...My heart's in Accra

The Economist has an online feature this week on Digital Nomads, people for whom mobile connectivity has become a central part of life. The piece features three videos, with the CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jan Chipchase of Nokia in Tokyo, and a podcaster and IT worker in Mumbai. The last of these is the most interesting - Abhishek Ashok Kumar documents a week in his life via voicemail, photos ....

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Seed: Out of the Blue BlueBrain is an ambitious project to model interconnected neurons with highly precise digital models. Between the "wet" work done to create accurate simulations and the programming, the scale of the task is beginning to look immense. A digital brain sometime soon? Not without major breakthroughs - "The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the ....

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Scamorama: book explains how to get into scambaiting as a hobby - Boing Boing Cory Doctorow posts a favorable review of a book about scambaiting. The comment thread is very interesting, evenly split between people who think scambaiting is funny and worthwhile and those who find it cruel and loathesome (tags: 419 email nigeria africa scambaiting) The Phoenix > Lifestyle Features > White hunters, black ....

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There’s nothing like the term “cyberwar” to capture a reader’s attention. For those who grew up on “Wargames”, “Sneakers” or William Gibson novels, the term conjures up images of heroic hackers in shadowy basements, frantically tapping on keyboards in a life and death struggle against the enemy on the other side of the glowing CRT screen. It’s a vision that was compelling to senior people in the US Air ....

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It’s pretty rare that I finish reading a dense, academic book four hundred pages long and find myself wishing it were just a bit longer. Paul Starr’s “Creation of the Media” ends with a sort of cliffhanger - he offers an in-depth history of the emergence of newspapers, the telegraph, the telephone, movies and radio in America, then stops abruptly with World War II, the emergence of FM radio ....

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I’ve become a big fan of chef Anthony Bourdain, first through his snarky, obnoxious and profane books about the restaurant industry and food around the world, and more recently through his excellent television show, “No Reservations“. The show portrays Bourdain travelling around the world - or sometimes around the corner - in search of unique culinary experiences. Much of the time, the show makes the case that you should ....

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Oh man. Google Insights for Search is good fun. I’m supposed to spend this week finishing a number of writing projects. But I spent almost all today running different searches and being basically stunned at how much data’s available through the interface. I mentioned earlier today that Google makes “related” search information available - there’s much deeper information available through the CSV interface, giving fifty associated terms for most ....

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