All sorts of scientific research is going to get fantastically easier as we approach the Singularity. If you have a really tremendous amount of data available, then instead of having to go out and collect data in order to answer questions that occur to you, all you need to do is extract your query from the records. You might say to your computer (your computer can talk, naturally, since it's in this thread): "How many times had Joanna been exposed to the subjunctive before she made this utterance?" or "When this model of chip has failed in the past, what was the average ambient temperature?"
Lock-in. In the case of social networking sites, it's more social lock-in than technical. You can only effectively move a social network by getting everyone involved to agree simultaneously to move it. That's why there needed to be any sort of public revolt on MySpace. If it were a brand of ketchup that people were offended by, they'd each individually switch what's in their individual refrigerators, and discuss it later-- but you can only switch social networking sites by getting your friends to come with you. That creates an integral conservativism.
The idea is that mice are incapable of understanding the situation well enough to give consent or to withhold it. Mice just act micey. It's our job therefore, since we have a bit more of a clue what's going on, to figure out whether or not laboratory life is acceptably pleasant for them. We have to make the decision for them.
It does inevitably require some anthropomorphizing, since we're incapable of really fully experiencing mousehood in the process of our deliberations, but we can try to formulate theories of what it's like to be a mouse, and incorporate everything we know about how mice experience life into our decision.
This is a very compelling argument. The terrain gets tricky so quickly, though. The implicit moral argument here is: If you could ask the mice for consent, and they had accurate knowledge of the options, they would choose to live in the lab rather than in the wild.
I think this is at least very close to the truth. Laboratories are just one of the places in the world to live-- at times wonderful, at times terrible, just like anywhere.
But since we are manipulating the entire existence of each mouse-- its genes, its diseases, its cures, its food, its challenges-- it's very difficult to really fix a frame on who is being imagined to give consent. If laboratory mice had to give consent in some particular way, we would write their genes so that they'd do whatever it was.
We're leaving the realm where these questions make normal reasonable moral sense in terms of "individuals" and "naturalness" and so forth. We use cloned strains of animals to run the exact same program over & over in different circumstances-- hacking out a momentary bit of code from the ongoing soup and prolonging it. It's difficult to stretch any moral understandings across this discontinuity.
Wikinews might have some short term utility, but it doesn't seem to me like it's destined to be a replacement for The News-- or at least, I think it's missing something.
What you need in order to write The News is a flow of information coming from people who are able to witness a situation. In the past the mainstream news media has accomplished this by actually sending their people with vans and helicopters so they can stand next to dramatic events and utter such immortal words as, "Can you give us an idea, I know the towel's over her head, but what is your sense of her state of mind right now?" Obviously in principle that shouldn't be a cost-effective way of finding out what's going on in the world for much longer, but in order to effectively replace it you will need another way of getting close to where the action is.
One way to get close to the action is to start there. That is, to be someone who happens to live somewhere where the news happens to happen. This is already starting to manifest. Often when there's a big news story someone will point me to a personal blog written by someone whose life has unexpectedly become entangled with the story. As blogging becomes more deeply integrated into our culture, and more efficiently organized, I'm sure that this trend will solidify.
I do think that there can be a way for "citizen journalists" to collectively write The News, but obviously they would need to do more than rewrite AP articles. One way they could get to where the action is would be to get to it virtually (including, of course, that venerable VR known as the telephone)-- to find someone who might know what's going on, and ask them. It's my guess that some sort of collective strategy around that could work to effectively gather news, but it would be a challenge to find a structure that would inspire and empower large numbers of people to the task.
What we've got here is a situation where computers have gotten easily small enough to be wearable on a purely practical level, but are still fighting against entrenched aesthetic norms. People hold up cell phones for seemingly hours at a time while walking around, even though they could easily have some sort of hands-free system. People put mp3 players in their pockets and run wires to their head, even though mp3 players could easily be fit somewhere near the ears. One can easily imagine a world in which it would have been cool all along to wear some kind of crazy cyberhelmet, and in that world we would have progressed much further into augmented reality. No use crying over spilled milk, so let's see what's possible with the culture we've got.
One possibility is that the barrier of aesthetic conservativism will be bypassed only once the size gets down to the point where it really is vanishingly small-- where a pair of sunglasses (or a necklace, or a bracelet, or a ring) with a computer in it is indistinguishable from one without. The computers will simply disappear, and the state of the art for most people in wearable computing will be whatever level is the latest to be effectively vanished.
