Question Technology

Shopping Carts with TVs for Kids

NPR reports on shopping carts with built-in TVs for your kids to watch while you shop.  The story includes some comments from childcare experts about how these are likely to be unhealthy.

Link: NPR : Grocery-Cart TV for Kids of Shoppers.

Image from the manufacturer's site, www.tvkart.com.

Previously: Nightmare Store of the Future.

Wired to Geeks: Come Talk About Yourselves

First there was the Wikitorial, and now Wired is giving it a try by posting a news story for readers to edit.  The subject: Wikis!  The original, unedited story begins:

Wikipedia has hit the big time.

The massive user-generated and edited site is not only the biggest encyclopedia in the world, it's also gotten the attention of the media elite, been lampooned by the Onion and Comedy Central and will come packaged with MIT's $100 laptop project.

But what are the lessons of Wikipedia and what bodes for the future of wikis beyond Wikipedia? Will open collaboration be the exception or the rule?

Wow, pretty shocking stuff, Wired.  Apparently I'm not the only one who's less than enthused about the topic.  After one day, only two people have edited the page besides the original author.*  I suspect the wiki-folk are abuzz somewhere about this experiment, but just not on the page itself.

Link to the wiki page: Wired Wiki.
Link to Wired story about the story: Wired News: Edit This Wired News Story.

Correction!  There have been 103 edits to date.  I was looking at the history for the "original unedited" version, which had been edited nine times by three users.  Confused?  Me too.  I blame SocialText's horrible navigation interface.  (Hey, wasn't Social Text the name of the journal that hosted the Sokal hoax?  I wonder if this coincidence means anything to anyone.)

Anyway, here's the opening to the current, edited story:

Wikipedia has edited its way into the big time.

The massive user-driven site is now by far the biggest encyclopedia in the world. It has recently attracted the attention of the media elite, having been lampooned by The Onion and Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert -- who in turn gave birth to the term "wikiality". Wikipedia may also become familar to children without access to the internet as its extensive database will come pre-packaged with MIT's $100 laptop in the One Laptop per Child project.

But is there a future for wikis beyond the encyclopedia model? Will open collaboration be the exception or the rule?

I usually try to restrain myself from criticizing other people's writing, because I'm no example, but this is truly crappy writing.  Of course I could go edit it myself if I really cared -- Wired even trotted out the obligatory "If you don't participate you can't complain about the results" in their teaser to the article, presumably being a bit tongue-in-cheek.

On Technology Criticism and its Reception

A quote from the preface to Langdon Winner's classic book, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986):

[T]his is a work of criticism.  If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand that the underlying purpose is positive.  A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that might be useful to other readers of the same text.  In a similar way, critics of music, theater, and the arts have a valuable, well-established role, serving as a helpful bridge between artists and audiences.  Criticism of technology, however, is not yet afforded the same glad welcome.  Writers who venture beyond the most pedstrian, dreary conceptions of tools and uses to investigate ways in which technical forms are implicated in the basic patterns and problems of our culture are often greeted with the charge that they are merely "antitechnology" or "blaming technology."  All who have recently stepped forward as critics in this realm have been tarred with the same idiot brush, an expression of the desire to stop a much needed dialogue rather than enlarge it.  If any readers want to see the present work as antitechnology," make the most of it.  That is their topic, not mine.

Twenty years later, the situation is hardly any better.

... I should add, though, that the analogy Winner makes here is perhaps imperfect -- it depends on how you define technology, which is tougher than it sounds.  I may expand on this topic later (not much time for blogging lately).

Digital Bookmarks to Encourage Reading

I noticed this product in a bookstore today -- the Mark My Time Digital Bookmark.  It's a combination stopwatch-bookmark that will track or count down your child's reading time.  It's the "best and easiest way to monitor reading time and keep kids excited about reading so they'll want to read more."

This is a hard product to criticize.  The testimonials on their website prove that it works, and the marketing is all quite responsible.  We all have problems with time management nowadays, and clocks are a useful tool for improving discipline.

