Question Technology

Professor Says Bloggers Are Losers

He won't make many MySpace friends with talk like this!

Bloggers are living in a world where emotions may be real but everything else is make-believe, says a University of Calgary professor in a new book.

[...] Michael Keren, who has written "Blogosphere: The New Political Arena," suggests individuals who bare their souls in blogs are isolated and lonely, living in a virtual reality instead of forming real relationships or helping to change the world.

"Bloggers think of themselves as rebels against mainstream society, but that rebellion is mostly confined to cyberspace, which makes blogging as melancholic and illusionary as Don Quixote tilting at windmills," the author says. [...]

"In this world of blogging, which the whole world can read, you have a personal expectation about a readership that's just not there for the millions of bloggers who are writing their personal feelings." [...]

"Many of us end up like Father McKenzie in the 'Eleanor Rigby' Beatles song, who is writing a sermon that no one is going to hear," he suggests. "Some of us are going to be embraced by the mainstream media, but the majority of us remain in the dark, remain in the loneliness."

Link: globeandmail.com: Author laments lonely life of bloggers.

As a critic of technology and self-loathing blogger, I'm inclined to agree.  But it sounds like he's painting with too broad a stroke, judging by this article anyway.  I absolutely love the creepy book cover, though.

Latest in Future Schlock: Discovery's 2057

I caught a few minutes of the Discovery Channel's new techno docu-drama "2057" the other day.  It's quite an achievement in the future schlock genre.  Flying cars!  Wired clothing! ("the doctor is in your shirt!")  Urine-analyzing toilets!

A memorable moment was when the flying ambulance arrived to treat the guy who had just tripped over a Roomba and fallen out a three story window (to prove a point that such a fall would kill you today, but not in our glorious future).  Before treating him, a paramedic consults her screen which chirps "Platinum Class verified!"  Presumably they'd just fly off if he wasn't properly insured.  Thank the gods!  Flying cars is one thing, but universal health insurance in fifty years?  That's just not believable.

The show's main web page locks up my browser (I guess I need to update to Firefox 2057), but I could get to the about page, 2057: About the Show: Discovery Channel, and here's an excerpt of their description of the show:

What would you see and experience if the clocks rolled forward 50 years? In a unique blend of drama and science, this three-part series shows you the world of tomorrow. Will we have flying cars? Will advances in medicine help us stay young forever? What about "printing" custom-made vital organs? What will our cities look like? What will tomorrow's wars be about? Will we have robots helping around the house? Will solar power be the new oil?

Supported by the world's leading scientists and research institutes, we embark on a quest to answer some of society's most fundamental questions and reveal the dramas of tomorrow's world along the way. State-of-the-art computer graphics in combination with a dynamic story line will create a world usually only seen in feature films, but with the accuracy and relevance of a documentary. This series is all about opening the window of our future based on science fact, not science fiction.

Glasses To Prevent You From Sleeping

You've probably seen these on other blogs already: new eyeglasses that alert you if you're falling asleep.  Study aid or new torture device?

Designed to assist those cramming for exams or going on a long drive, they work by detecting what angle the bespectacled user’s head is at. If the head drops below a certain level, a little motor kicks-off to vibrate the earpiece and no doubt scare the crap out of whoever is wearing them. The glasses can be set to go off at one of four levels of head-droop.

Link: Plastic Bamboo : Vision Optic MyDo Bururu sleep warning glasses.

Note that one of the suggested uses is while driving... yikes.

Walter Kirn's The Unbinding

I picked up a copy of Walter Kirn's new short novel The Unbinding yesterday.  The premise is interesting:

Kent Selkirk is an operator at AidSat, an omni-present subscriber service ready to answer, solve, and assist with the client’s every problem. Through the AidSat network Kent has a wealth of information at his fingertips–information he can use to monitor subscribers’ vital signs, information he can use to track their locations, information he can use to insinuate himself into their very lives.

