Computers, Society, and Nature

We discussed to auctioning of virtual goods already, but now it’s apparantly becoming so big business that Sony is getting into it.

“Late Tuesday, the company unveiled Station Exchange, an auction site that allows players to spend real money on virtual weapons, armor, coins and new, high-level characters.”

Check the story on Wired

For my blog review I decided to review the blog of a new magazine by O’reilly, the magazine “MAKE”.
Make is self proclaimed: “The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and Do-It-Yourself
inspiration”, the blog is basically an extension of the magazine, it seems like the magazine editors
are the posters. It teaches you how to hack and make interesting, although sometime useless things
with the technology around you, how to make the technology do things they are not meant to.

Here’s a few example of the kind of stuff you can find on the blog:

– How to turn the portable play station into a web browser
– How to make panoramic photos with your camera phone
– How to overclock (make faster) your Texas instrument calculator
– How to load wirelessly homebrew application on your Nintendo DS
– How to turn your cellphone in a magnetic stripe card reader.
– How to make Halloween decoration using wiper motors
– How to make an infrared web cam
– Solar powered iPod shuffle
– How Swatch watches work
– How to install a VSAT in Iraq

And the list just goes on and on…. there’s a few post a day.

I found that blog quite interesting, in the first place because although we often see electronic technologies
around us as black boxes, this blog shows that the black box is not that hard to break.
I think it is also a great potential source of ideas on how to recycle electronic devices.
I’m not sure of the popularity of that blog and the MAKE magazine, but it seems like hacking have turned
into a mainstream hobby.

I came across that interesting article on “Egocasting”.
Christine Rosen explains how we went from broadcasting (initial TV chanels) to narrowcasting (specialized channel MTV, ESPN, etc..) to egocasting (TiVo, iPod, etc..). She explains the control that the new technologies have given us over the content that we consume and the danger of it.

“the Walkman, the Video Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable music devices like the iPod—have created a world where the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute. Retailers and purveyors of entertainment increasingly know our buying history and the vagaries of our unique tastes. As consumers, we expect our television, our music, our movies, and our books “on demand.” We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences”

“they contribute to what might be called “egocasting,” the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste.”

“We can consciously avoid ideas, sounds, and images that we don’t agree with or don’t enjoy. As sociologists Walker and Bellamy have noted, “media audiences are seen as frequently selecting material that confirms their beliefs, values, and attitudes, while rejecting media content that conflicts with these cognitions.””

“TiVo, iPod, and other technologies of personalization are conditioning us to be the kind of consumers who are, as Joseph Wood Krutch warned long ago, “incapable of anything except habit and prejudice,” with our needs always preemptively satisfied.”

Sunstein argues that our technologies—especially the Internet—are encouraging group polarization: “As the customization of our communications universe increases, society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities in danger of dissolving.” Borrowing the idea of “the daily me” from M.I.T. technologist Nicholas Negroponte, Sunstein describes a world where “you need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less.”

Calling man “the animal which can prefer,” Krutch did not worry about mankind becoming more like machines. He saw a different danger: man might become slavishly devoted to his machines, enchanted by the degree of control they offered him once he had trained them to divine his preferences. “It often happens that men’s fate overtakes them in the one way they had not sufficiently feared,” he wrote, “and it may be that if we are to be destroyed by the machine it will not be in quite the manner we have been fearfully envisaging.”

In addition to what Rosen says I think the Internet as the potential to push “egocasting” even further.

In the same vein as my last post, from the bbc, an article about attempting to catalog human DNA, so as to trace the paths of human migration across the world and through history. It’s an interesting concept, and is estimated to take about $40 million US to perform. It’s being sponsored by IBM, National Geographic, and the Waitt Family Foundation (Ted Waitt being the founder of Gateway Computers).

There’s some resistence by some aboriginal groups to having their DNA collected in this manner, the article mentions previous incidents when they cooperated with scientists, but then quickly moves on to the contributions fo the various corporations. They don’t make mention of the potential for these sorts of studies to be twisted toward supporting who ‘arrived’ first or more ‘evolved’ and other arguments in this vein.

