From Tom Simonite in MIT’s Technology Review:
A person living in upstate Michigan may gain significantly more from the death of analog television than someone living in New York City–at least, as far as long-range wireless Internet is concerned, a study suggests. On November 4, 2008, the Federal Communications Commission voted to allow the “white spaces” in the radio spectrum that were freed up by the analog television switch-off to be used for long-distance wireless Internet connectivity. This spectrum will be unlicensed, meaning any standards-compliant device can use it.
The most detailed analysis yet of the potential of these white spaces for long-distance wireless Internet has now been published by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Their models illustrate how the interaction of population density, television stations, and economics will determine what consumers ultimately get.
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From Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker:
No one knows what the future of the music business will look like, but the near future of listening to music looks a lot like 1960. People will listen, for free, to music that comes out of a stationary box that sits indoors. They’ll listen to music that comes from an object that fits in the hand, and they’ll listen to music in the car. That box was once a radio or a stereo; now it’s a computer. The handheld device that was once a plastic AM radio is now likely to be a smart phone. The car is still a car, though its stereo now plays satellite radio and MP3s. But behind the similarities is a series of subtle shifts in software and portability that may relocate the experience of listening—even if nobody has come close to replacing the concept of the radio d.j., whose job lingers as a template for much software.
“Of the twenty hours a week that an average American spends listening to music, only three of it is stuff you own. The rest is radio,” Tim Westergren told me. Westergren is the founder of Pandora, one of several firms that have brought the radio model to the Internet. Pandora offers free, streaming music, not so different from the radio stations that many people grew up with, except that the d.j. is you, more or less.
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Asa Mathat/All Things Digital via Bloomberg
From The Wall Street Journal:
Thirty-three years after he helped to usher in the personal-computer age, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs is still making waves. On his watch, the company has transformed digital music with the iPod and iTunes and shaken up the mobile-phone industry with its iPhone. In April, Mr. Jobs introduced the iPad, a tablet computer that he says could kick off the next computer revolution.
He spoke with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher about where the iPad came from, where it might be heading and how Apple views customer privacy. Here are edited excerpts of the discussion.
To read more…
From David Talbot in Technology Review:
Multilingual Web content has been around for years. Now Web domain names in non-Latin languages are finally arriving–including Arabic addresses launched in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates earlier this month; Cyrillic, launched in Russia last Thursday; and soon Chinese–easing Web access for hundreds of millions of people around the world.
“This is the biggest change in the Internet in 40 years,” says Tina Dam, senior director of international domain names for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which is working on implementing 21 international applications for domain names in 11 languages. “You should have seen the Russian celebration of this, it was so emotional. Suddenly their own language can be used.”
…
Nevertheless, the impact will be enormous around the world, [Veni Markovsi, the Russian and eastern European representative to ICANN,] says. “Think what would have happened if the Internet was created in China, and we in the U.S. needed to write the Web address in Chinese. And suddenly the world Internet community says, ‘Well, now you can type your Web address in Latin characters.’ That is the same feeling is for people who don’t know Latin [letters]. Suddenly you will have people who might get online because they are not going to be afraid of the keyboard.”
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From Alex Iskold in ReadWriteWeb:
Two weeks ago, Facebook has announced a major new initiative called Facebook Open Graph. This is an attempt to not only re-imagine Facebook, but in a lot of ways, an attempt to re-define how the Web works. We wrote in details about the implications of this move for all interested parties.
A big part of the announcement is Facebook’s vision of a consumer Semantic Web. In this new world, publishers have an incentive to annotate pages by marking up activities, events, people, movies, books, music and more. The proper markup, would in turn, lead to a much more interconnected Web - people would be connected with each other across websites and around the things they are interested in.
Directionally, this vision is both correct and important. We’ve been talking about pragmatic approach to the Semantic Web for sometime, and we’re excited at the possibility of it finally happening. Yet, two weeks after the announcement it is becoming more and more apparent that there are gaps in Facebook’s offering and intentions. A close look reveals that perhaps Facebook’s intent is not to make the Web more structured, but instead to engineer a way for more data - mostly unstructured - to flow into Facebook databases..
As you will see from the rest of the post, it appears that getting semantics right has not been a big priority for Facebook, at least not prior to the announcement.
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Kids using the imaginary Dynabook
From Kurt Bakke at ConceivablyTech.com:
Giving Apple credit for reshaping the way we use computers, well at least attempting it, would be a bit too much. Apple simply built a device that was imagined and described in detail in a research paper 38 years ago. Reading that paper is a spooky experience – it is fascinating how closely the author describes what the iPad is today. He even got the price right – almost four decades ago.
