Posts tagged Tech

Distraction Free Thinking Cap, 1925 Edition Consider this the anti-Google Glass. Via Pacific Standard: Decades before Twitter, Snapchat, and viral cat videos, inventor Hugo Gernsback bemoaned the difficulty of concentrating on desk work. Even back in the 1920s, noise from the street and the frequency with which “a telephone bell or a door bell rings somewhere … is sufficient, in nearly all cases, to stop the flow of thoughts,” he wrote. Even more perniciously: “You are your own disturber practically 50 percent of the time,” always willing to be distracted by the wallpaper’s pattern or a buzzing fly, he warned. Gernsback’s solution, presented in the July 1925 edition of Science and Invention magazine, was elegant in its simplicity, if not its design: the Isolator, a head-enveloping helmet that sealed out external sounds and sights. Narrow eye slits would prevent the wearer from seeing anything but a piece of paper directly in front of his or her face. As Pacific Standard points out, an oxygen tube was provided to help ward off drowsiness. Image: The Isolator, via Pacific Standard.

Distraction Free Thinking Cap, 1925 Edition

Consider this the anti-Google Glass.

Via Pacific Standard:

Decades before Twitter, Snapchat, and viral cat videos, inventor Hugo Gernsback bemoaned the difficulty of concentrating on desk work. Even back in the 1920s, noise from the street and the frequency with which “a telephone bell or a door bell rings somewhere … is sufficient, in nearly all cases, to stop the flow of thoughts,” he wrote. Even more perniciously: “You are your own disturber practically 50 percent of the time,” always willing to be distracted by the wallpaper’s pattern or a buzzing fly, he warned.

Gernsback’s solution, presented in the July 1925 edition of Science and Invention magazine, was elegant in its simplicity, if not its design: the Isolator, a head-enveloping helmet that sealed out external sounds and sights. Narrow eye slits would prevent the wearer from seeing anything but a piece of paper directly in front of his or her face.

As Pacific Standard points out, an oxygen tube was provided to help ward off drowsiness.

Image: The Isolator, via Pacific Standard.

What Google Autocomplete Tells Us About Ourselves

Performing age related searches such as “I’m 15 and”; and then letting Google take over with its autocomplete this short video gives a depressing look at what’s on our collective minds.

Via Marius B:

Using billions of searches, Google has prototyped an anonymous profile of its users.

This reflects the fears, inquiries, preoccupations, obsessions and fixations of the human being at a certain age and our evolution through life

While search results may vary, Marius indicates in the video’s comment thread that “the queries are made in the “incognito tab” with no user signed in, no cookies nor history and with a permanent paid VPN targeting US.”

A Boy and His Atom

IBM researchers have created the world’s smallest movie, a 90-second stop motion animation made by moving a few dozen carbon atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope.

The video is viewable once you magnify it 100 million times, and would take 1,000 frames laid side by side to equal the width of a human hair.

Via the BBC:

The new movie, titled A Boy and His Atom, instead uses the STM, an IBM invention which garnered the scientists behind it the 1986 Nobel prize in physics.

The device works by passing an electrically charged, phenomenally sharp metal needle across the surface of a sample. As the tip nears features on the surface, the charge can “jump the gap” in a quantum physics effect called tunnelling.

The 242 frames of the 90-second movie are essentially maps of this “tunnelling current” with a given arrangement of atoms. It depicts a boy playing with a “ball” made of a single atom, dancing, and jumping on a trampoline…

…The effort, detailed in a number of YouTube videos, took four scientists two weeks of 18-hour days to pull off.

It underlines the growing ability of scientists to manipulate matter on the atomic level, which IBM scientists hope to use to create future data storage solutions.

IBM reports that while it currently takes about a million atoms to store a bit of data on computer devices, they have successfully reduced that number down to 12 with what they call atomic-scale magnetic memory. Meaning, the future of computing devices is about to get very, very small.

For example, “Being able to increase the data density of devices means more storage in a smaller space: specifically, storage that is 100 times denser than today’s hard disk drives, 150 times more dense than solid-state memory. An entire music and movie collection could fit on a charm-sized pendant around your neck.”

This Day in History: The First Web Site shaneguiter: First ever website brought back to life at its original URL | The Verge FJP — Via The Verge: April 30th may seem as ordinary as any other date, but in 1993 it marked an important milestone in the development of global communications: it was on that day that the World Wide Web entered the public domain. CERN, the same research group that’s presently busy smashing protons together using the Large Hadron Collider, made World Wide Web technologies available to everyone on a royalty-free basis. Without that enlightened decision, backed by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, we might never have enjoyed the glories of GIFs, ubiquitous social networking, and instant music streaming.