I wonder, though, if this subtly encourages too much clockwatching at too young an age, especially when used as shown in the photographs with the timer front-and-center.  Kids shouldn't be time-stressed like the rest of us.  I'm straying into serious Luddite territory here, but childhood isn't the time for everything to be quantized, digitized, and yoked to the machine.  Kids deserve free, unstructured time, or if it's structured then let that structuring be more indirect.  Surely a parent could keep track of time without delegating that task to the child or this device.

Though it's not stated explicitly, I get the impression that part of the digital bookmark's appeal is that it's an electronic gadget.  I guess it's never too early to promote gadget obsessions -- these kids are still too young for a cell phone (I think).

As I said before, I'm sure this works and that on balance it's fairly harmless.  When they release the WonkaZoid digital bookmark with video game and candy dispenser, then we're in trouble.

Daily Show's Future Shock

In case you haven't seen it already, I recommend checking out The Daily Show's funny new feature called "Future Shock" with Samantha Bee.  The first installment featured Ray Kurzweil and RFID-chip-implant do-it-yourselfer Mikey Sklar.  You can watch the videos on the Daily Show site (or you can find copied snippets on YouTube as well, if that makes you feel better).

Challenging the Chip: Labor and Environmental Consequences

I've noticed people searching for this book and landing on my site, so I thought I'd give it a mention.*

Challenging The Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry is a new book brought to you by the excellent Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.  Here's their description of the book:

From Silicon Valley in California to Silicon Glen in Scotland, from Silicon Island in Taiwan to Silicon Paddy in China, the social, economic, and ecological effects of the international electronics industry are widespread. The production of electronic and computer components contaminates air, land, and water around the globe. As this eye-opening book reveals, the people who suffer the consequences are largely poor, female, immigrant, and minority. Challenging the Chip is the first comprehensive examination of the impacts of electronics manufacturing on workers and local environments across the planet.

Contributors to this pioneering volume include many of the world's most articulate, passionate and progressive visionaries, scholars and advocates. Here they not only document the unsustainable and often devastating practices of the global electronics industry but also chronicle creative ways in which activists, government agencies, and others have attempted to reform the industry—through resistance, persuasion, and regulation.

I've only skimmed the book in a bookstore but hope to track down a library copy soon to read.  This book gives some much-needed exposure to issues that hardly anybody knows about.  We hear the odd murmur of about possible iPod sweatshops, but I think the problem is much, much bigger than people imagine.

*Yep, you have no privacy on the web, just in case you thought otherwise.  (But the TypePad stats only show referring sites or searches, that's all.)

Computers Writing the News

From the Financial Times:

First it was the typewriter, then the teleprinter. Now a US news service has found a way to replace human beings in the newsroom and is instead using computers to write some of its stories.

Thomson Financial, the business information group, has been using computers to generate some stories since March and is so pleased with the results that it plans to expand the practice.

The computers work so fast that an earnings story can be released within 0.3 seconds of the company making results public.

Link: FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Computers write news at Thomson.

(via BookNinja: Wire stories now really wired)

These are for business wire stories about earnings, so it's not too surprising, but so many other "news" stories these days are just regurgitated press releases that it can't be long before the practice takes off.

Video Games and Candy, Together at Last!

Finally someone has found a way to combine two popular sedentary activities among today's youth -- playing video games and eating candy.

Nestle introduces WonkaZoid, a portable video game with a built-in candy dispenser.  Win the game and it spits out candy.  Load, play, eat, repeat.

I read about this in the latest Adbusters.

"Neutral" Websites That Aren't

Rory Litwin at Library Juice writes about Procon.org, a neutral-looking news site that claims to give you the straight dope on various controversial subjects, when in fact it's really a deceptive effort to push certain agendas.  His post begins:

Procon.org is a new set of websites claiming to promote informed citizenship by providing “both sides of the issue” in a number of topics of debate or political interest. Its pages are designed so that students will easily notice all of the indications of reliability that information literacy instructors have taught them to look for in a web page: the group’s 501(c)(3) non-profit tax status and non-partisanship is prominently located in the upper left; contact information is easy to find; it’s at a dot org domain; and it is written in cool and measured prose. And the organizing principle of the site - providing the “pros and cons” - especially invites students to trust it.