I previously attempted to take shot at the iPad’s ancestors. I believe this is a rather difficult task if we look at recent history and really depends on your viewpoint and in this case, you will read what I think. For some reason, you know it is one of those occasions you just get stuck reading late in the day, I stumbled across a fascinating research paper that gets more and more stunning as you read along. It is called “A personal computer for children of all ages” and was published by Alan Kay of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) back in 1972.
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From John Markoff in The New York Times:
ARLINGTON, Va. — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is different from other federal agencies. For one thing, the agency, known asDarpa, created the Internet (really). For another, it is probably the only agency ever to offer a $40,000 prize for a balloon hunt, a contest that was inspired by Regina Dugan, a 47-year-old expert in mine detection, who took over last summer as its director.
Dr. Dugan, who has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, is the first woman to be the director of Darpa, and those who know her say she has a knack for inspiring, and indeed insisting on, creative thinking.
Last December’s balloon hunt, otherwise known as the Darpa Network Challenge, is a good example. In marking the 40th anniversary of the connecting of the first four nodes of the Internet in 1969, the agency offered a $40,000 prize to the first team of volunteers able to locate 10 large red balloons hidden around the country.
The task only sounds frivolous. It was actually something that experts agreed was impossible using traditional intelligence techniques. The challenge was designed to test new methods, involving the use of social networks.
The idea for the balloon search came out of Dr. Dugan’s insistence that a group of Darpa fellows — rising military stars — who had been posted to the agency for several months do something more innovative and useful than taking the usual field trips and meet and greet sessions. With her repeated prodding, the fellows — captains, majors and colonels — designed and organized the contest.
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From Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times:
A former model who is now chronically ill and struggles just to shower says the people she has met online have become her family. A quadriplegic man uses the Web to share tips on which places have the best wheelchair access, and a woman with multiple sclerosis says her regular Friday night online chats are her lifeline.
For many people, social networks are a place for idle chatter about what they made for dinner or cute pictures of their pets. But for people living with chronic diseases or disabilities, they play a more vital role.
“It’s really literally saved my life, just to be able to connect with other people,” said Sean Fogerty, 50, who has multiple sclerosis, is recovering from brain cancer and spends an hour and a half each night talking with other patients online.
People fighting chronic illnesses are less likely than others to have Internet access, but when compared to people of the same demographic group, they are more likely to blog or participate in online discussions about health problems, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the California HealthCare Foundation.
For the article…
For the report…
From James Fallows in The Atlantic:
Just now I spoke on the phone with David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer and author of yesterday’s Official Google Blog post about the company’s new policies in China.
Highlights from the discussion below. I was typing this down in real time, so it may be 98 rather than 100 percent faithful to what he actually said. The entire discussion was on the record.
I began by asking what was non-obvious about the development — an aspect of the story known on the inside that had not been captured in the public reports:
It may not be quite obvious that this is not really a “shutdown” of either our operations in China or of our mainland China-focused web site. We have moved the physical location of it [to Hong Kong], and the virtual location. But the experience we are trying to offer to Chinese users is like the one on Google.cn, but done without the censorship on our part.
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from an article at http://pewresearch.org/:
At a conference at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010, Pew Research Center analysts and outside experts discussed research findings about the Millennial generation, the American teens and twenty-somethings now making the passage into adulthood. In this second of three sessions experts on media and technology examine how Millennials are seeking, sharing and creating information.
Moderator:
Judy Woodruff, Senior Correspondent, PBS Newshour
Opening Presentation:
Tom Rosenstiel, Director, Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism
Panelists:
danah boyd, Social Media Researcher, Microsoft Research New England, and
Fellow, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Dylan Casey, Product Manager, Google
Amanda Lenhart, Senior Research Specialist, Pew Internet & American Life Project
For the article…
From the International Center for Research on Women:
In a new, groundbreaking study, International Center for Research on Women examines how cutting-edge innovations can transform women’s lives. The ICRW report analyzes how a variety of innovations that used technology, changed social norms and strengthened economic vitality helped women.
Researchers identified seven core approaches – or levers – needed for any innovation to create meaningful change for women.
They include:
- Creating strategic partnerships among governments, the private sector and civil society.
- Including women in the design and implementation of innovative ideas.
- Having committed support from governments as well as efforts at the grassroots level.
ICRW’s findings come at a critical moment.
Social, political and economic shifts globally are creating a perfect storm for innovations to benefit and potentially empower women. Take foot-pedaled water pumps. In sub-Saharan Africa, women in rural communities traditionally are responsible for collecting water to irrigate the crops that feed their families and that sell in markets. It can be a time- and labor-consuming effort.