The other possibility (the one which I, and I suspect most of us here, would prefer) is that there will be some new product or class of products that will change the collective aesthetic of our society and allow wearable computers to fully flourish. One entirely reasonable route for such a transformative device would be a pair of computerized sunglasses. Sunglasses are the largest head-mounted device which is a currently acceptable fashion. They are also conveniently close to the ears and even go in front of the eyes; they're perfectly situated to talk intimately with a user.
In order to effect such a transformation, a product would have to be a brilliant innovation either technically or aesthetically-- and probably both. The product under discussion here comes nowhere close to achieving that prerequisite. My guess is that the first mass market computerized sunglasses will be ones which can project some sort of display onto the glass.
This whole discussion seems to be couched in terms of how newspapers can go about finagling their way into profitability in the information age. That's all well and good, if you happen to be a newspaper, but I myself am on the contrary a citizen, so I have a rather different set of priorities. For me the question is not whether newspapers can find some way to survive, but whether they are still good for society. If they are worthwhile, then I should seek to support their continued existence (even against forces which would render them obsolete). If on the other hand they are now on the whole a negative force in society, then I should seek to abolish them (even against their attempts to remain in business).
So let's consider for a moment the pros and cons of perpetuating newspapers into the modern era.
Pro: Some people prefer the aesthetic experience of reading from a printed page. (Theoretically, there's nothing stopping electronic text from being as readable, but technical challenges will remain for the next few years.)
Con: Printing on dead trees uses a lot of resources, and so is likely to be either environmentally unsustainable or expensive.
Pro: Here's an interesting one: Newspapers provide a free public service of displaying headlines that are easily visible when newspapers are stacked in a rack or displayed in a box. This may add some to the general awareness of world events, e.g. you may not pay careful attention to the papers, but if you go to the store one day and the paper says "WORLD WAR III DECLARED" then you'll probably notice.
Con: The headlines on papers are chosen not primarily to inform, but rather to sell papers. Often they're fairly uninformative teases.
Pro: Newspapers provide a human-edited view of the world, meaning that they may tell people about things that they wouldn't have thought to learn about on their own.
Con: The humans who do the editing are human, meaning that they are subject to biases: Personal political opinions, advertiser pressure, whim.
Pro: Like anything usual & familiar, newspapers have an inherent conservative (not in the political sense) force. Familiar things are often emotionally reassuring. They remind people of their childhoods, and give us a collective sense that everything is safe and taken care of.
Con: Anything conservative can restrain positive change. In the worst cases, conspiracies (often informal) between newspapers and corrupt leaders maintain power arrangements which would be better abolished. But even when the papers are honorable and independent, their inherent inertia may resist healthy social transformations.
Pro: Holding up a broadsheet newspaper in front of you in a public place is one way to establish a boundary and give yourself more personal space.
Con: Newspapers are a major source of litter.
On the whole, it's my opinion that newspapers are well on the way toward being rendered obsolete by technology-- but they're not there yet. There are a lot of subtle cultural roles played by newspapers which we would be well advised to carefully examine.
For instance, the role of creating public awareness of events through splashing dramatic headlines. I believe that this role could be served much more effectively through modern technology, such as screens or LED tickers in public places displaying the latest news. It could be, but so far it hasn't been. So we ought to look at things like that closely, and see what lessons we can learn before closing off this chapter of our history.
First off I'll second all the objections to this ridiculous product: It's unnecessarily limited, proprietary, non-compatible, and probably-- anyone know for sure?-- absurdly patented. That said, there are two underlying concepts embodied here which I think are worthwhile as we look towards future interface design.
One: More I/O is almost always good. The human brain is in large part a pattern recognizing machine; put meaningful information anywhere in someone's environment and they'll adapt to make use of it. If this product was aimed at slashdotters, the ad copy could have read: "Mouse that displays two bits of information!" It's not much, but it's more than your mouse used to be telling you.
Two: Input and output work well in connected loops. It's much more intuitive that if somewhere lights up to tell you about something that needs your attention, you respond by touching there. If properly implemented, this kind of integrity to a mini I/O situation could help us in making meaningful connections and associations. For instance, if there is a button somewhere that lights up when we get an IM from a particular person, and brings up an IM window to that person when pressed (whether it's lit or not), then that button represents that person on multiple levels.
