Category Archives: Science & Technology

TED Talk: Geography is no longer destiny

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Geopolitical futurist Parag Khanna foresees a world in which megacities, supply chains and connective technologies redraw the map away from states and borders. He sees geography and connectivity fusing into what he calls “connectography.” He goes so far as to say “connectivity, not sovereignty, has become the organizing principle of the human species.”

Mr. Khanna predicts “we will build more infrastructure in the next 40 years, than we have in the past 4,000 years.” And “by 2030, more than two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities.

I really liked the part about redrawing the map away from “states and borders.” I was born in Missouri and have lived here most of my life but it’s not something I brag about. I have no pride in this chunk of land or the people who live here for that matter. And they — we — are probably no better or worse than people who live in other “states.” It’s just that the idea of thinking of oneself as a “Missourian” or a “Southerner” or by any other geographic designation seems archaic.

I have much more in common with the people I’ve connected with online than the people in my neighborhood or city. Shame on me, maybe, but there it is. It’s connections I’ve come to value, not geography. This TED Talk made me hopeful. If you watch it, I hope it does the same for you.

Distributed: A New OS for the Digital Economy

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“The increased surface area for corporate capitalism is human attention. So we spend more and more of our time feeding the market place. Central currency and chartered monopoly — corporate capitalism — is not a condition of nature. It is an operating system that was invented by certain people at a certain moment in history and they’ve long since left the building.”

“It was such a good little thing”

“How much is our data worth if we don’t have any money?”

“If we’re all doing everything for advertising, what’s left to advertise?”

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus – Douglas Rushkoff Link above to some of my favorite parts of the book (PDF).

One careless moment

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I’m quick to judge (and harshly) those who get scammed by email. I never download attachments or click links in emails from people I don’t know. I often check email headers or URLs to see if they’ve been spoofed. As for giving out my credit card info over the phone… never! And then I did.

I got a phone call one morning this past week from a woman who works in the billing department of the health care provider I use. Said they’d received a payment slip from me (USPS) but I had failed to enter the credit card number. She knew the amount. I said I was busy at the moment but would call back. I did, by hitting that number in the RECENTS list on my phone. Asked for her by name and gave her the card number.

Dumb. Turned out she was legit but dumb none the less.

When discussing this with my less-dumb friends we theorized how a scammer could have known the exact amount of the payment in question. Since I mailed it, someone could have intercepted that piece of mail and gotten the amount. Or, in theory, they could have social engineered the info from the health care provider. My obvious mistake was not verifying the correct phone number and placing the call instead of clicking the RECENTS link on my phone.

Surely, I cried, there must be a way to use my high tech smart phone to protect from such carelessness in the future. Turns out there are less than a dozen people who I would want/need to immediately take a call from. I’ve added those to my FAVORITES list in the iPhone and everyone else automatically goes to voice mail. Where they’re informed the best way to reach me is IM or email. And if they don’t already have my address or number, they’re SOL.

I’m still a little stunned I could have been so careless.

Surveillance Capitalism

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“What if, when I write down a thought on my phone to remember it later, what I am actually doing is extending my mind, and thereby extending my self using the phone. […] we extend our biological capabilities using technology. We are sharded beings; with parts of our selves spread across and augmented by our everyday things.”

“My iPhone is not like a safe any more than my brain is like a safe. It is a part of my self. In which case, if you want to get into my iPhone, what you really want to do is to violate my self.”

“Personal data isn’t the new oil, personal data is people. […] The business model of mainstream technology today is to monetise everything about you that makes you who are apart from your body.”

The nature of the self in the digital age » – Surveillance Capitalism – Part 2 »

The Smartphone is Eating Television

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“TV viewership peaked in the 2010 season and has been falling ever since. […] Smartphones are winning and traditional television is losing, especially when it comes to viewers in the most desirable 18 to 34 demographic. […] TV viewing by all age groups peaked in the 2009-2010 season, and has been on the decline ever since. Until that point, the audience for TV had grown every year since 1949.”

The Smartphone is Easting Television (Fortune)

Legislative Influence Detector; ClaimBuster

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“Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Data Science for Social Good programme have created the Legislative Influence Detector. This scours the text of US bills, searching for passages that have been cribbed from lobbyists or the legislatures of other states. To get the real story behind a bill, the software digs through 500,000 state bills, as well as thousands of pieces of text drafted by lobbyist groups that were saved into a database. An algorithm then calculates the top 100 documents most relevant to the bill in question before examining each one more closely, searching for passages the two have in common.”

