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“Nothing Covers Twitter Better Than The Robots”

March 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Evgeny Morozov opines at Slate on computer-driven automatic journalism. An excerpt:

“Narrative Science is one of several companies developing automated journalism software. These startups work primarily in niche fields—sports, finance, real estate—in which news stories tend to follow the same pattern and revolve around statistics. Now they are entering the political reporting arena, too. A new service from Narrative Service generates articles about how the U.S. electoral race is reflected in social media, what issues and candidates are most and least discussed in a particular state or region, and similar topics. It can even incorporate quotes from the most popular and interesting tweets into the final article. Nothing covers Twitter better than the robots.

It’s easy to see why Narrative Science’s clients—the company says it has 30—find it useful. First of all, it’s much cheaper than paying full-time journalists who tend to get sick and demand respect. As reported in the New York Times last September, one of Narrative Science’s clients in the construction industry pays less than $10 per 500-word article—and there is no one to fret about the terrible working conditions. And that article takes only a second to compose. Not even Christopher Hitchens could beat that deadline. Second, Narrative Science promises to be more comprehensive—and objective—than any human reporter. Few journalists have the time to find, process, and analyze millions of tweets, but Narrative Science can do so easily and, more importantly, instantaneously. It doesn’t just aim to report fancy statistics—it attempts to understand what those numbers mean and communicate this significance to the reader. Would Narrative Science have unmasked the Watergate? Probably not. But then most news stories are easier to report and decipher.

Narrative Science’s founders claim that they simply want to help—not exterminate!—journalism, and they may very well be sincere. Reporters are likely to hate their guts, but some publishers, ever concerned with paying the bills, would surely embrace them with open arms. In the long run, however, the civic impact of such technologies—which are only in their infancy today—may be more problematic.” (Thanks Browser.)

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Read more Evgeny Morozov posts:

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“A Machine So Instinctive, So Seductive, It’s As Alive As We Are”

March 21, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Jaguar likes to compliment well-heeled consumers, telling them that no machine could ever be a match for such special human specimens, that the Singularity will never arrive for those of a certain status. How irreplaceable you are. Actually the automaker thinks one machine is as superior as a human with a lot of money–the Jaguar. Campaign by Spark44.

“Be As Fast…Be As Strong”

March 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Amazon just acquired Kiva Systems robotics for $775 million to automate its warehouses. From IEEE Spectrum: “What does Kiva do that got Amazon so interested? Basically, Kiva has reinvented the centuries-old warehouse business, transforming distribution centers — which previously relied on slow-moving humans to walk around picking and packing goods — into a buzzing hive of superefficient, tireless robotic workers.”

“We’ve Seen Hearts Start Up Again On Their Own Inside The Body, Outside The Body, Even In Someone Else’s Body”

March 20, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Salon has a provocative excerpt from Dick Teresi’s new book, The Undead, which examines the difficulty of establishing when life has truly ceased, an issue that will only become infinitely thornier in the coming decades. The opening of “The Evolution of Death“:

“Michael DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh recalls making the rounds at a student teaching hospital with his interns in tow when he remembered that he had a patient upstairs who was near death. He sent a few of the young doctors ‘to check on Mr. Smith’ in Room 301 and to report back on whether he was dead yet. DeVita continued rounds with the remainder of the interns, but after some time had passed he wondered what happened to his emissaries of death. Trotting up to Mr. Smith’s room, he found them all paging through ‘The Washington Manual,’ the traditional handbook given to interns. But there is nothing in the manual that tells new doctors how to determine which patients are alive and which are dead.

Most of us would agree that King Tut and the other mummified ancient Egyptians are dead, and that you and I are alive. Somewhere in between these two states lies the moment of death. But where is that? The old standby — and not such a bad standard — is the stopping of the heart. But the stopping of a heart is anything but irreversible. We’ve seen hearts start up again on their own inside the body, outside the body, even in someone else’s body. Christian Barnard was the first to show us that a heart could stop in one body and be fired up in another. Due to the mountain of evidence to the contrary, it is comical to consider that “brain death” marks the moment of legal death in all fifty states.

