Computers, Society, and Nature

I came across the name of an old (relatively speaking I suppose) friend on the internet recently. As is standard procedure for me these days, I proceeded to put their name into Google, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that they had not only numerous hits in various communities, but a small personal webpage that they controlled.

People whose personal web pages come up while searching for their real name are typically what I would deem first class citizens of the internet: there are links to their contributions in online discussions or work, and you can both contact them easily, and with some work and a decent amount of background knowledge, get a good idea of their presence on the internet. For certain groups of people, the academic and tech communities come to mind, having insignificant-to-no results on a Google search immediately generates skepticism: where are the journal articles, the mailing list postings, the bug reports? You do not see such people being able to take part effectively in the discussions on most respected forums or blogs, RealClimate being one example.
If Google can’t find anything they’ve done, the question begs itself, have they done anything? While clearly the answer is generally yes, and the fault lies in the information not being available on the internet for search engines to find, there are generally few reasons for someone to allow themselves to be completely invisible on the internet. If you do not project a presence on the internet in a mildly significant and traceable way, it is difficult to contribute meaningfully to online projects: with no ‘credentials’, it’s tough to be taken seriously.

For a few years now, there have been options for those who didn’t have the technical wherewithal or time to bother setting up their own webspace, Geocities and Angelfire come to mind. Even with these tools, it wasn’t necessarily a fun or trivial task to put up a mildly decent website, and accordingly, only a small percentage did. With the bubble inflating once more, myspace and facebook (now the 4th and 28th most popular English language websites in the world respectively) would seem to vault millions of users into this first class citizenship. Now minor internet celebrities have links to their facebook or myspace profiles, and I have even seen such links proferred as evidence in defending online personas from accusations of ‘sockpuppetry’. Presumably the mild amount of time invested in the profiles of social networks websites provides a reasonable way to ensure that a unique legitimate person is behind each account.

It will be interesting to see where online communities go, greater dependance on the verifiability of participants, something that governments and those with an interest in monitoring activity on the internet would love, or a turn back towards near anonymity and its associated benefits and pitfalls.

See the beta version of my new content management system, which contains information about my and my team’s research.

Sorry for the site being down. I’m having my servers reconfigured. The site is likely to go down again as the database servers and the virtual machines get set up.

Now onto posting while we can!

If you’ve ever wanted to know how vulcanology works, visit the virtual Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO). Here you can see a history of the seismology, look at the web cams (even inside the volcano), and receive weekly reports on volcano conditions. You also can get information on how to collect an ash sample for AVO. This is a great use of the web for lay scientists and anyone who wants a user friendly introduction to the workings of a volcano.

Scientists are devising technology to remote control sharks on the high seas (seen in New Scientist). The plan is to use sonar to manipulate the shark’s brain signals, controlling its movements and possibly decoding its feelings. This technology is cited as being useful for understanding shark behaviours as well as having potential use for treating paralysis in humans. However, it is also mentioned that the research is being funded by the us military, who have designs for using the sharks as undetectable spies across the oceans…which seems to me to be severely ethically problematic. The pentagon’s ideas for sharks as “stealth spies” are a little more emphasised in the BBC article covering the topic (interestingly, the BBC also just posted an article discussing the problem of the media’s sensationalising of scientific stories…)