We are primed and ready to make emotional connections with the things around us. One might have thought that having a light that shows HD or network activity would be silly-- in fact it's often practical-- but more than practical, it's often reassuring. For decades now, when a computer looks like it might be hung, I look to the HD light to reassure me that it really is doing something. That light has an emotional meaning for me.
So, yes, this particular product is a ridiculous implementation, but the ideas which are being ridiculously implemented are themselves worthwhile. There's something missing in all of the vibrating mice and email buttons they've come up with so far, but that doesn't mean that we should never explore I/O that goes beyond 101 keys and one big glowing square.
UI designers seem to have some sort of allergy to power switches lately. Nothing comes with a power switch anymore, even if there's every reason in the world that it ought to. <3
From what I understand, you have to be very careful in fighting diseases like malaria. The populations of countries where malaria is endemic are relatively tolerant of it; their continual exposure to it makes them sick but also gives them enough immunity that they are much less likely to die. Therefore the worst of all worlds is to keep people from getting malaria for a year or two, and then slip up; with many people having lost some of their immunity, the new wave will be much more lethal. (Note: I'm no expert on infectious diseases. My source for this information is The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett, an excellent book that I read earlier this year.)
IOW, actually dealing with malaria will involve sustained committment & fundamental infrastructure improvements. Attempted magic bullets could even be worse than nothing.
That is not the finding. Neurons are not individually capable of recognizing celebrities. A single neuron in a dish would be incapable of recognizing much of anything.
What they did was record the firings of a small number of neurons, & see what pictures they fired in response to. They found that there might be one neuron which fired only when the subject was shown a picture of Bob Dylan, and not any of the other pictures they used in the study. Presumably the "Bob Dylan" neuron would fire when the subject was shown other pictures as well, but since the study didn't include pictures of every object in the universe it did not take a complete sample. (I believe that many of the neurons studied did in fact fire for several different objects.)
So what does this study prove about the ultimate storage & processing requirements for matching a human brain? Nothing at all. It's a study about how the data is stored, not how much data there is total.
On a different level however it does say something about the feasibility of AI (and eventually uploading): It's one of many current studies of how intimate specific details of neuroanatomy work. (This one got some press solely because it had something to do with celebrities.) All we have to do is keep paying attention, and we will soon enough find out.
I agree with you that we collectively have some idea of how to create a just & efficient society. We just have to be realistic about how much longer those questions are going to make the same normal kind of sense. We might be learning the rules just in time to see ourselves transported to a radically different game.
Any general purpose search engine that can't handle an abundance of mediocre information is improperly structured.
If you don't want to be tossed about by the rabble, you can make a nice safe whitelist. Of course, there aren't any whitelists that are quite as "vast" as the unfiltered truth-- but that's an inherent equation, now isn't it?
Not that I don't get your point, but "The era of approved information is over." seems a little bit ironic here on slashdot. Your post after all hasn't (so far) been modded up by The Powers That Be, & so hardly anyone is likely to read it.
Information filtering isn't over, & it isn't even a bad idea. What is changing is that the population of Approvers is getting much larger & more varied. If slashdot doesn't dig what we write, we can hitch on over to any of thousands of other forums moderated by various systems & populations.
I don't think it's the fault of the less interesting blogs that blogging doesn't seem interesting when you just browse it. The real problem is that good filters are still hard to come by.
Back when the web itself was new, few useful filters existed, & lots of jokes were made about how the web had nothing except "homepages" with BLINK tags & pictures of people's cats. Just as many of those crappy homepages are around today-- what's changed is that there are many new ways of getting around the internet that skip you over all the junk (even PageRank does so to some extent).
Blogs will become a much more orderly affair in the near future. For the time being, it's a treasure hunt-- & there is some stuff worth searching for.
"Manipulative" - the word was crafted as a bizarre PR ploy, to make suicide bombers seem less noble or something. The very fact that anyone feels the need to do this implies that there is something seriously wrong. Furthermore, FOX was (still is?) systematically changing -- manipulating -- reuters releases to confirm with their terminology.
"Inaccurate" - it's not completely inaccurate, as the person is a "bomber" who is committing "homicide," but it is less accurate, because it removes one of the primary characteristics of the description and replaces it with a senseless redundancy.