“At the University of Texas at Arlington, computer scientist Chengkai Li is building a system to fact-check the statements of politicians in real time. The ClaimBuster, as he’s calling it, will study work done by human fact-checkers and, with the help of machine learning, start automating some of that process. Li envisions a final platform that can scan through the transcript of a speech or presidential debate, picking out the lines that we already know to be true or false so journalists can work on checking more complicated claims.”

Full story »

“We believe the future of TV is apps”

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Apple CEO Tim Cook said that during the announcement of the latest version of Apple TV back in September. I didn’t give it much thought at the time but after using apps on the TV for a few days, I’m starting to get a sense of what he was talking about. Not sure I can describe it in any useful way.

Back in the 50s we had two or three channels and everything came through one of them (in real time). Cable brought us more pipes but you had to be watching the right pipe at the right time to see what you wanted (or what the network wanted you to see). VCRs and (later) DVRs allowed us to time shift and skip commercials but its was still a channels-of-programs world.

The iPhone introduced the concept of apps. The New York Times has an app; ESPN has an app; all gods children got an app. Now the world is mobile and apps is where it’s at.

reutersTVThis is where I was going to try to describe how “apps for the TV” delivers a fundamentally different experience than the current TV model but I don’t think I’m up to the task. I know it’s a cliche but you’ll just have to play with for a bit get it. But I do have one example.

The new (4th generation) Apple TV comes with an app for Reuters TV. You can watch individual stories (Trump on SNL) or categories (World News). Or you can let the app build a “newscast” for you. Tell it how much time you have (5, 15, 30 minutes) and it does the rest.

I’ve been impressed with the few of these I’ve watched. No high profile anchors and no famous network correspondents. I’m reminded of the early days of CNN Headline News with anonymous (but competent) reports told you what was happening. The reporters I’ve watched on Reuters TV are not slick or polished but they get the job done and the story is clearly more important than the people reporting.

The production values are excellent, they’ve just done away with a lot of the shit (glitzy graphics, etc) the networks have piled on over the years. And it’s rare to see an NBC newscast without at least one “story” promoting the network (“More on the TODAY SHOW tomorrow morning…”).

Reuters TV did toss in a couple of 10 second (?) ads but they were not intrusive and they weren’t aimed at the 65+ demo.

So, if I get home in the middle of the afternoon and want a summary of news, Reuters TV can give me what I want; the length I want; when I want it. On my new big screen TV. Apps do this well. Far better than networks and cable channels.

As I get more comfortable with TV = apps I’ll take another stab at describing this. I’d be very interested in hearing from others using the latests version of Apple TV.

Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream

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Amazon: “Smartphones have to be made someplace, and that place is China. In just five years, a company names Xiaomi (which means “little rice” in Mandarin) has grown into the most valuable startup ever, becoming the third largest manufacturer of smartphones, behind only Samsung and Apple. China is now both the world’s largest producer and consumer of a little device that brings the entire globe to its user’s fingertips. How has this changed the Chinese people? How did Xiaomi conquer the worlds’ biggest market” Can the rise of Xiaomi help realize the Chinese Dream, China’s bid to link personal success with national greatness? Clay Shirky, one of the most influential and original thinkers on the internet’s effects on society, spends a year in Shanghai chronicling China’s attempt to become a tech originator–and what it means for the future course of globalization.”

A few excerpts:

The mobile phone is a member of a small class of human inventions, a tool so essential it has become all but invisible, and life without it unimaginable.

There are only three universally personal items that someone will carry with them no matter where they live. The first two are money and keys; the third is the mobile phone, making it the first new invention added to that short list in three thousand years.

The number of mobile phone users crossed 4.5 billion last year, and because of dual accounts, there are now more mobile subscriptions in the world than there are people.

A smartphone is as different from a standard-issue Nokia 1100 as a computer is from a typewriter.

Mobile phones are a funny product, midway between commodity and luxury. They are a commodity in that everyone needs one. They are a luxury in that a phone makes a significant personal statement.

Status is a bigger feature of the iPhone (in China) than in the U.S. Electronics stores display phones running Android with the screen facing out, as usual, but iPhones are often displayed case out, to show off the Apple logo.

Nokia went from being the world’s most important mobile phone company to an also-ran in three years, collapsing into Microsoft’s waiting arms after another three, a generation of dominance undone in half a decade

If you make something that appeals to 5 percent of the Chinese population, you have a potential market the size of France.