Question Technology

Digital Dog Tag

From the Unnecessary Pet Technology department, FutureWire points us to the "Dog-e-Tag™" digital dog tag.  It stores phone numbers, e-mail addresses, vet info, and personalized messages like "I can't hear, I'm deaf," "I am 9 years old and I can't see very well," and the ever-important "I like my tummy rubbed."

And when the battery runs out?

I offered one of these to my dog, but he's a Luddog™.  Good boy.

Link: dogetag.com, via : FutureWire: A Database for Your Dog.

Unrest in New York over School Cellphone Ban

I'm sure this story has been reported and discussed ad nauseum already, but if you missed it: International Herald Tribune/NY Times: New York ban on students' phones cuts lifeline, parents grumble.

The parents do have a point -- we certainly are more dependent on cellphones, given the disappearance of public phones (though I have no idea if there are public phones in schools these days).  Surely there's some solution where students can keep their phones but must lock them away during class hours.

This story points out some distressing characteristics of life today.  Parents demand cellphones because of irrational fears, fed to them by the media, about child predators and terrorist attacks.  Kids can't imagine life without cellphones; "I feel so empty," says one 14 year-old who needs to listen to music on her cellphone to avoid a "really, really boring" subway ride.

U.S. Marks Chernobyl by Launching Pro-Nuclear PR Campaign

From Environmental News Service:

The nuclear industry launched a new campaign on Monday to generate support for increased nuclear power, spearheaded by Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore and former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman.

Nuclear power advocates are hoping that Moore and Whitman can sell the American public on the benefits of nuclear power and help spark the resurgence of an industry that has not constructed a new plant in some 30 years.

“Scientific evidence shows that nuclear power is an environmentally sound and safe energy choice,” said Moore, who along with Whitman will cochair the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CASEnergy).

[...]

Jim Riccio, a nuclear power analyst with Greenpeace USA, said Moore has been “living off his reputation with Greenpeace for some time now and lacks credibility.”

To call nuclear power clean and safe is “the height of hypocrisy, especially as we are ready to commemorate Chernobyl,” Riccio told ENS.

Wednesday is the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine – the world’s worst nuclear power accident.

Although U.S. plants are much safer than the doomed Chernobyl facility, critics remain unconvinced that the nation's regulatory agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or the nuclear industry, in fact focus on safety.

A report released Monday by Greenpeace finds that the industry has had some 200 “near misses” to nuclear meltdowns since 1986.

The study shows that nuclear power plants are a “clear and present danger,” Riccio said, and packaging nuclear power as a solution to global warming is “dead wrong.”

Link: U.S. Nuclear Industry Fires Up Public Relations Campaign,
via PR Watch: Learning from, and Spinning, the Chernobyl Disaster.

Chinese Scientists Clone Mad Cow-Resistant Calf

From VOA News:

Chinese scientists say they have successfully cloned a calf with genes resistant to mad cow disease.

China's official news agency, Xinhua, reports Wednesday that scientists at the Laiyong Agro-Science Institute in eastern Shangong used transplant technology to introduce genes to the calf, which was cloned from the cells of an adult cow.

The scientists say more tests are needed to confirm that the procedure was a success.

Link: VOA News - Chinese Scientists Clone Mad Cow-Resistant Calf,

via blog.bioethics.net: The Cow That Will Not Lose Its Mind (or Kill You).

It's surely a good thing to prevent mad cow disease, but does this mean the industry could now relax about what they feed cows?  Hooray for cow-nabilism! (sh-udder)

A Google image search for happy cow returns many things, some amusing and some downright frightening.  The image above is from a manufacturer of antibiotics for cows. Ew.  Did I mention I'm vegan (mostly)? :)

Singularity and Human Enhancement Events

Here are a couple of upcoming events that might interest you if you're in the Bay area and want to see lots of big name futurist types do their thing.

The Singularity Summit at Stanford, May 13, is "a rare gathering of thinkers to explore the rising impact of science and technology on society. The summit has been organized to further the understanding of a controversial idea – the singularity scenario."  Features Eric Drexler, Ray Kurzweil, Bill McKibben and many others.

The Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights conference is May 26-28, at Stanford Law School.  Speakers include James Hughes, Aubrey de Grey and others.

I'll be attending the Singularity Summit and will report on it here.  I'm not sure yet if I'll go to the Human Enhancement conference.

[Updated 4/30/06]

Newsflash: Number of Words in English Reaches a Gazillion!

You can't ask for a much better example of our fascination with scientific sounding yet meaningless statistics than the recent news stories about the number of words in the English language.  A few weeks ago one group told us that we were fast approaching one million, according to their particular database and method of counting.  Jesse Sheidlower wrote in Slate about the silliness of this count (Slate: Word Count: Are there really 988,968 words in the English language?).

Now today another group comes along and tells us we've just hit one billion words (AP/SF Chronicle: English Language Hits 1 Billion Words).  That's 1,000,000,000 instead of 1,000,000.  Unless they mean 10^12 instead of 10^9 -- this is a British group and the usage of "billion" varies -- see Wikipedia: Billion.  So who knows?  It's a one and a whole bunch of zeros.

Prepare to be dazzled, dear readers, when my personal vocabulary reaches 1,000.  I'm working on the press release already.