"Creepy" - this is a subjective term. I say it is creepy, because I feel weirded out by it. Why is it creepy to me? Perhaps because (A) they are systematically changing the news to fit some vague agenda, (B) they are apparantly offended by logic & calling things by their right names & prefer obfuscation, (C) they are redundantly repeating themselves over & over, (D) they are well known to have a political slant, & are making this change to the news in alliance with a particular administration, & (E) they are a bunch of creepy creeps & I know it & they can't fool me.
"Blog," like all words, has a sort of platonic ideal attached to it. Something is a blog to the extent that it matches this ideal. Nothing matches it perfectly, & it's arbitrary to draw a boundary at which point something ceases to be a blog & becomes "something else"-- words are extraordinarily flexible, & it's possible to play with the fringes of things & refer to the NYT as a "paper blog" or even say that the begats in the bible were an "ancient genealogy blog." Meaning fades seamlessly into metaphor.
That said, here are some of the characteristics of the ideal blog, as my idiolect has it:
Is a website.
Is updated frequently.
Calls itself a "blog."
Links to other sites, particularly other blogs, both/either in the text &/or in a blogroll.
I can understand why people have trouble groking this. It's hard to wrap your mind around. But the internet is VERY VERY large. By even the most conservative estimates, there are many millions of blogs, with many more starting by the second.
There are numerous blogs about any subject imaginable. There are at least three dozen blogs written by emergency medics. Are these "good"? They're just "what [they] do for a living," it's true, but what they do for a living is emergency medicine.
These are the medical leeches we got today to put on a skin flap with venous congestion that was threatening to destroy our work...
(Come on, you know you're curious.)
There are blogs by Senators, blogs by censored Nepali reporters, blogs by angsty teenagers in countries that you know little about.
Reading a few blogs at random & then dissing the whole concept is like skimming a cereal box, a drug store receipt, a toothpaste ad & a bookjacket blurb & then pronouncing: This "written word" stuff is useless crap!
You're expecting blogs to have to play by the rules of old media-- a few, professionally employed "reporters" who zoom around trying to catch the waves of hot stories.
Blogs aren't constrained by the same limitations. What's going to happen in the future is that attention will *shift* instantly to those people who are *already* blogging from whereever the newest story has erupted. People who can not only be there with a camera(phone) long before any oldschool reporter could be, but also have the background to really understand the terrain of the situation.
In a few years, people will start wondering what's so objective & informative after all about people airlifting into the scene of an event & trying to pretend they have any clue what's going on.
The quiet in a library is one of the only reasons they're still at all relevant, IMHO. They're temples of knowledge. They ooze solemnity & respect & space to think.
That said, I think that most libraries would do much better as far as being sources of information if they would start tearing down shelves & putting up terminals.
The difference between a dinner conversation & a web conversation is that here you can tune in whoever you want; it's not possible to drown someone out. A hundred thousand ignorant bloggers screaming at the top of their lungs won't stop you from reading whoever you want to read, exactly as if everyone else wasn't there.
The difference seems to be that paragraph-long texts are generally not even available in print media.
In fact, print media are so ritualized in their formats that only particular specific lengths are allowed. For instance novels are very unlikely to be published if they are too long or too short-- all but the very highest rung of authors are unable to fight their editors' demands to conform to the standard length.
I think on the whole I prefer to be free of that sort of stifling limitation, both as a writer & a reader, but of course like all freedoms it does come with a matching responsibility: to take over for ourselves the task of judging what is worthy of our attention, & not get drawn into dead-ends & mounds of trivia.
What's going to end the era of books is when someone finally makes a device that's comfortable to read for extended periods of time. It's a UI problem.
I actually do read long texts online, but I realize that I'm sacrificing comfort for my digiphilia. It really is more comfortable to curl up in bed with a paper book.
Hmm, well I think the underlying sentiment of the quote is the fact that people tend to be most defensive in relation to that which they find most threatening. That observation seems relevant here. Mr Gorman is criticizing blogging mostly because blogging is currently gaining significant momentum and power as a medium.
It's not always true that when someone feels threatened there is an underlying trend that actually threatens them (case in point, the persistent fear of anarchists that keeps popping up in this society, which as an anarchist I can tell you overstates how much of a threat we pose). But it does make some sense as a general rule.