What does IBM get (beyond public relations) for supporting this sort of research? It seems like an unusual thing for them to sponsor, and I wonder if they have any input or contributions other than purely techinical.

An interesting article in Wired, where it takes a brief look at the implications of pharmaceuticals exploiting the natural resources of ‘foreign lands’. It poses the question of who owns the genetic material found in nature, and how the spoils of beneficial discoveries are split.

It’s an interesting topic, and seems to have a strong basis in modern myths of an Indiana Jones type figure lost in the jungle stumbling on some sort of aboriginal cure for tooth decay. The term bioprospecting, used often in the article, seems oddly offensive, as though the West is going in to the ‘wild’, removing the valuable parts, and then leaving, probably with a suitable amount of cultural and environmental destruction.

It looks an awful lot like modern day colonialism, hidden under the guise of biological research. You can bet if a miraculous Viagra replacement were discovered in Togo, the vast majority of the profits would not be going to the people of Togo.

I was surprised to see all of the postings were by Jeff McIntire-Strasburg, is this his own blog, and basically people just comment, or is it open to the public? In just one day, he posted at 7:13 am, then 7:48 am, 10:45am, and 1:22pm, and there are a lot of posts (very long posts, in some cases) every day, with many links as well. He has sure sustained his sustainablog, but it was suprising not to see more comments.

Here’s an interesting idea, fighting
surveillance with sousveillance.

“In an attempt to establish equity in the world of surveillance, participants at the Computers,
Freedom and Privacy conference in Seattle this week took to the streets to ferret out surveillance
cameras and turn the tables on offensive eyes taking their picture.”

“In the stores, as conference attendees snapped pictures of three smoked domes in the ceiling
of a Mont Blanc pen shop, an employee inside waved his arms overhead. The intruders interpreted
his gesture as happy excitement at being photographed until a summoned security guard halted the photography.”

It’s true that cameras, guards are often intimidating, and even if there is none of that, you
still don’t know if you are being watched. Maybe we should use Mann’s approach and fight a sword with a
sword. And apparently the watcher doesn’t like to be watched.

Last weekend I met with one of my uncles who is a carpenter. He usually work on huge custom houses for
people who can afford them in the Quebec city area. He was telling me an interesting fact, which is that most houses he built in the last years was equiped with geothermal heating systems. Although more environmentally friendly than oil or electricity heating, they have a huge upfront cost, about $20,000. The process of digging the small and deep hole is apparently quite complicated. It shows again, that a lot of environmentally friendly technologies are still for the most fortunate.

He was also telling me that the new fashion for kitchens was to get two dishwashers installed, one clean, one dirty.

There is an interesting project on Java.net: instant messaging for whales, dolphins and humans.
Using Seadragon you can emit and acquire underwater whistles and try to communicate with whales and dolphins. The software attempt to recognize the whistles. If it can’t, it’s left to your own interpretation.

Here is a NYT story about a major deal in the software industry that is particularly interesting to me. Adobe has acquired Macromedia in an all-stock deal. Adobe and Macromedia are notorious direct competitors, offering many very similar products. Adobe had sued Macromedia at one point over alleged infringements of their patents. Adobe is looking to combine their strength in documents and print graphics with Macromedia’s strength in multimedia, such as their products Flash and Dreamweaver. It’s all quite exciting.

As was reported by many, a group of graduate students created a randomly generated computer science paper, and submitted it to a conference, where it was accepted to be presented (the invitation was hastily rescinded after it was posted on slashdot). After some discussion on slashdot, it seems the general consensus is that while it may have looked bad, admittedly the conference has accepted it without having it reviewed, and were relying on the presenters to verify the paper (similar to the defense Social Text used in the Sokal affair). The MIT students original site. The reuters report of it can be found here

Of course, the real fun will be when such a paper is accepted even after having been peer reviewed. As it is, the grammar the paper generates isn’t all that atrocious, and is certainly superior to some of the CS papers I’ve been reading lately.

Visit the new blog, Google Site Seeing, in which the posts consist of clips of Google maps satellite images. I love the bog’s subtitle: Why bother seeing the world for real?

