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…
This would be a fun class trip in the future…the Chicago Center for Green Technology is a building complex that has used green, or sustainable technology in its design. It uses natural light to help heat the building, and has a lighting system that adjusts the electricity depending on the amount of light outside. It has a green roof, to absorb rainwater and to reduce the amount of water going into the sewer system. Large cisterns also capture the water and reuse it to water the landscape. The building encourages people to use other modes of transportation besides cars. It has bike racks and showers and features outlets for those who drive electric cars. But there are only 2 dedicated spaces for those who carpool. Over 40% of the materials used in the renovation were purchased within less than 300 miles of the site (helping to decrease transportation distance). And over 40% of the materials used in the construction of the building were made from recycled materials. It is only the 3rd building in the US to use high standards of green technology. Where and when will we see the others?
The Guardian newspaper reports that the UK Environment Agency is investigating a recycling company as containers of garbage mislabelled as clean recyclable paper are being shipped back to Britain. This follows up on an earlier post when the contaminated recyclable paper was first discovered on its way to the developing world.
Thanks, Prof. Badami, for noting the story.
Check our the $100 laptops MIT labs are going to mass produce for the developing world. Is this a good idea? Already in the first world, we’re thinking about slapping on technology tax, to account for environmental “costs”, but technology already depreciates quickly over time. It would help bridge the digital divide, and would make it more equitable, but this also means more waste…and what about destroying the essence of cultures, with technology that will proliferate across nations, or is it something lost, something gained? Will this also be decreasing our diversity? I still think there should be something said about the amount of waste this will generate…the article doesn’t mention anything about whether the technology is less hazardous, and suppose first world countries started offering laptops at $100 a piece? Consumption would increase, no doubt…
With a nod to Liam, who made our only other post about
Apple Japan announces, pulls iPotty dock
Early Friday morning, the Japanese web site of Apple Computer briefly hosted pages depicting an previously unannounced iPod peripheral called “iPotty” (JPY 104,970, approx. $1000), a beige-and-white electric toilet seat featuring an integrated iPod dock on its right side. Presumably intended only for the domestic Japanese marketplace, iPotty promises to deliver music playback and an “optional scent eliminator” to drown out embarrassing bathroom sounds and smells. Availability is listed at 1-3 weeks, indicating an imminent release.
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…
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.
Message from Pete to his cat: Thanks, Billy. I was sick of having nice furniture anyway.
The WELL, one of the oldest virtual communities, turns 20 today.
A Guardian newspaper article that speaks to the sheer magnitude of the online gaming community in China and the degree to which it’s gotten out of control:
A spate of suicides, deaths by exhaustion and legal disputes about virtual possessions have been blamed on internet role-play games, which are estimated to have more than 40 million players in China.
The article highlights the story of one individual who’s facing the death penalty for killing a (real) person for stealing his (virtual) weapon.
The class is currently reading “The Green Internet”, a chapter in Conservation in the Internet Age, edited by James N. Levitt (2002, Island Press). It discusses the problem posed by the plethora of biodiversity data collected by museums and others that remains isolated in separate institutions:
After 300 years of species inventory, the biodiversity science community lacked the means–an information architecture and a set of common practices–for the discovery, retrieval, and integration of data. From one collection to the next–often within the same institution–underlying specimen data are heterogeneous and incompatible. The data are recorded and stored in thousands of idiosyncratic, independently developed information systems and are dispersed worldwide across academia, government agencies, conservation organizations, research institutions, and private museums (p. 146).
The solution is an architecture called Species Analyst that creates a standard for storing and sharing information, as well as an interface and tools for analyzing data. Species Analyst was developed by a consortium of biodiversity researchers and computer scientists at the University of Kansas’s Biodiversity Research Center and the Natural History Museum.
A report from the Cover Pages covers some of the technical details:
The Species Analyst relies heavily upon the fusion of the ANSI/NISO Z39.50 standard for information retrieval (ISO 23950) and XML. Z39.50 provides an excellent framework for distributed query and retrieval of information both within and across information domains. However, its use is restrictive because of the somewhat obscure nature of its implementation. All of the tools used by the Species Analyst transform Z39.50 result sets into an XML format that is convenient to process further, either for viewing or data extraction. This fusion of Z39.50 and XML brings standards based information retrieval to the desktop by extending the capabilities of existing tools that users are familiar with such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Excel and ESRI’s ArcView.
The Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN) has a slide show that demonstrates the structure and features of Species Analyst.