The search for the moment of death continues, though hampered by the considerable legal apparatus that insists that it has already been found.”

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Bernie, reborn, doing conga:

Read also:

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“It Describes Tattooing, Stamping Or Spraying ‘Ferromagnetic’ Material Onto A User’s Skin”

March 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You pre-ordered the New iPad, you huge douche, but you do not yet have this: a body tattoo that vibrates when your phone receives a call or text. Nokia has patented just such an invention and hopes to market it in temporary and permanent options. From the BBC:

“Vibrating magnetic tattoos may one day be used to alert mobile phone users to phone calls and text messages if Nokia follows up a patent application.

The Finnish company has described the idea in a filing to the US Patent and Trademark Office.

It describes tattooing, stamping or spraying ‘ferromagnetic’ material onto a user’s skin and then pairing it with a mobile device.

It suggests different vibrations could be used to create a range of alerts.

The application lists Cambridge-based Zoran Radivojevic as the innovation’s lead inventor. It was filed last week and was brought to light by the Unwired View news site.

It suggests a magnetic marking could be attached to either a user’s arm, abdominal area, finger or fingernail.”

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“What These Books Have In Common Is A Sense Of Mass Illusion”

March 19, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events." (Image by Weegee.)

Even in the 1930s, Nathanael West could see that media was becoming mass, that the Horatio Alger myth, a cruel hoax that pretended the exception was the rule, would soon be oppressively disseminated to all of America–to all of the world. From “He Foresaw History,” David Ulin’s 1997 Los Angeles Times article about West’s prescient prose:

“For West, the very substance of modern life exists in the place where the medium and the audience connect. His aesthetic was firmly rooted in the idea of mass communication, which by the 1930s, he recognized, had begun to change American culture in unpredictable ways. It’s one of the things that sets him apart from his contemporaries, and, as such, may have contributed to his marginal status.

‘In the 1930s,’ Veitch suggests, ‘American literature was dominated by icons of the left, like Ma Joad, but West wrote against that; he was a writer on the left who didn’t write about leftist themes. Instead, he wrote about consumerism. He wrote about the America that was emerging, the America of mass culture. At a time when the left had disdain for that, West homed in on it, using cliches, cartoons, comics, Tin Pan Alley songs. Miss Lonelyhearts is a slap in the face to the left’s fascination with folk culture, as is The Day of the Locust.”

His take on popular culture emerges not just in the substance of his writing, but in its style. Miss Lonelyhearts, for instance, was conceived as a ‘novel in the form of a comic strip’; ‘I abandoned this idea,’ West wrote in 1933, ‘but retained some of the comic strip technique: Each chapter, instead of going forward in time, also goes backward, forward, up and down in space like a picture. Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events.’

Writing in a voice that is deliberately flat, West portrays a newspaper advice columnist, caught between the cynicism of his editor, Shrike, and the despair of his readers, who, in a society where God has been replaced by the manufactured images of mass imagination, have nowhere else to turn for meaning. As Shrike declares, ‘The Miss Lonelyhearts are the priests of 20th century America.’ Miss Lonelyhearts becomes a counterpart for Christ, and his column a modern source of communion.

The Day of the Locust focuses the same perspective on the desperate dreams of Hollywood. And A Cool Million--a broad farce that, in tracing the disasters that befall a young man named Lemuel Pitkin when he sets out to seek his fortune, turns the Horatio Alger formula on its ear–touches on this issue. What these books have in common is a sense of mass illusion, of image somehow substituted for reality until there is little difference between the two.

‘West’s subject,’ says Library of America Publisher Max Rudin, ‘is the selling of mass fantasy, the American business of dreams.’

Elaborates Bercovitch: “There’s a sense in West of public life having a stage set quality, of the marketplace as a giant betrayal not just of America but of all human dreams. Yet while he understands this, he remains susceptible to the pathos of human need.'”

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“Isn’t it romantic?”:

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“That’s About 91.2 Million People Who Still Don’t Even Use Email”

March 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Quaint and terrifying math about American Internet usage from The Next Web:

“According to a study (PDF) from the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), around 30 percent of US citizens do not use the internet for anything, whether they’re at work or at home. Given that there are 304 million people in the United States, that’s about 91.2 million people who still don’t even use email.