I find Procon.org’s websites dangerous for undergraduates but useful in educating librarians to be better information literacy instructors.

Spending a good chunk of time with these sites provides an object lesson in how control over the way a question is framed and control over what information gets applied to it can go a long way in determining how people answer that question. The site presents questions to students, such as “Is the United States a Christian Nation?,” provides pro- and con- statements relating to them, and lets students feel that they are answering these questions for themselves. It is what you might call “guided thinking.”

Procon.org’s claim of non-partisanship and neutrality is a deceptive strategy designed to influence students’ thinking about topics like the war in Iraq, homosexuality, the ACLU, medical marijuana, and the Pledge of Allegiance. Its presentation appears at first glance to be so neutral and harmless that I fear many librarians will be fooled by it. Certainly many students will.

Link: Library Juice - Fake Neutrality: Procon.org.

The comments to the post are worth reading as well.  They demonstrate his points -- many of the commenters can't seem to tell that the site has a bias (either that or they're just trolls trying to promote the site).

Pushing an agenda is fine, but not when you do it dishonestly to trick students and other people.  The Reader's Comments are especially disheartening (if they're real, and sadly I think most of them are).  For example,

"Thank you for your intellectual honesty and clarity. This site [Israeli-Palestinian ProCon.org] should be advertised on more traditional media so that curious members of the general public can learn. Traditional forms of news and information have let the public down by substituting salaciousness and 'infotainment' for facts and reasoned discourse."
Ralph 8/6/06

"I love your simple, precise rendition of history. It's better than going to school!"
Rose 7/14/06

"If the world would start looking at things like this pro/con way maybe people would learn to respect each others differences a little bit more."
Hazystrains 7/1/06

"I have said so often that a perfect teacher will give no clue to a student as to his personal beliefs. ProCon.org qualifies as one such teacher."
Bart 11/12/05

The irony is really too much.

I've visited this issue a bit before in reference to SourceWatch.org, who are truly unbiased and informative (or so say I -- you can judge for yourself whether it's just my lefty tendencies speaking), in comparison to ActivistCash.com, a site that looks like straight information, but is really run by a PR firm, in a previous post: Following the Money (Or Not) - Sniffing Out Corporate PR.

Update: Kamy Akhavan from ProCon.org has posted a response here and also at Library Juice.  Please read them both for another viewpoint.  Perhaps I'm just too cynical for my own good.  I admit I  haven't yet done much more than skim the ProCon sites, so if I was unfair I apologize.

One of the main reasons I'm suspicious is the choice of topics.  There are only seven, and four are medical marijuana, gays, "under God", and the ACLU.  Who besides conservatives thinks those are the most important issues facing the US today?  They're undeniably "hot button" or "wedge" issues, and maybe that's the reason ProCon thinks it's important to address them.  But simply giving prominence to a wedge issue gives some credence to it -- this is part of the political strategy.  People get upset about wedge issues largely because they're told that it's an important controversy.

For example (as I believe Rory pointed out at Library Juice), who asks "Is the ACLU good for America?" besides conservatives?  I can see now that the ACLU is a topic here because of the founder, Steven Markoff's past involvement with them, and so it's understandable that he's written about it.  So one suggestion I'd make for ProCon is to explain (or explain more prominently) the selection of topics.

Celebrate Blackout Day

This is a good idea.  J. Sinopoli suggests that we make the anniversary of the 2003 Northeast US blackout a voluntary holiday from electricity.  Excerpt from an article at Interactivist Info Exchange:

[We] call to formalize, as a holiday, the August 14 Blackout.

It could be our version of Carnival, and we could use one. It requires no municipal support. We as a people could simply do it. A harmless ritual: You come home from work, or wherever, switch off your circuit breakers, and that's all, it begins. It is not a debauchery, not a wild night, but perhaps a free one. Free of the system, free of the machine, free of the exhaustive burdens of ambition. Free of electricity, and the 24 hours a day you-don't-stop that goes with it. There was a time, before electricity, when people simply retired at night. What else could you do? It was dark. Not anymore. Progress has its compromise. The blackout took us back to the basics, of who we are as human beings, with none of this shine and polish to distract us from the truth.

