Computers, Society, and Nature

We have talked a fair bit about computers at work – i.e. ergonomics, “micro-breaks”, fast replacement rates, etc, etc.. Also about the shift to using computer technology for SO many things (museums, taxes, other data collection stuff, buying things, etc etc)… Anyway, we basically all agree that computers are becoming more and more popular for more and mroe things. One thing we haven’t talked much about, or at least only in passing, is computers in schools.

I was just chatting on msn with my 11 year old cousin. She was typing up her homework! this perked my intersted and I asked her a few more questions… turns out she is not only using computers to type up written homework assignments. Her class is currently working on a science project about “animals”; they work in the computer lab next to their classroom to make powerpoint presentations about animals, when the powerpoint is ready to go she will use it as an aide for her presentation to the rest of the class! The have to submit basically everything typed and have software that they use for math and music classes!

Is this not crazy!~?!?!? They are using computers not just for everything in the world, but everything in the elementary school world as well!

Schoolhouse rock marketing?

Get Perpendicular

As was mentioned in slashdot a few days ago, the maker of wordpress (the blogging software used for this blog) was hosting link spam, designed to artificially raise the ranking of websites in search engines by having hidden links to websites that regular users don’t see, but search engine crawlers do. Such practices contribute to the irritating occurance of clicking on links from Google that lead to ‘index’ pages that exist only to link to advertising and pop-up ads (which sadly have begun making an appearance in Firefox again). WordPress is an open source project, and the default configurations have links back to the wordpress.org website (the bottom of this page has it for example). Now all of those links pointing towards wordpress.org give wordpress more authority, which is then used for these somewhat nefarious purposes.

The general consensus was that it was a poor move, which has caused WordPress to be removed from Google’s, Yahoo’s, and MSN’s indices, and no doubt the maker of WordPress feels sufficiently bad about it that he will think twice before doing it again.

The question is, at what point must we examine our usage of tools, based on their source? In this case, the questionable behavior was quickly rectified. But what if the department of defence (or… Microsoft!) released open source tools. Should people have ethical qualms about using that code based on its source? What if it is released and then used for generally evil purposes? Or for a more general example, what about contributing to projects that are generally used to further causes I personally do not agree with? I generally try to buy non-evil products, should it be ok to use ‘free’ projects with evil associations?

In one of the Philip K. Dick short stories I read, the premise was that the sci-fi writers are in fact predicting the future, without even knowing it, and people from the future who had a problem, decided to travel back in time, to get the person from the past, to write more of the story, to determine the solution to the problem they were having, that the author had already correctly predicted.

It was kind of a funny idea, and the story is somewhat amusing. As we discussed today even if we discount the idea that people are actually seeing into the future, it may be that science fiction is inspiring people to try to create what they read or see in novels and on tv or in movies.

However, the most interesting futurist on the internet has to be John Titor. Someone sent me his site a few years ago, which details how he is a time traveler from the future, who has come back to our times to apparently make an internet site detailing the world’s demise over the next few years. Not to the credit of my friend who sent it to me, they seemed quite convinced. I have long since lost the initial website, but here is a summary page and the Wikipedia entry.

The internet can create some interesting myths, which would probably otherwise have a lot more difficulty spreading. Beyond John Titor, another category of links people send me ‘secretly’ are posts about the oil peak, which predicts massive oil shortages very soon, due to various factors.

When things develop enough, sometimes these websites create enough momentum they begin to look like legitimate information, and people start to buy it. I wonder how long it will be before we see a religion with its primary texts written electronically? If it could gain a foothold, it would certainly have the potential to spread very rapidly.

We have already mentioned the Gomery inquiry in class a little bit. Well now it seems that an unassuming American blogger has triggered a political crisis in Canada by publishing testimony from the inquiry that was subject to a publication ban.

Here is a story from the Globe about this.

I won’t link to the actual blog in question for fear of us getting sued!

This is truly bizarre. John Donoghue, a professor of neuroscience at Brown University in RI has developed a brain chip that reads brain signals and allow those who are paralysed the ability to control everyday objects by thought alone. That means one can think a t.v. on or off, alter volume, and even move a computer cursor just with the brain. The chip is inserted into the motor cortex and wires are fed into a computer which analyses the brain signals, the signals are then transformed into cursor movements, which gives the user the ability to control computers just by their mind. What about those who have a really active mind? Will they be able to control their impulses? It is one thing to think of something bad, and something quite different to actually DO something bad. But with this technology, perhaps there will be a thinner line here…

Talk about funny acronyms, the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) directive which makes electronic manufacturers responsible for the recycling and disposal of goods, was going to become a law in the UK in August; however it has been pushed back to 2006. Read the BBC Newsarticle that highlights the story. Apparently the legislation is complicated, because, as the UK WEEE program manager notes, “When you look at the detail, it is complex. It requires interaction with people we don’t usually interact with.” And I thought ICT would make processes faster…government organization is still a slow process. In some ways this is good, in other ways, like with the urgency of environmental hazards, it is bad.