Branded Sheep: Baaaaad Idea

From the International Herald Tribune comes a story about sheep being used in the Netherlands as walking billboards.  People aren't happy about it.  I love this quote:

"My first reaction was a smile; it is very creative," said the town's mayor, Bert Kuiper. "My second reaction is that we have to stop this. If we start with sheep, then next it's the cows and horses."

Link: Billboards that eat and bleat - International Herald Tribune.

The image is from the ad company's website, www.leaseasheep.org.

People don't want video on their phones

Just a few weeks ago, Wired tried to tell us that people were clamoring for more features like video on their cell phones, despite evidence to the contrary (see earlier post: What do we really want from our cell phones?).  Today the New York Times reports that only one per cent of mobile phone users watch video on their phones, compared to 28% who have the feature available.  (Link: NYT: Video Handsets Mostly Just Used as Phones).  Some will say it's just a matter of time and cost.  But maybe people just don't want it, like they didn't want video phones in the 1970s.

Future Hype

Sorry if it seems like book promotion week here (though it is the start of TV Turnoff Week, so perhaps it's appropriate).  Here's another new book that I'm really excited about: Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change by Bob Seidensticker.  I've just read parts of it so far, but it looks like exactly the kind of level-headed skepticism we need more of.

There's a website for the book with excerpts and more information: www.future-hype.com.

Made to Break

Another interesting new book that I just spotted today: Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade.  "A history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence."

Link to the book's webpage, which includes an excerpt: Harvard University Press: Made to Break.

Technology Matters

I've been reading David E. Nye's new book, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, and finding it excellent.  Nye is a technology historian and is masterful here in describing the essence of so many necessary questions about technology.

From the book description:

In Technology Matters, Nye tackles ten central questions about our relationship to technology, integrating a half-century of ideas about technology into ten cogent and concise chapters, with wide-ranging historical examples from many societies. He asks: Can we define technology? Does technology shape us, or do we shape it? Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? (Why do experts often fail to get it right?)? How do historians understand it? Are we using modern technology to create cultural uniformity, or diversity? To create abundance, or an ecological crisis? To destroy jobs or create new opportunities? Should "the market" choose our technologies? Do advanced technologies make us more secure, or escalate dangers? Does ubiquitous technology expand our mental horizons, or encapsulate us in artifice?

These large questions may have no final answers yet, but we need to wrestle with them--to live them, so that we may, as Rilke puts it, "live along some distant day into the answers."

The Internet and Life's Major Moments

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report today summarizing results of recent surveys about how Americans use the internet to gather information on major decisions (in sum: they do).

Here's the link where you can read a summary and the full report: Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: The internet at major moments.

One of the surprising findings, I thought, was that few people say they're experiencing "information overload" when they use the net.  From the report:

Information overload was not experienced by the majority of those who relied heavily on the internet in the five key decisions. Just 15% said they felt they sometimes felt overwhelmed by the amount of information they had, 71% said they had all the information they needed and thought it was manageable, and 11% said they were missing information that they wish they had. Few who bought a car in the past two years reported information overload (9%). And even among who said the internet played a crucial or important role in helping someone with an illness, only 22% said they felt overwhelmed by the volume of information. With the stakes high — offering help to another person about a major illness — one might have expected higher levels of anxiety about sorting through such information.

I guess this is encouraging if it's true, but I wonder if something more complex is going on.  I'd be interested to see how self-reports correlate with other, more direct measures of decision-making quality.  Barry Schwartz wrote about this issue in depth in his book The Paradox of Choice, and seemed to reach different conclusions, though he wasn't addressing the internet in particular.

 

Spam

Quick administrative note: I've had to turn on comment and trackback moderation because I've been getting a lot of trackback spam.  So there will be a delay now before they show up.  Sorry.

The I Hate the 21st Century Reader

Because I'm just not pessimistic enough, I picked up this book the other day: The I Hate the 21st Century Reader: Everything That Makes Life Miserable, from Terrorists to Bad Television.  It's got a few essays on science and technology that look interesting.  I may post a review at a later date.

I've seen the other books in this series (mostly lefty political stuff -- I hate Republicans, etc.) and have mostly ignored them.  I do dislike Republicans (hate is such a strong word), but don't exactly need readers on the topic.

How Fast Should Evolution Happen?

New scientific studies are showing that human evolution happens faster than we used to think, according to a recent Wired article (link: Wired News: Getting Evolution Up to Speed).  Not that fast, mind you -- we're talking about a single gene mutation in 5,000 years instead of earlier estimates on the order of 100,000 years.

This new knowledge is encouraging to transhumanists like James Hughes (author of Citizen Cyborg) and Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near) who want to sell us on the idea that humans should evolve much faster -- and we should take the reins ourselves in order to make it happen.  Hughes says, "You can take what nature gave you, but there's no good reason to take nature as a guide for where you should go in the future."

Many of us would rather give mother nature the benefit of the doubt, however, or at least an honest hearing.  Surely there's a world of difference between intentionally changing the germline to alter our species permanently within a generation or two and nature's way of testing out a mutation over hundreds or thousands of generations before it sticks.  The risks are enormous -- who's going to manage that risk over time?  Our culture has accelerated so fast that a single human generation is an eternity to a corporation or government.

Furthermore, who do we trust to decide which alterations are worth making?  The past century's horrors of Nazism and eugenics should be lesson enough on what happens when groups try to improve the species.  That kind of power simply shouldn't be in human hands.