I care. I read a lot of personal blogs. Many of them are people I know, but some of them are strangers.
A lot of "serious" blogs leave me feeling cold. The world of facts & analysis is not the only world worth paying attention to; there is also an essentially important world of feelings & personal thoughts.
And aside from the poetic/artistic/spiritual value of these kinds of personal records, they *are* also real facts about the world. Usually the facts of individuals' daily lives aren't "newsworthy"-- but then again sometimes they are, as for instance in the recent cases of people who had been blogging in Iraq (or the tsunami hit areas, etc), when the eye of the global media's attention turned to their corner of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
All sorts of scientific research is going to get fantastically easier as we approach the Singularity. If you have a really tremendous amount of data available, then instead of having to go out and collect data in order to answer questions that occur to you, all you need to do is extract your query from the records. You might say to your computer (your computer can talk, naturally, since it's in this thread): "How many times had Joanna been exposed to the subjunctive before she made this utterance?" or "When this model of chip has failed in the past, what was the average ambient temperature?"
Scientific progress is going to go "boink."
<3
Lock-in. In the case of social networking sites, it's more social lock-in than technical. You can only effectively move a social network by getting everyone involved to agree simultaneously to move it. That's why there needed to be any sort of public revolt on MySpace. If it were a brand of ketchup that people were offended by, they'd each individually switch what's in their individual refrigerators, and discuss it later-- but you can only switch social networking sites by getting your friends to come with you. That creates an integral conservativism.
<3
The idea is that mice are incapable of understanding the situation well enough to give consent or to withhold it. Mice just act micey. It's our job therefore, since we have a bit more of a clue what's going on, to figure out whether or not laboratory life is acceptably pleasant for them. We have to make the decision for them.
It does inevitably require some anthropomorphizing, since we're incapable of really fully experiencing mousehood in the process of our deliberations, but we can try to formulate theories of what it's like to be a mouse, and incorporate everything we know about how mice experience life into our decision.
<3
This is a very compelling argument. The terrain gets tricky so quickly, though. The implicit moral argument here is: If you could ask the mice for consent, and they had accurate knowledge of the options, they would choose to live in the lab rather than in the wild.
I think this is at least very close to the truth. Laboratories are just one of the places in the world to live-- at times wonderful, at times terrible, just like anywhere.
But since we are manipulating the entire existence of each mouse-- its genes, its diseases, its cures, its food, its challenges-- it's very difficult to really fix a frame on who is being imagined to give consent. If laboratory mice had to give consent in some particular way, we would write their genes so that they'd do whatever it was.
We're leaving the realm where these questions make normal reasonable moral sense in terms of "individuals" and "naturalness" and so forth. We use cloned strains of animals to run the exact same program over & over in different circumstances-- hacking out a momentary bit of code from the ongoing soup and prolonging it. It's difficult to stretch any moral understandings across this discontinuity.
<3
What you need in order to write The News is a flow of information coming from people who are able to witness a situation. In the past the mainstream news media has accomplished this by actually sending their people with vans and helicopters so they can stand next to dramatic events and utter such immortal words as, "Can you give us an idea, I know the towel's over her head, but what is your sense of her state of mind right now?" Obviously in principle that shouldn't be a cost-effective way of finding out what's going on in the world for much longer, but in order to effectively replace it you will need another way of getting close to where the action is.
One way to get close to the action is to start there. That is, to be someone who happens to live somewhere where the news happens to happen. This is already starting to manifest. Often when there's a big news story someone will point me to a personal blog written by someone whose life has unexpectedly become entangled with the story. As blogging becomes more deeply integrated into our culture, and more efficiently organized, I'm sure that this trend will solidify.
I do think that there can be a way for "citizen journalists" to collectively write The News, but obviously they would need to do more than rewrite AP articles. One way they could get to where the action is would be to get to it virtually (including, of course, that venerable VR known as the telephone)-- to find someone who might know what's going on, and ask them. It's my guess that some sort of collective strategy around that could work to effectively gather news, but it would be a challenge to find a structure that would inspire and empower large numbers of people to the task.
<3
What we've got here is a situation where computers have gotten easily small enough to be wearable on a purely practical level, but are still fighting against entrenched aesthetic norms. People hold up cell phones for seemingly hours at a time while walking around, even though they could easily have some sort of hands-free system. People put mp3 players in their pockets and run wires to their head, even though mp3 players could easily be fit somewhere near the ears. One can easily imagine a world in which it would have been cool all along to wear some kind of crazy cyberhelmet, and in that world we would have progressed much further into augmented reality. No use crying over spilled milk, so let's see what's possible with the culture we've got.