This is funny! I think it might be an inside joke or something…

http://www.google.com/googlegulp/

The editors of Scientific America have decided to give up on the evolution debate:

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Water found on Mars!

The WELL, one of the oldest virtual communities, turns 20 today.

Here’s another item that relates to how knowledge and information are defined in the digital age. The Acronym Finder is a database of more than 400,000 acronyms and their definitions. I would guess well over 2/3 of these acronyms are technology-related and most are probably Internet-related. What has our discourse come to when we require 400,000 acronyms to describe what we’re saying? I think I might have to join the AAAA. Maybe this blog needs an ACO. How many AFN do you think there are? Here’s one for the AHOF: TLA.

Go to Google and type miserable failure and then hit the I Feel Lucky button.

By now, you may have already heard of this practice of “google bombing.” The results of a google search relate not only to the content of pages but also to how often and in what ways pages are linked to. Basically people can manipulate Google’s search results faily easily by adding pages to the web that link to other pages using certain words. Here is one article and another one about this — incidentally these articles come up in the search for “miserable failure.”

Not only is this an interesting thing to know about but it also raises questions about the usefulness and reliability of search tools on the Internet. Google has been heralded by some as the be-all and end-all of search engines and it does do a pretty good job but in reality it’s a popularity contest. The Internet has fundamentally changed how we think about and organize knowledge – but has it been for the better? What about an authoritative, content-based cataloguing system for the net as opposed to all these popularity contests?

There was a post in slashdot a few days ago, about some of the politics and debates that get started by the competing models for how climate is changing. The post, implies one group of researchers is criticizing another, for not publishing the source code they’re using for their model, but only the general algorithms.

The source code is the plain text which can be turned into a computer program you can run, the algorithm, simplistically would be the idea of what the source code implements. The critics in this case seem to be alluding to the idea that it’s difficult or impossible to replicate and thus verify the results of the simulation if one cannot reproduce the software used to generate the results. It’s an interesting discussion, should researchers be forced to publish the source code when presenting data? Many of the concepts ‘science’ is based on, rely on being able to independently reproduce results, which may be nearly impossible if one has to recode the algorithm, as for any somewhat complicated algorithm, there are likely to be many subtly different ways to implement it.

And this isn’t just because Craig’s a friend; it’s just too weird.

From CNN

On March 11, a company called Deep Space Communications Network beamed the first commercial transmission of a Web site into space.

The message? Over one hundred thousand separate postings from craigslist.com, the popular community Web site that includes classified listings for jobs, housing and other goods. The transmission included a date and time stamp, as well as an audio track identifying the message as originating from Earth.

In case an alien needs an apartment or used washing machine, it’s all set.

We discussed in class how some people were ready to pay real money to buy virtual goods in online games.
Well it’s seems like microsoft and games publisher won’t miss out on this opportunity to cash in more money.
The Xbox 2, to be realeased sometime next year, will enable “real money” microtransactions (a few cents to a few dollars) to buy virtual goods from virtual stores that will enhance the gamer experience. Microsoft expect an additional $5 million per game in revenue from this service.

Now that money seems to be breaking the barrier between the real and the virtual world, I think it’s worth wondering about a few questions:

Will I be able to get insurance for my virtual space ship. I mean if I spend hundreds of hardly earned real dollars in a real job to buy the best weapons and shield for my virtual space ship I might want to insure it in case my enemy destroy it. I might also want to get life insurance for my Sims character.

Furthermore if somebody vandalize my ship, can I take legal actions against him for vandalizing my property? Is the virtual ship actually my property?

Are virtual goods taxable?

Do I have to declare the online gaming points that I earned in my income tax report?

How much a dollar is worth in virtual gaming points, is there some kind of floating currency exchange rate?

Can I get a loan from my bank to buy this super new reactor for my virtual ship? Will they consider my virtual ship as a good enough guarantee for the loan?

In brief there is a lot of funny questions like this that seems to arise, some might be ridiculous, some might already have answers, but my point is that by introducing real money in virtual gaming world, it seems to me like it’s going to make it even harder for some people to draw a line between the virtual and the real.

Without comment from our neighbours to the south.

From the Guardian, Creationists take their fight to the really big screen

They are the epitome of safe family entertainment, renowned for lavish animations, exquisitely filmed scenes of natural grandeur and utterly tame scripts. But IMAX films have suddenly found themselves catapulted into controversy, thanks to their occasional use of the dreaded E-word: evolution. In several states, IMAX cinemas — including some at science museums — are refusing to show movies that mention the subject or suggest that the Earth’s origins do not conform with biblical descriptions.

Reading the NYTimes article on the same issue, it becomes clear that decisions by American IMAX theatres have impacts here as well.

The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry say – perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film’s bottom line – or a producer’s decision to make a documentary in the first place.