As with anything good, the blackout as a holiday would be optional; none of the hospitals must shut down, no vital services would close. No one must do anything. But for those who can do it, and wish to, the blackout offers a pre-existing holiday so simple to celebrate there is almost no reason not to. Every August 14 we could easily stage a re-enactment of the largest-known naturally-occurring party in the history of the human race. The city went dark that night and 10 million people did not flip out or riot, or conduct themselves in any way sinister or foul. Newscasters were amazed at how peaceful it was.

Link: Interactivist Info Exchange | J. Sinopoli, "A Proposal for the Adoption of the Blackout as a Holiday".

Bloggers, The Great Unread

Nicholas Carr has an excellent post about the nature of the blogosphere that's generating lots of discussion.  Excerpt:

An innocent fraud is a lie, but it's a lie that's more white than black. It's a lie that makes most everyone happy. It suits the purposes of the powerful because it masks the full extent of their power, and it suits the purposes of the powerless because it masks the full extent of their powerlessness.

What we tell ourselves about the blogosphere - that it's open and democratic and egalitarian, that it stands in contrast and in opposition to the controlled and controlling mass media - is an innocent fraud.

Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The Great Unread,

via Michael Zimmer.

There seems to be a convergence of blogger crises-of-confidence lately, or maybe it's just coincidence that I'm seeing many posts recently about how lonely the blogosphere can be.  See also this comic (via Matthias Klang), and the many links in Nicholas Carr's above post and the accompanying comments.

Privacy is Important, Unless it's Funny

I haven't blogged about the AOL search record disclosure fiasco, nor do I often blog about privacy issues in general, because the topic is so well covered elsewhere. (See Michael Zimmer, Lauren Weinstein, EFF, etc.)  But one aspect of the AOL episode that I find strange is how the internet chatter (I refuse to use the word 'meme') shifted so quickly from concern for privacy to delight over the content of the records.  Lists started popping up all over of the crazy things people search for (see BoingBoing for examples).  And of course these were AOL users, one of the lowest Internet classes and a favorite target for ridicule.

I know it's all just harmless fun, more or less, but beyond the joking, I think this is an instance of two core geek values colliding: privacy and "free culture."  Free culture appears to trump privacy, at least in the sense that privacy is seen as something for corporations to honor.  Free copying is something that citizens will do, regardless of the privacy consequences.  Once something is out there, there's no getting it back.  Or at least it seems to me that that's the underlying model here.  It's evident also in this casual statement in a recent Wired story:

AOL has apologized and taken down the data, but it is now widely available on the internet and some have set up search engines that query the records.

Link: Wired News: FAQ: AOL's Search Gaffe and You.

The phrasing -- "it is now widely available" -- suggests that individuals aren't responsible for continuing to make the data available.  It's just the way things work.

Spinning Soy Safety

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article today by James Nestor on the soy "controversy," which I still find hard to take seriously.  Nestor's main source on the anti-soy side is Kaayla Daniel, author of The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America's Favorite Health Food.  As one of the Amazon reviewers pointed out, you need look no further than the web site of her publisher, NewTrends Publishing, to sense something fishy, or rather beefy, about their agenda -- all of their books promote milk and animal fats.

Nestor talks with some pro-soy voices as well:

"Shame on you for even talking to her!" says Dr. Mark Messina, adjunct professor of nutrition at Loma Linda University in Southern California, and author of the pro-soy book "The Vegetarian Way: Total Health for You and Your Family." "Here is a person with a mail-order Ph.D., without one paper in a peer review publication, trying to promote a book of quasi-science." (Daniel fervently defends her Ph.D., which she received at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, and Union Institute. Though both are accredited universities, the latter is a distance learning-based institution.) 