This Day in History: The First Web Site

shaneguiter:

First ever website brought back to life at its original URL | The Verge

FJP — Via The Verge:

April 30th may seem as ordinary as any other date, but in 1993 it marked an important milestone in the development of global communications: it was on that day that the World Wide Web entered the public domain. CERN, the same research group that’s presently busy smashing protons together using the Large Hadron Collider, made World Wide Web technologies available to everyone on a royalty-free basis. Without that enlightened decision, backed by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, we might never have enjoyed the glories of GIFs, ubiquitous social networking, and instant music streaming.

The partnership between Comedy Central, a cable cannel owned by Viacom, and Twitter represents the evolving relationship between television and social media. Twitter is often incorporated into programming with viewers using the site as a second screen while watching live television. But slowly, Twitter is becoming an outlet on which to watch video.

Amy Chozick, The New York Times. A Comedy Show That Comes via a Hashtag.

Next week, Comedy Central is hosting a comedy show almost entirely on Twitter, with comedians posting video clips and jokes using the hashtag #ComedyFest. It’s an experiment to get users to watch video directly on Twitter, rather than use Twitter as a second screen while watching TV.

Also:

As early as next month, Comedy Central will introduce a free, ad-supported app, called CC: Stand-Up. Designed to look and feel like a cable channel devoted to stand-up, the app will offer videos of comedians performing routines.

A recommendation algorithm (similar to the one used by Amazon) will allow users to discover new comedians. If you watched Jeff Ross, for example, a web of other comics would pop up based on routines with similar topics (like mass transit), style (like dark humor) or other relationships (both like marshmallows).

Hello, Digital Public Library of America The Digital Public Library of America launched today with “photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States.” Its goal is to create “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in current and future ­generations.” Exhibitions are here. And your inner hacker can access the DPLA’s API here. Yes, the library has an API, which is awesome. One app currently using it is the Library Observatory: Library Observatory is an interactive tool for searching and visualizing the DPLA collections, accompanied by an interactive documentary that weaves together history, visualizations, and audio about the making, use, and enduring significance of library data and the collections they describe. Another app searches both the DPLA and Europeana, a European project similar to it, simultaneously giving results from each. Start exploring.

Hello, Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America launched today with “photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States.”

Its goal is to create “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in current and future ­generations.”

Exhibitions are here. And your inner hacker can access the DPLA’s API here. Yes, the library has an API, which is awesome. One app currently using it is the Library Observatory:

Library Observatory is an interactive tool for searching and visualizing the DPLA collections, accompanied by an interactive documentary that weaves together history, visualizations, and audio about the making, use, and enduring significance of library data and the collections they describe.

Another app searches both the DPLA and Europeana, a European project similar to it, simultaneously giving results from each.

Start exploring.

We have had gadflies among us ever since [Socrates], but one contemporary breed in particular has come in for a rough time of late: the “hacktivist.” While none have yet been forced to drink hemlock, the state has come down on them with remarkable force. This is in large measure evidence of how poignant, and troubling, their message has been.

Hacktivists, roughly speaking, are individuals who redeploy and repurpose technology for social causes. In this sense they are different from garden-variety hackers out to enrich only themselves. People like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates began their careers as hackers — they repurposed technology, but without any particular political agenda. In the case of Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak, they built and sold “blue boxes,” devices that allowed users to defraud the phone company. Today, of course, these people are establishment heroes, and the contrast between their almost exalted state and the scorn being heaped upon hacktivists is instructive.

Peter Ludlow, New York Times Opinionator Blog. Hacktivists as Gadflies.

FJP: Ludlow argues that while American society celebrates its hackers, the ones they do are those that are “non-political”, and hack to start companies. See: Jobs, Wozniak, Gates and Zuckerberg.

For those with a political agenda — perceived or otherwise — the law comes down hard. See: Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer (writing a script to collect personal information exposed by AT&T and handing the results of his investigation into the security hole over to Gawker) and sentenced to 41 months in prison; Barrett Brown (linking to a publicly available Web page containing the results of a credit card hack committed by others) and now facing charges of up to 100 years on 12 counts of credit card fraud; and Aaron Swartz (writing a script to download academic articles but not distributing them) who killed himself before before going to trial in a case that could have meant 35 years in prison, among others.

As we’ve pointed out before, US laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are so broad — and so out of date in our current networked environments — that almost all of us, technically, do things that put us on the wrong side of the law.

