Rhododendrites

Woes

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I had to disable comments.

This blog has been drowning in a deluge of comment spam these past few months despite my catchaing effrorts. Recently Google marked it as a dangerous site. Horrifying.

One of the downsides of deciding to script my own site (as opposed to using a WordPress or Blogger kind of service) is that now I actually have to figure out authentication or something in order to fix commenting...which I don't have time to do. SO comments disabled for the time being.

My apologies to anyone who left an actual comment recently. It wasn't feasible to sift through the 3000 or though spam posts to look for legitimate ones.

Now that I'm not instantly depressed by spam when I go to write something here, we'll see a resurrection!

Report: DDoS Attacks on Independent Media and Human Rights Sites

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Last week the Berkman Center released the report "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites." It's the product of a project I was privileged to have been a small part of this past summer, alongside Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, Jillian York, and John Palfrey.

The gist: The Internet provides an amazing forum for expression that has dramatically changed the ways in which ordinary people can produce, consume, and communicate information. Sometimes those who wish to suppress certain opinions--for example, those of human rights advocates under oppressive regimes--do so through the use of denial of service attacks. The effects of such methods, which seek to disrupt access to certain websites by overloading them in some way, range from a slowing of traffic to a total loss of data and/or extended downtime (permanent in rare instances). The report addresses historical, technical, and political aspects to these attacks, examining their nature, incidence, and efficacy, giving many examples and attempting to provide recommendations for recourse, preparation, and prevention to sites who might fall victim.

Who knew such a topic would garner such mainstream media interest? It's been mentioned by Slashdot, PC Magazine, Computer World, New Scientist, the BBC, Al Jazeera (Qatar), PC Pro, IT Pro, UPI, the Inquirer, Washington Post, Information Week, Sol (Portugal), Christian Science Monitor, Irrawaddy (Burma), Boston Globe, and IT News.

Released on 2010.12.20, it was, of course, quite timely given the WikiLeaks "cablegate" debacle, with pro- and anti-WikiLeaks groups utilizing denial of service attacks on high-profile targets. So timely, in fact, that many of the comments on Slashdot implied the report was coming to the rescue of the big corporations who were being attacked for actions taken against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. (In which case this would be an impressively speedy 66 pages).

Now the 29th, I'm coming to this conversation fairly late. I'd just like to link to a few relevant bits by the authors ...

Ethan posted a valuable follow-up to the report on his blog. It's particularly important in that it points out how recent events actually provide cause for reconsidering one of the report's recommendations (that you might be safer being hosted by an internet giant like Google....or Amazon).

More on the research and its relationship to the WikiLeaks happenings can be found in: Hal's post, Ethan's Q&A with CJR's Laura Kirchner, and John Palfrey's blog.

Semester Wrap-Up (aka Reentry into the World)

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Phew. First semester of my first year in the CRDM program at NCSU has come to an end.

Overall I'm pretty happy, despite having to now pick up the pieces of my life that have fallen into disarray over the last month.

I got to do a bit more work with Wikipedia, which I remain obsessed with and manage to relate to a surprisingly broad range of academic conversations--to the point that it, along with my undying love for Google, may have constructed a good chunk of my classroom persona (which is ok with me). Most interestingly I did a rhetorical analysis of its community's ethos, which I hope to develop over the next months. Taking a course in rhetoric has served to, more than anything, highlight the vast landscape of things I don't know about rhetoric. Writing about it through this now only 70% opaque lens has caused me a little bit of discomfort about my treatment of the term in the last paper I wrote on Wikipedia. There, though I intended the article mostly for the new media/media studies/sociology/cultural studies crowds and made no pretense of providing a sound rhetorical perspective, I committed a newbie mistake of using "rhetoric" to simply mean something like "propaganda" or "demagoguery," which is really only one aspect of the discipline--and one of the less interesting ones at that. Thankfully I don't think it takes away from the meat of the old paper--only discrediting my knowledge of rhetoric to rhetoricians by the very invocation of the term.

The other big project I took on traced the history of artificial memory over the last 2600 years and all of its mental, mechanical, mystical, and ultimately digital manifestations. For the amount of research I did, starting with Frances Yates's Art of Memory and working outward into computers, psychology, encyclopedias, the occult, universal languages, utopias, mind uploading.....it could have been dissertation length. I'll probably have to chop it up and focus on a particular angle a bit more, but I hope to put it out there at some point because it really is very interesting stuff.

My TA and RA also went well. I helped with Relational Communication, teaching one class of it, and have been researching the rhetoric of the War on Terror, which has been educational, fascinating, sobering, and, unfortunately, renewed a certain vitriol that led me to write off politics in 2004. Maybe that's a good thing?

Next semester's classes: Communication in a Networked Society, Intro to Cognitive Science, and Quantitative Methods. I'm excited. I'm also teaching a class: Intro to Public Speaking, which I haven't taught before. I think it's an easier load, but not easy by any stretch of the imagination. Life as a doctoral student is so far one of the best and most horrible things I've attempted :)

Pixel Cityscapes

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I'm a softy for pixel art. Needless to say, this collection is really exciting.

PIXEL CITYSCAPES

I love the range of styles he exhibits: dark, cold, and corporate; decaying; majestic reverence for grand structures; plastic and depthless; abstract; hot and antagonistic; claustrophobic; mysterious light shows...

The one thing markedly missing from every single image is any trace at all of humanity. While there are implications of space, these are clearly not places. They may be inspirational, but not interactive.

I want to be able to imagine what it would be like to inhabit these cities, but I just can't. Because these are fingerprints independent of identities (simulacra).

...Which isn't necessarily a bad thing! I'm not at all denigrating the power and importance of aesthetics/image. I just found it interesting that I was so taken with these cities not as attractive representations of actual cities but as exquisite celebrations of urban archetypes.

[I'll abstain from referencing Warhol or Baudrillard here because I don't hate the people who are kind enough to visit my blog].

If you're into pixel, video, or net art I'd also recommend perusing the artist's many other Flickr collections.

Poofy Cork Is Not Easily Googleable

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Computers and the Internet have made many facets of my life easier. Getting hopelessly lost in an unfamiliar city is a thing of the past. I rarely have to count cash. If I want to get a message out to the world, I can do so instantaneously. I can shop for the best pizza deals and coupon codes in my area, customize a pizza, and pay for it in a minute or two, then watch it progress through its prep, baking, and delivery phases until it gets to my door. I CAN FIND THE ANSWER TO ANY PIECE OF TRIVIA ANY TIME, ANY PLACE.

But one area these advances have not helped me is in the realm of basic around-the-house handiwork. I'm not even talking about plumbing or building a deck. I have unthinkable amounts of information at my fingertips at all times and am very good at navigating what's out there, but I can't seem to manage cutting strips of cork such that they properly fit the cabinet shelves they're supposed to line. (Even after I got the size about right, it was all poofy).

Some years ago I bought some wood, nails, screws...I don't remember what exactly, but I was intent on building a bookcase. I didn't want anything special, just something that would hold books. Maybe some DVDs, too.

Utter.
Failure.

Whether or not society is moving forward from gender roles such as "the man does the fixing stuff," the inability to do so is still totally emasculating. And we won't even talk about car repair.

There are many, many how-to websites that attempt to address the problems I encounter. Lots of them are written by freelancers who don't actually know what they're doing. The others just don't seem to help me most of the time. They just never appear to address my situation.

I don't think that I'm clumsy, uncoordinated, or lacking in fine motor skills. I can make more than one chess move per second, am pretty good at racquetball, can cook a few things, and so on. The scary thing is: maybe my technological abilities have left lacking the skills necessary to focus on unforgiving mundane tasks. If you discount subjective successes and failures when it comes to social interactions, there aren't a whole lot of activities I partake in that don't allow me to tweak/redo/proof. When you screw up cutting cork or build a shoddy bookcase, that's it. There's (generally) no fixing it.

Bruno LaTour has a term, "deskilling," that refers to how technology makes things easier for us and thus inevitably removes the need for us to know how to accomplish those same tasks the old way. To the same end Marshall McLuhan more graphically describes technology as "extending man" as well as "amputating." Perhaps the easiest example of this is phone numbers. How many phone numbers do you remember since you first got a cell phone?

Deskilling generally takes time and is linked to social evolution, but on a micro scale, if I'm busy accomplishing things that didn't exist to be accomplished 20 years ago, what am I losing out on that I would've known back then? The ability to cut cork, perhaps? Will handiwork go the way of farming--a realm of specialists far removed from our minds as well as where we live, and almost mysterious from average urban perspectives?

The New World

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Two years ago I decided to pursue a career in academics. 10 months ago I was losing my mind while applying to doctoral programs. 4 months ago I made my decision on where to go. 2.5 weeks ago I drove a moving truck for 17 hours from Boston to Raleigh. Today I found out that my Master's Project was approved. Thursday is my first class as part of the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Ph.D. program at North Carolina State University.

Everything is covered with cheese and bacon. Starbucks doesn't even put out the Non-Fat milk carafe because nobody uses it. It's been in the 90s and humid every day since I've been here. Going for a stroll outside is like pushing through a block of potato soup. There are lots of exotic, terrifying bugs. Many streets don't have sidewalks and people don't seem to understand pedestrians (returning to car ownership seems an inevitability).

All that being said, it's been a good change of pace for me so far. Aside from being excited to start the program, I really like almost everybody I've met. And while I don't know if I'll ever appreciate the give-and-take formalities, I like that there isn't a palpable misanthropy in the air around residents here like there is in Boston. On the sidewalks and subways up north, the mean score on the Niceness Scale is approximately "hostile." Here it's "generally pleasant." The food will make it hard for me to lose the pounds I gained while being tethered to my apartment for work and school over the last year, but the school actually has a lot of great facilities I'm excited to take advantage of (anyone else want to join the racquetball club?)

In sum, aside from probably needing a car and the sadness that comes with having to leave the people I care about, this is actually a pretty easy transition. And now with my Master's Project done and move completed, all I have to think about is slowly getting settled in my new home and, of course, the behemoth that is the CRDM program.

Yesterday I spent an hour organizing my Circa notebooks (I will miss you most of all, Levenger), which is something I have far too much fun doing.

I'm not really sure what I'm in for, but I'm ready to get started.

I am the Internet. Bring the pain.

Twitter, Blip.FM

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I created my Twitter account shortly after the site launched, did a little ethnography project about it for a class assignment, then abandoned it for lack of personal utility. Well, I would seem to have joined the crowd now. No longer the new media heretic! (I still hate Apple, though). Username: Antisomniac.

Also discovered Blip.FM, which feels like it's a rehash of a tired Web 2.0 idea, but to me works much more effectively than social music broadcasting sites of yore. It interacts very well with FaceBook and Twitter, having been largely modeled after the latter.

The genius feature of Blip.FM, as far as I'm concerned, is the way it takes advantage of what YouTube has so curiously been appropriated for in recent years: song sharing. Search for any song, choose a version from one of multiple sources, and Blip it--with or without a short message. You can then share it with any of your social networks...or none at all, which is another clutch feature.

Blip.FM is its own pretty good social networking site in itself. DJs listen to each others' selections or, by default, a playlist that combines what all of your friends ("favorites") have been listening to, in reverse chronological order. An interesting "props" system does a good job of allocating credit where it's due.

MY BLIP.FM PROFILE

Nothing else.

Hitler Finds out About the DMCA

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0500

The "Hitler finds out..." videos were removed by YouTube en masse recently at the request of its copyright holder, Constantin Film.

If you've missed this meme, the concept starts with a particular clip from the movie Downfall in which Adolf Hitler rages at his generals. The audio and video are left untouched, adding only subtitles that make the fuhrer appear to be angry about something else (the iPad, the death of Michael Jackson, and even the popularity or removal of these videos).

Presumably because of their popularity, I've heard a lot more outrage at YouTube about these clips being pulled than I have for any previously (well, except for Lukeywes1234).

Google/YouTube

Given YouTube's track record--and that of any reasonably big media hosting site--I don't understand why anyone is surprised. Before getting into legal details, it should be understood that no such business is going to get involved in defending the murky fair use rights of one of its users. YouTube, after all, is a huge target; and let's not forget it's generally the only entity profiting from any purported copyright infringement that occurs on its site. To avoid litigation, it therefore goes beyond DMCA requirements, offering a system to copyright holders that can automatically detect when certain content is uploaded and remove all offenders. It was through these tools that mass Hitler videcide occurred. [Note: I'm going to use the term "DMCA takedown request" even when I mean takedowns through these tools].