One possibility is that the barrier of aesthetic conservativism will be bypassed only once the size gets down to the point where it really is vanishingly small-- where a pair of sunglasses (or a necklace, or a bracelet, or a ring) with a computer in it is indistinguishable from one without. The computers will simply disappear, and the state of the art for most people in wearable computing will be whatever level is the latest to be effectively vanished.
The other possibility (the one which I, and I suspect most of us here, would prefer) is that there will be some new product or class of products that will change the collective aesthetic of our society and allow wearable computers to fully flourish. One entirely reasonable route for such a transformative device would be a pair of computerized sunglasses. Sunglasses are the largest head-mounted device which is a currently acceptable fashion. They are also conveniently close to the ears and even go in front of the eyes; they're perfectly situated to talk intimately with a user.
In order to effect such a transformation, a product would have to be a brilliant innovation either technically or aesthetically-- and probably both. The product under discussion here comes nowhere close to achieving that prerequisite. My guess is that the first mass market computerized sunglasses will be ones which can project some sort of display onto the glass.
<3
This whole discussion seems to be couched in terms of how newspapers can go about finagling their way into profitability in the information age. That's all well and good, if you happen to be a newspaper, but I myself am on the contrary a citizen, so I have a rather different set of priorities. For me the question is not whether newspapers can find some way to survive, but whether they are still good for society. If they are worthwhile, then I should seek to support their continued existence (even against forces which would render them obsolete). If on the other hand they are now on the whole a negative force in society, then I should seek to abolish them (even against their attempts to remain in business).
So let's consider for a moment the pros and cons of perpetuating newspapers into the modern era.
Pro: Some people prefer the aesthetic experience of reading from a printed page. (Theoretically, there's nothing stopping electronic text from being as readable, but technical challenges will remain for the next few years.)
Con: Printing on dead trees uses a lot of resources, and so is likely to be either environmentally unsustainable or expensive.
Pro: Here's an interesting one: Newspapers provide a free public service of displaying headlines that are easily visible when newspapers are stacked in a rack or displayed in a box. This may add some to the general awareness of world events, e.g. you may not pay careful attention to the papers, but if you go to the store one day and the paper says "WORLD WAR III DECLARED" then you'll probably notice.
Con: The headlines on papers are chosen not primarily to inform, but rather to sell papers. Often they're fairly uninformative teases.
Pro: Newspapers provide a human-edited view of the world, meaning that they may tell people about things that they wouldn't have thought to learn about on their own.
Con: The humans who do the editing are human, meaning that they are subject to biases: Personal political opinions, advertiser pressure, whim.
Pro: Like anything usual & familiar, newspapers have an inherent conservative (not in the political sense) force. Familiar things are often emotionally reassuring. They remind people of their childhoods, and give us a collective sense that everything is safe and taken care of.
Con: Anything conservative can restrain positive change. In the worst cases, conspiracies (often informal) between newspapers and corrupt leaders maintain power arrangements which would be better abolished. But even when the papers are honorable and independent, their inherent inertia may resist healthy social transformations.
Pro: Holding up a broadsheet newspaper in front of you in a public place is one way to establish a boundary and give yourself more personal space.
Con: Newspapers are a major source of litter.
On the whole, it's my opinion that newspapers are well on the way toward being rendered obsolete by technology-- but they're not there yet. There are a lot of subtle cultural roles played by newspapers which we would be well advised to carefully examine.
For instance, the role of creating public awareness of events through splashing dramatic headlines. I believe that this role could be served much more effectively through modern technology, such as screens or LED tickers in public places displaying the latest news. It could be, but so far it hasn't been. So we ought to look at things like that closely, and see what lessons we can learn before closing off this chapter of our history.
<3
First off I'll second all the objections to this ridiculous product: It's unnecessarily limited, proprietary, non-compatible, and probably-- anyone know for sure?-- absurdly patented. That said, there are two underlying concepts embodied here which I think are worthwhile as we look towards future interface design.