Writes Ludlow:

When everyone is guilty of something, those most harshly prosecuted tend to be the ones that are challenging the established order, poking fun at the authorities, speaking truth to power — in other words, the gadflies of our society.

Related: Boing Boing, CISPA: Congress wants to create unlimited Internet spying powers.

When the Government Comes Knocking, Who Has Your Back?

Hat tip to Josh Stearns for making us aware of this 2012 report.

Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

When you use the Internet, you entrust your online conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to companies like Google, AT&T and Facebook. But what happens when the government demands that these companies to hand over your private information? Will the company stand with you? Will it tell you that the government is looking for your data so that you can take steps to protect yourself?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation examined the policies of 18 major Internet companies — including email providers, ISPs, cloud storage providers, and social networking sites — to assess whether they publicly commit to standing with users when the government seeks access to user data. We looked at their terms of service, privacy policies, and published law enforcement guides, if any. We also examined their track record of fighting for user privacy in the courts and whether they’re members of the Digital Due Process coalition, which works to improve outdated communications law. Finally, we contacted each of the companies with our conclusions and gave them an opportunity to respond and provide us evidence of improved policies and practices. These categories are not the only ways that a company can stand up for users, of course, but they are important and publicly verifiable.

While some Internet companies have stepped up for users in particular situations, it’s time for all companies that hold private user data to make public commitments to defend their users against government overreach. The purpose of this report is to incentivize companies to be transparent about what data flows to the government and encourage them to take a stand for user privacy when it is possible to do so.

Read through for the report’s findings.

News Is Bad For You

Apparently, the more mobile devices you have, the higher your perceived value of media is. According to BCG’s recent study, Through the Mobile Looking Glass, when you get a second mobile device, there is a 41% increase in perceived media value, a 40% increase when you get a third, and a 30% increase when you get a fourth. 

Which makes sense, if you’re spending your days juggling four mobile devices and consuming media on all of them. What could be more important than the information nuggets you’re eating all day long?

Hopefully a lot of things, considering that the nutritional value of all the information we’re consuming could be very low.

The Guardian’s Rolf Dobelli explains:

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

Dobelli goes on to provide illustrative examples of the following:

  • News misleads.
  • News is irrelevant.
  • News has no explanatory power.
  • News is toxic to your body (literally).
  • News increases cognitive errors.
  • News inhibits thinking.
  • News works like a drug (you begin to crave it).
  • News wastes time.
  • News kills creativity.

Dobelli wants us to go without news. To be clear, he’s not arguing against ALL journalism. He supports investigative journalism, long-form, and books, but for the last four years has entirely removed the consumption of other (shorter) news from his diet. He’s since experienced: “less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, and more insights.”

FJP: Firstly, journalists simply can’t afford that kind of lifestyle and anyone active on a social network can’t avoid it. And great, illuminating, informative, well-reported, well-presented journalism is out there. But if we set aside the details of his argument (over which we could debate at length), Dobelli’s larger point (that our news consumption habits aren’t very healthy), coupled with the fact that we of the mobile generations perceive the value of media so highly, raises the most important question of all for people living in 2013: How can we construct healthy, anxiety-free, informative, enjoyable news diets that help us live better lives and understand the world better? News literacy. Just like we ought to do with food, practice consuming with balance and intention.—Jihii

Only A Third of the World’s Population is Online Via Statista. Select to embiggen.

Only A Third of the World’s Population is Online

Via Statista. Select to embiggen.

How Google Glass Works By Martin Missfeldt.

How Google Glass Works

By Martin Missfeldt.

Swallow Mag Brings Scratch and Sniff to Mexico City Issue

fjp-latinamerica:

Swallow has devoted its third issue to our beloved Mexico City, as reported by The New York Times’s Maria Newman in a short introductory blog post. 

What is remarkable about this issue, though, apart from the stunning and jaw-dropping photography, is a strange new feature that, in our view, exponentiates the scope of basic written storytelling:

“A scratch-and-sniff feature that brings you the smells of the sprawling metropolis”.

Delicious, or maybe not, depending on your sensibility towards all things chilango. Yet, we kind of wonder if this trend-setting feature will eventually embody the future of travel writing/reporting for print publications; a disruptive device hard impossible to find in digital publications.

Here is the rationale behind that editorial decision:

This time, said James Casey, the magazine’s editor, they decided to include the ambitious olfactory project, put together by Sissel Tolaas, a fragrance expert and artist. Mr. Casey had reached out to Ms. Tolaas after he heard of a project she had done that reproduced the smells from 200 Mexico City neighborhoods.

