein willkommener Gegenentwurf zum inneren und äußeren Reformstau.

Twitter is really my only experience of social media, so far. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I'd had access to some sort of agreeable social media in my early teens. I think I would really have liked it, so then I feel a little sorry for my younger self. Then I remember that all of that stuff might still be around, and I feel a huge relief that it isn't.


Age bias is "something that no [employer] talks about. But it's a reality in tech that if you're 45 years of age and still writing C code or Cobol code and making $150,000 a year, the likelihood is that you won't be employed very long.
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"If you're an unencumbered worker" -- that is, single with lots of time to work extra hours and attend training to update your skills -- "then you're 'young,'" she says.
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The difficulty for programmers is twofold: For one thing, the desired skills keep changing and changing again, requiring them to refresh their talents on a nearly continuous basis. And, unlike managers, programmers often don't have a clear career path within an organization.
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He was hired by the city of Alexandria 11 years ago to service a Cobol-based payroll system, with the understanding that the system was scheduled to be phased out within a year and a half (but that has yet to happen, O'Connor points out with some amusement).

Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.

The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was circa 1450, when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type. But if you go back further there’s a more helpful precedent for what’s going on. Starting in the first century A.D., Western readers discarded the scroll in favor of the codex — the bound book as we know it today.

Collide@CERN is an international competition that will run for a period of three years. Each year, artists working in different art forms will have the opportunity to take up a funded residency of up to three months.

Und jetzt die Masterfrage: Wozu brauchen wir – ‘im Internet’ oder sonstwo – eine Sammlung von persönlichen Daten aller Menschen, die sich in der Bundesrepublik aufhalten, ohne dass sie irgend einer Straftat verdächtig sind? Weil jeder von uns einen Kinderpornoring gründen könnte? Weil wir alle Sprengstoff herstellen wollen könnten? Weil wir organisierte Spontanhandlungen verhindern wollen? Oder geht es am Ende doch um illegale Datentransfers, Urheberrechtsverletzungen, für deren Nachweis kein Richter eine Spitzelgenehmigung erteilt, weil das eben keine schwere Straftat ist?

Also noch mal zum Mitschreiben: Verdachtsunabhängige Ermittlung ist das Kennzeichen des Überwachungsstaats. Es spielt keine Rolle, ob sie ‘im Internet’ oder sonstwo zur Anwendung kommt. Sie gehört verboten.

“@AnChVIE: Mirko Kovats erklärt uns die Welt der Wirtschaft: http://t.co/1pMIzLN”

These are the 17 most-watched Top Gear clips on the site. Is your favourite in there? http://t.co/2PVxbAv

This article will first introduce you to some of the different styles used for personal names, and then some of the possible implications for handling those on the Web.

From the company’s earliest days, Thomas Watson Sr. had lofty ambitions for its impact on the world. But it was his son who launched what became the shadow function of IBM: educating the world on the nature and potential of information, science and mathematics. This deeper, long-term educational mission was central to Watson Jr.’s notion that “good design is good business.” And central to that mission was the work of the Eameses.