Latour; The Last Critique

Harper’s Magazine for April 2004 has reprinted an essay by Bruno Latour on “The Last Critique” that examines the role of critique. Latour starts by noting how “social construction” has been coopted by the right to undermine calls to deal with global warming. The right uses critical arguments to call good science into question in a way not anticipated by critical theorists. The problem is a general one with the left – what do we do when our methods are used against us? What do we do when criticism and dissent become reactionary?

What I don’t understand is Latour’s turn at the end to Turing. He sees in Turing’s paper on AI a way forward for critique.
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Google Labs

Google has just changed their interface. They now point to a “more” section with more services. Google Labs is one of the new services which has a number of interesting experimental projects including one that allows you to volunteer processing for academic use – like the SETI screen saver, but a generic service. Now they should try a Beacon-like volunteer archiving project. See my note Freenet and Beacon.

Vivisimo Clustering Engine

Vivisimo Clustering – automatic categorization and meta-search software is a meta search engine with a great outliner like interface that lets you move through lots of hits. They gather hits from other engines and cluster them into a hierarchy that can be browsed. The idea is obvious once you try it for searches where you want to manage lots of hits. Thanks to Matt for this.
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A history of computers

A History of Computers is a site that takes a broad view of the history of computers. It includes a page on Ramon Lull and his significance, for example. There aren’t as many entries for modern computing advances, but a good spread over time.

Update: Thanks to Jacinda, I was alerted to the fact that the link above is not longer working. You can still see the site using the Wayback Machine.