The scariest thing about this report is that in this group of around 91 million people, 37.8% say they just don’t need broadband internet connections. As Ars Technica points out, the United States almost requires a decent internet connection for someone to do well; the vast majority of applying to get a job or to get into college is done online.”

“Novels Go Beyond Simulating Reality To Give Readers An Experience Unavailable Off The Page”

March 19, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Science has proven that reading novels, unsurprisingly, makes us more empathetic people, but it’s a little startling that the brain apparently makes no distinction between actual experience and the experiences we read about in a novel. From Annie Murphy Paul in the NYT:

“The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that ‘runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.’ Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”

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Novelist Henry Miller takes a swim:

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“One Of The World’s Most Tightly Controlled Economies Suddenly Became A Free-For-All”

March 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Why Countries Go Bust,” Adam Davidson’s New York Times Magazine piece about the poverty-reduction theories of superstar economist Daron Acemoglu, an explanation of how we managed to screw up even the post-Hussein Internet access market in Baghdad:

“On April 9, 2003, the day the city was captured, one of the world’s most tightly controlled economies suddenly became a free-for-all. Amid the chaos, many former state functionaries turned into entrepreneurs. Nearly every engineer from the ministry of housing, it seemed, had opened his own construction company. Satellite TVs, once illegal to all but a very small elite, were sold on every major street. Under Hussein, only one company (widely rumored to be monitored by the intelligence service) offered Internet access, and it was incredibly bad and expensive. After it was gone, there were so many new Internet companies that I had far more access options then than I do today in Brooklyn.

Yet the American authorities, who had not planned for this budding free market, all but destroyed it when they gave the bulk of new contracts to large companies outside the country. Often, these outsiders subcontracted to Iraqi firms with close ties to the state’s new political establishment. By the anniversary of the United States invasion, it was clear that economic success would again come from connections and corruption rather than talent and hard work. Today, Transparency International ranks Iraq as one of the most corrupt nations on earth. An Iraqi friend once told me that he had hoped we would teach the Iraqis how to be Americans. Instead, the Americans learned how to be Iraqi.”

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“It Became Almost Second Nature”

March 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Pro hockey players are using computers to try to train their brains to better focus and concentrate. From Tal Pinchevsky at NHL.com:

“Muscles can be toned, endurance can be refined, leadership qualities can be taught. But how do you train a hockey player’s brain? Can a coach work the areas of a player’s brain responsible for awareness and intuition?

The Israeli Air Force, of all people, has the answer.

More specifically, the answer comes from Applied Cognitive Engineering, or ACE, an Israeli technology company that has worked with the Israelis and the  U.S. Air Force, as well as NASA and the American military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Originally used to train fighter pilots, ACE’s IntelliGym is now being adopted by more and more hockey coaches.

The cognitive training system develops players’ awareness and ability to make fast-paced decisions and has already made its mark on the hockey world in just three years.

‘We had no idea what to expect. It kind of looked like a video game. Sure enough, you could see how it related to hockey and increased your awareness and knowledge,’ said Michael Cornell, a junior defenseman and alternate captain at the University of Maine, whose team used the IntelliGym last season. ‘I think it was one of those things where it became almost second nature. I read this play differently because of the tools I’ve been using. It helped develop a high level of awareness for me.'”

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“Intercourse By Words, Letters, Or Messages”

March 18, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Ray and Charles Eames, that wonderful huband-and-wife design team, who were ahead of their time in understanding that industrial materials could be beautiful, also knew a thing or two about communications. Their 1953 short, “A Communications Primer.”

