techandsoc.com

on March 6, 2010

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cloud-s 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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Data, data everywhere: An Economist special report on managing information

Published

on March 2, 2010

in Books and Uncategorized

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201009srd001 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…

The State of The Internet

Published

on March 1, 2010

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AT&T, Verizon and Sprint 4G: Not so fast

Published

on February 23, 2010

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mobile_tower_dhansa-763404 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…

The Future of the Internet IV

Published

on February 20, 2010

To download the report in pdf format…

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pew-internet-iv 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…

More than 75,000 computer systems hacked in one of largest cyber attacks, security firm says

Published

on February 18, 2010

For the article…
For an account of the attack from Information Week…

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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.

Google Tweaks Buzz After Overblown Privacy Backlash

Published

on February 17, 2010

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1444417344-googlebuzzlogo68 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.

In the World of Facebook

Published

on February 7, 2010

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250px-facebook_log_in1 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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Tending the Garden of Technology

Published

on January 26, 2010

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From Andrew Lawler, Orion Magazine

For Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly, technology is neither the practical nor the neutral result of scientific discoveries, but a powerful universal force for creating opportunities. He speaks in unapologetically theological terms. The internet is “a miracle and a gift” that allows phpthumb_generated_thumbnailjpg humans to organize and create in radically new ways. He says that we are moving from being People of the Book to People of the Screen. Kelly’s radical pronouncements earn fire from both sides of the chasm between religion and science, even as he seeks to see beyond those dogmas. Today he wants to “talk about faith using the vocabulary and logic of science.” When I arrive at Kelly’s home south of San Francisco, he’s sweaty from riding his bike up the steep hill, which rises from the coast. Poet, wanderer, publisher, cross-country bicyclist, former hippie, and self-described nerd, Kelly’s trimmed white beard is that of a New England clipper-ship captain. His home office is perched in a wooded neighborhood and has the pleasant feel of a lived-in tree house, the floor strewn with books and papers and gadgets.

To Read More…

Suggestions for Making Google’s Services More Relevant for Non-Elite Chinese Users (involves some ethnography!)

Published

on January 23, 2010

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culturalbytes1 From Tricia Wang’s blog cultural bytes:

Google announced on its company blog that Chinese hackers had attacked its users and as a result Google.CN may leave China due to the security breaches.

While unfortunate that Google.CN may be shutting down, my ethnographic work in China revealed five things that aren’t being told in the current story:

Many Chinese internet users don’t find Google to be very useful. Therefore, a Google withdrawal would not have any immediate impact on the daily Chinese internet user because most people search with Baidu, the reigning search engine in China.

Many Chinese internet users prefer Baidu over Google because using Baidu makes them feel more “Chinese.” Baidu does an excellent job at tapping into nationalistic fervor to promote itself as being the most superior search engine for Chinese users.

Chinese internet users don’t know how to get to the Google site. While they may “know” of Google, it’s a whole other matter when it comes to typing or saying Google’s name.

Google is primarily used by highly educated netizens. And even these users prefer Google.COM over Google.CN.

Google is not successful at reaching the mobile internet market.

For the complete post…

Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms

Published

on January 18, 2010

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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.

For the complete post…

DARPA and “The Body Electric”

Published

on December 27, 2009

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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…

Rethinking What Leads the Way: Science, or New Technology?

Published

on December 24, 2009

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nature-of-tcngy 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.

…

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…

Look Who’s Talking: The Turing Test’s 3,000 Year History - And My Proposed Modification

Published

on December 18, 2009

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From Richard Eskow, 3 Quarks Daily.

In his famous experiment, Alan Turing pictured somebody talking with another person and a computer, both of which are out of sight. If they’re unable to tell the computer from the human being, the machine has passed the “Turing Test.” But here’s a question for a human or a machine to answer: Why did Turing pick speech as his proof?

The Test is usually described as way to determine whether a computer has achieved consciousness, but Turing’s original framing was more subtle. “I believe (the question of whether machines can think) to be too meaningless to deserve discussion,” he wrote. “Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

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How Buildings Will Communicate With the Smart Grid

Published

on December 14, 2009

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From Jim Sinopoli, Automated Building.

The electrical utility grid that Thomas Edison initiated over 100 years ago is long overdue for an overhaul. It will be a 180 degree change in the utility business model, going from selling more and more energy to consumers to putting everyone on a healthy energy “diet”. The entire concept of the utility grid, buildings, vehicles, energy sources and energy storage all communicating with one another to enable the efficient use of energy is ambitious and breathtaking. It will be the details of implementation that will determine its success.

Much of the Smart Grid is obviously focused on utility grids not necessarily buildings. However, some of the characteristics of the Smart Grid effort addresses the integration of distributed energy resources, demand response, demand-side resources, ‘‘smart’’ appliances and consumer devices, plug-in electric and hybrid electric vehicles, thermal-storage air conditioning, and timely information and control options for consumers. Intuitively we know that a smart grid without smart buildings would be a greatly diminished deployment and a very expensive lost opportunity.

The larger question is what are the attributes and characteristics of the connection between smart buildings and the smart grid? What are the applications? What is the communications interface? How will it be addressed technically? What could or will it mean for building owners and facility management? Buildings are being designed and upgraded to be energy efficient but that effort often is disconnected from the Smart Grid initiative- how do we get the two in sync? Let’s start with the possibilities of applications and then review the possible communications protocols.

To Read More…

Howard Rheingold on ‘Future Fundamentals’

Published

on December 12, 2009

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tokyo-shinjukutiny 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.

For video..

For words…

The Age of The Informavore: A Talk With Frank Schirrmacher

Published

on December 10, 2009

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From Edge

We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett’s response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.