"If you want some real perspective," Messina snaps, "look at 70 years of studies, clinical trials, talk to real scientists, look at the thousands of real research trials done on this stuff. It's the thousands of positive trials that never get attention  --  only the ones that are different from everything else that the media clings on to."

Messina, who also consults for the soy industry, [...]

Nestor seems quick to dismiss Messina as a "lobbyist" and throws up his hands near the end of the article:

What happened to the voices of (unsponsored, un-self-promoting, unaffiliated) reason, of temperance, of moderation?

Marion Nestle is the noted author of "Food Politics and What to Eat," [sic] a decidedly moderate voice in the nutrition wars, neither a soy lobbyist nor a detractor. Her unbiased, no-nonsense nutritional advice is trusted by hundreds of thousands of Americans. Can she clear this up?

"I think overall the research on soy is really uncompelling," Nestle says. "What the data shows is that if there is harm from soy, it is very small; and if there are benefits, they are also very small. That means the data revolves around zero. And the FDA health claim was on soy ... I think it was way out of line. Foods aren't medicines!"

"People don't have to eat soy if they don't want to!" Nestle says. "To figure you have to eat it for any reason makes no sense to me at all -- nobody needs to eat this stuff to be healthy."

Link: Too Much of a Good Thing? / Controversy rages over the world's most regaled legume.

Marion Nestle's Safe Food actually seems more relevant here.

I think most reasonable people already understood this -- there's no "miracle food," but soy protein is better for you than animal protein.  Adding soy to an unhealthy diet won't help you -- that's like getting a side salad at Golden Corral.

This kind of "he said, she said, oh never mind" journalism is irritating.  It does nothing but muddy the waters so people will be scared and not believe either side.  Most people will take home the scare message of the lead and the front-page headline, and not the reasonable conclusion buried at the end.

Previously: Is Soy Food Scare For Real?

Innovation That Matters

The Stanford Social Innovation Review has an interesting article by John Voelcker on 10 innovative projects to bring truly helpful technology to poor nations.  Link to pdf: Creating Social Change: 10 Innovative Technologies.

Via Idealist.org who summarize the article:

Despite the buzz that often surrounds the latest high-tech gadgets, the fact remains that the vast majority of the world’s people need less flashy technologies that are more appropriate to their locales, budgets, and problems. This article profiles ten of the many brilliant and innovative technologies that social entrepreneurs have created and deployed in recent years to solve chronic problems that rarely receive the attention they merit.

The Internet Saves Tibet!

Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing has been filing a four-part multimedia extravaganza of a series from Dharamsala for NPR's Day To Day show.  It's called "Hacking the Himalayas" and it

explores how Western "hackers" are building low-cost communications networks to bring phone and Web service to displaced Tibetan refugees -- and how native peoples are trying to hold onto their culture in an interconnected world.

I'm trying to be open-minded about Xeni's journalistic skills and about the genuine benefits that the Internet will offer to exiled Tibetans, but certain passages just make me gag.

Inside the Gyuto Ramoche temple in the northern Indian city of Dharamsala, the scene is timeless, seemingly centuries old: Rows of scarlet-robed young monks from Tibet, hunched over prayer scrolls in mediation [sic].

But outside, an antenna sits on a rooftop not far away. It's one of 30 connection points in a wireless network that's bringing the Internet to this remote region where communication technology has been expensive, unreliable and hard to come by -- until now.

Praise Buddha!  There's hardly more depth to the rest of the feature, which is all written in this breathless techno-evangelist style.

At the Tibetan Children's Village, youngsters are learning "computer skills" like how to build web pages and do other things:

TCV officials envision a future where Tibetan exiles man up profitable call centers, like the ones in India's booming tech centers further south. Or e-commerce sites, selling traditional art or yak cheese online.

This is progress?  And have you heard about CD-ROMs?

Tibetan elders are also embracing technology as a way to share cultural knowledge. Sacred texts, once smuggled out of Tibet or hidden from the Chinese, are being preserved digitally. Hundreds of volumes can fit onto a handful of CD-ROMs.

Link: NPR : Hacking the Himalayas.