Category: 4. Society-at-large
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Open Data is Moving, Slowly but Surely
I’ve been participating in various workshops and working groups on open data now. It is hard scrabble, but things are moving. Today I participated in a workshop of the open data task force of Bitkom which I am a member of. The highlight of the day was the participation of Saskia Esken who explained some […]
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Some Progress on Wikipedia Editing
Wikipedia has long been suffering from its rather raw “wiki markup” editing experience. The reason is that the underlying software is stuck in the mud and any progress is slow and painful. Right now there is some excitement over progress on the “visual editor” of Mediawiki. As you can see in the video below the […]
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Einladung zum 2. Offener IT-Gipfel — Offenheit, Innovation & Gesellschaft
Ich werde am 18.11. in Berlin auf dem 2. offenen IT-Gipfel mit einem Vortrag zu Open Source vertreten sein. Sie sind herzlich eingeladen, die Teilnahme ist kostenlos. Mehr Information zur Veranstaltung.
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Should Cars be Programmed to Make Life or Death Decisions?
With self-driving cars in our near future, I’ve seen more and more articles about the moral dilemma of what the car should do when faced with an impossible decision, for example, to either kill a grandmother or drive into a flock of children. In my mind, the pundits are getting it all wrong; the underlying […]
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Should Children Learn to Code?
According to the WordPress summary of my site, the most popular post in 2014 was “Should You Learn to Code?”, beating out the perennial favorite “The Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source Business Model”. Obviously, the broader the interest, the more readers. This morning I read about the call by a German politician to introduce mandatory programming […]
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Sexist Ads Alive and Well in 2015
I just saw an advertisement for software from an anti-virus company, homepage pictured below. The ad showed the woman flirting with the man (licking her lips, sliding her finger along the rim of the glass) while an overlaid text box was saying: “You don’t have to understand it, you just have to install it.” The […]