The form is interesting as well.  Kirn wrote and published the book in installments for Slate last year (still available here).  There are links throughout the text to images, videos, and sites on the web.  For the print version, the link words are printed in boldface and the reader is asked to go to Kirn's website to follow them.

I doubt I'll actually stop reading to look up the links.  I usually don't like footnotes in fiction either (unless they're done well and contribute a lot -- Nicholson Baker yes, David Foster Wallace not so much).

Goodbye Gutenberg: Journalism in the Digital Era

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard has published a special issue of their journal, Nieman Reports, called "Goodbye Gutenberg".  The issue has articles about newspapers and journalism in the digital era and is available online.  From the introduction:

Journalism is on a fast-paced, transformative journey, its destination still unknown. That the Web and other media technologies are affecting mightily the practice of journalism is beyond dispute. Less clear is any shared vision of what the future holds. Newsrooms are being hollowed out, and editors who resist such cutbacks are losing their jobs. Digital video cameras and tape recorders replace reporters' notebooks as newspapers—and other news organizations—train staff in multimedia storytelling. In this issue, words about journalists' experiences in the digital era transport our vision forward, while our eye takes us on a visual voyage back to a time when newspapers wove communities together.

Link: Nieman Reports - Winter 2006.

(via Guardian tech blog.)

Today is Family Literacy Day

In Canada, anyway:

Created by ABC CANADA Literacy Foundation in 1999, ABC CANADA Family Literacy Day (FLD) is a national initiative that promotes the importance of reading and learning together as a family. Every year, on January 27, families and communities across Canada celebrate this special day at literacy-themed events coordinated by literacy organizations, schools and libraries.

Link: ABC CANADA Family Literacy Day.

We don't have kids, but I'm encouraging the cats to put away their video iPods for a few minutes and come read with us.

iPhone to come with free iCancer

Okay, maybe that title is a bit alarmist, but earlier this week there was more news of a possible link between long-term cellphone use and brain cancer:

A large-scale study found that those who had regularly used mobiles for longer than 10 years were almost 40 per cent more likely to develop nervous system tumours called gliomas near to where they hold their phones.

The new research, to be published later this year in the International Journal of Cancer, is the second study to suggest increased risks of specific types of brain tumours in regions close to where mobile phone emissions enter the head.

However, a number of other studies have found no increased health risks associated with mobile phone use.

Prof Lawrie Challis, the chairman of the government-funded Mobile Telecommunications Health Research (MTHR) programme, said last week that most research had shown that mobiles were safe in the short term but that there was a "hint of something" for longer-term users.

Link: Telegraph | News | Mobile phone use 'linked to tumour'.

Of course, just recently there was another study in the news and this one claimed to show that there was no link.  More studies need to be done, and the fact remains that cellphones haven't been around long enough for anyone to be able to say for sure how dangerous they are.

Bush's Baby Einstein Gaffe (Slate)

Timothy Noah takes issue with Bush's state of the union shout-out to the creator of the Baby Einstein videos.  Excerpt:

What is Aigner-Clark's achievement? She got rich marketing videos to infants. No one told the president, I presume, that this profit-making scheme ignores advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics that children under 2 years of age shouldn't watch TV. One recent study went so far as to suggest, plausibly, that too much TV at so early an age can be a risk factor for autism. [...]

Baby Einstein is part of what Alissa Quart, in an August 2006 piece in the Atlantic ("Extreme Parenting"), called the Baby Genius Edutainment Complex, an industry that preys on the status anxiety of neurotic parents who, until Aigner-Clark and others told them otherwise, didn't sweat the meritocratic rat race until it was time to place their pint-sized strivers in preschool. That changed in the mid-1990s, when Don Campbell, extrapolating wildly from earlier research involving college students that, Quart writes, has never been duplicated, trademarked the slogan "Mozart effect" and used it to market classical-music CDs for infants. Aigner-Clark followed suit with her Baby Einstein videos in 1997.