A takedown request is issued to the internet service provider/host, not the content creator. YouTube has to cover its ass, responding to DMCA requests effectively (quickly), because it, and probably not the uploader, is going to be the one in hot water for making the content available. They receive piles of these requests every day and have attracted a lot of heat for the volume of copyrighted material accessible through the site. Once ownership is established, the detection and removal tools mentioned above can be used. It's not their responsibility to determine whether or not the use is fair, only to find copyrighted content and remove it when the owner demands it (or to allow the owner to do it automatically).

The uploader whose video or account has been removed does, however, has recourse built into the law. There's a DMCA statute (17 U.S.C. § 512(f)) that allows damages to be collected from those companies that issue takedown notices without a good faith belief that the use is, in fact, an infringement of the owner's copyright (this basically means that to issue a statement to YouTube requesting content be taken down, you have to first determine that it isn't fair use). Also, YouTube content (including accounts) aren't simply deleted when in trouble for copyright issues; there is a window of time during which to respond, and videos are often reinstated.

I am not saying the Hitler videos being taken down was just; only responding to the backlash against YouTube. In the end, it's Google's house and their Terms of Use that you agreed to supercede what you legally have the right to say, own, or express, so if they need to protect themselves, your video will be taken down. Your role, if using the material fairly, is to go through the proper legal or Google channels--or host the video yourself so you'll get to be the one responding to DMCA notices or not.

Fair Use

Let's say, for the sake of conversation, these cases went to court. Whether or not fair use would hold up isn't clear (to me). Common sense may say the videos could actually help sales of the film, relatively unknown in America as it is. But that logic is harder to argue than "it gives away one of the most dramatic scenes in the movie, presented with no alteration to the audio or video other than subtitles."

Changing the meaning doesn't itself constitute fair use on parody grounds because it also has to be transformative, a term that requires heavy subjectivity to apply. From my limited experience, it typically means that if the work is derivative it must, at least in part, make some sort of commentary about the original (again heavily subjective). In the case of Hitler Finds Out There Is No Santa (these links probably temporary), you might argue that portraying a historical monster as a tantruming manchild is satire and thus probably considered parody. But the parody argument might be a little more difficult when it comes to Hitler Finds Out No Camera in Ipod Touch. Even moreso with metamemes like Hitler Reacts to the Hitler Parodies Being Removed from YouTube. Surely it can't be that you can distribute any movie as long as you put some text at the bottom of the screen.

Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of a massive overhaul to intellectual property law, including a broadened, more nuanced fair use test. I just find it odd that this hubbub (or fuhrer furor, because I'm clever) comes not for any of the other bazillion questionable YouTube takedowns, but in response to a 4 minute clip of a movie. Not a painting of a scene in a movie, play based on a movie, alternate audio, reenactment, or appropriation of dialogue--all of which have been subjects for copyright disputes--but actually the movie itself...with funny words underneath. Maybe it's just due to the popularity of the meme? All of these Hitler videos SHOULD be fair use, but I think only a few of them ARE fair use according to the law. I also think there's no other way for Google to do business but to remove first and ask questions later when the owner requests it.

Oh, and I'm not a lawyer; this is just my take on the situation.

1968 1337

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

There are many cats in many videos on YouTube, many of them animated. To my knowledge, however, this is the only ASCII animation of a cat from 1968.

Anonymous vs. Anonymity

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Dear everybody,

Stop reporting that "Anonymous" did something - and going so far as to even condemn "them" as though it's a remotely delineated group.

Anonymous has been around for millenia, lurking wherever real names and IDs are not required. Those writing about sensitive - or not even - subjects for years have signed their articles, letters, and comments "Anonymous" and no journalist ever referred to them as if they were a member of the same organization. It's like the police actually looking for a group of people who call themselves "John Doe" after the name kept popping up associated with various crimes.

On imageboards like 2chan, 4chan, and 7chan - massively popular, hyperactive, and diverse sites that are the source of a disproportionate amount of Internet culture - people who post something will, by default, by credited as "Anonymous." Likewise, many blogs and other websites will credit unnamed contributors as "Anonymous." At some point, it became a joke - and then a meme - that "Anonymous" was a real person. It became funny to refer to "Anonymous" as a personification of some aspect of Internet culture - an aspect that would vary depending on who is doing the referencing. When an idea to participate in some sort of event (or an idea to do something that could be seen as an event in hindsight) spreads across these sites and many, many others, "Anonymous" takes credit for it, purporting itself as a discrete entity. Sometimes specific plans are orchestrated, but far more often it takes the form of a bunch of people - mostly different people each time - working with loosely-related ideas towards the same vague concept (usually self-amusement/"lulz", but sometimes political).

Media who report on this spectre are simply perpetuating and encouraging the meme. But why now? Why does this Anonymous receive distinction?

Well, past anonymii never had a face.

When a group self-identifying as Anonymous waged a war on Scientology, it acquired a bit of notoriety. The group announced that "Anonymous" would be protesting, "Anonymous" sent messages to the Church of Scientology via YouTube, and "Anonymous" took credit for the DDoS attacks on the Church's websites. The heavy press these events received could largely be credited to the growing fashionability of Scientology-bashing at the time, but the reason people were so legitimizing of their existence as a distinct group was due to its members having not just a face, but a shared face - that of a Guy Fawkes mask, itself a meme. Henceforth, a group of people wearing Guy Fawkes masks would be recognizable as "Anonymous."

So why does it matter? Why am I complaining? Two reasons. First and foremost because this hurts the concept of anonymity in the public eye.

The communication construct that allows for safe dissent, whistle-blowing, and all manner of honesty is now synonymized with irresponsible pranks and destructive, inflammatory protest. Considering the preexisting dark underbelly of anonymity - providing shelter necessary to commit crimes - it doesn't need any more bad press.

The second reason I'm frustrated: Have you ever overheard a policial conversation in which the person arguing the side you agree with ideologically represents your cause in a horribly-informed, beligerant, or otherwise unsavory way? You know how you just kind of wish they would be on the other side?

Two years ago I was in a large MIT lecture hall for the event that would close ROFLCon - a super conference about Internet memes that will be happening again in a couple months (mark your calendars). There was a part towards the end during which people from the audience could come up to a microphone at the front and make comments about the weekend's events.

After some recited copypasta and an a cappella version of Never Gonna Give You Up, a group of Anonymii - who had been invited to talk about their war on Scientology - stormed the mic and blasted a $5 boombox into it while bobbing to Wu Tang. This went on for several minutes past when the microphone was shut off, prompting laughter, then annoyance, and finally hostility from the audience. Eventually they quit and I felt the distinct urge to give Scientology a second chance; perhaps I had unfairly dismissed that dreck.

They were invited to ROFLCon (via at least one or two real names, by the way) to talk about their group and Project Chanology, then were more or less asses to the conferencegoers.

Other events that have been attributed to Anonymous include the posting of bright, flashing-colored GIFs to an epilepsy forum; racism infiltrating virtual world of Habbo; countless instances of cyberstalking/bullying; and disguising pornography as children's videos on YouTube. Obviously, someone who isn't already convinced that say, Scientology is nonsense, won't be swayed by a group known for this stuff. To the contrary, maybe Scientology would be seen as in need of defense! That isn't to say that many of the videos, interviews, and methods weren't very good in terms of articulating their case and protesting; but for every well-spoken news interview, someone would make a bomb threat or post a picture of Tom Cruise eating feces.

So when Anonymous was recently credited with an (another) attack on multiple Australian government websites during what was known as Operation Titstorm, I facepalmed again. The impetus was Internet filtering legislation, something to which I am staunchly opposed. Despite Australian anti-censorship groups complaining that it hurt their cause, the DDoS attacks proceeded and were celebrated on the Chans (et al).

Operation Titstorm has been heavily covered already, so I'll just link; this post was just a product of "ANONYMOUS: STOP BEING ON MY SIDE" + "MEDIA: STOP CREDITING ANONYMOUS AS IF IT'S ACTUALLY THE SAME PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR EACH EVENT" grief. Thank you. Disclosure: I actually like 4chan and have, at one time or another, been Anonymous.

Deep Sea Divers for Internet Privacy

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Google Street View has always been a little creepy, providing anybody in the world a close-up view of your house, work, and maybe even you. Once in a while, however, creepiness fights back.

Start at this Google Maps location, make sure it's set to street view, look for the SCUBA divers and start moving east on that street while keeping an eye on the divers.

Boing Boing reported on this find yesterday, also linking to a Google-Translated Norweigan newspaper article. Translated title: Who Chases Google with Desires Fork?

I like to think of these two brave souls as defenders of personal privacy. Next time the Street View vans come rolling through, I propose a symbolic international protest: People everywhere; ready by the road; dressed in diving gear; menacing Google.

Hacking GMail Web Clips (aka Making Web Clips Usable)

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0600

Last week I was browsing the goodies available in the GMail Labs and came across Web Clips. It seems to display a highlighted line of text above your mailbox taken from RSS headlines. They list a number of popular sites (CNN, Engadget, etc.) or you can add a custom feed.

I noticed its fatal flaw instantly: 75%+ of the clips it displayed were Sponsored Links. You can skip by them and browse real headlines (as well as additional Sponsored ones) via little left/right arrows, but the value of this is in effortless headlines that may or may not be something useful. If I wanted to browse through RSS feeds, I'd use a real RSS reader. Before disabling, however, I did a quick search to see why anyone would be using this (or if my experience was atypical). I abandoned that curiosity when I found this: Gmail Disable Sponsored Links.

It's a GreaseMonkey script (a great add-on for FireFox that allows you to run bits of JavaScript on user-defined URLs) that seems like it just looks for "sponsored" and, when found, executes the code that simulates clicking the right arrow, effectively skipping by all the ads.

Now I'm a Web Clips fan.

The Earthquake in Haiti, News, and the Internet

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0600

This morning Haiti was hit by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake.

I found out about while watching CNN--the first time my TV has been on in months--and thought to myself something like "it seems like there's been a lot of disasters lately." But why? Intellectually I think if I did the research I wouldn't find support in historical data, but it does feel that way. I'm going to go ahead and credit two things for that feeling: my parents and technology.

As a child, I think I was largely shielded from most catastrophic news and so, with the exception of Desert Storm, have a relatively clean recollection of the world climate for the first 13ish years of my life.

In terms of technology, I think that the increased amount and quality of images and video that saturates every aspect of modern society, in combination with broadband Internet, has created a more palpable sense of reality beyond our familiar geography. Even reading about an earthquake, tsunami, or explosion now comes with a greater sense of immediacy and is more personal than it was to previous generations because we can connect it to real images we've seen instead of being forced to conceptualized unfathomable horror (and usually just avoiding the task).

There are aspects of TV and the Internet that have been said to desensitize those that consume them because of the volume of violent (et al) images contained therein. I don't know enough about the psychological studies to comment knowledgably, but my gut tells me there's something to it. However, I think the blame is placed wrongly. The problem is not violent images, television, news, etc. The problem is the exploitation of the very sorts of personal connections enabled by multimedia: sensationalism instead of reporting, fear mongering, melodramatic coverage of non-stories, and getting every American to ask "how does it impact me?" Violence exists in reality. Reporting reality will include violence. When the news ceases to accurately reflect reality, teasing things like "WILL IPODS KILL YOUR CHILDREN??...We'll tell ya, at 11!" or prioritizing local home invasions to get ratings is when there's a problem.

When searching for "earthquake haiti" on Google News, sorting by date, then going back and looking for the first headlines of the earthquake, the very first is a quick news flash from MarketWatch. The second is from laist.com, titled "Earthquakes in Northern California & Haiti a Good Reminder for L.A. to Get Prepared." There are absolutely no details of the event, just that it happened, followed by what Californians should do to prepare.

What I never hear pointed out (and this just might be my ignorance), is the opposite effect. Not only does watching video of the aftermath of a disaster taken by someone in the thick of the situation bring us closer to it, but I think that the media--raw citizen media in particular--can now, to a certain degree, actually sensitize us to world events and the conditions of others. These aren't plastic news anchors sitting at a desk with an image superimposed over their suit-clad shoulder, these are real people whose eyes we're looking through.

Good news coverage of events like this, because technology will bring us closer to them, will always elicit very essential human emotions. Just stop it with the "how will it affect you?!" nonsense already. ...Unfortunately, as living things are inherently self-centered to some degree (or else would have gone extinct), scare tactics get ratings.

So how to fix it? The only things I can think of are the Internet and better media literacy. Learn how to identify spin and sensationalism and read the facts with a skeptical eye for accompanying analysis. Dismiss television news altogether unless you're looking for entertainment. That includes CNN and MSNBC. Avoid being a captive audience. Even better, down with passive consumerism! Rah rah Web 2.0! All hail citizen media! The Internet rules! Wait...I don't remember what were we talking about.

Yeah yeah, I know people have been preaching this stuff for years (media literacy, citizen media, and the woes of sensationalism), but it's important so here it is again.

Google's Cell Phone Revolution, Nexus One, and Initial Doubts

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0600

It's interesting that for me--and I'm probably not alone--a change in the appearance of the Google.com landing site is a minor event along the lines of seeing a handwritten envelope behind a bunch of junkmail. Today's unveiling (quite literally given Google's new JavaScript fade-in) was the equivalent of getting a card with money in it.

It's been a couple months since I last heard rumors of a G-phone and at the time I had written it off as gossip. Well, the Nexus One is here. Google is selling phones.

FIRST TAKE

After reading the pre-release Engadget review and taking a quick look at the specs and marketing material, this really seems like a misstep to me. It just isn't special enough for the long-speculated foray into hardware by theInternet company. Granted, it's miles ahead than Apple's first phone (do we remember the get-rich-quick abomination, the ROKR?) but while it's good--and better than its competition in many regards--it's still just an incremental step forward in a predictable trajectory that Motorola, Samsung, RIM, etc. have under control. Don't get me wrong, if it had a physical keyboard instead of a somewhat below-par virtual one, it'd be ordered already, but it shouldn't have been Google's big event. How about a service plan paid for by advertising? Or a new design to focus on browser maximization?

Needing something special for an initial release isn't the only reason I think that Google may have erred. What happens now with the Open Handset Alliance? When Android was released, it was presented like a gift unto the world. That is, after all, what most of Google's services feel like ("here, have free email, have a decent web browser, have a search engine, have some maps and a calendar...it's all good software that you can use as long as you put up with these ads we'll conspicuously place on the sidelines"). By giving away an open source, cross-platform operating system, Android not only makes things better for manufacturers, software developers, and users, it also standardizes compatibility with Google's applications and brings more people towards the little ads. Doesn't getting in the ring and competing with those it gave Android to seem to run contrary to those initial intentions? Also, Google is just now starting to be the target of public murmurings of Big Brotherness. Control of the Internet, the software used to access it, AND the hardware housing the software could even make a Googroupie like me uncomfortable.

SECOND TAKE:

But LO! I see now that the event isn't the Nexus One. The event is a revolution in the cell phone marketplace!

Google doesn't seem to have been any more involved in the development of this device than it has been in past Android endeavors (the G1 in particular). It's manufactured by HTC, just like the G1 and several other Android-based phones. The big difference is where and how it's sold. Google.com/phone should really have a more prominent link to the post on its Official Blog titled "Our new approach to buying a mobile phone."

Android was developed with one simple idea: Open up mobile devices to enable greater innovation that will benefit users everywhere.

[...] Well, today we're pleased to announce a new way for consumers to purchase a mobile phone through a Google hosted web store. The goal of this new consumer channel is to provide an efficient way to connect Google's online users with selected Android devices. We also want to make the overall user experience simple: a simple purchasing process, simple service plans from operators, simple and worry-free delivery and start-up.

The first phone we'll be selling through this new web store is the Nexus One

The first phone.

Cell phone carriers would like to lock you into phones and contracts and create a giant cost to exit. By selling an unlocked phone (as unlocked as possible at the moment) while simultaneously lobbying for greater FTC and FCC protections for openness and creating an alternative market through which to buy the hardware, you place the power in the hands of the consumers in the same (exact) way you can pull up and compare plane tickets, APRs, and car rental rates.
(Sidebar: Maybe if phone carriers were run by Steve Jobs, honed their cutsy and colorful design aesthetic, and ran condescending ad campaigns that portray anyone who likes Google as stupid and less attractive they would be able to somehow convince THEIR customers to welcome higher prices and tethering technologies....oh nevermind).

So Google gets points for using its brawn to muscle power away from carriers and into the hands of users. ...and Nexus One is a pretty good phone. That's my take anyway.

Zombies and Cupcakes

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Since my master's project will take the form of a video game, I've been playing with pixels a lot lately, and writing the last post about zombie neurobiology made me revisit the idea for an existential zombie game I had a few months ago. Unfortunately time didn't permit me to continue it into the summer, but I hope to get back to it someday.

So, for a little indulgent fun here are a couple pixels (I'm not claiming anything here is stellar work, by the way :) ).

Zombies

Girl named Lyric and cat named Pi

Post-It Pixel Cupcake

The Neurobiology of a Zombie

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Decided to put together some coherent sentences from the notes I took at the Coolidge Corner Theater's Science on Screen event back in April. Before a screening of Night of the Living Dead, Dr. Steven Schlozman, psychiatrist and educator at Harvard Medical School, gave a truly enlightening talk on zombie neurobiology. As it turns out, zombies are just humans suffering from Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome. Read on.

Armed with a great PowerPoint presentation filled with pop culture references, he covered many areas of the human brain and their functions in order to point to specific neurological causes for several zombie traits.

But first let's be specific: we're talking about George Romero zombies, not the running, hyper, super-strong creatures from newer movies like 28 Days Later. This debate over which can officially be called "zombie" rages all over the Internet and I'm not going to weigh in with my opinion; just setting the parameters for what we're discussing here.

The frontal lobe, for starters, is responsible for planning, "executive functioning," abstract problem solving, staying on task, paying attention, and, most importantly controlling impulsivity. Schlozman describes impulsivity as something where "if you had a few more seconds, you might not have done it."

As a relevant example, he points to Phineas Gage, the guy who survived a big metal rod going through his head back in the mid-1800s. It's an interesting case, not just because he survived, but because the massive frontal lobe damage he sustained in the accident significantly changed his personality. He was, to relevantly summarize the changes, more impulsive.1

The amygdala is the source of our base emotions: fear, rage, and so on. Taking the impulses of the amygdala and processing them through other parts of the brain is, according to Schlozman, "what makes us human." We have animal instincts, but intellect to moderate them. A crocodile is, he says, "all amygdala." Getting mad at a zombie doing what zombies do is, thus, sort of like getting mad a crocodile for being a crocodile.

When the amygdala does go a little crazy, there's another part of the brain that gets involved in addition to the frontal lobe: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). It acts as a sort of emotional speed bump. It slows down impulses so the frontal lobe can swoop in and moderate the situation. People who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder, he points out, have more amygdala activity and less anterior cingulate cortex activity (more base emotion with less slowing).2

The cerrebellum and basal ganglia are the parts of the brain responsible for balance and coordinated movement, respectively. Cerebellar atrophy and basal ganglia dysfunction can result in a poor coordination, severe tremors, and a wide-legged, unsteady lurching walk that looks an awful lot like the zombie gait. There are a number of YouTube videos showing this, but I don't really feel great about linking directly to people's personal recovery videos in this context.

The hunger can be explained by lesions to the ventromedial hypothalamus, which can cause obesity and hyperphagia (eating and eating because you never feel satiated).

So. To be a zombie may be to have an overactive amygdala, decreased frontal lobe and anterior cingulate cortex functioning, and damage to the cerebellum, basal ganglia, and ventromedia hypothalamus.

1. The skull and offending metal rod are both on display at the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School.

2. As a bit of trivia having nothing to do with zombies, the connection between the amygdala and ACC gets stronger with age, which is one reason why we're less likely to do something dumb on a dare when we're older.

The Endless Forest

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The Endless Forest is a massively-multiplayer online game by Tale of Tales in which there are no quests to complete, no dragons to slay, no guilds to join, and no hit points. You don't spend any time leveling up, mining gold, or chopping wood. You don't worry about which weapon you're going to use, what the best balance of charisma and agility might be, or whether or not you have enough food. You also don't type or verbally interact with other users at all. There are no elves, goblins, warriors, clerics, faries, or dwarves. There are deer. You are a deer.

It's the first MMOG I know of to feature playable non-human characters that are NOT in any way anthropomorphic.

I have to admit my excitement was pretty great when I first read about this idea, and now that I'm playing it, I don't feel let down. The eponymous forest is lush, beautiful, and detailed, with enough simplicity to make it feel like home. It's small enough that you regularly run into other users, but large enough to explore without being crowded.

Once I got past the fact that I was a deer (a cute little fawn, in fact), what struck me was how magical the game feels. It seems that a lot of the game is really a mystery, known only to the developers who quite literally (and creatively) play god...and I really appreciate that.

I also like how the game is technically a screen saver. I wasn't sure what to think of that at first, but in practice having several of the deer be sleeping in the forest (people away from their computers) is actually quite nice.

Ok. That's all you get. Part of the magic is exploring the mechanics and environment for yourself. Go play it.

YouTube Again: YT=Database and ThruYou

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

A few years ago I was extremely excited about what YouTube meant for the future of media production and consumption. Thousands of people were emoting, performing, preaching, reporting, conversing, directing, and otherwise using the opportunity it offered to anyone to put something out to the world.

The democratizing effects of the Internet weren't new, but the concept of it "giving everyone a voice" was mostly limited to text; bandwidth and production equipment being costly barriers. The confluence of YouTube's hosting and the advent of videophones, cheap camcorders, and VERY cheap or bundled webcams meant lifted barriers and a massive influx of...stuff.

Somewhere between Lonelygirl15 and Fred, I lost interest. Totally jaded. The things that interested me conceptually about YouTube were still interesting, but whereas I used to really enjoy browsing random videos and otherwise engaging with the site, it eventually became torturous. Rarely do I see any goodness through the static of indulgent, seemingly incestuous nonsense. Why the preponderance of racial epithets in comment sections? Who are the people that make up the 237,973,368 channel views for Smosh? Why is there an anime mashup for every song ever recorded?

YouTube has been great when I need to see a TV news clip from 1997 or want to check up on the latest memes (David After Dentist rules), but it seemed like I just wasn't the target audience (or that there couldn't possibly be an audience) for the vast, vast majority of clips. I felt like it had turned into the video equivalent of late 1990s/early 2000s Geocities.

But let me clarify: Geocities is not a bad thing. Even if we say that ALL of the pages hosted on Geocities are primitive drivel, it, like YouTube, still served an important role as Internet identity sandbox and accessible forum for expression with a massive potential audience. That's not something I've lost sight of. My problem with YouTube has been a personal value judgment, not an objective one: I just have no use for the video equivalent of an animated GIF-festooned page that links to collections of "yo momma" jokes. And terms like "Web junk" and the myriad jokes about posting nonsense or complaining on YouTube during prime time television lead me to believe this is an increasingly popular point of view: YouTube is becoming more and more trivial.

Today I'm officially changing my opinion of YouTube, what it means to me, and why it's important. Two reasons:

The first has to do with thinking of YouTube as an extension of Google (which it technically is, after all).

Why is it that we only go to Google Image Search when we're looking for an image OF something, but so many of us attempt to browse YouTube without such specificity because that's just "how you're supposed to use it"? Assuming no knowledge of either site, one would logically think that video, being a more complex medium than image (in fact, consisting of images and adding sound), would demand greater emphasis on search and organization. Similarly, if you go to a random page on the Web as directed by Google's normal search engine, it too will most likely lack any personal relevance for you. Why do we see Google and Google Image Search as resources that can be used for entertainment, but YouTube as entertainment that can be used as a resource?

It has recommendation applications and social systems, yes, but recommendation systems are only useful incidental to search (and sometimes history). And the social systems, by and large, cater just to a small group (largely the producers themselves). I think it would help those like me to realize that YouTube is first and foremost a database.

Thinking of YouTube as a database removes expectation that anything should be applicable to you by default. It also depreciates the idea that you'll like what's popular. When you're flipping through channels on TV, odds are decent that you'll want to watch one of the popular shows. Similarly, a popular movie is often going to be entertaining. But if you look at Alexa's top 20 most visited sites on the Web and take the search engines and other meta tools out, you'll realize that at the moment you complete this exercise, you won't have any use for most, if not all, of the popular sites. This is because the Web isn't entertainment. You might at some point visit the popular sites (in a month, tomorrow, an hour ago...), but the notion that a popular website will have worth to you at the moment in time you discover its popularity is ridiculous. So because YouTube isn't just entertainment, of course judging it by perusing the most viewed items of the day will be largely frustrating.

YouTube, like the Web in general, can give you a glimpse into other cultures, people's lives, and is capable of conveying intricacies of the human condition. It also brags a vast wealth of archived cultural history and information about an unimaginable number of topics. There's a massive amount of static, yes, but the same could be said for the Web (how many parked domains, spam sites, fake blogs, etc. do you run into?) Is it the same as the Web? No, of course not. It's more standardized in terms of how long it takes to consume something, the medium it deals in provides more sensory stimulation than a lot of what the static Web has to offer, the interface is standardized and controlled, it is subject to a great deal of preconceived notions of what video should accomplish whereas the Web is more of a blank slate, etc. Still, for me at least (and ALL of this might be common sense or old news to a lot of you), it helps to think of YouTube as Google Moving Image Search.

The second reason for my higher opinion of YouTube today is ThruYou. A guy who calls himself Kutiman took a bunch of solo musical performances people posted on YouTube (usually a person with an instrument or singing in their bedroom in front a webcam) and mixed them together to make whole songs. Instead of changing the speeds of the media to match, he set out to find music with similar beats and keys, then cut them up and formed loops.

ThruYou is successful not just in creating very original-sounding and good music, but also in taking the idea of "collaborative culture" to the next level. People taking advantage of YouTube's public forum to share private parts of themselves from the safety of their bedroom, collaborating by proxy with other people in their respective bedrooms around the world. I really can't say enough about this project. It really gets to the root of what makes YouTube and Web 2.0 in general so special. I'd write and rave about it more, but this is already long enough and I'm getting burned out on YouTube pontification.

New Sites

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500

I made a blog.

A year ago I stopped posting here because 1) I got busy and 2) I hated the hackjob Blogger template I was using.

When I was thinking about what to do for a class project some months ago, I realized that beyond removing the design and usability limitations put in place by blog-hosting sites (WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, etc.), writing my own code would lessen my already-uncomfortable reliance on Web 2.0 corporations, not to mention their massive Terms of Use agreements.

So I created the basic framework for what you see now: a super-simple blog, written in PHP/HTML/CSS/MySQL/JavaScript. Well past the class, after endless wrestling with CSS, debugging RSS, figuring out database security, and learning about comment spam (there were 5,000 comments over 10 posts a week ago), I'll call it done for now. I can't say I love love love the design, but it's ok. I am pretty proud of myself that it (seems) to work and doesn't look like a Geocities page from 1998, considering I didn't know any web programming a year ago.

I also made RyanMcGrady.com, something of a portfolio/resume site.

What I need now is feedback. I've been looking at them through Chrome and Internet Explorer (FireFox seems to crash Vista on me) on my widescreen monitor for a while now, and need more outside perspectives. I'm looking for criticism. Does anything not work? I know that ryanmcgrady.com doesn't look how it's supposed to on IE due to use of the opacity style (I know there's an IE equivalent that I just haven't implemented yet). But what else? What's not intuitive? Is there some glaring lack of functionality? Is everything centered correctly? Do you hate the colors? How's readability? Does the RSS work/update correctly? ...

Thanks. I'm irrationally excited to start blogging again.

First Monday

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600

A paper about Wikipedia I wrote a while back was just published in the Februrary issue (14.2) of First Monday!

"Gaming Against the Greater Good"

Abstract:

Wikipedia has grown to be one of the most visited Web sites in the world. Despite its influence on popular culture and the way we think about knowledge production and consumption, the conversation about why and how it works--or whether it's credible at all--is ongoing. This paper began as an examination of what the concept of "authority" means on Wikipedia and what role rhetoric might play in manufacturing this authority. But Wikipedia's editors have functioned so well as a community, having collaboratively developed a comprehensive set of social norms designed to place the project before any individual, that ideas like authority and rhetoric have only marginal roles in day-to-day activities. This paper takes an in-depth look at these norms and how they work, paying particular attention to a relatively new guideline that exemplifies the spirit of the Wikipedia community--"Gaming the system."

Walkman Effect on Wikipedia

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

For the past year, I've been doing a lot of work with Wikipedia, examining how it works and peeking in on its community. When I was writing my last post, Walkman Effect and Voice Filters, I was surprised to find out "Walkman Effect" had no presence on Wikipedia.

Long ago, I made many small edits to it to get a feel for how the interface works, but I've only just now created my first Wikipedia entry. It's extremely rare that I come across a topic that I know anything about that there isn't already an entry for. So this is MY first Wikipedia entry. MINE. I am the sole author and you had better not edit it.

Walkman effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Actually, in addition to wanting you to edit for content, I know that I screwed up the formatting in a number of ways. Most obviously, I couldn't figure out how to use the same reference multiple times. The "ref name=" tag didn't seemed to screw all sorts of things up. The result was a line in the References section for each use of the same article. I'm also having some trouble unorphaning it (fostering? parenting?) by finding articles that can link to it relevantly.

My primary motivation for writing it was not simply to add that bit of information to Wikipedia, but rather--more selfishly--to learn more about the editing community. I even added it to the Request for feedback page in the hope that some might come by to offer constructive criticism and bring up issues that I was unaware of. I'm only a little embarrassed to admit that I'd be a little excited if someone mistook my eagerness to learn for Wiki-diligence (because it's only just begun, my friend) and threw a barnstar my way.

Handwriting and Robots

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Kuka is a robot that writes calligraphy. Developed by the RobotLab at the Center for Art and Media in Germany, it is currently writing out "by hand" the entire Martin Luther Bible.

When I was in Junior High, I spent many class periods working on my penmanship. 5th and 6th grade had been spent earning and maintaining my reputation as the one who could write the fastest, but all that had gotten me was more roles as group/class "scribe."

A point came sometime in my sophomore or junior year in college when I found myself alternating between several different handwriting styles. I still don't know all of the factors that contribute to the use of each one, but available time, line size, importance, and audience are some obvious variables. Here are the four I can pinpoint as distinct:

1) All caps. Larger letters where capitals would normally be. Characters are usually very close together. Points are very pointy, round extensions are sweeping.

2) Normal capitalization. The bodies of most letters are small, but certain lines of lowercase letters extend upward (b, d, h, k, l) or downward (g, j, f, p, q, y) in a quick, spastic lurch such that they often noticeably cross into other lines.

3) Normal capitalization, but lowercase letters are oversized to occupy the entire height of the line. This is the neatest of the three.

4) Normal capitalization. Similar to #2, except much wider due to writing fast and much less legible. Many tails, circles, and semicircles are incomplete.

Given that 4 describes best what my fast writing looks like, you could say that it, and by extension #2, are the most "natural," but I don't think the choice to use 1 or 3 is ever a conscious one.

You could probably draw all sorts of interesting psychological conclusions about me and my formative years based on this (maybe something about self-esteem, identity crises, or some form of artistic expression?), but that's not my point.

My point is that I have several handwriting styles that few people ever see, but my communication is almost exclusively mediated by technology. I have mailed maybe two written letters in the past 10 years and my stamp consumption is probably down to about 4-5/year. When I do write something online, however, I almost always use default fonts. If I'm in Word, I'm using Times New Roman. On the web, usually Arial, Verdana, Georgia, or whatever else a given site offers. Every once in a while my love for late 80s/early 90s telecommunications shows and I switch to a Courier font, but other than that, I'm fontually dull.

Why? I don't even feel so much as a desire to seek out or use a different font.

At some point I had a DOS program that allowed you to pretty easily create a TrueType font. Just draw the letters in their respective 20px by 20px boxes. The first thing I tried to do--as I imagine many did--was to try to make a font that looked like my handwriting. The foremost problem with that program for me was that it didn't have a way to change the appearance of a letter based on the one that came before or after it. The e after an h looks slightly different than an e after an s or before an o. It's a matter of where your hand ends one letter, where the next one begins, and the level of concentration it takes to make a letter (yes, I would submit that a capital Q takes slightly more mental juice to write than a lowercase a). Although I was able to find a way to make the font recognizable as being created in my handwriting's likeness (something like a caricature of the real thing), it was still clearly just a gimmicky simulacrum.

So why a robot to write calligraphy? Well, because there's a certain charm to something that's handwritten. Calligraphy is an art form; it makes text look beautiful. It's also more difficult, and thus more respected. Mostly, though, it has become exotic. It's superfluous and luxurious--an unnecessary relic being pulled through the technology that has caused people to see it as pretty, but unproductive. Who's got time?

Now then, what if a robot--or an inkjet--could simply write in calligraphy for you instead of spitting out some bland sans-serif? First, Arial is easier to read quickly than calligraphy, so we might have to relegate it to select personal or formal correspondence. But even then, would anybody care? PERFECT calligraphy, we're talking. I don't think so. But why?

Even though we might not be able to tell the difference between documents written by human or robot (which could even be coded to screw up or drag the pen once in a while), it just doesn't feel special coming from electronics. Calligraphy is an art form. Art has to come from humans. If it comes from a computer and can be reproduced--if anybody can do it--it becomes less.

Handwriting is, to most people, kind of a dull subject. Computer typography even more so. I think that is why this is so interesting to me.

[Robot via Next Nature]

Walkman Effect and Voice Filters

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Consider how MP3 players--or at least the appearance of ear buds-function when used in public spaces.

Writing about the technology of his time, Shuhei Hosokawa describes a "Walkman Effect" (1984) through which music listened to via headphones allows for the user to gain more control over their environment.

Whereas your attention is fair game while simply walking down the street, riding on the subway, or sitting on a bench to rest, when you do the same activities while listening to music, you are multitasking. You appear busy and fully engaged already, making any attempt at communication effectively an interruption. Those who might otherwise be willing to interrupt may be further deterred from interaction by the fact that there's a good chance they won't even be heard...and that even if they are heard, it's easy for you to act as if they weren't.

Headphones enable users to actively tune in or tune out who or what they want. Awkward exchanges with acquaintances are less obligational, solicitors are less likely to bother you, and the cacophony of traffic can be subdued by a Bjork song. Mobile music listening also provides a personalized soundtrack to your life, customizable for optimum affect to make you feel good and give you a sense of confidence as you roam the streets. In all these ways, MP3 players allow you to float through public areas inside a protective bubble, commanding full autonomy in the management of chance encounters. They allow us to be more selective about who or what we engage with.

There are many critics of this trend who say that communities suffer when people disengage from the space they inhabit. Communities suffer both in the sense that "communities" as commonality-based solidarities don't develop and in the sense that the lived space is neglected. They suffer because individuals alienate or isolate themselves from other individuals.

There are a number of articles about the loss of manners due to portable technologies--the Walkman, cell phone, iPod, and now BlackBerry--that distract us from our physically immediate interactions.

One thing that I have not seen addressed is how a constant "separation" from other people effects how we monitor our own voices and words. Increasingly, I find that I don't think about the possibility of other people hearing what I'm saying--or the potential repercussions thereof.

Portable music and cell phones have gotten us so accustomed to being an exclusive audience and being excluded from the aural experiences of co-present others that I think we may forget to turn on the filter we all use to varying extents when talking about sensitive subjects.

The impetus for all this? I just had a phone conversation with my girlfriend about our downstairs neighbors' kittens, which effectively live with us. In detail, I described a scene, which I had only caught the very end of so wasn't entirely sure if what I thought happened did, that led me to believe we should talk to the neighbors about now being a good time to have the brother and sister cats spayed and neutered if they were going to do so.

The conversation took place just outside of a crowded computer lab, with a flow of people walking by and a couple dozen people within earshot. It wasn't the quietest place in the world, so I had to speak somewhat loudly.

If I'm using language well (that is, effectively and appropriately), I don't really like to self-censor to meet societal norms except in certain circumstances, but it's gotten to the point that I don't even think about the presence of people in crowds (it's different if I'm alone with a stranger on the elevator--I know I have their complete attention should I do anything).

Apologies to eavesdroppers and to helpless, headphoneless, alert passerbys.

[Some of this text taken from a paper I wrote in December about augmented reality.]

Wilson's Slate Article Complicates (Not Dispels) Misconceptions About Wikipedia

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0600

If Chris Wilson's recent article, "The Wisdom of the Chaperones" were published on Wikipedia instead of Slate, it would have been very quickly spotted as "POV" and removed.

The piece basically serves to call Wikipedia and Digg oligarchies, top-heavy organizations that claim to be democratic, but are really controlled by an elite few. The article is written entirely in an accusatory "get a load of this" tone, utilizing old rhetorical standbys like the "undemocratic" pejorative, and mounting up to a call for the sites to "stop pretending they're operated by the many and start thinking of ways to rein in the power of the few."

I want to address three things: two quotes from the article and then the data it used.

1) "Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0, direct democracy isn't feasible at the scale on which these sites operate"

Web 2.0 is great because it allows access for ANYBODY to participate. It's not a fairy tale. Anybody CAN participate on Wikipedia--you don't even need to make an account! Wilson even points out that "elite users aren't chosen by a corporate board of directors or by divine right. They're the people who participate the most."

