Real-life Frogger
“I was like, this is a really bad idea,” said Fried. “Let’s do that!”

“Europe’s “Little Ice Age” may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague, according to a new study.” (BBC)

I haven’t yet tested whatshouldireadnext.com but I hold out great hopes for it.

“A new search engine for programmers promises to alleviate that problem by making it easier to find and share code. That in turn could increase programmers’ productivity and give a fresh boost to the open-source movement.
Krugle, which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network.” (Wired)

“In a recent study of 30 undergraduate students, researchers from the University of Chicago and New York University said the tone of an email message was only correctly interpreted 50 per cent of the time.
Psychologists Nicholas Epley and Justin Kruger paired the students off and gave each a list of 20 statements about general topics such as campus food and the weather and were asked to e-mail the statements to a partner introducing either a serious or sarcastic tone.
The senders of the messages expected their partners to correctly interpret their tone nearly 80 per cent of the time, but in fact they only scored just over 50 per cent, said the report in Wired.
Those attempting to interpret the message believed they had scored 90 per cent accuracy, according to the results which have been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.” Age

“The Age’s report on the greenhouse row, in which leading scientists assert they have been muzzled for trying to lay their science and their expert opinion before the public that funded them, is the latest development in an alarming trend in which our science is being taken away from us – because somebody deems we ought not to know of it.
This trend is pervasive in our scientific institutions today. For various reasons, including political influence, commercial influence, managerial pressure, institutional control, publisher influence, stakeholder pressure, national security and bureaucratic interference, scientific findings and opinion are increasingly withheld. The consequences could be grave, both for Australia and for science.” (Age)

This article on Radia Perlman as the ‘Mother Of The Internet’ starts with a situation familiar to lots of women in IT, but her work (and her perseverance) is really inspiring.
“Radia Perlman had a solution for an information routing problem. Unfortunately, no one was listening.
It was the mid-1970s, and Perlman was a software designer for computer network communication systems

“A leading US digital rights campaign group has warned against using Google software which lets people organise and find information on their computers.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the latest version of Google Desktop posed a risk to privacy. ” BBC

“Online reference site Wikipedia blames US Congress staff for partisan changes to a number of political biographies.
Computers traced to Capitol Hill removed unpalatable facts from articles on senators, while other entries were “vandalised”, the site said.” (BBC)

Looks like Google’s China deal has taken effect:
Check out http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen versus http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen