The End of Cyberspace

The Muppet Matrix

How did I miss this?

Clearly I need to check Alex Halavais' blog more often.

Technorati Tags: movies, science_fiction

links for 2006-10-24

• The End of Cyberspace and Other Surprises -- Thomas 12 (4): 383 -- Convergence [sub req]
  The concepts "Web 2.0, the end of cyberspace, and the internet of things... have synergies both with the current fashion for modifying physical objects with the features of virtual objects...and with the potential technologies for collective intelligence.
  (tags: endofcyberspace blogject brucesterling digital-physical internetofthings hypertext)
• Behind the 'Great Firewall': Decoding China's Internet Media Policies from the Inside -- Zhang 12 (3): 271 -- Convergence [sub req]
  "This study examines China's current internet media policy in terms of the nature of the policy, the policymaking process, major forces driving the policy and future trends."
  (tags: internet policy China)
• The World Wide Web as a social infrastructure for knowledge oriented work [PDF]
  "[H]ow has the Web‘s potential for communication and its accessible information infrastructure affected [knowledge workers'] strategies for acquiring and spreading professional information?"
  (tags: collective_intelligence collaboration)
• Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
  (tags: media technology internet endofcyberspace)
• Kathleen K. Olson, "Cyberspace as Place and the Limits of Metaphor," Convergence 11:1 (2005) [sub req]
  Examines "the use of the ’cyberspace as place’ metaphor in the creation of the legal concept of ’cybertrespass’, examines the consequences of... that metaphor to the free flow of information on the internet, and evaluates alternative metaphors."
  (tags: endofcyberspace law language)
• Happy birthday, iPod (MercuryNews.com, 10/21/2006)
  "Five years ago Monday, Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod, the company's most important product since the original Macintosh and one of the most successful consumer electronics products ever."
  (tags: ipod ubicomp music)

Commodity computers, custom computing

From Greg Matter:

I've commented frequently upon a central paradox of IT: software and hardware components are the products of fierce, high-volume competition, yet their final assembly by IT organizations is one-of-a-kind artisanship. To quote Scott McNealy, I've never toured a datacenter with the reaction "Wow, this looks just like the one I visited yesterday!"

We ought to ask why this is so, because it is supremely inefficient. Practically all IT organizations speak of the commoditization of computers, but seldom of computing. Partly, this is because computers and storage are simple to understand and quantify compared to the enormous complexity of their assembly into systems that deliver some (with hope, predictable) level of business service.

Technorati Tags: computer, end of cyberspace

"Putting computing closest to the source of value"

From Jonathan Schwartz:

[Oil companies put] sensors on spinning drill bits to extract seismic data, which then guides the bits as they descend into the earth (I had no idea you could actually steer a drill bit). And they do this on offshore drilling platforms. And after they pump crude into supertankers, they use data from sensors spread throughout the ships to monitor vibration, fluid dynamics and rotational physics - to keep the ships, and their precious sloshing cargo, moving safely in the right direction.

I was similarly surprised to hear a global relief agency describe the IT challenges of managing a disaster - starting with a need to supply computing capacity to remote disaster locations without power. More painfully, without desktop system administrators.

And then there's what Disney's up to, passing out trackable stuffed dolls to kids in their theme parks, so parents can follow them (as Scott would say, "that's not Big Brother, that's Dad..."). By tracking clusters of dolls, the operator can tell parents how long the lines are for a ride, and determine where to place concession stands (in front of waiting patrons, of course)....

All of the above are examples of putting computing closest to the source of value - and responding in near real time to a changing physical world.

Via Kempton

Technorati Tags: computer, end of cyberspace, internet

The pearly gates of level 200 of Tetris

Observed on Flickr:

This slab is claimed to be the place where Jesus' body was prepared for burial. Superstitious Christians from around the world come here to kiss the stone and rub common-day items against the rock in order to "suck up" some sort of blessing or holiness.

You'll notice the kid is rubbing his Game Boy on the rock.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, games, religion

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

MIT has a new Center for Collective Intelligence:

While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities.

Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?

Via Kempton

Technorati Tags: collaboration, collective intelligence

Keywords of human-computer differences

One of the reasons that predictions about the death of the library, office, workplace, book, etc. in the age of the Internet have not come to pass is that these older institutions or technologies had uses that went beyond the strictly functional ones of information processing, storage, retrieval, etc.. Offices, for example, aren't just places where knowledge workers move zeros and ones around; the good ones are creative spaces that offer workers access to unique stores of informal knowledge.