While Wikipedia doesn't see itself as a democracy (it plainly states otherwise), it really seems pretty close. A democracy is a government run by the people with equal rights for all. A direct democracy is one without representatives or intermediaries (the people actually make the decisions). However, does a people lose the title "democracy" if not EVERY person votes? What if for every thousand people, there's one person who donates a ton of time to a cause they care deeply about? Does that process need to "stop pretending" to be democratic?

2) "A small number of people are writing the articles, it seems, while less-frequent users are given the tasks of error correction and typo fixing."

It's not news that there is a relatively small group of people who deeply care about Wikipedia and account for a disproportionate amount of work. This would seem to be the most popular criticism of Wikipedia as of late, edging out long-time favorites "anybody can write anything there" and "it's unreliable." I'm not sure why this comes as a surprise to so many people. The concept of a power law is pretty well known, and common sense could guide you to realize that not everybody who uses Wikipedia has the same amount of time to invest or has the same level of interest.

Wilson's talk of "territorialism...authorial domination by 1 percent of contributors" just shows he hasn't really spent much time on Wikipedia. On it there's a policy page called "Ownership of articles" which states pretty clearly "Believing that an article has an owner...is a common mistake people make on Wikipedia." As a collaborative project, nobody gets individual credit. Some editors are recognized for their contributions by other editors behind the scenes, but the meritocracy of Wikipedia is based on effort and diligence, not expertise or authority. The top 1% has simply donated more of their time--they don't actually have more power than you.

There are many reasons why people contribute to Wikipedia: passion for a particular subject, passion for information or knowledge, and/or a sense of furthering a common good. There aren't a ton of people who care SO MUCH about Wikipedia's mission of providing free access to knowledge that they are willing to sacrifice time. Thankfully, there are some. The 1% who contributes something like 50% of the content are those benevolent few who really want Wikipedia to succeed.

A study by Kittur, Suh, Pendleton, and Chi (2007) analyzed work on Wikipedia and broke it down into "direct" and "indirect" work. Direct work refers to article edits and new article creations and indirect work includes "meta" activities such as conflict resolution, discussion, community management, and undoing vandalism. They found that increasingly, people are spending a greater percentage of their time on the "indirect" activities. Between 2001 and 2006, for example, the "percentage of edits going toward policy, procedure, and other Wikipedia-specific pages has gone from roughly 2% to around 12%" The most experienced and most passionate users do the bulk of this work. Therefore, while the content itself comes from very diverse sources, there is a core group of Wikipedians who tweak, format, Wikify, organize, categorize, correct grammar, and so on.

But here he announces this finding, which contradicts what we previously held true about the 1%/50% figure:

People who've made more than 10,000 edits add nearly twice as many words to Wikipedia as they delete. By contrast, those who've made fewer than 100 edits are the only group that deletes more words than it adds. A small number of people are writing the articles, it seems, while less-frequent users are given the tasks of error correction and typo fixing.

This claim didn't quite make sense to me, although I guess maybe I could see a class of Wiki superstars researching and summarizing heaps and heaps of information while the new users are too timid to do anything more than correct grammar. There are a few factors that could contribute to this being true, but I couldn't see any of them having THAT much of an effect: new users are far more likely to "blank" a page (remove all of the words/content), experienced users are far more likely to "revert" a page (restore a previous version when someone has damaged it), etc.

3) Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd

Let's look at the data supporting the new statistic: Palo Alto Research Center's Ed Chi's paper titled "Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie

We examine "elite" vs. "common" user contributions over time, with the elite defined either by status (administrators) or by participation level (high-edit users). Two different metrics (number of edits and change in content) provide converging evidence on an answer.

While there are several odd things about this study (like why use administrators for the "elite" group instead of the users with the most edits and why factor into the "elite" group "those that might become administrators later"), the most important thing to note comes from the methodology section of the paper, most of which I quote here:

In the following analyses, we used a history dump of the English Wikipedia that was generated on 7/2/2006. The dump included over 58 million revisions, from more than 4.7 million wiki pages, of which 2.4 million are article-related entries in the encyclopedia...

To calculate the work done while editing an article, we calculated both the number of edits made and the change in content between edits. We model change as the number of words added and removed, as calculated by a traditional "diff" operation [9]. However, we used words as units instead of lines, allowing greater precision than previous studies...For both measures we aggregated edits over all 58+ million revisions, grouping by time and user participation level. User participation level was calculated based on the total number of edits made by a user.

They used all 58 million revisions in the dump! Not just the articles! They compared the contributions (words added/removed, edits, etc.) of experienced and novice Wikipedia users on TALK pages, POLICY articles and deliberations....even on those like the Request for Comment discussion page! You may have seen how long talk pages and discussions about Wikipedia decisions can get; how many edits and words go into them, with few words ever being removed? As Kittur, et al pointed out, it takes time (and a certain amount of passion for the topic at hand or for Wikipedia) to gain an understanding of the value of "indirect" work.

By including portions of Wikipedia that most newer users have never even heard of, the data becomes heavily skewed towards higher edits and word contributions on the part of the experienced Wikipedians.

I would bet that the same study, if repeated with the limitation of only examining article pages, would show exactly what we thought before--that the top 1% covers so much ground at least in part because of all the custodial work that it does.

Comcast's Tube Shrinking

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0600

On Monday the FCC held a public hearing at Harvard Law School to address broadband network management practices.

First a quick background:

A few months ago Comcast was caught blocking peer-to-peer traffic. According to Portfolio:

The A.P. attempted to access a digital version of the King James Bible using BitTorrent from computers in Philadelphia and San Francisco. It found that Comcast blocked two of three file transfers, leading one snarky Web commenter to ask: "Why does Comcast hate Jesus?"

Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told the A.P. that the company uses "sophisticated" methods to "manage" its network, and to make sure bandwidth, or capacity, is properly allocated. The company has indicated that it views peer-to-peer traffic as less "timely" than other traffic, such as email.

"Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent," Douglas added.

Some time after this spectacle of semantical PR acrobatics, Comcast admitted to "delaying" certain types of traffic, including peer-to-peer. This of course, is "blocking," but it doesn't block access to any application, just access to the internet from that application.

From Comcast's lengthy self-aggrandizing filing with the FCC:

Network management that is reasonable and done for the benefit of subscribers is critical to every broadband service provider's ability to offer its customers the quality and reliability subscribers demand and expect. This includes using state-of-the-art technologies that do not prevent or block consumers from using P2P protocols but do ensure that such uses do not degrade other users' access to content, applications, and service...

Comcast's network management practices (1) only affect the protocols that have a demonstrated history of generating excessive burdens on the network; (2) only manage those protocols during periods of heavy network traffic; (3) only manage uploads; (4) only manage uploads when the customer is not simultaneously downloading (i.e., when the customer's computer is most likely unattended) ("unidirectional sessions" or "unidirectional uploads"); and (5) only delay those protocols until such time as usage drops below an established threshold of simultaneous unidirectional sessions.

Internet providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T tend to hold the stance that they own the "pipes" that the internet uses, so should be able to control what passes through those pipes and when. This is the antithesis of what we call Net Neutrality, which calls for unfettered access to the Internet for all.

Comcast's reasoning for restricting access is that they want high quality access for all of their subscribers and don't want the "pipes" to fill up. Essentially, as the only game in many towns, they want to stretch themselves as far as possible while doing as little as possible. Why build bigger pipes when you can just use a program to stop people from sending files to each other?

To me--as it is to most--the issue of Net Neutrality extends much further than bandwidth limitations. Comcast cuts off p2p to save themselves money, but what happens when a pipe-owner gets into bed with other companies? Maybe we become able to connect to MySpace instantly, but FaceBook trickles in as if we were on dialup. Maybe all searches performed on Verizon's Internet become forced through MSN. Maybe you have to use a particular web browser to get online. How long until the major media companies buy up the volume of the pipes, leaving only traces for the independent media and citizen journalists that make the Web great? Not just media, this can extend to any industry with an Internet presence. There are infinite ways outside influence could manifest itself. Some of these practices are already illegal or dark gray in the eyes of the law, but it seems about time for one of these Net Neutrality bills to get pushed through. Openness and decentralization are what made the Web.

The hearing on Monday was in response to Free Press, Vuze, and other organizations' complaints, accusing the media giant of using its power of access to stifle competition (Comcast, of course, also supplies cable TV and programming "On Demand").

In his testimony, Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Vuze gave this metaphor:

What we have here is a horse race, and in this contest Comcast owns the race track -- in fact, the only track in town. They also own a horse. We are being told they are only slowing down our horse by a few seconds.

This was a chance for the public to hear what's going on, show support for one side or the other, and even submit questions beforehand.

It was set to start at 11 AM. I got there at 10:40 and was promptly turned away with a crowd of others by the police guarding the door. I hung out for a while, trying to figure out a way in, but eventually gave up like what seemed like hundreds of others.

As I was lingering, I jokingly commented to an acquaintance that the Comcast folks probably got to the first-come first-serve event early to take up all the seats.

Turns out they did.

Comcast paid people off the street to go in and reserve seats (without telling them who the seat was being reserved for). According to various reports, some left at one of the first breaks, some applauded everything Comcast's David Cohen had to say, and a few slept through the proceedings.

While they're considering a do-over at Stanford, it sounds as though the hearing went pretty well for the good guys.

From Portfolio (whose Sam Gustin I have to commend for what I've found to be the best/most comprehensive coverage of this story as it has progressed--not to mention being the one to get a Comcast representative at the event to fess up to this):

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said today that the F.C.C. is "ready, willing and able" to punish Comcast Corp. and other network providers that violate commission rules calling for unfettered access to all legal internet content, applications, and services.

Save The Internet, an organization dedicated to supporting Net Neutrality, was present at the hearing, snapped a photo of a Comcast employee handing out papers to a group of seat fillers, and put out a pretty concise YouTube video about it:

It's all pretty frustrating.

P4K15T4N's 1337 DoS Attack on Its Own People

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Earlier today I had a chat window open and read "is YouTube not loading for anyone else?" I didn't notice that the site went down for about an hour.

Here's a summary of what's happening:

The Guardian:

Pakistan's government has banned access to the video-clip website YouTube because of anti-Islamic movies posted on the site, an official said yesterday...The authority did not specify what the offensive material was, but a PTA official said the ban concerned a trailer for an forthcoming film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

TimesOnline reported a different impetus:

Pakistan blocked access to YouTube yesterday because the website was carrying cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that have sparked protests by Muslims across the world... The cartoons were published by Danish newspapers in 2005 and reprinted earlier this month.

AFP:

At least 17 Danish newspapers republished the controversial drawing, vowing to defend freedom of expression a day after Danish police said they had foiled a plot to murder the cartoonist...

Five people died in Pakistan in February 2006 during protests against the cartoons, while a Pakistani cleric offered a reward of one million dollars and a new car for anyone who killed any of the cartoonists.

And another angle from the Blogger News Network:

Musharraf is a very self centered and insecure man these days and has recently learned from his sycophants that YouTube carries many videos critical of his government especially his torture on lawyers and political captives and since during this campaign technology played critical role in influencing people he wants to block out every kind of criticism. Again many citizens have reportedly uploaded video clips showing rigging under process in the constituencies where his allies either won or managed to dilute the verdict.

But...

iTWire:

According to reports, a Pakistani ISP tried to implement the government edict not by blocking the traffic but by changing network routing so that attempts to reach YouTube were directed to another IP address.

But the way the Internet works meant this route spread outside Pakistan, and YouTube's site became unavailable to a growing number of users around the world until the bogus route announcements were stemmed and YouTube issued new routes to undo the damage.

BBC News:

Pakistan's attempts to block access to YouTube have been blamed for an almost global blackout of the video website for more than an hour on Sunday.

ZDNet:

I suspect the second repercussion was that Pakistan's Internet access crawled to a halt as all of a sudden they were handling IP requests for one of the busiest sites in the world...

...While working on a fix that will filter out the spurious route announcements, PCCW has found it necessary to shut down Pakistan's Internet access.

Pakistan tries to censor the interwebs, Pakistan loses interwebs.

I think that I've tracked down all three of the possible blasphemous YouTube clips:

Geert Wilders's promotional teaser for an upcoming movie about Islam

One of many clips depicting the Danish cartoons

2 for election rigging in Pakistan: CNN, Quayyum

The Guardian:

Pakistan is not the only country to have blocked access to YouTube. In January, a Turkish court ordered the site to be blocked on account of video clips that allegedly broke the law by insulting the country's founding father, Kemal Ataturk.

