Category: Tech Talk

Miscellany of questions and information tidbits on day-to-day interaction with technology

Has PLDT been depriving its customers of available capacity all this time?

March 16, 2020March 16, 2020 benign0 7 Comments

One of the good things about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it reveals what business organisations are actually capable of given a call to step up the quality and performance of their products and services. According to a Rappler “report”, it turns out top national telco Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) company has “more than…

Business, Tech Talk

Can you solve these calculus problems for Pi Day?

March 15, 2020 Anthony Quilon 2 Comments

March 14, or 3.14 in the U.S., marks Pi Day, an annual celebration of one of the world’s most famous icons of nerd culture: the irrational number pi. Founded in 1988 in San Francisco by physicist Larry Shaw, this date was selected because of the numerical date (3.14). In a bid to put the pi…

Science, Tech Talk

Unless social media changes, it will continue to make people dumber instead of smarter

January 7, 2020 benign0 7 Comments

Social media is proving to be less and less effective at delivering across important messages in an increasingly complex world. The trend towards more digestible but, as a consequence, less substantial content shared on social media started back in the mid- to late-2000s when “microblogging” sites like Twitter started ramping up in popularity. As more…

Society, Tech Talk

Time for Globe and Smart to stop giving Filipinos unlimited Facebook access

November 3, 2019 benign0 7 Comments

It’s time. Many Filipinos and their “thought leaders” have been criticising the role social media giant Facebook had supposedly been playing in skewing political chatter. Many argue that it had become a platform for “disinformation” and “fake news”. More importantly — in particular, to the oligarchs who are losing money in their once-profitable media businesses…

Lifestyle, Media, Tech Talk

A nice Artificial Intelligence project: ASKLENI.COM or LENIBOT.COM

June 27, 2019 benign0 6 Comments

I realised recently that the domains AskLeni.com and LeniBot.com are available for the taking as of this writing. There’s an idea right there for an interesting project or thesis for Computer Science students — building an artificial intelligence (AI) that can generate Leni-speak. The AI could work off a digitised body of public statements from…

Education, Tech Talk

Jeepneys remain a constant reminder of how backward and fundamentally WEAK the Philippines is

June 3, 2019 benign0 55 Comments

It is the 21st Century. Yet the most iconic symbol of the Philippines remains the jeepney. Once hailed a triumph of “Filipino ingenuity”, it now persists as a stark reminder of a failure to develop engineering excellence at a time when engineering excellence is an even more important foundation upon which global competitiveness could be…

Culture, Development, Tech Talk

On Continuous Publication, Updating Articles and SEO

February 23, 2019July 24, 2019 Khayri R.R. Woulfe 14 Comments

In February 2019, the Philippines’ National Bureau of Investigation arrested the CEO of Rappler, Maria Ressa, over a cyber-libel case filed against her by businessman Wilfredo Keng. Ressa’s camp argued that the case is was invalid due to the fact that the alleged article that caused the suit was published months before RA 10175 Anti-Cybercrime…

Crime, Media, Tech Talk

The Philippine Government should shut down Facebook and make Maria Ressa happy

February 12, 2019February 12, 2019 benign0 15 Comments

If we take the time to sift through what some personalities in the “journalism” and corporate “news” media communities have been screeching about, it would seem that Facebook is increasingly regarded as the source of all forms of misinformation nowadays. Indeed, in the Philippine setting, nowhere is this idea more aggressively promoted than in the…

Media, Tech Talk