Monthly Archive for May, 2011

Is Wikipedia a World Cultural Repository?

Published on May 30, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Jared Keller, The Atlantic

Boasting more than 18 million entries in 279 languages, Wikipedia is arguably the largest store of human knowledge in the history of mankind. In its first decade, the digital encyclopedia has done more to challenge the way we think about the relationship between knowledge and the Internet than virtually any other website. But is this ubiquitous tree of knowledge as culturally sacred as the pyramids of Giza, the archaeological site of Troy, or the Native American mound cities of Cahokia?
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, thinks so. Spurred on by a German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the digital encyclopedia will launch a petition this week to have the website listed on the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s world heritage lists. If accepted, Wikipedia would be afforded the international protection and preservation afforded to man made monuments and natural wonders.
The first digital entity to vie for recognition as cultural treasure, Wikipedia argues that the site meets the first and foremost of UNESCO’s criteria: “to represent a masterpiece of human creative genius. “

Office Politics: Behind the Scenes at the Start of Microsoft

Published on May 27, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Staff, The Economist

ASKED to pen an endorsement for Paul Allen’s new autobiography, Bono, a well-known musician, declares that the co-founder of Microsoft’s “…intellect and generosity of spirit are there on every page”. He is only half right. “Idea Man” does provide plenty of insights into the ways in which Mr Allen has helped revolutionise everything from software to space travel. But its pages are also permeated by a bitterness towards Bill Gates, the man with whom he created a company that transformed the world of technology. Indeed, there are enough sour grapes in these pages to fill an entire vineyard.

The irony is that the primary focus of Mr Allen’s resentment—his co-founder’s intense competitiveness—is also one of the things that propelled Microsoft to greatness. That trait, and the tension that it provoked between the two men, is evident from the time they meet at school. Mr Allen describes how Mr Gates became apoplectic when a practical joke he played on Mr Allen backfired. In another vignette, he portrays his pal sweeping the pieces off a chessboard in fury when he lost yet another game to Mr Allen.

As any veteran of a start-up will tell you, the strains of building a company can be enough to undermine even the strongest partnerships. In the case of Microsoft, set up in 1975, the surprising thing is that the union between the two men lasted as long as it did given the tension that already underlay their friendship. Mr Allen eventually walked out of the company in 1983 (although he kept his stake in the business), leaving Mr Gates in sole charge of Microsoft, which then went on to turn both men into billionaires.

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Photo Courtesy of Doug Wilson/Corbis

Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences

Published on May 25, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences by Marcus Breen is now available from the Technology and Society imprint.

The Internet has transformed the social relations that were once managed by the powers that be. As a rapidly maturing communications technology, the Internet has brought people together even while it has reinforced privatism. The desktop computer, the laptop, the cellular and mobile phone, the Global Positoning System, the pilotless drone aircraft, video games and Government documents courtesy of Wikileaks, all are connected on the network of networks. Together these converged elements of a global socio-technical system offer wonderful possibilities for human emancipation, even while those ideas collide with established ideas of civility and decency.

Utilizing a transdisciplinary approach, Uprising examines the way transgressive knowledge circulates in places and spaces where communication regulation has been removed. In doing so, the book offers a new approach to proletarianization. It is based on the theory that the deregulation of the digital infrastructure allows transgressive knowledge to be mobilized in ways that remake political economy. The current moment sees the Internet opening up questions about social organization, power and democracy. The unintended consequences that are attached to this analysis of the Internet are discussed in research about pornography and jihad. These case studies show how proletarianization can be used to understand the Internet, culture and society.

A Week on Foursquare

Published on May 24, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Albert Sun, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Zach Seward, The Wall Street Journal

We collected every check-in on location-sharing service Foursquare for a week starting at noon Eastern on Friday, Jan. 21 until noon on Friday Jan. 28. Foursquare, which provided the data, removed all material that could identify an individual user.

How does New York compare to San Francisco?

New York City and San Francisco were among the first cities where people started using Foursquare, and the company’s founders say it’s because the service spread first among their own friends.

Now, Foursquare provides an interesting look at how the cities are alike and different — at least when it comes to this young, tech-friendly population.

In many ways, the cities are the same. A category that is popular in New York is likely to be popular in the Bay Area; check-in categories in the two areas have about an 92% correlation.

The categories where the two cities were most similar? Gyms, parks, American food, trains, movie theaters and dessert places.