Last spring the Thai government banned YouTube for four months because of clips regarded as offensive to the country's revered monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Moroccans were unable to access YouTube last year after users posted footage critical of Morocco's treatment of the people of Western Sahara.

The Ultimate in DIY Stigmata

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0600

A few days ago I mentioned the largest music collection in the world being sold on eBay.

Today Boing Boing reported on another unusual auction up on the Belgian version.

With an opening bid of 500,00 EU and a Buy It Now option for 10.000,00 EU, somebody is selling nails that were used to hang Jesus from the cross. The description offers very little (including proof), but hey they sure look old, right?

Auction

Description from the Google Translate(d) version:

NAILS WITH A SERVIS CRUCIFIER CHRIST

IN HIS STATE OF ORIGIN

PRICE OF SEPARATION OF AUCTIONS 500 EUROS

IMMEDIATE PURCHASE 10000 EUROS

Questions for the seller:

Q. Bonsoir what are your sources? Cordially

A. Clous has awarded what the announcement says a vendor expert.

Q. A DNA analysis it is provided as proof? Thank you for your reply Sincerely yours. K.

A. Hello, DNA analysis, if it can properly dating these objects have actually not been made.

No bids yet. 6.5 days to go.

Nightmare Playgrounds

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0600

There are many places on the interwebs that aggregate images on a theme, but Dark Roasted Blend is far and away the best that I've seen. Case in point: Nightmare Playgrounds.

Where I grew up there was a playground called Kid's Kingdom with pictures of monsters in unlikely corners. It was fun to pretend to be afraid of them, as I recall. Some of these are terrifying. I especially like the creepy garden sorcerer and the playground outside the apartment highrise that looks like it is only used for shooting up heroin and gang fights.

Selling CDs on eBay

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0600

I love to see huge or odd eBay auctions for some reason. Unlike the craigslist free-for-all, eBay has a lot of rules in place to ensure the legitimacy of their listings. Transactions on eBay are not done anonymously through email with all traces of the original classified removed upon completion; to the contrary, buyers, sellers, bidders, winners, and losers are visible to the public, as are each of their buying or selling history...and it stays there after the auction is over. When there's a show about a singing unicorn on public access cable, it's neat. When the same show is on NBC, it's more of a spectacle.

eBay novelty would seem to have shifted from experimentation, jokes, and art projects (see ReflectoPorn, Migrant workers, and Personal hatred) to the sort of massive-scale auctions previously relegated to the likes of Sotheby's and visible only to whoever it is that attend such events.

Currently available with a starting bid of $3,000,000: The World's Greatest Music Collection

To take from the ad's description:

From Thomas Edison to American Idol, this is the complete history of the music that shaped and defined five generations. 3 million records and 300,000 CDs containing more than 6 million song titles. It's the undisputed largest collection of recorded music in the world. About half of the recordings are new and never played, and every genre of 20th century music is represented. There are countless rare recordings worth hundreds, or even thousands of dollars each on the collectibles market. Organized and cataloged, the collection is meticulously maintained and housed in a climate-controlled warehouse. The estimated value of this amazing collection is more than $50 million.

Some interesting questions to the seller:

Q: Pardon me for being skeptical, but does the collection really have "everything," including things that are modern and far outside of the mainstream? Does it include post-rock and black metal and noise and shoegaze and oi! punk? Or does the collection focus on older music and/or more popular music? Is there any chance of an actual list of what is in the collection being made available? Many good wishes towards your enormous collection!

A: The collection contains about 99% of all charted music throughout the rock era, and about 60% of music that didn't make the charts. From Frank Sinatra to super strange...it's all there.

Q: I know that this is a ridiculous question, but I felt compelled to ask anyway. I spend most of my waking time listening to my records, and my taste is eclectic for sure. I think my jaw literally dropped to the floor to find that you had every album in popular music, and I would do almost anything for it, but I'm just a student. So my question is this. Is there anything in the world that you would trade for this collection. And I mean -anything- that would be worth this 3 million dollar collection. I'll even entertain heinous and impossible ideas. Do you need somebody whacked or do you need a personal servant to cook you meals and clean your house for the rest of your life? I know ths is not intended for the typical consumer but I would treat them immaculately. I will turn my whole house into a climate controlled super music museum if I owned them so that they would never be destroyed. I know my question is totally absurd so feel free to call me names and such, but I had to know.

A: We appreciate and applaud your love for the music, but the owner of the collection and I are too old to get three million dollars worth of cooking and cleaning in our remaining years. We talked it over and don't need anyone whacked, either. Here's an idea: Arm-twist your dad into co-signing a $3million loan and just buy the collection.

Q: do you have any ween?

A: Yes. Eighteen different listings on singles, LPs and CDs.

Q: Hi Mr. can I pay in 10.000 comfortable monthly installments? Thanks

A: Get a life.

Aerogel

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Meet aerogel. It looks animated and it's one of the most expensive substances by weight you can buy.

A gel is a liquid with a network of particles throughout that gives it a solidlike structure. If you replace the liquid with gas, you have aerogel.

According to Wikipedia, "Aerogel was first created by Steven Kistler in 1931, as a result of a bet with Charles Learned over who could replace the liquid inside a jam (jelly) jar with gas without causing shrinkage."

These amazing cartoonish substances have amazing load-bearing strength, though squeeze too hard and they shatter like glass.

Aerogel has 15 entries in the Guinness Book of World Records, including lowest density solid and best insulator. Here are some pictures of aerogel protecting various colorful items from a flame.

You can buy aerogel. It's expensive, but a couple specialty retailers like United Nuclear carry it in both small fragment and granular form. There are also (at least currently) a few listings on eBay...but don't you overbid me. :)

I have to admit, I really want a piece just because I've never seen anything like it. To me, it really looks like the person in this video is holding something that was drawn in a la Slimer in Ghostbusters.

More aerogel:

OiNK Died. Labels Dying.

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0600

OiNK, the most impressively complete, organized, invite-only file sharing community the world has known, was shut down in October. I missed it. I had an account a while back, but didn't own the router I was using and wasn't able to upload, so was booted (there are strict rules about upload/download ratios). While I was there, what I saw was a labyrinthine library of music, only available in the highest quality, and a group of die hard music fans who made every single file ready-to-download.

The next day, Demonbaby posted one of the best damnations of the record industry that I've read, "When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide." It's long, but in an age when the RIAA is suing children, single moms, grandmothers, and deceased great grandmothers for downloading music, depicting music fans as horrible criminals, it's a worthwhile read.

Snorting Sleep

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Your friends and mine, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have bottled a brain hormone (orexin A) that eliminates the negative effects of sleepiness, restoring cognitive function.

As DailyGalaxy reports,

The research came about after [Jerome Siegel, a UCLA professor] discovered that the absence of orexin A appears to cause narcolepsy. That finding pointed to a major role for the peptide's absence in causing sleepiness. It stood to reason that if the deficit of orexin A makes people sleepy, adding it back into the brain would reduce the effects, said Siegel.

The idea, of course, is to have soldiers use it to stay awake when they need to. It's easily administrable through a nasal spray and seems to have tested well so far.

Things like this get me excited. I hate sleep. I don't understand why it's biologically still necessary. In an age of electricity, cheap transportation, technologically-enabled efficiency, and instant global communication, sleep seems like such a waste of time. We aren't prey to anything, we can do most of the same activities at night that we can during the day, and we can illuminate our own world. Why do I have to disengage for a third of my life? How many more books would I read? How much better would I be at doing things that I like? Sleep is especially a hassle when it tries to knock me out while I'm doing something or when I have something to do in the morning but it tricks me into thinking that I want more of what it's selling.

Unfortunately, while the nasal spray removes the cognitive deficiencies caused by being tired, it does not prevent the longer-term problems associated with sleep deprivation.

A few weeks I needed to stay awake for a long time. I went for a bit more than 50 hours, slept for 6, then went another 24. At around hour 35, still having a relatively easy time of things, I decided to look up what happens if you don't sleep. Of course eventually you wouldn't have any choice but to nod off (assuming you're not pumped full of speed or hormones), but what would keep me from only sleeping once every few days?

When you don't sleep, cognition, decision-making skills, communication, memory, your immune system, and concentration all suffer. Sleep deprivation has been named as responsible for a lot of accidents, death, and disaster (Exxon Valdez, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island are examples). One study referenced by the Psychiatric Times found that "our societal sleep debt is so great that simply losing one additional hour of sleep due to the spring shift to daylight savings time can increase traffic accident rates by 7% (Coren, 1996b) and death rates due to all accidents by 6.5% (Coren, 1996c)."

One famous sleep deprivation cautionary tale was that of Peter Tripp, a radio DJ who undertook a 201-hour on-air "wakeathon" to benefit March of Dimes. A couple days into the broadcast, he grew extremely irritable and difficult to understand. As time went on, he became very paranoid and was plagued by hallucinations. One report I read at MultiPlay described Tripp as never being the same again after these events--that they changed his personality, which destroyed his career. Many researchers say that sleep allows your neurons to repair and that depriving yourself of sleep can permanently damage the brain.

Coincidentally, one person that I talked to while researching this shared an anecdote of a friend of his who went for several days without sleep and who was "never the same again." He was not surprised when I told him the Peter Tripp story, saying that he would never go more than a day without sleep after what he saw happen to his friend.

So...I wasn't up for 200 hours. I wasn't even up for 100 hours. However, what I experienced during this time, the longest I've ever been awake, left an impression. After about 36 hours, I started to hallucinate. Not the sort of LSD hallucinations where you stare at something or someone that isn't there (the type Tripp had), but quick little concentrated flashes of light in my periphery. As time went on, the flashes became more frequent and vivid. They looked like little squiggles or lasers...or how fairies buzz around in movies. I started to really feel awful late on the second day, but was still able to function. At around 48 hours, the hallucinations were a little more frequent--probably a flash causing me to turn my head every 20-30 minutes. While I was talking to somebody online who deprived themself of sleep often (yes, I realize there's something odd about wasting time talking to people about sleep deprivation when you're sleep deprived and should be working on the thing that is causing your deprivation), I momentarily saw a thin silver line almost in front of me, but off to the left. I mentioned it to the person, who indicated it was something of an archetypal sleep deprived hallucination for him. Bizarre. The same hallucination. Google wasn't much help for this.

I slept for 10 hours when it was done, woke up, met a friend for Thai food, almost fell asleep in my curry, slept for another 9, and was pretty tired for the next 3-4 days.

I still hate sleep. I hate it more now that I know what it will do to me if I ignore it, but the way the human brain works is so fascinating that I can't help but mention it.

ScientificMatch

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0600

ScientificMatch is the latest online dating service.

It's only offered in the Boston/Providence area, but it looks pretty good: One way that it matches people is through a system that compares like "personality/values:"

We believe that we've got the best personality matching system--anywhere. The beauty is in the simplicity. We match you according to your fundamental, core values. Psychologists have determined a range of values that, taken together, compose the full array of principles that define us as human beings. We all value these principles to one degree or another, but we all prioritize them differently than most other people.

To supplement this, there is an additional step in which you may enter specific, more technical information:

The personal preferences section allows you to tell us more about who you're looking for. It includes things like age range and distance from where you live.

Sounds pretty great, right?

Oh, right...and matches are generated based on DNA.

According to this page, many aspects of relationship quality are inversely proportionate to immune system similarity. The evolutionary basis for this is that we want our babies to have as diverse an immune system as possible.

Now I tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to end this post without making a joke about cloning, referencing imaginary humorously-named genes (for example, "can it filter out the ___ gene?"), or even use "immune system" as a euphemism for certain archetypal undesirable traits. That's what I do for you.

Passage

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0600

Passage is a video game created by Jason Rohrer.

I'm not going to tell you anything about it except that you could call it "game art," it won't take a lot of your time to play, and it's the only game I can think of that I've described as "beautiful" out loud (not about its graphics). I don't expect everybody to like it as much as I did, but check it out anyway.

Downloads for Windows or Mac here. Do yourself a favor and play it before reading anything about it. Arrow keys are all you need. Oh, and because it's not that intuitive these days, "Q" quits.

If you're into it, check out Rohrer's other games and the Montreal art-game event Gamma 256, where Passage was one of the featured submissions.

Via Raph Koster.

Objectuals

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0600

Objectuals is a collection of wearable devices designed by Hyungkoo Lee to alter body perceptions.

You know those depictions of the future where everybody walks around with odd, non-functional, oft-colorful clothing or accessories just because it's the future? I like that. I like this.

Via NextNature.

Yesss, purrrry little kitties on a little podcast just purrrring soooo cuuuuuute like tiny little kittiiiiies

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0600

It's so nice, these days, to visit a site featuring cats that talk without grammatical and syntax errors...and that aren't "in" someplace while emphatically doing something mischievous.

