Question Technology

Paul Boutin knows how to rant

Paul Boutin:

Engineers It's hard to be smarter than everyone else, isn't it?  You tech people never ask anything about my job.  Instead, you explain it to me.

• You just know that my life as a professional writer must be exactly like your life as a professional software developer or sysadmin. Salespeople must come by my desk and demand I change my articles so they can close a big deal, right?
  
• You're 100% certain that if you wrote the article instead of me, it would have been better. Lucky for you, your fellow engineers are like string theorists: They'll praise this assertion for its elegance and daring, instead of asking you to prove it with a real-world test.
  
• You'll explain to me that my ideas for articles start from press releases, and must be reviewed prior to publication by the companies I write about. If I recommend your competition, it must mean they bought an ad. You got this worldview from your company's PR lady. You have a crush on her.
  
• Do me a favor: 34 percent of the Internet is comments from engineers that begin, "It is unsurprising to me that ..." Look, we get it. Nothing surprises you. So it's unsurprising to us that it's unsurprising to you. So shut up already.

Bloggers  There is, in fact, a special circle of hell reserved for you.  You're keeping it real!  Real long, and real dull. [...]

Link: Why I hate you -- and I do mean you (Valleywag)

Techno Tuesday by Andy Rementer

www.technotuesday.com

The Politics of Facebook

Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler, has an excellent article in the Guardian about Facebook and the politics of some of its funders, including venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Link: With friends like these... (The Guardian), via Rough Type.

Sandbox Summit on Kids and Technology

The first Sandbox Summit, a conference "exploring the way kids play, learn, and connect in a digital world" took place at last week's CES.  From an AP story:

The International Consumer Electronics Show is such a glitzy celebration of technology that it was striking to see a set of panel discussions here Tuesday exploring whether electronic connectedness is valuable for children.

Are computers and electronic toys providing creative new outlets for kids to play, socialize and learn? Or does staring at screens all day addle the developing mind and hinder critical thinking skills?

It's a little of both, judging by the commentary at this first "Sandbox Summit" at CES. The trick, participants said, is for parents to intelligently monitor their children's use of computers and communication devices.

Link: 'Sandbox Summit' debates tech and kids (AP/Globe and Mail)

There is a website and blog for the conference series here: Sandbox Summit.

French Truckers Caught Watching TV While Driving

Speaking of multitasking...

French long-distance truck drivers have sparked alarm with a new pastime for beating boredom at the wheel: watching television.

From today, police have been ordered to keep a close watch on the cabs of heavy goods vehicles after reports that drivers are putting their feet up on the dashboard and watching videos or playing computer games while steaming along at 90 kilometres per hour.

To take their eyes off the road, they have devised a technique for "driving by ear," according to Le Figaro.

When traffic is not too dense, the driver sets the truck on cruise control and puts its right wheels on the band that marks the edge of the hard shoulder. These are often ribbed and are meant to create a noise to alert sleepy drivers that they are heading off the road.

The driver then steers by sound, leaving him free to watch a DVD, play a game or read, witnesses say.

Links: Truckers drive 'by ear' so they can keep eye on TV (Ottawa Citizen/Times of London), or in French: Ces routiers qui regardent la télévision en conduisant (Le Figaro).  Via Watching TV Online.

Is "Continuous Partial Attention" Real?

Multitasking has been in the news quite a bit lately.  Research has shown that multitasking can make us perform worse -- it's usually better to focus on single tasks.  Often, though, I've seen people try to counter this news in the tech media and blogs by referring to Linda Stone's concept of "Continuous Partial Attention."  She posted an article last week at Huffington Post about this, and it begins:

People often say we're multi-tasking ourselves to death.  Is that really what we're doing? I think not.

I call what we're doing today continuous partial attention, or cpa, for short.

Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. Each activity has the same priority - we eat lunch AND file papers. We stir the soup AND talk on the phone. With multi-tasking, one or more activities is somewhat automatic, like eating lunch or stirring soup. That activity can be paired with another activity that's automatic or with an activity that requires more cognition, like writing an email or talking on the phone. At the core of multi-tasking is a desire to be more productive. We multi-task to CREATE more opportunity for ourselves -time to DO more and time to RELAX more.

In the case of continuous partial attention, we're motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There's a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With cpa, we feel most alive when we're connected, plugged in and in the know.  We constantly SCAN for opportunities - activities or people - in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, "What can I gain here?"

Link: Linda Stone: Fine Dining with Mobile Devices

I think I see her point (and I've read more about CPA at her web site).  It sounds plausible that there are different kinds of multitasking, but as far as I can tell this is all just speculation on her part.  Where is the science?  Has anyone done serious psychology studies on this?  What I've read on multitasking contradicts her ideas.  Unless she can cite some studies (or at least work in progress) to show that CPA is a meaningful psychological construct, I have a hard time taking this seriously.