So the blog I have decided to review (finally) is www.warrenkinsella.com. This far from my favourite blog and it’s not even really a blog in the traditional sense (it doesn’t allow comments) but it does demonstrate quite clearly how the Internet is being used as a virtual public space.

I will assume that most of you have not heard of Kinsella; if I’m right, don’t worry. He is, however, quite well-known in incestuous Canadian political circles as a writer and a columnist with lots to say. He is a lawyer by training and used to be a senior strategist, advisor, and speech writer for Jean Chretien when he was prime minister. Kinsella also worked for the federal Liberals in a variety of other capacities. He has two other very different interests: the history of hate groups in Canada and punk rock. He has written one book on hate groups and neo-nazism in Canada and a book about the history of punk music is forthcoming.

His blog is mostly about Canadian politics. He posts almost every day, often including links to external media or pasted bits of news stories. He comments on news stories and provides his own thoughts and opinions on what’s going on. Obviously with all the sponsorship inquiry stuff going on, he’s been talking about that quite a lot. He also has quite an interesting past working for the Liberals and often bits of his past come up and he talks about it. He doesn’t get along well with the current Liberal leadership (Paul Martin and co.) – he much preferred Chretien. So he often talks about stuff related to that.

Anyway, Kinsella’s blog is pretty popular, thousands of unique visitors per day from what I can remember. He has created a virtual space — and a rather successful one at that — where he can spread information (or misinformation), campaign for people, complain, protest, etc. He doesn’t allow comments because he says they create a sticky legal issue where the blog owner can be held responsible for everything in the comments. This makes his blog considerably less interactive but it is still, I would argue, a public space.

[Edited to remove snarkiness]

Taking a small break from studying, a story concerning automated car rentals by the BBC.

People who want to have access to the cars for a short while, are pre-approved, and given an RFID tag. Then when people need them, they can go online, and book the car usage, apparently at next-to-no notice. They can then use the RFID tag, and the car, using cell towers, to determine how far the car has travelled, and where it is.

Sounds like an interesting idea for people who only want to use cars every so often, although it seems like in the past, people would likely simply ask one of their neighbours if they could borrow their car for a little bit. I wonder if insurance has made that more of an impossibility. I also wonder if they charge a variable amount depending on the driving record or demographics of the person renting the car. Possibly because I am a high risk young male, but it has always seemed like a bizarre form of legal discrimination to be able to charge different amounts for mandatory insurance simply for being a member of a particular demographic.

Slightly more on topic, I’ve heard about similar, although slightly less low tech, ideas for renting bicycles, where people can use shared bicycles which are locked in various places, and then drop them off. Probably better for the environment for short haul trips, although it can be tough to carry a few bags of groceries on a bicycle, particularly in the winter…

Hannah talked about supercomputers in her presentation on tuesday.
Here’s a new way to build a supercomputer very easily.
Chaos is a 6MB distribution of Linux that can be booted up from a network or a CD on any computer independently of its hard disk content. The computer can then join a cluster to do some number crunching. Chaos is currently mainly used by it’s creators to do password cracking, but it could be used for other supercomputer traditional tasks. The great thing about Chaos is that you can use any computer running any OS and easily make it part of your cluster without having to re-format the disk, install software, etc…
It could be a great technology for re-using obsolete PCs to build supercomputers.
Here’s the Wired article

Straight from slashdot, an article about how a researcher has taken dormant plankton eggs from many years ago from a heavily polluted lake, incubated them, then compared the hatched plankton with current plankton.

It confirmed some of their hypotheses, the semi-ancient animals showed different traits than do the current ones, likely owing to the different environments the plankton were living in.

It would be interesting to see how the creationists would respond to things like this. Although I suppose it’s not so hard to defend things which aren’t falsifiable.

The article is here: ABC News

It’s also funny how the article is from a broadcast television news website.

Renee granted me rights for posting on this blog today. Now that the course is over, I hope people will continue to contribute. I have found this to be pretty interesting over the winter months (especially the cats!). I have linked the MSE webpage about student initiatives to here and to Garry Peterson’s Wikki so newcomers to the MSE can see what kinds of things students are discussing.

Good luck on your exams, and to those of you graduating, congratulations!