I present to you (via Boing Boing), the Purrcast. Having just posted their second episode, the creators have set a goal a new post every week.

So far I'm partial to the guttural, Karygara throat singing style of Piglet (episode one) over the quicker, more abrupt, and higher-pitched Fatty (episode two), but I'll suspend judgment until I've heard more.

Opening it up for user submission = massive hit/internet meme. I'm calling it. Called. Ship it. Call ROFLCon.

Hello Cavity!

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0600

Kokoro, a company owned by Sanrio (yes, the Hello Kitty people), has developed an android named Simroid for use in dental training. According to Pink Tentacle,

[She can] follow spoken instructions, closely monitor a dentist's performance during mock treatments, and react in a human-like way to mouth pain. Because Simroid's realistic appearance and behavior motivate people to treat her like a human being, as opposed to an object, she helps dental trainees learn how to better communicate with patients.

Not limited to reactive lurches and vocal expressions of pain from wreckless scraping, picking, and drilling, Simroid is also equipped with a gag reflex in case trainees put their instruments in too far.

Terrifying. Just terrifying. Here's a demonstration video. Probably not for the dentophobic.

I can't help but feel like I'm watching a snuff film.

What happens when we develop AI good enough to not merely mimic pain, but also be aware of its surroundings or have some element of self-awareness? Talk about the ultimate in dentistry training!

For those of you who don't have a Hello Kitty humidifier, bean bag chair, calligraphy set, and toaster, you may not know Sanrio's reputation for putting their characters on impossible amounts of crap. Not "crap" in the bad sense necessarily, but fantastical, aesthetically pleasing, happy, oft-functional crap.

I can't wait to get my hands on all the great Simroid merchandise!

Human-Charged Batteries

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0600

Boise-based company M2E is working on technology that turns human motion into energy. Motion you create when you go about your daily activities causes magnets to slide back and forth near coils of copper, which is then stored in a battery.

This process, known as electromagnetic induction, is not new. It's one of the newer methods of harnessing kinetic energy (newer than wind turbines and waterwheels anyway), but we've been using generators for some time. What is new (at least I think so) is the harnessing of the entire human body without need for additional effort expensed (such as cranking, pedaling, etc.)

For a long time, humans have tended to try to outsource or automate as much of our work as possible. Sometimes it's because a machine or specialist can do it better, sometimes it's because we're lazy or greedy, and sometimes it's outsourcing or automating for their own sake. The advancement of this type of technology that M2E is working on is long overdue, delayed by our desire for convenience. However, increased awareness of global environmental problems is making clean energy fashionable.

One step in the right direction: how fantastic does a hand-cranked cell phone charger sound right now? Ten years ago, swept up in the accelerating advances of mobile technology, people would have laughed at such an antiquated-seeming tool. A hand crank is one of the first cliches one thinks of for outdated technology. Today, the problems with this prospect are that cranking takes effort and most people wouldn't believe a crank would provide sufficient benefit to merit such effort. We still want things to be convenient. If something requires us to work, it better be worth it. If the act of "cranking" (or its equivalent) becomes such that it takes little or no physical effort, then even a minimal added benefit would be deserving of consideration. Companies like Freeplay Energy have attempted to modernize this idea and to make it more convenient and palatable, not to mention less stressful on our body. If greater attention were paid to such energy sources over the past half century, might we be at a point now where harnessed human kinetic energy could actually do a better job at charging your device than a plugging it into an outlet? That being said, even if the benefit were minimal, a behavior change that requires no extra effort would be considerable.

The amazing One Laptop Per Child program, whose mission is "to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child," has developed an affordable, rugged laptop to accomplish this goal that, among its other features, will be able to be charged with human power (currently, I believe, a foot pump). This is a great example of current (old, even) technology being used extremely well not just because they wanted to celebrate an alternative source of energy, but because this type of power is useful for those who may not have access to traditional electrical power all the time.

M2E is going further, though. By doing away with the hand crank and similar (relatively) work-intensive mechanisms and harnessing motion the body generates anyway, there is no longer an inconvenience. The company's goals right now are to extend the battery life of mobile electronics, such as cell phones. While the promotional material claims doubling the uptime of some cell phone batteries (2 hours of motion=30 minutes of talk time), soon it will hopefully get to the point when there will hardly be a need to plug your devices in at all.

I should probably note that my speculation as to where this technology could go is just that: my speculation. I am not an engineer. There could very well be scientifically definable limits to where this can go that I am not aware of. I just found this exciting...but then, I've always found hand-powered devices really neat.

I found out about M2E via Next Nature, who likened such utilization of human kinetic energy to the machines in The Matrix being powered by human body heat. Fortunately for us, this only works if we're moving ourselves around. Let's just hope the energy that it would take for a machine to open our heads and make us move via appropriate brain stimulation is not less than the energy gained from the movement itself.

Bullshit Generators

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0600

Doc Searls found the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator! As much as I'm ashamed to admit that I laughed out loud at a generated bit of tech-business text, "reinvent dynamic ecologies" made me giggle. For some reason I've found the overuse of the word "ecology" in the context of the web hilarious. Don't tell anyone.

It got me wondering what other types of bullshit generators are out there.

Dack's Web Economy Bullshit Generator would seem to have been the inspiration for the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator. This isn't as "funny," but it's more transparent (which is, by the way, a big hit under "adjectives").

For those wanting to enhance geographic strata or curate topographical partnerships, there's the Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator. Bullshit Job Title Generator operates similarly, spitting out exciting nondescript snippets to go on a business card. I want my next job to be as a "legacy solutions designer."

Kalvos and Damian have altered Dack's aforementioned generator to bring you the Musical Bullshit Generator. Don't know how to describe your friend's new all-sitar jamboree? How about "tough-sounding back porch soundscape"?

Bullshit generators seem, by and large, to be limited to marketing, business, and specifically web marketing. Because of this, I've become bored searching for bullshit generators and have decided to make my generator. A cereal generator. A futuristic cereal generator. Next post.

Futuristic Cereal Name Generator

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0600

The (ridiculous) futuristic cereal name generator was inspired by the last post's search for interesting "bullshit generators."

The code I used is a modification of Dack.com's Web Economy Bullshit Generator.

To use, just click the "cereal" button.

It makes me really happy to seriously consider what these cereal names would mean...but then, most people probably not want to do that.

UPDATE 11/18/07: The "Maple Brown Sugar" part of the Maple Brown Sugar Oatmeal Crisp that I bought yesterday is a little less exciting than it was when it sang to me from the supermarket shelf.

Speaking of which, what ever happened to HyperSonic Sound? Why aren't cereal boxes singing to me yet when I walk down the aisle? I think that I may have to post some of the article I wrote last year about HSS...

Smokey the Bear's Creepy Roly-Poly Cousins

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0600

This is a pill bug, also known as roly-poly, armadillo bug, or (officially) Armadillidium Vulgare. You've probably encountered them before. I think they're pretty cute. When they get scared they roll up into a ball so that only their hard shell is exposed.

I just happened to notice a profile of of a robot named OLE on Communist Robot. OLE, designed at the University of Magdeburg-Stendal, was modeled after the pill bug...and fights forest fires.

Apparently this little guy (which is not so little) crawls around the forest patrolling for fires using a variety of sensors. If things get too hot, it can roll up into a ball, withstanding extremely high temperatures and protecting its more fragile underside.

I can't seem to access the main research site right now, but according to Slippery Brick, once it detects a fire it can run to it at a speed of up to 20km/hr (about 12.4 mph). I'm not sure how I would react if I were taking a leisurely stroll through the woods and this critter clawed past me.

They look to be about the size of a beer keg with legs. While bigger than its crustacean counterpart, it probably can't hold all that much of whatever chemical concoction it sprays. Are we talking about armies of these things scouring fire-prone forests?

Apparently the claim is that 30 of them could adequately patrol a 7000 sq km area (2700 sq mi). This equates to one OLE able to cover 90 square miles. What? 90 Square miles is almost two Bostons. I recognize part of this calculation factors in bugs being able to help each other out, but I would have a hard time believing all 30 of these robots could cover a forest the size of one Boston, nevermind 60 Bostons (2*30).

When the original link goes back up, I'll check the claim for myself. For now, I'll just enjoy imagining hordes of these things crawling around, ganging up on hunters around campfires.

Giant robot bugs make nature walks so much more appealing to me.

MISC

Pill bug pictures taken from its Wikipedia page.

YouTube video of a real pill bug.

Ubiquitous Seamless Phenomenological Searchability - 1 of 2

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0600

This is PART ONE (1) of a TWO (2) PART posting. This part gives an overview of knowledge exporting and discusses the current problems with information searches. Part two proposes a possible solution to these problems (what the title refers to). The two parts were not written separately, but split for ease of consumption. That being said, I would encourage you to also read PART TWO (2) here.

Everybody knows the internet has revolutionized the way we store, process, access, and interpret information. Popular access to broadband internet, cheaper storage, functional portability, the collaborative web, the "daily me," ubiquitous connectivity, and other tools we associate with Web 2.0 all play a part in this technosociophenomenoepistemological shift.

Bruno LaTour, in his article "Where are the Missing Masses: Sociology of a Door," makes the case that tools--technological or otherwise--have a "deskilling" effect. That is to say, by creating a calculator, we no longer have a need to know how to do long division or calculate cubed roots (let alone use an abacus). Although by using the term "deskilling," this process sounds regressive or degenerative, I think a better argument could be made for it being a step forward.

-EXPORTING MEMORY-

Instead of making a declaration about the human brain without a source at my fingertips to back it up, I will declare that my brain does not have infinite storage capabilities. Or rather, even if memory is endless, my recall functions are limited. It is for this reason that, even after I've read or been told a piece of information, I don't always remember it.

I know that, over the course of my life, I've more than once looked up the capital of Uruguay, the name of that bug that looks and sounds like a cicada but isn't a cicada, if the vibration coming from the back of my car means anything bad, how the date Thanksgiving takes place on is determined, etc....but I certainly can't tell you right now. For this reason, I love Google and Wikipedia. I love being able to search for the information I want and find it. It makes it okay that I don't remember everything.

David Brooks wrote a great article in the New York Times a few weeks ago titled "The Outsourced Brain," in which he professes his love for his GPS:

"Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns...My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana....I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn't want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator."

This, which I didn't realize before copying/pasting, uses the same calculator metaphor that I did (or perhaps I conveniently forgot in order to make a point about memory limitations), poetically illustrates this notion of celebrated export of knowledge.

Unfortunately, this is not a seamless system. We have to be careful about what we export. Things fail. Devices fail. Programs fail. Brooks goes on to state:

"I'm no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins."

Most of us can appreciate a sense of helplessness or personal loss when our cell phone or laptop breaks or acts unpredictably. Depending on the person, a failing device could mean any range of lost business, personal, or interpersonal information, memories, data, structures, knowledge, or communication. For many youth, even an hour of FaceBook downtime can mean significant anxiety.

Reliance on hardware that can fail is a problem, but not the one I'm concerned with right now. The only problem having to do with hardware that I want to address here is the need for seamlessness, which I'll bring up in a few paragraphs. Rather than hardware, what I want to talk about is the failure of the software.

-GOOGLE-

Google fails. The Google search engine, which of course doesn't actually know anything aside from how to create and manage metadata, is an extremely useful tool to find information that exists "out there." The problem is that Google is biased. Search results aren't based on informational accuracy, but on popularity, linkage, topness of domain, etc.

Google will also search for exactly what you want it to search for...and nothing else. If you search for "what does the spitting noise coming from the back of my car mean," you may very well find the correct answer. More likely, however, you will find hundreds of different descriptions of a spitting sound without knowing that the spitting sound you're describing is more commonly referred to as "sputtering."

Once you find an explanation of the problem that makes sense and are able to somehow verify it, you may want to fix the problem. Almost any "how do I..." search will bring in myriad opinions and approaches of varying levels of accuracy and coherence, and tailored to myriad different expected audiences (a "how to" on a mechanical engineer's website might differ somewhat from that on a blog entry titled "Experimenting With Car Engines for Fun Sixth Grade Projects!")

Also, how many times have you had to reword a Google search in order to find what you want? I'm not talking about correcting spelling or grammatical mistakes--although there is something to be said about Google's "did you mean..." attempt at solving this issue, which again directs people towards the lowest common denominator and sometimes away from the answer they're actually looking for. I'm talking about something like this:

I Google "my state capital." I'm logged onto Google, so I might think that Google knows that I'm in Massachusetts because my Google profile says so. At the very least, I would hope it to bring me to a list of state capitals. In fact, the first hits were: Texas Legislature Online, the Texas capitol; Welcome to the State of California; Devvy Kidd -- Rally at Texas State Capitol a Resounding Success; MyFlorida.com Home; Wisconsin State Legislature...