A second reason that bits haven't triumphed over atoms is that some activities or functions look the same when done by computers (or networks) and people (or institutions), but turn out to have subtle but critical differences. Two examples recently crossed my radar.

First was a New York Times article detailing how it's getting harder to expunge criminal records:

In 41 states, people accused or convicted of crimes have the legal right to rewrite history. They can have their criminal records expunged, and in theory that means that all traces of their encounters with the justice system will disappear....

But real expungement is becoming significantly harder to accomplish in the electronic age. Records once held only in paper form by law enforcement agencies, courts and corrections departments are now routinely digitized and sold in bulk to the private sector. Some commercial databases now contain more than 100 million criminal records. They are updated only fitfully, and expunged records now often turn up in criminal background checks ordered by employers and landlords....

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer in Miami, tells her clients that expungement is a waste of time. “To tell someone their record is gone is essentially to lie to them,” Ms. Rodriguez-Taseff said. “In an electronic age, people should understand that once they have been convicted or arrested that will never go away.”

Judge Stanford Blake, whose court often enters expungement orders, said his inability to make them effective had left him feeling frustrated and helpless.

“It’s a horrible situation,” said Judge Blake, the administrative judge of the criminal division of the Eleventh Circuit Court in Miami. “It’s the ultimate Big Brother, always watching you.”

This case demonstrates something that Ellen Ullman argued in her brilliant essay "Memory and Megabytes:" namely, that there's a big difference between human and computer memory, and we tend to overlook the critical differences between them.

Computers are indiscriminate rememberers. This is a very good thing if they're keeping track of bank records or subatomic events, but it's more problematic when it's applied to the world of more complex human affairs. This is because individuals are much more selective about what they remember, and societies actively negotiate what they choose to remember and call attention to.

First, the case of individuals. Forgetting insults and painful events, we all recognize, is a pretty healthy thing for individuals: a well-adjusted person just doesn't feel the same shock over a breakup after ten years (if they can even remember the name of Whoever They Were), nor do they regard a fight from their childhood with anything but clinical detachment. Collectively, societies can also be said to make decisions about what they choose to remember, and how to act toward the past. Sometimes this happens informally, but has practical reasons: think of national decisions of avoid deep reflection on wars or civil strife, in the interests of promoting national unity and moving forward.

Sometimes, though, that forgetting is the product of formal social negotiation. For a long time, our actions as youths have been understood to be separable from adulthood, and we've agreed that bad things that kids do shouldn't always count against them as adults. Likewise, there are expiration dates on most bad actions. Someone who does jail time for a crime is supposed to have paid their debt to society. We feel a little uncomfortable when politicians have thirty year-old college arrests splashed in the news (it's not a big thing, it was a long time ago); we may have mixed feelings about a 83 year-old woman who's deported for serving as a guard at a Nazi prison camp in her youth (yes, it's bad, but is it too harsh to throw an elderly woman out of the country where her husband is buried?). Of course, there are some deeds that are too serious to ever outlive: serial killers don't get second chances.

Increasingly, however, thanks to the imposition of computers on what been a psychologically nuanced and socially negotiated activity, those second chances are becoming harder to come by. Just as important, the chance to move beyond past bad events-- both ones done by you, and ones done to you-- is starting to slip. Computers remember, but they don't mature; people can forget in ways that computers don't, and that's one reason they do.

The second example comes from a post by engineer and pilot Philip Greenspun about the role that increasing accuracy in avionics may have played in a recent mid-air collision in Brazil:

Airplanes under instrument flight rules fly from one navigation beacon to another along published standard routes. In the old days, with radio navigation receivers and pilots flying by hand, a plane wouldn’t fly its clearance exactly. The airways include a tolerance for error of +/- 4 miles. If you’re 4 miles to the right of course, in other words, you’re still legal and safe from hitting mountains or other obstacles. Altitude was similarly sloppy. If you reached for a drink of coffee or to look at a chart, you might drift up or down 200′. Air traffic control wouldn’t get upset.