To Read More…

Can Anyone Stop Facebook?

Published

on December 8, 2009

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091204_tech_facebooktn1

From Farhad Manjoo, Slate.

Nearly a year ago—in the course of cajoling people into joining the ubiquitous social network—I marveled at Facebook’s astonishing growth rate: The site had just signed up its 150 millionth member, and about 370,000 people were joining every day. “At this rate,” I wrote, “Facebook will grow to nearly 300 million people by this time next year.” I confess, though, that I didn’t think it was possible for the site to keep growing at that rate. Every hot Web site begins to fade at some point, and back then, the tech world was enamored of an upstart that was gaining lots of attention from celebrities and the media—Twitter. Even Facebook seemed scared of the micro-blogging site. In June, it redesigned its user pages to display updates as quickly as Twitter does, a move that prompted a barrage of threats to quit.

To Read More…

Journalism 2009: Desperate Metaphors, Desperate Revenue Models, And The Desperate Need For Better Journalism

Published

on December 6, 2009

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From Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post.

I was asked to give a speech this morning at a journalism conference in Washington, DC sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission. The topic, as it so often seems to be these days, is what can be done to save journalism? Since Rupert Murdoch was scheduled to address the conference a little before me, I thought this would be a good time to take a look at Murdoch’s increasingly bellicose war against new media sites that aggregate the news, the increasingly desperate revenue models being discussed for online news, and what, in fact, needs to be done to ensure that journalism will not only survive, but thrive.

To Read More…

Getting political on social network sites: Exploring online political discourse on Facebook

Published

on November 5, 2009

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fm-politics_and_facebook

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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Swarms of Solar Microbots May Revolutionize Data Gathering

Published

emily

on September 8, 2009

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Bridgette Meinhold at Inhabitat.com writes:

Researchers are developing ways to mass-produce tiny robots the size of a fly that operate like swarms of insects to collect data to aid in surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, and more. Measuring in at under 4 mm square, the microbots have all the equipment necessary to move, communicate, and collect data, plus they generate all of their own power via solar panels.

These mini-robots are quite revolutionary, considering that they contain all that’s necessary to collect data and relay it back using one single circuit board. In the past single-chip robots have presented significant design and manufacturing challenges due in part to the use of solder as an adhesive. These new microbots use conductive adhesive to attach the components to a double-sided flexible printed circuit board using surface mount technology. The circuit is then folded into thirds and wrapped around the ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit). More…

Information and Communication Technologies and the Current Crisis: How Are They Connected?

Published

emily

on August 6, 2009

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Special Issue of tripleC

Call for Papers:

The Crisis that began in 2007 continues to convulse the world. Labelled by some as merely a recession, yet it is associated with dramatic changes in national and global power. Others frame the Crisis as merely a consequence of over-promoting a narrow range of financial transactions associated with subprime mortgage instruments. These were indeed overly aggressively oversold by deregulated bankers, but this was likely only an important trigger of the Crisis, not the primary cause.

In this special issue, we will explore the notion that much of the basis of the Crisis should be assigned to financial transactions not just made possible but also strongly afforded by use of computer technologies. Thus, those operating at the highest levels of algorithmic capacity bear substantial responsibility for the Crisis.

For students of technological innovation and diffusion, many questions emerge about the connection between the Crisis in general and computerization. Some of the questions involve the tight relationship between cultures of technological empowerment and financial elites. Others questions, while appearing initially to be purely economic, turn out on examination to articulate strongly with the public interest, civil society, policymaking, and public discourse more generally.

These in turn lead to further, perhaps quite new critical questions about the emerging relationships between capitalism, democracy and the data-information-knowledge-technology nexus. Thus, equally important for responsibility is specification of what is known within computer science about the technological dimensions of the Crisis of this crisis. Ultimately, a rethinking of the very notion of “crisis” itself may be needed.
Continue reading ‘Information and Communication Technologies and the Current Crisis: How Are They Connected?’

“Wikipedia Bans Scientology From Site”

Published

phillip

on May 31, 2009

. 0 Comments

Wikipedia has banned the Church of Scientology and its members from editing its site after discovering that members of the church were editing articles in order to give the church favorable coverage. The move is being hailed as “an unprecedented effort to crack down on self-serving edits,” and it is the first instance in which Wikipedia has banned a group as large as the Church of Scientology. More…

“Fending Off Attacks in Cyberspace”

Published

phillip

on May 31, 2009

. 0 Comments

President Barack Obama announced on Friday his plan to appoint a new cybersecurity official to coordinate federal efforts to defend vital government and private computer systems from the onslaught of cyberattacks by computer hackers. The administration also plans to create a new military cybercommand that would be able to conduct offensive operations on enemy computers as well as defensive warfare, though those details were not unveiled. Does this approach adequately address holes that exist in cybersecurity? How much focus should be placed on increasing the military’s cyberwarfare capabilities? More…

The New Temple of Knowledge

Published

kathryn

on March 10, 2009

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The New Temple of Knowledge: Towards A Universal Digital Library has now been published and is available for purchase.

This book describes the current situation of libraries as scientific archives, the history from which they come, and the various procedures that are being implemented to bring order to that immense and growing informative universe. Subsequently, the authors delineate a final model of development that may take us completely through the passage from printing press days to the digital era —a transformation that today is still somewhat Utopian but, sooner rather than later, will be feasible. Their proposal is that technology develop a model previously considered, one that is ideal from the viewpoint of logical analysis and inspired by the Popperian vision of knowledge as an objective World in which all manner of conjectures and arguments are interwoven.

Published

admin

on February 18, 2009

. 0 Comments

New Book - Coming Soon

Published

kathryn

on February 11, 2009