Stone is a writer, speaker, and consultant, and is well known, apparently, as a "visionary thinker and thought leader."  But it's not surprising that the idea of continuous partial attention gets a welcome reception from laptop-bearing technology pundits at conferences.

(Via the believers at Lifehacker.)

Question Your Tea Spoons

This is a lovely passage from Georges Perec that Nicholas Nova quoted on his blog, Pasta & Vinegar:

"What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.

Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.

Question your tea spoons.

What is there under your wallpaper?

How many movements does it take to dial a phone number?

Why don’t you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not?

It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth."

(Georges Perec, The Infra-Ordinary, 1973, translated by John Sturrock)

Link: Pasta&Vinegar

Some context for the quote: This is from the introductory section of The Infra-Ordinary, a set of essays in which Perec records observations of mundane things.  One essay is called "Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Food-stuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four."  You can find this in the 1998 essay collection Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.

Drama is in the Past?

In the Guardian, Joe Queenan asks:

Why are so many dramas and thrillers now set in the past? Is it because, in a world of mobile phones, satnav and Google, suspense is impossible?

Link: Confessions of a technophobe, via textually.

It's an interesting question, and maybe this is true for some types of drama, but the many tech-heavy shows like 24 and CSI on American TV don't seem to be having a problem.

Headphone Dangers

I like this ad campaign from New South Wales, Australia.  The captions read "Watch for cars when wearing headphones."

From adgoodness:

DDB Sydney has released a print campaign to raise awareness of the fact that the number of teenagers dying as a result of listening to ipods whilst they cross the road is beginning to reach “epidemic proportions”.

Link: adgoodness, via TreeHugger.

The Future is Getting Closer

Sci-fi blog io9 asks "Why is Science Fiction Going Back to the Near Future?":

William Gibson says reality has become science fictional, and therefore all his science fiction is now set in the present day. Authors like Charles Stross and Margaret Atwood have followed suit, writing books set in the near-future. What is this obsession with near-future SF? We asked io9's muse, science fiction author Ken MacLeod, whose latest book The Execution Channel is set in a not-too-distant future, and marks a strong departure from MacLeod's far-future space opera phase that included books like Learning the World, Newton's Wake, and the Engines of Light trilogy. MacLeod says he turned to the near-future out of fury with the present.

Link to full interview: Ken McLeod: Why is Science Fiction Going Back to the Near Future?

(By the way, Mark Swartz's H2O is set in 2020.)

H2O by Mark Swartz

Mark Swartz's 2002 novel Instant Karma was one of the most memorable new books I've read in recent years.  It takes the form of a journal, with footnotes, written by an obsessive young man who spends most of his time in the Chicago public library.  Thoughts of art and anarchy and a certain librarian lead him to plot to blow up the library he loves.  It's strange and very funny.

I recently read Swartz's newest novel, H2o, which is set in a not-so-unimaginable future beset by severe water shortages and corporate greed.  The main character, Hayden Shivers, is an engineer at water megacorporation Drixa who stumbles upon a method for synthesizing fake water.  Things get complicated: the technology has a flaw, an environmental protest group called ICE-9 turns up, there's a patent battle, and somehow a mail order bride agency is involved.

A cover blurb compares H2O to Don DeLillo's White Noise.  It made me think also of J.G. Ballard  and Kurt Vonnegut.  H2O seemed a bit less polished and focused than Instant Karma, but still an enjoyable read, and quite possibly the first novel to confront the problem of worldwide water shortage.

Techno Tuesday by Andy Rementer

www.technotuesday.com

Gotcha Capitalism

Terry Gross interviewed Bob Sullivan on Fresh Air today about his book Gotcha Capitalism: How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day-and What You Can Do About It.  It's a good interview and sounds like an important and useful book.

Links:

• Fresh Air interview
• Web site for the book: Gotcha Capitalism
• Bob Sullivan's blog The Red Tape Chronicles

Movies on cell phones? David Lynch is not a fan.

Watch here (warning: language).

The Approaching Voting Machine Nightmare

Clive Thompson has an article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine on the increasing worries about touch-screen voting machines as the US gets closer to the next presidential election.  Excerpt:

As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through the next few months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will once again find itself under a microscope. In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though he’s pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person “undervote” for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.

The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. [...]

Critics have spent years fretting over corruption and the specter of partisan hackers throwing an election. But the real problem may simply be inherent in the nature of computers: they can be precise but also capricious, prone to malfunctions we simply can’t anticipate.

Link: Can You Count on Voting Machines?

See also Clive Thompson's blog, Collision Detection.