Question Technology

Cellphone use while pregnant linked to health problems in children

From The Independent:

Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with behavioural problems, according to authoritative research.

            

A giant study, which surveyed more than 13,000 children, found that using the handsets just two or three times a day was enough to raise the risk of their babies developing hyperactivity and difficulties with conduct, emotions and relationships by the time they reached school age. And it adds that the likelihood is even greater if the children themselves used the phones before the age of seven.

The results of the study, the first of its kind, have taken the top scientists who conducted it by surprise. But they follow warnings against both pregnant women and children using mobiles by the official Russian radiation watchdog body, which believes that the peril they pose "is not much lower than the risk to children's health from tobacco or alcohol".

The research – at the universities of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Aarhus, Denmark – is to be published in the July issue of the journal Epidemiology and will carry particular weight because one of its authors has been sceptical that mobile phones pose a risk to health.

[...]

The scientists say that the results were "unexpected", and that they knew of no biological mechanisms that could cause them. But when they tried to explain them by accounting for other possible causes – such as smoking during pregnancy, family psychiatric history or socio-economic status – they found that, far from disappearing, the association with mobile phone use got even stronger.

They add that there might be other possible explanations that they did not examine – such as that mothers who used the phones frequently might pay less attention to their children – and stress that the results "should be interpreted with caution" and checked by further studies. But they conclude that "if they are real they would have major public health implications".

Link: Warning: Using a mobile phone while pregnant can seriously damage your baby,

via Textually.

Negroponte's $100 laptop is no longer about learning, if it ever was

Ivan Krstic, formerly the director of security architecture for the (now failing rather spectacularly) One Laptop Per Child project, has some strong words about the project's philosophies, its leader, and the free-software gurus who hijacked the project to push their own agendas.  From his blog:

I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

Yeah, I'm not sure what that leaves either.

There are three key problems in one-to-one computer programs: choosing a suitable device, getting it to children, and using it to create sustainable learning and teaching experiences. They're listed in order of exponentially increasing difficulty.

[...]

That OLPC was never serious about solving deployment, and that it seems to no longer be interested in even trying, is criminal. Left uncorrected, it will turn the project into a historical information technology fuckup unparalleled in scale.

As for the last key problem, transforming laptops into learning is a non-trivial leap of logic, and one that remains inadequately explained. No, we don't know that it'll work, especially not without teachers. And that's okay — the way to find out whether it works might well be by trying. Sometimes you have to run before you can walk, yeah? But most of us who joined OLPC believed that the educational ideology behind the project is what actually set it apart from similar endeavors in the past. Learning which is open, collaborative, shared, and exploratory — we thought that's what could make OLPC work. Because people have tried plain laptop learning projects in the past, and as the New York Times noted on its front page not so long ago, they crashed and burned.

Nicholas' new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn't work. But hey, I guess they'll sell more laptops that way.

Link: Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi,

via Fake Steve Jobs.

Carr on Shirky and Gilligan's Web

Nicholas Carr has posted a fine critique of Clay Shirky's "Gin, Television and the Social Surplus" talk/theory (see earlier post for context) on his blog.  Excerpt:

Did my friends and I watch Gilligan's Island? You bet your ass we did - and thoroughly enjoyed it (though with a bit more ironic distance than Shirky allows). Watching sitcoms and the other drek served up by the boob tube was certainly part of our lives. But it was not the center of our lives. Most of the people I knew were doing a whole lot of "participating," "producing," and "sharing," and, to boot, they were doing it not only in the symbolic sphere of the media but in the actual physical world as well. They were making 8-millimeter films, playing drums and guitars and saxophones in bands, composing songs, writing poems and stories, painting pictures, making woodblock prints, taking and developing photographs, drawing comics, souping up cars, constructing elaborate model railroads, reading great books and watching great movies and discussing them passionately well into the night, volunteering in political campaigns, protesting for various causes, and on and on and on. I'm sorry, but nobody was stuck, like some pathetic shred of waterborne trash, in a single media-regulated channel.

Link: Gilligan's Web.

Dispatches - New Magazine Embraces Print

From Reuters/Washington Post:

A pall hangs over the word "print" these days, but the editors of a new magazine bet that discerning readers want news analysis on paper and don't mind getting it just four times a year.

Dispatches, which debuts on Monday, is taking a contrarian stance at a time when most news outlets are trying to stem the losses they're incurring in printed media by following readers and advertisers to the Internet.

The magazine, edited by journalist and author Mort Rosenblum and photographer Gary Knight, is a quarterly compilation of analyses of world events, with each issue grouped around a theme and featuring the work of well known journalists and authors.