What’s interesting about the chapter is not its report on the technical challenges of broad system diffusion, which are considerable, but its discussion of the social barriers to interoperability. First, the article points out that “too many museums have not grasped the first principle of the information age–namely, that access to their authoritative biotic information for knowledge creation and decision making is as valuable as the information itself” (p. 155). What the authors do not acknowledge is that transforming data into a format compatible with the information age (e.g., using the Darwin code standards) takes a lot of time and resources. Who in academia and elsewhere has the time to adapt their datasets to a particular standard and what’s in it for them? This is not a cynical review of university practices but a pragmatic reflection on the paradigm in which academics operate. The focus is on doing what’s necessary to get published and therefore advance in one’s career. Fail to complywith the paradigm and you get fired/aren’t promoted. This paradigm fails to recognize the prosaic needs of academia to broadly diffuse its source data after the articles are published. Not recognizing the prosaic needs means not giving out grants to do it or acknowledging the effort when promotion time comes around.
Second, the authors indicate that many institutions have policies that discourage and even prohibit sharing of biodiversity data. The authors don’t mention that many of these policies protect the intellectual property of the individuals as well as the intellectual capital of the institutions. Institutions may be governed by liability concerns over potential misuse of the data or copyright laws over which they have no control. For example, Canada operates under Crown Copyright Law (e.g., all the benefits of government activity must financially benefit the Queen), which renders nearly impossible sharing of spatial data by government agencies.
Third, the authors report that the successful integration and publication of all of the species collections will convince decision makers in institutions and government that sufficient amounts of data already have been collected to analyze biodiversity. Therefore, no further funds are necessary. This is, of course, the irony of developing a system such as Species Analyst, which has as its raison d’etre the idea that if only we could integrate all the species information out there, we could conduct phenomenal analyses of the world’s biodiversity. Why collect any more data or why not wait until the analyses are done before we collect more data? Promoting the system for broad diffusion inevitably undercut the need for further basic data collection. This speaks to the low regard in which basic research is held, on both the left (“Who needs basic research on an insignificant species such as snail darters when there’s so much poverty in the world?â€) and the right (“Basic research on an insignificant species such as snail darters impeded economic development, which is more important to the well-being of individualsâ€). It also speaks to the myth of technology that it can automatically create knowledge out of data.
Last, the authors mention that lots of data is still not associated with technology nor with geography. For example, what do you do about the legions of archival data that exists in museums? Who’s paid to adapt collections data that can stretch back to the 1800’s? Also, most data doesn’t have locational data (location is a prime method used to integrate data in Species Analyst) or has vague spatial data (e.g., a species may be found along a river reach instead of at a specific point). I’ve discovered instances in which the geographic data collected by biologists is irrelevant to their studies. The lat/long point at which data is collected really represents an entire region (even though the actual point has been GPSd) or represents an ideal landscape in which species are modeled. Datasets which contain abundant temporal and species diversity may be represented by one data point.
I don’t want to detract from the research achievement of Species Analyst. Many people propose architectures to increase interoperability for biodiversity data but few engage in the technical difficulties of actual implementation. Still, interoperability can be limited more by social hurdles than by technical obstacles.
Canada will host the first meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol in Montreal in conjunction with the eleventh session of the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention. The Conference will take place from November 28 to December 9 at the Palais des Congrès in Montréal.
For those of you who are in Montreal, this will be a chance to be close to policy making in action.
For more information, see the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
The people at No Computer Should Go To Waste are offering a city-wide (Montreal, QC, that is) disposal of computers. It’s on Saturday, April 16. Check the site for location, although I believe it’s the recycling station at Jarry.
Good news. First, the event organizers promise that computers will not be disposed of in landfills. Nor will they be sent to China or Mexico. Second, your computer could be reused as well if it meets the following conditions:
– If your computer is less than 5 years old and in working order
– The System must have Hard Drive, Monitor, Keyboard, & Mouse [but they’ll also take laptops].
– The Software License Agreements should be taped to the CPU box for installed software.
– YOU are responsible for removal of all personal information in the hard drive.
– Hardware needing repair is considered on a case-by-case basis.
You have to register your computer on the site to be eligible for the reuse.
If you run a nonprofit in the Montreal area, you could also get one of these computers free.
On April 16, as an added bonus, the people who are organizing the recycling event are promising music , entertainment , take-away green goodies and valuable awards for volunteers at the event.
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.
From the Guardian newspaper:
More than 1,000 tonnes of contaminated household refuse disguised as waste paper on its way to be recycled in China is to be sent back to Britain after being intercepted in the Netherlands.
Dutch environment ministry officials believe that British refuse is being systematically dumped in poor countries via the port of Rotterdam, the largest container port in Europe. In one of the biggest international scams uncovered in years, they say waste companies across Europe are colluding to avoid paying escalating landfill and recycling charges.
What next? Garbage stuffed into computer monitors sent to be recycled?
Thanks to Louis-Philip for catching this.
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?