OK, I'll fly in the face of apparent near-unanimity and suggest that taking this project down doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me, given the age of the children we're talking about. How happy would you be if your black 8-year-old walked up to another child's science-fair display, discovered that her peers overwhelmingly prefer white Barbies, and concluded that other kids like the white kids better than her? And later, when the news spread and the playground begins to self-segregate at recess? Sure, taking down the project is censorship in the technical sense, but so is keeping children out of X-rated movies. I agree that it's a shame from the point of view of the girl who did the experiment (which sounds like better science than anything I saw judging an eighth grade science fair recently), but it's not hard to imagine that leaving it up would have hurt more kids worse. We manage how we present complicated information to children, that's a huge part of the process of raising them. If this school district is really trying to ignore all race issues, in all grades, then that's probably bad, but I think they're within both their rights and their responsibilities to think about how topics like race, drugs, sex, war and religion are best broached, including deciding that a second-grade science fair, where they're already confronting the tricky subject of the scientific method and the nature of knowledge, isn't the place for some of them.
If you want to customize your shoes, Customatix lets you play with a lot more elements than Nike's three colors and a word. I can't comment on the quality of the delivered shoes because I can't stop fiddling with my design. And while I can't vouch for their labor practices in any way, either, they do at least claim (here) to be trying to improve their workers' situation.
Digital recording of broadcast TV is just a way-station on the way to digital transmission. A million Tivos caching the same data is an inane topology. The data ought to be stored at the source, and downloaded on demand. Why send 98 channels down my cable, 24x7, when you can just send me the one program I want right now? The technology isn't there yet, but it will come. Like The Sopranos? Flip to HBO and get the entire list of available episodes. Watch them in order, at your leisure. Anything that isn't live, to begin with, doesn't need a time slot. The entire concept of "time-slot" is obsolete, and tv-shows can finally be treated as durable products, the way books have been for centuries, music for decades, and movies for years. The distinction between "movies" and "tv" goes away, and instead we just have "video", some of which will be distributed theatrically before it's available for download and some of which won't.
This undermines the whole nature of current broadcast television, of course, almost none of which is intended to be good enough that viewers would pay for it. Would you pay $2 (figuring movies are ~$8 and a sitcom is 1/4 the length) to see an episode of King of Queens? I bet not. So the tv industry is right to see this idea as a threat, and they'll fight it. They'll probably lose, but I wouldn't want to have to predict how soon.
The actual Jupiter claim (see this) was that users of music-sharing technology were 45% more likely to have increased their music spending than people who do not use music-sharing technology. This is still simplistic, untrustworthy and inconclusive, but at least it makes sense, which Katz's bizarre mangling of it did not.
Two different kinds of fantasies
on
5 Novels
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· Score: 1
Harry Potter is fantasy of the "imagine there were a cooler world, so we didn't have to put up with this one" sort. Pinkwater's books tend, instead, to be fantasies about how the real world is the cooler world, if you know how to think about it correctly, and where the all-night movie theaters and strange, cheap restaurants are. I discovered both recently, post-30, and have enjoyed them both immensely, but my adult self definitely finds Pinkwater's blend of deranged whimsy and urban realism a bit more sophisticated and intriguing than Rowling's relatively straight-forward school for wizards. I think Harry Potter is really for a slightly younger audience.
Trying to make machines do tasks that only humans can do properly is the biggest mistake we (everybody, but technophiles particularly) make with technology.
The numbers aren't just overinflated, they miss the important point that the amount of time people spend doing things is gated by their patience and interest more often than it is by how long the task "really" takes. I'm guessing the average person will spend no more than ten minutes a day scanning TV listings, for example, if that. Our attention spans protect us. Information overload isn't a problem for the consumers of information, it's a problem for the producers, competing in increasing numbers for a finite audience.
Previously, if you wanted to know the flight speed of a coconut-laden African swallow, you probably realized you would have to go to the library and spend hours researching, and then decided you didn't really need to know, and went back to whatever else you were doing. Now maybe you'll waste and hour or two looking for it on the web, but even if you find it, it's not clear whether you're better off. Clarke's fear, put another way, is that we will become paralyzed by possibility, so innundated by the overhead of figuring out which things we could be doing that we won't end up doing much.
Albums with "two good songs" on them are not, for the most part, a music-industry scam, they're simply a mismatch between your reaction to the song you bought the album for and your reaction to the other ones. There's a short rant about this perennial complaint at the beginning of a review of A Certain Hostility, by Vitesse, a few weeks ago in my music-review column.
