Misc

As someone who is interested in technology (old and new), here are a few of my go-to YouTube channels.  Broadly speaking, these cover current and historical trends in technologies.  I think what I enjoy about these channels is that the history of technology is yoked to the histories of people and cultures.  AudioPilz  The AudioPilz channel, home of shows like Bad Gear and Better Gear (but mostly Bad Gear;). We all love synthesizers, grooveboxes and drum machines but some of them are hated too. Let's take a closer look. Brace yourself for jams, video mashups, memes, real education, electronic music production enlightenment and all kinds of madness. Andrew Robinson  Journalist & Reviewer covering audio, home theatre, tech & design. Cathodic Ray Dude (CRD)  If I had to pick a theme, I'd say I try to make videos about things we tend not to think can be interesting. Vintage video gear is a big interest, but I've logged far more hours in the computer cock...

[see updates at the end of this article] I disagree with a fair chunk of Griffiths and co's work theoretically and methodologically. That's science. But Griffithsgate  goes beyond that and raises some uncomfortable questions about editorial bias and the very real consequences of carelessly applied research (see  Dorothy Bishop's  blog and Tom Chiver's  article in  Unheard ). In saying that, it is tricky to separate procedures from science because the rushed nature of the work means that it is riddled with contradictions. Like a political party trying to avoid the opposition, it is almost impossible to debate a moving target. For example:   Write about why data should be open , but don't share your own when requested .  Write about students and issues concerning plagiarism , then do the very same thing . That's all just procedural remember and long before getting to the actual science. I've previously written about the problems of publishing on an ...

We recently ran a little study to see what happens when you prevent a small group of students from using their smartphone for 24 hours. Participants were instructed to place their smartphone in a secure evidence bag. So what happened? Well not much really, they missed their smartphone.  As part of this study, we also asked participants to complete the Smartphone 'Addiction' Inventory (SPAI). Interestingly, a few participants who dropped out later in the study had fractionally higher SPAI scores. This may indicate that smartphone ‘addicts’ were unable to fully participate in the study and so discontinued, thus affecting our findings. However, this is unlikely given that smartphone addiction scales  do not align favourably with objective behaviour . It is worth noting that while this small number of participants were slightly more anxious at time 1 they were also on average, a bit happier. It's increasingly difficult to know exactly what these 'addiction...

*Updated 6/01/2014 [12th mobile] Hard to believe that I am now on my 11th mobile phone. Trying to convince my parents that I ' really needed ' a mobile phone at 13 years of age was a challenge in 1999. I also remember my mum being mortified as she contemplated the idea of me walking down the street ' talking to someone on the phone like a right poser'.  Anyway, after a quick Google image search, I have compiled my own mobile phone timeline. Enjoy.

Out of 28,000 teachers who qualified in 2010, just three individuals had a computer-related degree . This makes me wonder just how tech-savvy a lot of 10 to 15 year olds really are. When I was 10 in 1996, my parents purchased our first ever home computer. It had the latest Intel Pentium processor that clocked in at a whopping 120Mhz. To put that in perspective, most iPhones today run at ten times this speed.  Things were tricky at first. Windows 95 took awhile to get used to and most video game developers still preferred MS-DOS as a platform because it provided a more stable environment. Direct X was in its infancy and the Xbox was over a decade away. Microsoft's idea of Plug and Play technology rarely applied and/or worked.  Fifa 96 was a Christmas present that year, but due to MS-DOS being unable to correctly identify the computers CD-ROM drive or sound card, I didn't get to play it until February 1997.  When attempting to run the game, inste...