"Essentially," Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan Lynn told the Chicago Tribune "Media Mom" (and occasional Slate contributor) Nell Minow in December 2005,

"the baby video industry is a scam. There's no evidence that the videos are educational for babies, and a review of the research on babies and videos concludes that while older babies can imitate simple actions from a video they've seen several times, they learn much more rapidly from real life."

Link: Bush's Baby Einstein gaffe. - By Timothy Noah - Slate Magazine.

Bush's Nuclear Power Propaganda

George Bush said in the state of the union address Tuesday:

It's in our vital interest to diversify America's energy supply -- the way forward is through technology. We must continue changing the way America generates electric power, by even greater use of clean coal technology, solar and wind energy, and clean, safe nuclear power.

The White House energy policy web page calls it "clean, safe, climate-friendly nuclear energy."

A contrary view from Helen Caldicott in her book Nuclear Power is Not the Answer (p. xi):

When nuclear proponents say that nuclear power can be used to reduce the United States's insatiable reliance on foreign oil, they are simply wrong.  Oil and its by-product gasoline are used to fuel the internal combustion engines in automobiles and trucks.  Oil is also used to head buildings.  But oil does not power the electric grid.  The grid, which is used to power electric lights, computers, VCRs, fans, hair dryers, stoves, refrigerators, air conditioners, and for industrial needs, is powered primarily through the burning of coal, other fossil fuels, and currently, through nuclear power.  (Oil does generate an infinitesimal amount of electricity -- 2% in the United States.)

Animal Hybrid Science Fair Project

To the person who searched for science fair project ideas on animal hybrids and found my blog instead: I admire your ambition but I don't think it'll fly with your school's ethics/review board.  Good luck anyway.

Image from the awesome Hybrid Animal photoshop creations by Mr. Diconti's 7th grade art class, via Google image search.

Second Life Satire

Get a First Life: A One Page Satire of Second Life.

New Book: The Shock of the Old

I just spotted this new book by historian David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900.  It looks excellent, based on a quick browse of it in a bookstore.  It promises an "entirely new approach to the history of technology, one that will change forever how we view invention and innovation."

From the publisher's page:

From the books of H.G. Wells to the press releases of NASA, we are awash in cliched claims about technology and history, writes David Edgerton. Now, in The Shock of the Old, Edgerton offers a startling new and fresh way of thinking about the history of technology, radically revising our ideas about the interaction of technology and society in the past and in the present. Our sense of technological time--and our thinking about technology and production, nationalism, war, and more besides--will all be changed, and to a surprising degree.

Modern technology, writes Edgerton, is not just a matter of electricity, mass production, aerospace, nuclear power, and the internet. It also involves the rickshaw, the horse, corrugated iron, cement, DDT, small arms, flat-pack furniture and the refrigerator. The Shock of the Old challenges us to view the history of technology in terms of what everyday people have actually used --and continue to use around the world--rather than just what was invented. The reader discovers that many highly touted technologies--from the V-2 rocket to the Concorde jet--have been costly failures. On the other hand, corrugated iron emerges as hugely important, a truly global technology. Its cheapness, lightness, ease of use and long life made it a ubiquitous material in the poor world in a way it never had been in the rich world. Edgerton reassesses the significance of such acclaimed inventions as the Pill and IT, and underscores the continued importance of unheralded technology, debunking the idea that we live in an era of ever-increasing invention and casting doubt upon the many naive assertions about "the information age."

The book has possibly the wittiest opening ever in a history of technology book: (paraphrasing from memory) "There have been plenty of books on the history of technology written for boys of all ages.  This is a history of technology book written for people of all genders and ages."

See also this interview with David Edgerton in the Guardian last August.

Hazards of Extreme Genetic Engineering

The ETC Group (Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration) has released a free 70-page report on the threats of "synthetic biology."  From the press release:

A new report by the ETC Group concludes that the social, environmental and bio-weapons threats of synthetic biology surpass the possible dangers and abuses of biotech. [...]

"Genetic engineering is passe," said Pat Mooney, Executive Director of ETC Group. "Today, scientists aren't just mapping genomes and manipulating genes, they're building life from scratch - and they're doing it in the absence of societal debate and regulatory oversight," said Mooney.