While newspapers and news magazines have been adopting ever-faster schedules to keep up with the 24-hour news cycle prompted by the always-on nature of the Internet, Dispatches is slowing down the breathless delivery of "what" and downplaying instant analysis. [...]

While the magazine features a website (http://www.rethink-dispatches.com), it will not be the heart of the matter, Rosenblum said in an interview last week.

"We're somewhere between Google and Gutenberg," he said. "We really believe there's a place for the printed word."

The press release announcing Dispatches's debut takes an even harder line, saying the magazine "is meant for those who savor the printed word and the timeless photo, from foreign-affairs specialists to students who want more than fleeting images on a computer screen."

Link: Dispatches magazine prefers print over internet.

Machinated Leisure

That's the name of this Doodle 4 Google finalist by Mariam Hovhannisyan, who writes:

"What if our reliance on machinery to carry out simple tasks crossed the boundaries of technological advancement and we distorted our flesh to the extent that so little remained of what made us human that we became but a twisted, robotic caricature of our former selves."

Nicely put.  Go vote for it here (Grade 10-12 category).  (Via Valleywag: Highscooler warns of transhuman dystopia.)

See also: Official Google blog: Your vote matters.  The winning doodle will appear on Google's front page on May 22.

Here comes everybody... to destroy your town's award-winning garden

From the Daily Mail:

More than 300 people ran riot and destroyed an award-winning garden after they responded to a campaign for a mass water fight on social networking website Facebook.[...]

Leeds City Council claim around 350 people armed with water pistols and buckets trashed the garden, which scooped a bronze medal at the 2004 Chelsea Flower Show and is a symbol of the city's enduring partnership with Nelson Mandela and his hometown of Durban.[...]

Videos and pictures of people destroying the garden have been posted on the Facebook site and footage has also featured on YouTube [link]. Organisers even boast of the "success" of their "event", the council said.

Plants were trampled, turf ripped up, water features emptied and filled with foam and the mechanism for the fountains is thought to have been damaged during the rampage.

Link: The moment award-winning garden is destroyed after hundreds respond to Facebook water fight,

via Smart Mobs, The Register.

New Book: The Dumbest Generation

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) by Mark Bauerlein is released next week.

From the book's website:

The dawn of the digital age once aroused our hopes: the Internet, e-mail, blogs, and interactive and ultra-realistic video games promised to yield a generation of sharper, more aware, and intellectually sophisticated children. The terms “information superhighway” and “knowledge economy” entered the lexicon, and we assumed that teens would use their know-how and understanding of technology to form the vanguard of this new, hyper-informed era.

That was the promise. But the enlightenment didn’t happen.

The technology that was supposed to make young adults more astute, diversify their tastes, and improve their minds had the opposite effect.

According to recent reports from government agencies, foundations, survey firms, and scholarly institutions, most young people in the United States neither read literature (or fully know how), work reliably (just ask employers), visit cultural institutions (of any sort), nor vote (most can’t even understand a simple ballot). They cannot explain basic scientific methods, recount foundations of American history, or name any of their local political representatives. What do they happen to excel at is – each other. They spend unbelievable amounts of time electronically passing stories, pictures, tunes, and texts back and forth, savoring the thrill of peer attention and dwelling in a world of puerile banter and coarse images.

Anyone who thinks this is mere intergenerational grousing, the time-worn tradition of an older generation wagging its finger at a younger one, should think again.

Drawing upon exhaustive research, detailed portraits, and historical and social analysis, The Dumbest Generation presents an uncompromisingly realistic study of the young American mind at this critical juncture. The book also lays out a compelling vision of how we might address its deficiencies.

To fail to do so may well mean sacrificing our future to the least curious and intellectual generation in national history.

Interested in a print version of the radio series "How to think about science"?

If you've checked out the CBC Ideas radio series (and podcast) called "How to think about science" I'd appreciate your thoughts on this question.

The show's host David Cayley sent out some email asking people if they think the CBC should produce printed transcripts and/or a book version of the series.  I think it's a great idea but I'm just one listener.  (See this earlier post for my thoughts on the show.)

If you have an opinion, please cast your vote in the newfangled widget thingy below and/or in the comments to this post.  (If you're reading this on a feed reader I doubt that the widget will work properly there, so please click through to the original page to vote.)  Thanks.

Techno Tuesday: Outdated Grandpa

Techno Tuesday is by Andy Rementer.

The Problem of Niches, or Do Internet Social Theorists Know Anything?

This weekend's edition of NPR's On The Media had an interesting item about the Web's niche problem, i.e. the problem that people might flock to groups and news sources online that cater specifically to their established interests and that this might make for a more narrow-minded citizenry.  They called this problem "homophily."  This was preceded by a story about a search engine tailored for black users called Rushmore Drive.