One: More I/O is almost always good. The human brain is in large part a pattern recognizing machine; put meaningful information anywhere in someone's environment and they'll adapt to make use of it. If this product was aimed at slashdotters, the ad copy could have read: "Mouse that displays two bits of information!" It's not much, but it's more than your mouse used to be telling you.
Two: Input and output work well in connected loops. It's much more intuitive that if somewhere lights up to tell you about something that needs your attention, you respond by touching there. If properly implemented, this kind of integrity to a mini I/O situation could help us in making meaningful connections and associations. For instance, if there is a button somewhere that lights up when we get an IM from a particular person, and brings up an IM window to that person when pressed (whether it's lit or not), then that button represents that person on multiple levels.
We are primed and ready to make emotional connections with the things around us. One might have thought that having a light that shows HD or network activity would be silly-- in fact it's often practical-- but more than practical, it's often reassuring. For decades now, when a computer looks like it might be hung, I look to the HD light to reassure me that it really is doing something. That light has an emotional meaning for me.
So, yes, this particular product is a ridiculous implementation, but the ideas which are being ridiculously implemented are themselves worthwhile. There's something missing in all of the vibrating mice and email buttons they've come up with so far, but that doesn't mean that we should never explore I/O that goes beyond 101 keys and one big glowing square.
<3
UI designers seem to have some sort of allergy to power switches lately. Nothing comes with a power switch anymore, even if there's every reason in the world that it ought to. <3
From what I understand, you have to be very careful in fighting diseases like malaria. The populations of countries where malaria is endemic are relatively tolerant of it; their continual exposure to it makes them sick but also gives them enough immunity that they are much less likely to die. Therefore the worst of all worlds is to keep people from getting malaria for a year or two, and then slip up; with many people having lost some of their immunity, the new wave will be much more lethal. (Note: I'm no expert on infectious diseases. My source for this information is The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett, an excellent book that I read earlier this year.)
IOW, actually dealing with malaria will involve sustained committment & fundamental infrastructure improvements. Attempted magic bullets could even be worse than nothing.
<3
What they did was record the firings of a small number of neurons, & see what pictures they fired in response to. They found that there might be one neuron which fired only when the subject was shown a picture of Bob Dylan, and not any of the other pictures they used in the study. Presumably the "Bob Dylan" neuron would fire when the subject was shown other pictures as well, but since the study didn't include pictures of every object in the universe it did not take a complete sample. (I believe that many of the neurons studied did in fact fire for several different objects.)
So what does this study prove about the ultimate storage & processing requirements for matching a human brain? Nothing at all. It's a study about how the data is stored, not how much data there is total.
On a different level however it does say something about the feasibility of AI (and eventually uploading): It's one of many current studies of how intimate specific details of neuroanatomy work. (This one got some press solely because it had something to do with celebrities.) All we have to do is keep paying attention, and we will soon enough find out.
I agree with you that we collectively have some idea of how to create a just & efficient society. We just have to be realistic about how much longer those questions are going to make the same normal kind of sense. We might be learning the rules just in time to see ourselves transported to a radically different game.
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If you don't want to be tossed about by the rabble, you can make a nice safe whitelist. Of course, there aren't any whitelists that are quite as "vast" as the unfiltered truth-- but that's an inherent equation, now isn't it?
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Information filtering isn't over, & it isn't even a bad idea. What is changing is that the population of Approvers is getting much larger & more varied. If slashdot doesn't dig what we write, we can hitch on over to any of thousands of other forums moderated by various systems & populations.
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Back when the web itself was new, few useful filters existed, & lots of jokes were made about how the web had nothing except "homepages" with BLINK tags & pictures of people's cats. Just as many of those crappy homepages are around today-- what's changed is that there are many new ways of getting around the internet that skip you over all the junk (even PageRank does so to some extent).
Blogs will become a much more orderly affair in the near future. For the time being, it's a treasure hunt-- & there is some stuff worth searching for.
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"Inaccurate" - it's not completely inaccurate, as the person is a "bomber" who is committing "homicide," but it is less accurate, because it removes one of the primary characteristics of the description and replaces it with a senseless redundancy.
"Creepy" - this is a subjective term. I say it is creepy, because I feel weirded out by it. Why is it creepy to me? Perhaps because (A) they are systematically changing the news to fit some vague agenda, (B) they are apparantly offended by logic & calling things by their right names & prefer obfuscation, (C) they are redundantly repeating themselves over & over, (D) they are well known to have a political slant, & are making this change to the news in alliance with a particular administration, & (E) they are a bunch of creepy creeps & I know it & they can't fool me.
