Several weeks ago, the popular message board Reddit announced that it was making a policy change to ban all “suggestive or sexual content featuring minors.” Owned by Advanced Publications, Reddit has made a name for itself in part by its hands-off, pro-free-speech, let-the-users-decide, and self-police approach. In fact, before the policy change, the only rules of […]
As the red carpets, champagne flutes, and stressed out assistants are rolled, boxed, and…well, rolled…from the Grammys to the Academy Awards, it might be a good time to reflect on our award culture. I am particularly interested in our propensity to pile awards upon those whom we’ve already rewarded. For example, at the Grammys, the […]
[Cross Posted on my Personal Blog] It has been a strange couple of days in #GAMEDEV land. For those that haven’t followed Double Fine’s Adventure on KickStarter, now would be a good time to start. The short story is that a small studio run by a game development luminary employing other game development legends managed […]
In the past year I have been preoccupied by the politics and globalization of cultural production. This might come from being located in Ireland where the European headquarters of Google, Facebook, eBay, Gala Networks and Activision-Blizzard et al. are located. It also links to our discussions on this blog about who gets to construct the […]
The president, secretary, and immediate past president of the International Mathematical Union released a statement, February 8, 2012, challenging academic publishing giant, Elsevier, to rethink their approach to (some might say monopoly stranglehold on) access to academic scholarship. You can find their statement here: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/a-more-formal-statement-about-mathematical-publishing/ Even though the signatories represent themselves as individuals, rather than […]