Transcripts and audio of the two stories are here: Search is the New Black and The Pleasure Principle.

Both are interesting interviews and worth listening to.  One observation I'd add is that there's a common assumption made in this discussion: that "regular" search (i.e. Google) is not biased and represents the all-inclusive truth against which to measure niche search engines.

Search engines index only a fraction of what's on the web, and the ranking they assign is based on metrics of popularity that surely suit some needs better than others (when they're not being gamed outright).*  Whether intentional or not, search engines always exhibit bias.  So really they're all niche search engines, in a way.

The main thing I wanted to write about, though, was a moment in the second story during Brooke Gladstone's interview with Ethan Zuckerman about homophily or "preaching to the choir" (which I do think is a real concern, but I'm no expert).  They're talking about Zuckerman's suggestions for getting people to pay attention online to stuff outside their comfort zone.  From the transcript:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, how do you try to lure people into paying attention? You wrote that you have a short list of arguments – actually you have three appeals – to guilt, to fear and to greed.

ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: [... on using guilt, fear, and greed as appeals ...]

My hope is that there's another form of attention, which I refer to as xenophilia, basically this idea that what's most fascinating and what's most exciting out there is the diversity of the world, the diversity of perspectives.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's funny, but whenever I talk to deep thinkers about the Internet, you probe down a little and they always end up with these appeals to human nature. And [LAUGHS] it makes me sad.

ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: Well, I mean, there's the sort of Soylent Green response to this, right, which is to say, the Internet is people, because obviously it is. All these networks can do is bring us together. That's all they do. And what that means is that our behavior, the good and the bad, can get amplified within these networks.

When we're talking about the problem of homophily, this isn't an Internet problem. This is a human problem.

The way I heard Brooke Gladstone's statement, which I admit is probably not how she intended, is that internet theorists really don't have a clue about what's happening on the internet.  I mean if you're going to reduce these questions to "this isn't an Internet problem. This is a human problem" then why are we listening to you?

I have a lot of respect for the type of work that the Ethan Zuckermans, Clay Shirkys and danah boyds of the world are trying to do, but often there doesn't seem to be much real insight, just pop theories and anecdotes.  (To be fair, I don't read Zuckerman's rather verbose blog so maybe I'm missing out.)

Ethan Zuckerman has some comments about his On The Media appearance on his blog: Talking homophily with Brooke Gladstone and On The Media.

* On search engine coverage and bias, see Web Dragons by Witten et al.

Notes on the Underground

The MIT Press has published a new edition of Rosalind Williams's 1990 book Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination.  A description from the publisher's page:

The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet’s deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization.

Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today’s technology-dominated society. In a new afterword written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness--an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls "the human empire on earth."

I just picked up a copy of this today and am looking forward to reading it.  (Coincidentally, Williams is a past president of SHOT, which I wrote about in the previous post.)

Kranzberg's Laws of Technology and History

In his CHI 2008 keynote, Bill Buxton mentioned Melvin Kranzberg's Laws of Technology.  These are from a 1986 article in Technology and Culture called "Technology and History: Kranzberg's Laws" (available here for $10 and probably elsewhere).  These are the laws, via Wikipedia:

1. Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
2. Invention is the mother of necessity.
3. Technology comes in packages, big and small.
4. Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.
5. All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
6. Technology is a very human activity - and so is the history of technology.

I don't think these are terribly useful without further explanation and context.  Here is an interview in which Kranzberg expands a bit on the first and fifth laws: Missionary: An interview with Melvin Kranzberg.  The same site has excerpts from Kranzberg's papers.

Melvin Kranzberg was a historian and one of the people who founded the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) in 1958.  He was also SHOT's first president.  The image above is from special posters that were made for SHOT's 2007 meeting that celebrated the society's 50th anniversary (a two-year celebration that continues at this year's meeting in October in Lisbon).  The above links are also from the 50th celebration pages.  There's a lot more on that site, too, though the navigation is a little lacking.

SHOT is worth joining, even if you're not a historian.  It's relatively cheap and comes with a print subscription to Technology and Culture, their quarterly journal.  I joined it a couple years ago for this reason.  Most of the articles are quite readable to a layperson like myself, and T&C attracts material from a wider group than just historians, such as sociologists and people in science and technology studies.  (Sadly, they don't have all their archives available to subscribers yet, which is why I haven't read the "Kranzberg's Laws" article -- well, that and other priorities).

The Gospel of Consumption

It probably won't shock anyone to find an article called "The Gospel of Consumption" in (environmentalist) magazine Orion, but this piece by Jeffrey Kaplan is better than your average anti-consumption rant, I think. 