For the web page…
For the research brief…
From Canadian entrepreneur and software developer Tim Bray in his blog Ongoing:
As of this morning I work for Google. The title is “Developer Advocate”. The focus is Android. Fun is expected.
How? · Google and I have been a plausible match for a long time. Web-centric, check. Search, check. Open-source, check. The list goes on.
…
The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.
For the complete post…
From Joseph Tartakoff at paidContent.org:
Microsoft … is still most closely associated with its desktop software (Windows, Office etc.), but on Thursday CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft was “betting our company” on the cloud. About 70 percent of Microsoft employees are working on cloud-related projects right now; that figure will reach 90 percent within a year, he said.
Ballmer’s remarks—made during an address at the University of Washington—may portend a change in mission for the software giant, which for years has talked about a future of software plus web-based services. Contrast that with the tagline Microsoft is now using for its cloud efforts: “We’re all in.”
Lots of excitement here for Ballmer’s talk—his first ever at the school, a surprising milestone considering the university’s close ties to its Redmond neighbor. The ground floor of the atrium is packed—and people are lined up on four levels of balconies. Before Ballmer started talking, I heard one girl urge her friend to skip class with her.
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From The Economist print edition for 25 February 2010:
Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headaches
WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.
Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.
All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.
But they are also creating a host of new problems. Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space (see chart 1). Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.
For the report…
From David Goldman at CNNMoney.com:
Despite claims from mobile phone carriers, the next generation of mobile technology, or 4G, will only be slightly faster than current 3G speeds, at least initially.
Massive costs, soaring consumer demand for data and the logistical nightmare of setting up tens of thousands of new cell sites will prevent 4G technology from reaching its promised speeds for years, according to carriers and wireless experts.
True 4G must generate speeds of at least 100 megabits per second, according to the International Telecommunication Union. Current 3G technology offers speeds of up to 2 megabits per second and broadband delivers 5 megabits per second to the average U.S. household.
Faster may be better, but the road to get there will be tough. In order to fully deploy a 4G network, some carriers will have to install about 10,000 cell sites, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each, according to Gartner analyst Akshay Sharma.
For the article…
From Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie at www.pewinternet.org:
A survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders reveals fascinating new perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered.
The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers. It is the fourth in a series of Internet expert studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. In this report, we cover experts’ thoughts on the following issues:
- Will Google make us stupid?
- Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
- Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
- Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?
- Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?
For the web page…
To view the report…
To download the report in pdf format…
From Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post:
More than 75,000 computer systems at nearly 2,500 companies in the United States and around the world have been hacked in what appears to be one of the largest and most sophisticated attacks by cyber criminals discovered to date, according to a northern Virginia security firm.
The attack, which began in late 2008 and was discovered last month, targeted proprietary corporate data, e-mails, credit-card transaction data and login credentials at companies in the health and technology industries in 196 countries, according to Herndon-based NetWitness.
News of the attack follows reports last month that the computer networks at Google and more than 30 other large financial, energy, defense, technology and media firms had been compromised. Google said the attack on its system originated in China.
This latest attack does not appear to be linked to the Google intrusion, said Amit Yoran, NetWitness’s chief executive. But it is significant, he said, in its scale and in its apparent demonstration that the criminal groups’ sophistication in cyberattacks is approaching that of nation states such as China and Russia.
For the article…
For an account of the attack from Information Week…
From Ryan Singel in the Wired blog Epicenter:
Google is quickly making changes to its new social networking service Buzz — built on the back of its popular Gmail service — as a complaint to federal regulators follows a populist privacy backlash over the past week.
Google admitted to rare gaff in its rollout of Buzz last week, responding nimbly to a populist outcry by users who thought the social media service add-on to Gmail violated their privacy by outing who they often communicated with. A privacy group has already filed a complaint with U.S. regulators, and Canada’s privacy commissioner says she’s already looking into it.
But in the grand scheme of privacy invasions, this one ranks a “Grenada” — even though it has provided some cautionary lessons — not the least of which that Google shouldn’t limit pre-release testing to its unrepresentative army of coders.
From Charles Petersen in the New York Review of Books:
Facebook, the most popular social networking Web site in the world, was founded in a Harvard dorm room in the winter of 2004. Like Microsoft, that other famous technology company started by a Harvard dropout, Facebook was not particularly original. A quarter-century earlier, Bill Gates, asked by IBM to provide the basic programming for its new personal computer, simply bought a program from another company and renamed it. Mark Zuckerberg, the primary founder of Facebook, who dropped out of college six months after starting the site, took most of his ideas from existing social networks such as Friendster and MySpace. But while Microsoft could as easily have originated at MIT or Caltech, it was no accident that Facebook came from Harvard.