The biggest differences: New Yorkers go for bars, train stations and corporate offices, while Bay Area residents prefer coffee shops, grocery stores, gas stations and light rail.

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Slide Show: The Birth of the Mouse

Published on May 20, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Paulina Reso, The New Yorker

This week in the magazine, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the creation of the computer mouse. As the creation story goes, Steve Jobs got the idea for the modern mouse after visiting Xerox PARC in 1979. Within a few days, he met with Dean Hovey, who was one of the founders of the industrial-design firm that would become known as IDEO. Hovey described the meeting to Gladwell from his old office in downtown Palo Alto, which he was borrowing from the current tenant “just for the fun of telling the story of the Apple mouse in the place where it was invented.” Gladwell writes:

He had brought a big plastic bag full of the artifacts of that moment: diagrams scribbled on lined paper, dozens of differently sized plastic mouse shells, a spool of guitar wire, a tiny set of wheels from a toy train set, and the metal lid from a jar of Ralph’s preserves. He turned the lid over. It was filled with a waxlike substance, the middle of which had a round indentation, in the shape of a small ball. “It’s epoxy casting resin,” he said. “You pour it, and then I put Vaseline on a smooth steel ball, and set it in the resin, and it hardens around it.” He tucked the steel ball underneath the lid and rolled it around the tabletop. “It’s a kind of mouse.”

Solar Power from the Moon

Published on May 18, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Reaction to the LUNA RING among space experts whom The Futurist contacted was optimism tempered by skepticism. This article by Patrick Tucker included feedback from John Hickman:

John Hickman, a member of the board of advisors of the MarsDrive project and author of Reopening the Space Frontier (Common Ground Publishing, 2010), is known as a space-policy realist. He’s argued that the problem with most super-large space projects is that they require too much from potential investors: too much up-front capital, too much patience, and too much faith.

“If attracting capital for projects using proven technologies like communications satellites remains difficult, imagine the difficulty of attracting sufficient capital to construct a mining facility on the Moon or terraforming Mars or Venus,” he wrote in his 1999 essay, “The Political Economy of Very Large Space Projects,” a critical analysis of why mega-scale space schemes almost never get off the ground.

Hickman says that the LUNA RING boasts a few advantages over other similar projects. It could provide returns within a reasonable time frame, but would probably make for a better investment if ownership of lunar real estate were part of the deal. He suggests that Shimizu obtain legal title to the land on which it plans to build. “Unfortunately, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty made the Moon an international commons. That means that Shimizu would be constructing the LUNA RING on land ‘owned’ by all of the states on Earth,” he wrote in an email. But Japan could withdraw from the treaty and “claim the lunar equator as its sovereign national territory.”

Hickman is curious about what funding streams the company may draw upon but thinks the LUNA RING would probably need a large public investment to be economically viable.

Read the complete article, Solar Power from the Moon by Patrick Tucker here.

The Origins of the First Arcade Video Game: Atari’s Pong

Published on May 16, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Harold Goldberg, Vanity Fair

Excerpted from All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture. © 2011 by Harold Goldberg.

Nolan Bushnell was a dreamer who dreamed big dreams. In his dreams, he imagined the finest things that money could buy: expensive cars and massive homes and the prettiest girls. Yet his greatest dream surrounded a game so simple, so utterly straightforward, so easy to learn that even a stinking drunk in a bar could learn to play it.

The testing ground for Pong, the very first arcade game, was a newly opened bar in the Silicon Valley. Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, wasn’t the kind of place where fights would break out every night. But the hole, named for the surly British comic-strip slacker, was shadowy and dark. Cigarette smoke swirled so thick that it rivaled the fog that rolled in over the Santa Cruz Mountains. You might bring your girlfriend to Andy Capp’s, but not on a first date.

The story goes this way. After designer Allan Alcorn made Pong’s circuitry and Ted Dabney crafted its case, a lowly sawed-off plastic milk jug was placed inside beneath the coin slot, to collect quarters. Pong was put in a truck and delivered to an anteroom in Capp’s that also included a pinball machine. Then the drunks played. Not only did they play, they lined up to play. Their egos wouldn’t take being beaten by a machine. They fed so many quarters into the slot that the machine jammed up. Then the bar’s usually genial manager, Bill Gattis, phoned Bushnell in a booming voice that carried the length of the bar.

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Photo Courtesy of VanityFair.com