In early 2014 I participated in a radio discussion on the need for comprehensive single payer healthcare reform on WIUP FM radio in Indiana, PA.  Eric Barker of the Center for Community Growth in Indiana, PA hosted the program.  I was on a panel with fellow Health Care for All PA Will Ferrell (not the […]

  The PBS program Religion and Ethics Newsweekly had a discussion of the ethics of social media sites like Facebook and OK Cupid to elicit a specific reaction from their users. I have written before about how sites like these manipulate news feeds either to tell you what they think you want to hear or […]

Post by FRONTLINE. The Frontline documentary Generation Like (which can be seen in it’s entirety here) gives a glimpse of the impact of the competition for likes, retweets, shares, and +1s in social media is changing teenagers.  It claims that they are manipulated by and manipulating it to gain fame and even money while unwittingly […]

The website and YouTube channel Science Hive has been created to answer basic questions about science, especially about biology.  It’s creator, Bee, is featured in the video above.  In it she gives a good definition of the difference between living and nonliving things.  In her next video whe gives a good explanation of mutations.   […]

Follow my blog with Bloglovin I’m kicking off the fourth year of this blog with a new video by the troupe Dancing Statistics which explains the concept of correlation very creatively.  At the top of this blog I’m also announcing this blog will also be listed on the blog referral site Bloglovin.  I encourage you […]

PodCamp Pittsburgh 8 is upon us this Oct 5 from 9am-4pm at Point Park University.  I won’t be able to present at it but I plan to be there.  This year is included a presentation on the NSA spying program and privacy in social media. I’ve posted the playlist from PodCamp Pittsburgh 7 which includes […]

Here is an update on my last post on NSA surveillance.  The magazine MotherJones has posted graphs on how often Google, Microsoft, and Twitter complied with NSA requests (along with other local, state, and federal law enforcement requests for data) for user data with Google (which owns blogspot, and YouTube) being most compliant and Twitter […]

Just one week after posting on the trial of Bradley Manning, the big news is Edward Snowden’s leaking of a domestic surveillance program to Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian Newspaper.  Naturally jaws are dropped in Congress and in the public.  Personally I am not surprised that we are tracked in this modern world where almost […]

The video of my session is now posted. Above you can see the video in it’s entirety (47 minutes) and below you can see the slides I presented and the video clip I showed in the presentation. It’s hard watching myself and I hope that I am my harshest critic. You can use the Gapminder […]

I don’t have anything to say about the Newtown shootings or the fiscal cliff.  I’ve written posts on those topics before on the mass shooting which occurred a mile from where I live in 2009 and on the debt ceiling talks which are now being made and rerun from July 2011.  In my last post […]