There's a longer rant about why MP3s are not an incipient social revolution at the beginning of another issue.
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OK, I'll fly in the face of apparent near-unanimity and suggest that taking this project down doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me, given the age of the children we're talking about. How happy would you be if your black 8-year-old walked up to another child's science-fair display, discovered that her peers overwhelmingly prefer white Barbies, and concluded that other kids like the white kids better than her? And later, when the news spread and the playground begins to self-segregate at recess? Sure, taking down the project is censorship in the technical sense, but so is keeping children out of X-rated movies. I agree that it's a shame from the point of view of the girl who did the experiment (which sounds like better science than anything I saw judging an eighth grade science fair recently), but it's not hard to imagine that leaving it up would have hurt more kids worse. We manage how we present complicated information to children, that's a huge part of the process of raising them. If this school district is really trying to ignore all race issues, in all grades, then that's probably bad, but I think they're within both their rights and their responsibilities to think about how topics like race, drugs, sex, war and religion are best broached, including deciding that a second-grade science fair, where they're already confronting the tricky subject of the scientific method and the nature of knowledge, isn't the place for some of them.
If you want to customize your shoes, Customatix lets you play with a lot more elements than Nike's three colors and a word. I can't comment on the quality of the delivered shoes because I can't stop fiddling with my design. And while I can't vouch for their labor practices in any way, either, they do at least claim (here) to be trying to improve their workers' situation.
Digital recording of broadcast TV is just a way-station on the way to digital transmission. A million Tivos caching the same data is an inane topology. The data ought to be stored at the source, and downloaded on demand. Why send 98 channels down my cable, 24x7, when you can just send me the one program I want right now? The technology isn't there yet, but it will come. Like The Sopranos? Flip to HBO and get the entire list of available episodes. Watch them in order, at your leisure. Anything that isn't live, to begin with, doesn't need a time slot. The entire concept of "time-slot" is obsolete, and tv-shows can finally be treated as durable products, the way books have been for centuries, music for decades, and movies for years. The distinction between "movies" and "tv" goes away, and instead we just have "video", some of which will be distributed theatrically before it's available for download and some of which won't.
This undermines the whole nature of current broadcast television, of course, almost none of which is intended to be good enough that viewers would pay for it. Would you pay $2 (figuring movies are ~$8 and a sitcom is 1/4 the length) to see an episode of King of Queens? I bet not. So the tv industry is right to see this idea as a threat, and they'll fight it. They'll probably lose, but I wouldn't want to have to predict how soon.
The actual Jupiter claim (see this) was that users of music-sharing technology were 45% more likely to have increased their music spending than people who do not use music-sharing technology. This is still simplistic, untrustworthy and inconclusive, but at least it makes sense, which Katz's bizarre mangling of it did not.
Harry Potter is fantasy of the "imagine there were a cooler world, so we didn't have to put up with this one" sort. Pinkwater's books tend, instead, to be fantasies about how the real world is the cooler world, if you know how to think about it correctly, and where the all-night movie theaters and strange, cheap restaurants are. I discovered both recently, post-30, and have enjoyed them both immensely, but my adult self definitely finds Pinkwater's blend of deranged whimsy and urban realism a bit more sophisticated and intriguing than Rowling's relatively straight-forward school for wizards. I think Harry Potter is really for a slightly younger audience.
Trying to make machines do tasks that only humans can do properly is the biggest mistake we (everybody, but technophiles particularly) make with technology.
The numbers aren't just overinflated, they miss the important point that the amount of time people spend doing things is gated by their patience and interest more often than it is by how long the task "really" takes. I'm guessing the average person will spend no more than ten minutes a day scanning TV listings, for example, if that. Our attention spans protect us. Information overload isn't a problem for the consumers of information, it's a problem for the producers, competing in increasing numbers for a finite audience.
Previously, if you wanted to know the flight speed of a coconut-laden African swallow, you probably realized you would have to go to the library and spend hours researching, and then decided you didn't really need to know, and went back to whatever else you were doing. Now maybe you'll waste and hour or two looking for it on the web, but even if you find it, it's not clear whether you're better off. Clarke's fear, put another way, is that we will become paralyzed by possibility, so innundated by the overhead of figuring out which things we could be doing that we won't end up doing much.
There's a longer rant about why MP3s are not an incipient social revolution at the beginning of another issue.
glenn