What is “social networking”? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or “profile,” that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who’s crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet’s peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, “friending” them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.
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From danah boyd in her blog apophenia :: making connections where none previously existed:
When I learned that Mark Zuckerberg effectively argued that ‘the age of privacy is over’ (read: ReadWriteWeb), I wanted to scream. Actually, I did. And still am. The logic goes something like this:
- People I knew didn’t used to like to be public.
- Now “everyone” is being public.
- Ergo, privacy is dead.
This isn’t new. This is the exact same logic that made me want to scream a decade ago when folks used David Brin to justify a transparent society. Privacy is dead, get over it. Right? Wrong!
Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.
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illustration by David Plunkert
William Saletan reviews Michael Belfiore’s The Department of Mad Scientists in the New York Times.
Two years ago, in his book “Rocketeers,” Michael Belfiore celebrated the pioneers of the budding private space industry. Now he has returned to explore a frontier closer to home. The heroes of his new book, “The Department of Mad Scientists,” work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, a secretive arm of the United States government. And the revolution they’re leading is a merger of humans with machines.
The revolution is happening before our eyes, but we don’t recognize it, because it’s incremental. It starts with driving. Cruise control transfers regulation of your car’s speed to a computer. In some models, you can upgrade to adaptive cruise control, which monitors the surrounding traffic by radar and adjusts your speed accordingly. If you drift out of your lane, an option called lane keeping assistance gently steers you back. For extra safety, you can get extended brake assistance, which monitors traffic ahead of you, alerts you to collision threats and applies as much braking pressure as necessary.
With each delegation of power, we become more comfortable with computers driving our cars. Soon we’ll want more. An insurance analyst tells Belfiore that aging baby boomers will lead the way, enlisting robotic drivers to help them get around. For younger drivers, the problem is multi tasking. Why put down your cellphone when you can let go of the wheel instead? Reading, texting, talking and eating in the car aren’t distractions. Driving is the distraction. Let the car do it.
For the complete review…
John Markoff reviews W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology in the New York Times,
The popular view is that technology is the handmaiden of science — less pure, more commercial. But in “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves,” W. Brian Arthur, an economist, reframes the relationship between science and technology as part of an effort to come up with a comprehensive theory of innovation. In Dr. Arthur’s view, the relationship between science and technology is more symbiotic than is generally conceded. Science and technology move forward together in a kind of co-evolution. And science does not lead.
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Dr. Arthur tries to explain the emergence of radical new technologies from jet engines to GPS. He correctly points out that the jet engine did not arise from the steady accretion of small improvements in piston engines nor did the modern computer burst forth as the next generation of mechanical calculator.
He points to the human propensity to solve problems as the force that leads to new generations of technology through recombination of existing technologies. Technology is “alive” in the sense that a coral reef is alive. The reef is an ecological system with many species, and technology in the broadest sense is an elaborate and constantly changing structure made up of thousands of discrete technologies, themselves composed of separate technologies.
For the complete review…
Howard Rheingold has something to say about new literacy:
Popular discourses about the technologies that have been built on the microchip have focused primarily on the hardware, the software, the industries, the economics of computer games, PCs, dotcoms. My experiences have convinced me that the most important focus for public attention right now should shift to the literacies that bring power to those who possess them and leave behind those who don’t know how to use their telephone as a medical instrument, educational medium, social radar, political organizing tool. Chip fabrication plants, teenage personal computer wizards and moguls, networks of fiber optics and satellites, have played and will continue to play their parts in the distribution of computing and communication power to every human on Earth. But now that devices with such enormous untapped power are in the hands of so many, the factor that will most powerfully shape the resulting social institutions is literacy. My definition of “literacy” builds on the thinking of Neal Postman: I mean the inward-looking skill that enables an individual to read and write, to decode and encode messages with a medium, and I also refer to the external community to which this skill provides entrance.
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For words…
From Matthew J. Kushin and Kelin Kitchener,
This study explores use of the social network site Facebook for online political discussion. Online political discussion has been criticized for isolating disagreeing persons from engaging in discussion and for having an atmosphere of uncivil behavior. Analysis reveals the participation of disagreeing parties within a discussion, with the large majority of posters (73 percent) expressing support for the stated position of the Facebook group, and a minority of posters (17 percent) expressing opposition to the position of the group. Despite the presence of uncivil discussion posting within the Facebook group, the large majority of discussion participation (75 percent) is devoid of flaming. Results of this study provide important groundwork and raise new questions for study of online political discussion as it occurs in the emergent Internet technologies of social network sites.
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From Tricia Wang’s blog