This issue of Swallow includes 20 scratch-and-sniff stickers throughout that are imbued with the aromas of one of the city’s many colonias, or neighborhoods. (Reproducing the smells in the magazine was a complex undertaking for their printers in Singapore, and is partly the reason it took more than a year to publish.) Not all of the odors are pleasant.

FJP: We can only hope that our fellow Chilanga-in-Portland is not the only one left awestruck:

Images: Assorted local snacks, candies, and pastries. Partial screenshots of Swallow Magazine’s piece on Mexico City’s supermarkets.

FJP: Never underestimate the power of scratch and sniff.

Your Digital Afterlife Because, evidently, Google listens to Krissy, it now has a new plan in place should you, perhaps, not quite wake up tomorrow. Via Google’s Data Liberation Blog: Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account. The feature is called Inactive Account Manager — not a great name, we know — and you’ll find it on your Google Account settings page. You can tell us what to do with your Gmail messages and data from several other Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason. For example, you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided. FJP: Macabre, yes, but a reality that digital services need to pay attention to. Image: Pleasant Hill Cemetery, via Wikimedia Commons.

Your Digital Afterlife

Because, evidently, Google listens to Krissy, it now has a new plan in place should you, perhaps, not quite wake up tomorrow.

Via Google’s Data Liberation Blog:

Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.

The feature is called Inactive Account Manager — not a great name, we know — and you’ll find it on your Google Account settings page.

You can tell us what to do with your Gmail messages and data from several other Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason.

For example, you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided.

FJP: Macabre, yes, but a reality that digital services need to pay attention to.

Image: Pleasant Hill Cemetery, via Wikimedia Commons.

Data Journalism: From the Inbox any recommendations for training/workshops in data journalism? (also, i love this blog) — aliciee Hi there. We love that you love this blog. Here goes: Since I don’t know where you actually are I’m going to stick to mostly online resources. One place I’d start is Lynda.com which is an online training site with video-based courses that range from desktop applications like Photoshop to programming languages like Ruby. It’s subscription-based but you can pay by the month ($25) and drop it at any time. Two courses that might be of interest are Interactive Data Visualization with Processing and Up and Running with R. Also, if you’re still in school, see if it’s available to you for free. Jihii has free access to it at Columbia. One of the hard things about answering this question though is that there are various moving parts, not least of which is what tools you want to be working with. I mentioned R and Processing above, but there are also tools like Google’s Google’s Fusion Tables, Hadoop and Gephi, not to mention a whole host of others. Which, come to think of it, is probably why you’re asking about training and workshops. Figuring out where to start can be confusing. So here are some places to start: Go Through the Data Journalism Handbook. Review DataVisualization’s inspiration on tools you can use. Hit up Reddit, and head to the subreddits such as this one on visualization. Ask questions. Go to Perugia, Italy. There’s a data journalism conference going on there April 24-28… We can fantasize, right? In the offline world, take a look at Meetup and Eventbrite for events and workshops. They pop up all the time. For example, here are upcoming workshops in New York City and here are NYC Meetup groups that focus on data. So, with apologies for not being more specific on actual workshops, that’s what I got for you. Hope it helps. — Michael Have a question? Ask away. Image: Using Google Earth to visualize marine and coastal data. Via OpenEarth.

Data Journalism: From the Inbox

any recommendations for training/workshops in data journalism? (also, i love this blog) — aliciee

Hi there. We love that you love this blog. Here goes:

Since I don’t know where you actually are I’m going to stick to mostly online resources.

One place I’d start is Lynda.com which is an online training site with video-based courses that range from desktop applications like Photoshop to programming languages like Ruby. It’s subscription-based but you can pay by the month ($25) and drop it at any time. Two courses that might be of interest are Interactive Data Visualization with Processing and Up and Running with R. Also, if you’re still in school, see if it’s available to you for free. Jihii has free access to it at Columbia.

One of the hard things about answering this question though is that there are various moving parts, not least of which is what tools you want to be working with. I mentioned R and Processing above, but there are also tools like Google’s Google’s Fusion Tables, Hadoop and Gephi, not to mention a whole host of others.

Which, come to think of it, is probably why you’re asking about training and workshops. Figuring out where to start can be confusing.

So here are some places to start:

So, with apologies for not being more specific on actual workshops, that’s what I got for you. Hope it helps. — Michael

Have a question? Ask away.

Image: Using Google Earth to visualize marine and coastal data. Via OpenEarth.