Category Archives: Science & Technology

When the net was young

Posted on by

A couple of nights ago I was browsing through some old Day-Timers (calendars) and came across a few memories from 1994:

April 26 – A meeting with some folks at MOREnet and the University of Missouri J-School. My first look at a web browser (Mosaic). I was blown away. The Internet was a very different creature before the browser.

June 20 – Sent check to someone named Bill Bahr a check for $1,700 for a used Toshiba notebook computer. Base price was $1,400 plus $300 for a fax/modem PCMCIA card.

I think it was this one. It was a heavy mother but I was giddy at the idea of being able to take a computer with me on the road.

Hospital room of the future?

Posted on by
Reply

According to this post at Fast Company, this might be as close at 10 years away. I don’t want to spendy any time in the hosptial but this would make the stay less awful.

“The room is constructed as a plug-and-play environment in which customizable, prefabricated components integrate all aspects of care. The Patient Ribbon, for example, is a digital, silent, flat screen headboard that captures vital signs, houses gases, and holds the controls for all forms of lighting in the room. Ruthven says it’s possible that it will be the first component to be integrated in existing hospitals in the next five years. A media center at the foot of the bed facilitates collaboration between caregivers, patients, and visitors, and provides connections to multimedia entertainment and hospital information.

While most of the medical care is conducted within the patient room, several key functions for patients, staff, and visitors occur at the entry to the space. Namely, the Staff Resource Station features sliding doors made from smart glass technology and includes digital alerts for patient allergies, food restrictions, or special conditions.”

I’m guessing health care will be really good or really bad. Probably both, depending how wealthy/poor you are.

Google +1

Posted on by
11

I was going to do a post about Google’s +1 but anyone who cares probably already knows what it is and how it works. The rest of you… just click the little button below each post if you like it. That will make that post more like to show up in relevant Google search results. Just click the fucking button.

Future of video conferencing?

Posted on by
1

Skype, more bandwidth and easier-to-use software is making video conferencing ever more practical. We’re doing it at Learfield, Barb’s firm is using, it’s happening. But we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Some students from the MIT Media Lab show off a few features of what’s around the corner.

My favorite is the little timer in the speech bubble that shows how long each person has been talking.

What you see is NOT what you get

Posted on by
Reply

A lot of my recent reading has dealt with consciousness and –by extensions– reality. It has completely changed the way I see my world. Literally.

“Your senses are your windows on the world, and you probably think they do a fair job at capturing an accurate depiction of reality. Don’t kid yourself. Sensory perception – especially vision – is a figment of your imagination. “What you’re experiencing is largely the product of what’s inside your head,” says psychologist Ron Rensink at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “It’s informed by what comes in through your eyes, but it’s not directly reflecting it.”

“In conjuring up this “now”, the visual system has to do something even more remarkable: predict the future. Information striking the fovea cannot be relayed instantaneously to conscious perception: first it has to travel down the optic nerve and be processed by the brain. This takes several hundred milliseconds, by which time the world has moved on. And so the brain makes a prediction about what the world will look like about 200 milliseconds into the future, and that is what you see. Without this future projection you would be unable to catch a ball, dodge moving objects or walk around without crashing into things.”

“The problem with attention is that it is a limited resource. For reasons that remain unknown, most people are unable to keep track of more than four or five moving objects at once. That can lead your visual system to be oblivious to things that are staring you in the face.”

My favorite line from this piece: “Essentially we experience the brain’s best guess about what is happening now.”

Quick! I need to speak Italian!

Posted on by

Five years ago I used this elaborate timeline to illustrate where I saw myself in relation to others in terms of technology awareness. A little out front (at the time) of most of our company… waaay behind the Smart Kids.

For much of the past 15 years I’ve been annoying people (mostly at work) with the latest gadget or –more recently– app. There were early adopters like me; others who would get on board once they clearly saw some proven value to their current job; and still others who jammed their fingers in their ears, chanting “la la la la la la I can’t HEAR you!”

This group always referred to “the Internet thing,” and to this day think Twitter is about what you had for lunch.

But something has changed. People are starting stop by my office or my table at the Coffee Zone and ask for a crash course in all this stuff I’ve been yapping about. It’s as though they woke up one morning and realized, “Shit! I’m way behind!”

Let me hasten to add, there is NOTHING I know that any reasonably intelligent person can’t pick up. But just as you can learn to speek Italian from a series of CD’s, you won’t really understand the language until you live in Genoa for a few years. It’s a cultural thing.

If I had to guess at what has brought this on –if, indeed, something has changed– I’d say it’s the iPhone and the iPad. The web has moved from your desktop (which you leave behind every night at 5 o’clock) to your pocket.

These latter day Luddites are hearing more and more expressions (from customers!) the meaning of which they have only the vaguest idea.

I’m doing my best to purge any “I told you so” from my thinking, but the simple truth is, a lot of these folks won’t catch up. They’re trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide. By the time they scramble up and over… everyone will have moved on.

Ehi, aspetta per me voi ragazzi!

“The Internet is over”

Posted on by
1

The Guardian sent Oliver Burkeman to SxSW where he realized the Internet is over:

“If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realized – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed.”

We can probably stop saying “digital” media since all media is digital. Same for “online identity.” We only have one identity and unless you’re hunkered down in a Montana cabin, it’s online.

As long predicted, the Internet/Net/Web is woven in to all that we do. Like electricity and indoor plumbing. We don’t think about it. It has become invisible. We’ll stop saying (as I did above) “online” because we’ll never be “off line.” (Yes, I realize there are lots of people in the world for whom this is not the case. It will be.)

I wonder if I will miss the Internet when it is no longer an identifiable thing? Something I can “get on?” A place to go.

Software reconstructs shredded spy files

Posted on by
Reply

"A research team in Germany has developed a computer-software system to piece together some 45 million pages of secret police files ripped into 600 million pieces. The files were torn up nearly 18 years ago by panicking agents of communist East Germany's dreaded State Security Service (Stasi).

"…piecing together all the 600 million slips of paper by hand would take 30 people 600 to 800 years; their computer program should hopefully be capable of finishing the job in a little more than five years.

Story at Nature.com

Daniel Kahneman: Riddle of experience vs. memory

Posted on by

This talk runs 20 min and I realize most of you won’t invest that much time. And I’m not sure I can summarize, but let me try: There are the experiences in our lives… and our memories of those experiences. And they are not the same. Our “happiness” ( a word that no longer has much useful meaning) has more to do with the latter.

As for the future?  Kahneman  says “we think of our future as anticipated memories.”

My understanding (based on my reading on this topic): The past and the future are delusions, stories. Created by the mind to protect the ego. Only now -this moment- has any reality.