He talks about the forces that created American consumer society in the last century.  In the 1920s the abundance brought about by "labor-saving" machinery could have led to short workdays and a more active citizenship (as championed by people such as W.K. Kellogg).  Instead, industrialists and politicians put economic growth at the forefront, leading to the wonders of advertising to manufacture need in consumers, thus leading to more production and even more work.

Jeffrey Kaplan is an activist and has an agenda, to be sure (see Take Back Your Time for more work along these lines).  I believe his history here to be fairly accurate, though.  It's an interesting contrast to Clay Shirky's story.

Link: The Gospel of Consumption (the sidebar has some interesting links to check out as well, such as the introduction to Kellogg's Six-Hour Day by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt).

Oh, and happy May Day (Wikipedia, Britannica).

TV, Cognitive Surplus, and Wikipedia

This past weekend Clay Shirky posted a transcript of a talk he gave called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus that's been getting a lot of links around the blogosphere.  Following on themes from his book, Here Comes Everybody, he tells a story that goes like this: We gained lots of free time (a "cognitive surplus") in the 40s and 50s because of shorter workweeks.  We squandered the surplus by watching TV sitcoms and the like.  Now we're finally waking up from this "collective bender" and putting our energies into better things, like editing Wikipedia.

I have a number of problems with this story.  First of all, did we gain free time in the 40s and 50s?  I'm not an expert, but what I've read about work life has said that Americans are working more hours now than they did at the beginning of the 20th century, not less.

Second, is the time now spent editing Wikipedia or doing other things online really coming from time formerly spent watching TV?  In other words, even if there's a negative correlation between TV viewing and online activity, correlation doesn't imply causality.

Third, who's to say which of these activities is more valuable?  Shirky has a couple of fairly simple rules for assigning value.  Producing is better than consuming -- so writing a blog or posting to a mailing list is better than watching TV or reading.  Activity is better than inactivity or passivity -- playing World of Warcraft is more valuable than watching a movie.

I think those rules are awfully simplistic and don't seem to get at the heart of what's valuable.  Some TV shows and movies are far more sophisticated works of art than are most video games.  Reading a book can be a much more efficient way to deepen one's understanding of a topic than debating it online.  Even an adolescence wasted watching Gilligan's Island (an example of Shirky's) might reward you later with the creative juice to launch a career writing postmodern novels.

It's wishful thinking to believe that all of these new technologies will bring forth some great creative and intellectual bounty.  We've already got hundreds of millions of blogs -- how much have they really changed things?  How important is Wikipedia, really? If it disappeared tomorrow would anyone be truly inconvenienced?  I doubt it -- Google would turn up another source or you'd go look in the library if it really mattered.  Yet think of all the energy and hours that have been put into Wikipedia.  The return on investment just doesn't seem that impressive.

Libraries and Denial

Over at Library Juice, Rory Litwin has started an interesting discussion about the mission of libraries today.  He begins:

I would like to propose that the current era in librarianship, which is normally characterized as a “period of rapid change,” is perhaps better described as a period of denial. It is a period in which librarians are scurrying to disassociate themselves from their own profession as it tends to be thought of, with a sense of desperate shame.

What am I talking about? I’ll exaggerate a bit to make my point. I’m talking about librarians who say,

We’re not about books! We’re about computers! Don’t associate us with books! We don’t want to be saddled with that! When people hear the word “library,” we want them to think words like “Future,” “Hi Tech,” “Information Age,” and “Shiny Gadget!” Fellow librarians, don’t even use the word Book! It’s a no-no! Bad word! Hurts! Pretend you don’t even know what one is!

Link: Librarian: Accept Yourself

Here in the Bay Area I just noticed that my local library is pushing a new campaign called Free2, which seems like a big effort to rebrand the library as pretty much anything but a place to borrow books (it's a "21st century community center").  The blurb:

This campaign is designed to raise awareness of libraries in the Bay Area (at least initially). It encourages you to visit more often, whether that means stopping by your local branch to check out the latest video game or accessing the online catalog or participating in a program or activity.

It challenges stereotypes of dusty bookshelves and shush-happy librarians. It promotes how libraries sit in the heart of our communities. It recognizes that our libraries are among our most revered public institutions. It honors their great legacy of innovative partnerships. And it demonstrates an important fact in the Digital Age -- that our libraries are the number one point of Internet access for millions without connectivity at home, school or work.

Indeed, the question is not whether libraries are relevant today. But whether they can keep pace with the increased demand for their services and materials. With your help, they can.

And if you can come up with a good slogan for the campaign you could win an iPod or a video camera!

To their credit, I did find some mention of books on the site.  The video on the front page is of library users saying what they like about their library -- turns out some of them go there for books (who'd have thought?).