How does it work now that the computer age has finally reached aviation? The GPS receiver computes an exact great circle route from navaid to navaid. All GPS receivers run from the same database of latitude/longitude coordinates, so they all have the same idea of where the Manchester, New Hampshire VOR is, for example. The autopilot in the plane will hold the airplane to within about 30′ of the centerline of the airway and to perhaps 20′ in altitude. If two planes in opposite directions are mistakenly cleared to fly on the same airway at the same altitude, a collision now becomes inevitable.

Almost any other system would be safer.

If correct-- and apparently some other navigation systems deliberately introduce a measure of fuzziness in order to avoid problems like these-- this is another good example of how terms like "accuracy" are interpreted and enacted by computers and people, and what happens when different interpretations (pardon the term) collide.

In both cases, the same terms-- memory and accuracy-- are applied to digital and human functionalities. This leads us to sometimes assume that they're the same. But often they're not, and not always in ways that give computers the upper hand.

What are other examples of terms that we've carried from the human to the digital world that lead to such misunderstandings?

Technorati Tags: crime, end of cyberspace, language, memory

links for 2006-10-18

• RFID Consultation Website
  Web site for the RFID Consultation project, an EU effort to solicit public ideas about the future of RFID.
  (tags: RFID EU Europe policy law)

The experience of using Google docs and the future of collaboration

Today one of my colleagues at the Institute and I finished up a draft of a piece on the future of biomimicry. We've been working on it for a while, and had divided up the piece into several sections. But when it came time to write the opening and conclusion, and do the editorial work necessary to make the pieces flow together, we decided to try something new: we put it up on Google docs (formerly Writely), and worked on it together.

The experience was a very interesting one, for a couple reasons.

First, the technology. Google docs has a basic word processor, and while it doesn't do footnotes, it has most of the essentials for styling and structuring documents (though most people mistake the former for the latter). It also has a pretty good revisions tracker, which is a cross between the "track changes" functionality in Word, and the view changes feature you see on many wikis.

I suspect that when people design (or start to play around with) such systems, they imagine the collaborators being separated by oceans and time zones: that the real benefits will come to coauthors in Berlin and Berkeley, or Paris and Perth. And for lots of groups, that's probably a plus. But what struck me, as my colleague and I were working on our article, was how valuable it was for the two of, even though we were right across from each other. We'd brainstorm a transition, or talk about how to restructure a paragraph; one of us would make the changes, and save the version; we'd hit refresh, look at it on our respective machines; and rework it until we had it right.

In a couple hours we had written as much as we'd each written in the previous month. Why? In part, writing together serves to tighten attention. I'm easily distracted, and can hit Google to look up some very specific fact, only to find myself ten minutes later looking at a Web site about animal pictures on the London Underground.

It also serves to eliminate some of the rationalizations that slow traditional multiauthored pieces. There are always turns of phrase or pieces of argument that really need to be worked out with your co-authors; when you're writing alone, it's easy to put those sections off until later, and tell yourself, "Well, I can't write the next paragraph until we work out that transition. I wonder if there are any new cat videos on YouTube?" When your coauthor is right beside you, and it's easy to make changes right in the document, the bar to completion gets lower.

It's also much easier to make changes directly onscreen, in a way that everyone can see, than to put edits on a printed page, which have to then be carried later (if you can remember exactly what they meant).

Of course, the technology could be a little better: having automatic line or paragraph numbering, for example, would make it infinitely easier for collaborators to stay on the same page (as it were). Instinct suggests that this isn't hard to implement, but if you assume that coauthors are going to be working asynchronously and at a distance, you don't need it.

But that doesn't detract from the big point: the system may facilitate collaboration at a distance, but it supercharges collaboration in person. More broadly, I suspect that this is where the really big gains in collaborative and social software will be made in the future: not in teams whose members are on opposite sides of a continent, but teams whose members are on opposite sides of a coffee table.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, collective intelligence, social software, work

Have a cow, man

Leading candidate for "Best PowerPoint Title of the Year:" Networked, GPS-equipped Cows.

Proving as well as anything actor-network theory's argument that the distinction between technology and nature is contingent and subject to change.

This from Slideshare, an interesting new service that's essentially like YouTube for presentations-- though Google hasn't yet bought it for a zillion dollars.

Technorati Tags: agriculture, cows, end of cyberspace, geoweb, pervasive computing, ubicomp