In the hit descriptions, for some reason, it bolds "capitol," which normally is an indication of a term I searched for. But I searched for "capital," the city that acts as the official place of government, not a structure. Worse, upon following all of those first links, and doing a "find" for the name of the state capital of each (Austin, Sacramento, Tallahassee, and Madison), I find that not one even lists what the capital is.

As soon as I get those results, I'll probably realize that Texas and Wisconsin sites won't help me, so I add "Massachusetts" to the search, now trying to find "my state capital massachusetts." The first result is still a link to California! The next result is "My State Theme Unit," the third "Massachusetts: Definition and Much More from Answers.com," and the fourth "Massachusetts State Capital - Boston - Linen - (eBay item...)"

The first hit to provide me with an easy answer is an Ebay listing somehow. Of course, had I decided to explore what in God's name "My State Theme Unit" was or humor what the "definition" of Massachusetts might be, I would have found what I was looking for as well, but you get the point. Googling is a skill. People are good or bad at it. I consider myself very good at it, and it still very often takes me several attempts to find what I'm looking for.

-WIKIPEDIA-

The number one hit for many popular Google searches is a Wikipedia article. But Wikipedia fails, too. I love Wikipedia, but it does level off extreme opinions, it does ban original research, it is subject to memetic engineering and persuasion, it is reliant on information that, while citable, may be incorrect, and it is run by a core group of admins and editors who, like the rest of humanity, have their own biases.

With Wikipedia as the primary source of information and its status thereof perpetuated by Google's searching methods, we are faced with a homogenization of accessible information, which will inevitably be assimilated and turned into knowledge. Knowledge, in turn, is then more confidently reconstituted digitally as information regardless of whether it is the best or most accurate information for you.

This is PART ONE (1) of a TWO (2) PART posting. Part two proposes a possible solution to these problems (what the title refers to). The two parts were not written separately, but split for ease of consumption. That being said, I would encourage you to also read PART TWO (2) here.

Ubiquitous Seamless Phenomenological Searchability - 2 of 2

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0600

This is PART TWO (2) of a TWO (2) PART posting. Part one gave an overview of knowledge exporting and discussed the current problems with information searches. This part proposes a possible solution to these problems (what the title refers to). The two parts were not written separately, but split for ease of consumption. That being said, I would encourage you to first read PART ONE (1) here.

Here's what I want: ubiquitous seamless phenomenological searchability. That is, a way for me, regardless of where I am, to search for what I want to know on my own terms, displaying what will give me the information that I'm looking for without having to connect to a network and wait for my Google search to load.

-UBIQUITY-

The idea of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is not new. The late Mark Weiser coined the term in the late 1980s to refer to a state in which computer processing has been fully integrated into the everyday (read more on the subject here, here, and here...and information about the Ubicomp International Conference here). Urban areas are already blanketing their cities and towns in publicly accessible WiFi. Cell phones with internet access are standard. There's no question that we are headed towards enabled persistent connectedness. It's just a matter of time.

-SEAMLESSNESS-

Wireless networking and mobile technology are obviously still evolving. Such is evident by volatilities in connection strength, connection quality, data transfer speeds, problems of interface, etc.

If you currently wish to search for some information with one of these technologies, you first have to find a place to connect (ubiquitous computer will fix this). Once found, you must connect to the network. Ubicomp and wireless/mobile technology will bring devices that never disconnect, but we currently have a short but problematic lag time between when our device finds the network and when we actually arrive at our internet destination. The technology I'm describing cannot have any lag time. It has to be connected and instantly accessible.

On a related note, interface must also be improved. The time it takes to boot up a laptop or remove a phone from a bag, then navigate to the internet icon before any of this connection even takes place is also problematic.

I'll resist the urge to go off on a transhumanist cybernetics tangent here, prophecizing body augmentation, networked bodies, etc. Another time.

-WHY WE NEED A NEW SYSTEM-

We see that Google has problems. It fails us from time to time. Any attempt at a universal fix without a high level of personalization (I'll redirect this term's importance later) will simply create a convoluted parallel failure.

For example, I had an idea to create a website called www.googlefailures.com, to which people could submit what they were searching Google for and whether or not a satisfactory answer was found. If no good solution was found, the problem would be added to a publicly accessible database of unsolved Google failures, to which others could respond, redirect, or provide answers. If a solution was found, one could submit where it was eventually found to provide a shortcut to future searchers or give the exact search term that yielded the desired result.

The problem with this hypothetical googlefailures.com is it will recreate the same problems it purports to fix. For starters, Google fails so often that googlefailures.com would eventually rise to be the top hit in many searches, creating a new lowest common denominator and substituting itself for the first several hits. This defeats the point and perpetuates the problem. By making the once-scarce answers most prominent, you make the once-prominent answers scarce...or, if it includes both sets of these hits, googlefailures.com becomes a copy of Google itself. Even if googlefailures.com worked as intended for a time, there would eventually be a need for googlefailuresfailures.com. The problem is that this type of searching doesn't always work. Instead of applying Band-Aids, we need a new system.

-PHENOMENOLOGICAL SEARCH-

Phenomenology is a term I use in this context somewhat pretentiously. I use it because "personalization" makes me think of a program constructing something for humans based on AI that "gets to know us." Personalization is what Amazon does for you when it recommends a book. A personalized search could be one aspect of this phenomenological approach, since computers process things in ways that humans cannot, but when I speak of "phenomenological search" I want to convey an idea of a person taking their own personal meaning and exporting it for future reference; a person developing their own search engine, tagging, and knowledge management.

I'm under the impression, however uninformed, that there is an entire industry dedicated to "learning management" that studies how people learn and then develops methods or technologies to enable individuals to learn in the way that suits them best.

Imagine you want to bake a chocolate cake and don't know where to start. You do a Google search, are directed to recipes.com, and find a confection that looks tasty. You make it, following the directions to a tee, but it tastes awful. Next time you scroll down a little further, visit a different cooking site and try somebody else's recipe. This one is almost there. For cake number three, you tweak the recipe by adding a little more sugar and achieve perfection. Two years later, you want to make a chocolate cake again. Odds are good that you've forgotten the combination of different searches and the tweak that previously proved successful (if you remember that you were successful at all).

What if you were able to, upon finding the good recipe, tell our system that this is your chocolate cake recipe. You can have others, but this is the one that made your parents proud. You could save the recipe to an entry for "chocolate cake," which could also include a photo of the cake from the site you found the recipe at...or the you could just take a picture of the cake with the device and store it alongside the recipe. Oh, but what about the extra sugar? You could edit the recipe directly, but what if you only used extra sugar because your parents have a sweet tooth? Just type in a little sticky note: "this was perfect for mom and dad with an extra half cup of sugar." Two years from now, you search for "chocolate cake" and up comes an image of the cake you made, the recipe, and the note with a picture of happy mom and dad.

More simply, I'm not handy. I recently tried to learn something pretty simple (and embarrassing to not know by this point): how to patch a hole in sheet rock. I had made a little accident in my wall. Googling this had me thinking I would be cutting geometric holes, buying new sheet rock, putting in pieces of screen...eventually I found "spackle." Spackling, for those of you as clueless as me, is easy. You put some gunk in the hole, smooth it out, wait until it dries, then do it again if it needs it. Paint if you want. The end. I would like to save the page that told me spackling was the way to go and how to get it done under "how to patch a hole in the wall" so that, in case I forget (not being handy tends to lead to avoidance of handiwork, thus an anticipated long break before the next time such a problem will arise), I will be directed to what I need. Not what your average Googler needs or what handy people need. I would also save it under "handiwork" or something similar so I could start at that site for other issues that may arise.

Not even Google can help with personal, abstract memory recollection. I'm trying to remember what song it was that my girlfriend and I listened to on our first date with the volume all the way up and the windows down while driving around at 2am. Neither of us can remember, but because I often associate music with feeling, I've long since filed that song under my girlfriend's name, "first date," and "memory songs" (in which the same song is also somehow associated with reading Richard Brautigan in a shopping plaza sometime in the spring of 2006). I can quickly find out that the song was Heartbeats by The Knife because I've organized it as such. Perhaps this system would allow me to relive those particular types of feelings--those that are so distinct, but so dreamily ephemeral due to being tied to a particular trigger (like a song) that they can disappear for ages until zapped back into being by that trigger. This, of course, raises a host of psychological questions that I'm so sure I don't want to address, that they make me almost wish I wanted to go back and delete the last idea. Google is, nonetheless, helpless in these areas.

For a final example, take a picture of your lawyer friend Harry as you know him, record him saying that funny thing he always says when he drinks, throw in the song you two sang at karaoke, and file it under "Harry" with directions to his house, a reminder that he owes you a dollar, and whatever other information you want to associate with Harry. Also file it under "friends" and "lawyers" in case you haven't talked to Harry in a while and need a lawyer. Years from now, when you remember your old friend Harry, refile the "friends" data as "old friends," a category you treat with comforting familiar ignorance like friends of your old MySpace account.

-CONCLUSION...MORE OR LESS-

Build your knowledge base when you want to, then forget it. Like the point Brooks made in his Times article, you no longer have to remember directions. You no longer have to know long division. You no longer have to memorize state capitals. Because of these outsourcings of knowledge, I believe we have more room for other things. As peculiar as it sounds to state idealistically: what else can we forget?

A lot. Well, it all depends. It depends on ubiquitous computing, which is coming. It depends on seamless access to searchability without connection or device lag, which is probably coming. Finally, it depends on a phenomenological search and knowledge management system. The last, of course, is the most abstract and difficult, but I think doable. Remove the social aspect of del.icio.us, allow for ease of multimedia (like current SmartPhones, with voice memo, camera, speakers, etc.), enable cascading of different media, and, of course, a search engine to find information that you don't have categorized.

There are a lot of issues to be discussed about the device portion of this system. Something with so much personal information would have to be secure. Biometric access? Something with so much personal information would also have to be reliable. Yearly replacements or tuneups? Well, as I stated early on in this blog, I'm tabling most of the hardware issues. Too complicated for now.

This was just an idea that I had that I want to exist. If it does exist, I was unsuccessful in searching for it (comment about irony omitted). You're reading my attempt to put such an idea "out there." If what I'm describing does exist or is being researched, I would love it if people in the know would leave comments with leads about who is working on or studying what aspect.

Thanks for reading to the end :)

Gorilla Tonnage

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0600

I'm writing a blog post for the Center for Citizen Media and started to refer to CafePress as "the hundred ton gorilla of custom merchandising" when I realized that gorillas probably don't weigh a hundred tons. Not even the really really big ones. They're probably one ton at most, but "one ton gorilla" didn't seem substantial enough to be used as a popular metaphor.

[Note: Wikipedia says an adult male will typically range between 310-440 lbs. with obese gorillas in captivity weighing in as high as 600 lbs. This is not even close to one ton. CafePress is not a three-tenths of a ton gorilla.]

I Googled: "the 'ton gorilla of'"

Here are all of the results from the first two pages:

The 8000 Ton Gorilla of Travel Sites

2 ton gorilla of the ISP world

ten-ton gorilla of the elections business

Five-Ton Gorilla of Moviemaking

50-ton gorilla of 2005

zillion-ton gorilla [of great music typesetting]

two-ton gorilla of food service distribution

ten-ton gorilla of a game

two-ton gorilla of white light on the noir scene

2721 metric ton gorilla of transportation

34-ton gorilla of a rock

20-ton gorilla of the $11 billion annual specialty coffee market

ten-ton gorilla of ball-blasting arcade puzzlers

million-ton gorilla of healthcare and long-term care costs

two-ton gorilla of a tech resource site

two-ton gorilla of their backs

two ton Gorilla of the Japanese Mobile Industry

10 ton Gorilla of social news sites

one-ton gorilla of Beaujolais

two-ton gorilla of white light on the noir scene

TALLY:

1 ton: 1

2 ton: 7 (2 of which were of the "white light of the noir scene" variety)

5 ton: 1

10 ton: 4

20 ton: 1

34 ton: 1

50 ton: 1

2721 ton (metric): 1

8000 ton: 1

1000000 ton: 1

Zillion ton: 1

So I went with 10. I know 2 was the most popular, but I chose 10 anyway. And I spelled it out ("ten").

Can we please get our metaphor usage together? Seriously.