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That said, here are some of the characteristics of the ideal blog, as my idiolect has it:
- Is a website.
- Is updated frequently.
- Calls itself a "blog."
- Links to other sites, particularly other blogs, both/either in the text &/or in a blogroll.
- Has an RSS feed.
- Is opinionated & independent.
- Allows comments/trackbacks.
- Is ridiculously hyped.
<3I can understand why people have trouble groking this. It's hard to wrap your mind around. But the internet is VERY VERY large. By even the most conservative estimates, there are many millions of blogs, with many more starting by the second.
There are numerous blogs about any subject imaginable. There are at least three dozen blogs written by emergency medics. Are these "good"? They're just "what [they] do for a living," it's true, but what they do for a living is emergency medicine.
(Come on, you know you're curious.)
There are blogs by Senators, blogs by censored Nepali reporters, blogs by angsty teenagers in countries that you know little about.
Reading a few blogs at random & then dissing the whole concept is like skimming a cereal box, a drug store receipt, a toothpaste ad & a bookjacket blurb & then pronouncing: This "written word" stuff is useless crap!
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You're expecting blogs to have to play by the rules of old media-- a few, professionally employed "reporters" who zoom around trying to catch the waves of hot stories.
Blogs aren't constrained by the same limitations. What's going to happen in the future is that attention will *shift* instantly to those people who are *already* blogging from whereever the newest story has erupted. People who can not only be there with a camera(phone) long before any oldschool reporter could be, but also have the background to really understand the terrain of the situation.
In a few years, people will start wondering what's so objective & informative after all about people airlifting into the scene of an event & trying to pretend they have any clue what's going on.
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The quiet in a library is one of the only reasons they're still at all relevant, IMHO. They're temples of knowledge. They ooze solemnity & respect & space to think.
That said, I think that most libraries would do much better as far as being sources of information if they would start tearing down shelves & putting up terminals.
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The difference between a dinner conversation & a web conversation is that here you can tune in whoever you want; it's not possible to drown someone out. A hundred thousand ignorant bloggers screaming at the top of their lungs won't stop you from reading whoever you want to read, exactly as if everyone else wasn't there.
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The difference seems to be that paragraph-long texts are generally not even available in print media.
In fact, print media are so ritualized in their formats that only particular specific lengths are allowed. For instance novels are very unlikely to be published if they are too long or too short-- all but the very highest rung of authors are unable to fight their editors' demands to conform to the standard length.
I think on the whole I prefer to be free of that sort of stifling limitation, both as a writer & a reader, but of course like all freedoms it does come with a matching responsibility: to take over for ourselves the task of judging what is worthy of our attention, & not get drawn into dead-ends & mounds of trivia.
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What's going to end the era of books is when someone finally makes a device that's comfortable to read for extended periods of time. It's a UI problem.
I actually do read long texts online, but I realize that I'm sacrificing comfort for my digiphilia. It really is more comfortable to curl up in bed with a paper book.
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Hmm, well I think the underlying sentiment of the quote is the fact that people tend to be most defensive in relation to that which they find most threatening. That observation seems relevant here. Mr Gorman is criticizing blogging mostly because blogging is currently gaining significant momentum and power as a medium.
It's not always true that when someone feels threatened there is an underlying trend that actually threatens them (case in point, the persistent fear of anarchists that keeps popping up in this society, which as an anarchist I can tell you overstates how much of a threat we pose). But it does make some sense as a general rule.
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I care. I read a lot of personal blogs. Many of them are people I know, but some of them are strangers.
A lot of "serious" blogs leave me feeling cold. The world of facts & analysis is not the only world worth paying attention to; there is also an essentially important world of feelings & personal thoughts.
And aside from the poetic/artistic/spiritual value of these kinds of personal records, they *are* also real facts about the world. Usually the facts of individuals' daily lives aren't "newsworthy"-- but then again sometimes they are, as for instance in the recent cases of people who had been blogging in Iraq (or the tsunami hit areas, etc), when the eye of the global media's attention turned to their corner of the world.
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Yeah don't judge librarians by that prick. Most librarians are helpful, open-minded, wonderful people. I <3 Librarians.
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