Synbio - dubbed "genetic engineering on steroids" - is inspired by the convergence of nano-scale biology, computing and engineering. Using a laptop computer, published gene sequence information and mail-order synthetic DNA, just about anyone has the potential to construct genes or entire genomes from scratch (including those of lethal pathogens). Scientists predict that within 2-5 years it will be possible to synthesise any virus; the first de novo bacterium will make its debut in 2007; in 5-10 years simple bacterial genomes will be synthesised routinely and it will become no big deal to cobble together a designer genome, insert it into an empty bacterial cell and - voilà - give birth to a living, self-replicating organism. Other synthetic biologists hope to reconfigure the genetic pathways of existing organisms to perform new functions - such as manufacturing high-value drugs or chemicals.

A clutch of entrepreneurial scientists, including the gene maverick J. Craig Venter, is setting up synthetic biology companies backed by government funding and venture capital. They aim to commercialise new biological parts, devices and systems that don't exist in the natural world - some of which are designed for environmental release. Advocates insist that synthetic biology is the key to cheap biofuels, a cure for malaria, and climate change remediation - media-friendly goals that aim to mollify public concerns about a dangerous and controversial technology. Ultimately synthetic biology means cheaper and widely accessible tools to build bioweapons, virulent pathogens and artificial organisms that could pose grave threats to people and the planet. The danger is not just bio-terror, but "bio-error," warns ETC Group.

Link: ETC Group - Publications - Extreme Genetic Engineering: An Introduction to Synthetic Biology.

There's some interesting discussion happening at Salon between Salon columnist Andrew Leonard, ETC Group, and MIT assistant professor of synthetic biology Drew Endy.  The latest post is here (update: and in the comments I believe I'm called both a Luddite and evil -- nice!).

The ETC Group is based in Canada and was one of many parties behind an open letter calling for public debate on synthetic biology, issued last May to coincide with the Synthetic Biology 2.0 symposium -- see previous post.

Their site has lots of interesting reading material.  They recently had a competition to design a hazard symbol for nanotechnology (the final judging will take place soon).

Track Your Workers With GPS

The Globe & Mail has an interesting article about companies installing GPS tracking on company vehicles to monitor workers.  Excerpt:

Called telematics, the technology goes beyond simply providing businesses with vehicles' locations -- it can also supply data on things like when a vehicle's doors are open, when engines are turned on or when cargo has been picked up. What's more, the technology can also enable a business to remotely control a vehicle by turning off its engine, locking a door or disabling the ignition.

But the technology does have its drawbacks. For every advocate trumpeting the benefits of telematics, there is a critic who says tracking workers violates privacy. Unions, for example, are looking at telematics carefully, and some are negotiating restrictions on monitoring workers in collective agreements.

However, those concerns do not seem to be diminishing telematic's growing popularity. Recent research says businesses' use of telematics will continue to expand this year, growing into a $1.2-billion (U.S.) industry by the end of this year.

Link: globeandmail.com: Do you know where your workers are?.

Five Minutes to Doomsday

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced today that they're moving their nuclear doomsday clock forward two minutes.  From the site:

By moving the hand of the Clock closer to midnight — the figurative end of civilization — the BAS Board of Directors is drawing attention to the increasing dangers from the spread of nuclear weapons in a world of violent conflict, and to the catastrophic harm from climate change that is unfolding. The BAS statement explains: "We stand at the brink of a Second Nuclear Age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth."

The BAS statement continues: "The dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause irremediable harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival."

Link to press release: "Doomsday Clock" Moves Two Minutes Closer To Midnight.

Update: I've been surprised at how negative/dismissive some of the reactions have been to this news.  See John Tierney's blog at the New York Times for an example: The Doomsday Clock and Schlock.  I agree that they probably didn't need to trot out the celebrity scientists for the event, but they probably got more attention by doing so.

My favorite comment, which I think I read on Slashdot, was something like "These guys are full of crap -- they haven't been right yet!"