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“Clinton Never Gave Up On The Idea That All He Needed Was A Few More Speeches, Or A Slightly Better Message”

March 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

President Obama has been criticized for not communicating his message well enough to the American people during his first term, but perhaps that effort would have been time wasted. There are probably moments when an American President can define the narrative, but usually they’re just being led by it, at best framing it. You’ve probably already read “The Unpersuaded,” Ezra Klein’s smart New Yorker piece on the topic, but here’s an excerpt: 

“No President worked harder to persuade the public, Edwards says, than Bill Clinton. Between his first inauguration, in January, 1993, and his first midterm election, in November, 1994, he travelled to nearly two hundred cities and towns, and made more than two hundred appearances, to sell his Presidency, his legislative initiatives (notably his health-care bill), and his party. But his poll numbers fell, the health-care bill failed, and, in the next election, the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in more than forty years. Yet Clinton never gave up on the idea that all he needed was a few more speeches, or a slightly better message. ‘I’ve got to . . . spend more time communicating with the American people,’ the President said in a 1994 interview. Edwards notes, ‘It seems never to have occurred to him or his staff that his basic strategy may have been inherently flawed.'”

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“I Just Have To Look At The Asteroids”

March 18, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Tobii EyeAsteroids 3D allows you to blast space junk sans fingers.

“Words Began Dying More Often In The Past 10 To 20 Years”

March 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

It would make sense that the lingua franca becomes simpler and flatter as people communicate more widely, as they need to find common ground with others from a variety of backgrounds and locations. And what has spellcheck, texting, etc. wrought for language? From Charles Choi at Discovery:

“The investigators found words began dying more often in the past 10 to 20 years than they had in all the time measured before. At the same time, they discovered languages were seeing fewer entirely new words emerging. They suggest that automatic spell-checkers may be partly responsible, killing misspelled or unusual counterparts of accepted words before they see print.”

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Speaking Ubbi Dubbi, back when pencils were still in use:

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“As Long As The Content Hits My Visual Cortex, It Doesn’t Matter What Form It Comes In”

March 16, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Collecting will change over time but never vanish. People, to varying degrees, need to own stuff. But technology has had a profound effect on the nature of collecting, reducing its tactile nature, making trash of artifacts. From USA Today:

“Spencer Haley, 33, who works at fabled Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., once proudly displayed 3,000 hardcovers in his home. But since a Kindle joined the family, he and his wife are down to a few hundred. ‘As long as the content hits my visual cortex, it doesn’t matter what form it comes in,’ he says.

For Haley, collecting still means adding to those prized first-editions on his shelves. But it also refers to the list of e-books on his tablet, the book reviews he has amassed online and the friends who follow his recommendations via social networking.

‘I missed flipping pages for about a day,’ Haley says. ‘I don’t have CD or DVD racks anymore. Having things stored in the cloud just fits my lifestyle.'”

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“Daisey Is A Major Talent, But He Can’t Just Play Reporter And Then Walk Away From It When The Label Becomes Inconvenient”

March 16, 2012 in Science/Tech | Permalink

"Daisey's provocations probably will help improve working conditions, but the methods are still unacceptable." (Image by Steve Jurvetson.)

More major fallout from the Mike Daisey-This American Life collaboration, in which the NPR show presented a large segment from his theater piece, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which decries the horrid working conditions at the Foxconn tech-manufacturing complex in China. Ira Glass and company have retracted the story, saying that Daisey’s reportage doesn’t check out, and the monologist himself has acknowledged that he misrepresented interviews. Daisey has defended misleading people, saying his only mistake was in allowing a theater piece to be broadcast as journalism. But the problems run deeper than that. When someone presents an unadorned monologue, gives no hint of artifice, and poses as a reporter who’s done leg work and interviews, expectations of veracity, even in a theater setting, are different.

The upshot is that there are major problems at Foxconn factories and Daisey’s provocations probably will help improve working conditions, but the methods are still unacceptable. Daisey is a major talent, but he can’t just play reporter and then walk away from it when the label becomes inconvenient. He needs to rethink his process.•

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“You Would Never Have To Make A Charging Stop Again”

March 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the early days of autos there were more electric cars (and steam ones, for that matter) than gas-powered cars. But fossil fuels became predominant, so how do you unlearn what’s been learned, turning away from so much familiar infrastructure? Shifting to electric cars would be a much more attractive proposition if the vehicles were automatically recharged by coils embedded in the road. From Jon Stewart at BBC:

“Engineers in his lab are developing a way to wirelessly charge electric cars from magnetic coils embedded into the road. The car would pick up the power via another coil, meaning – in theory – that you would never have to make a charging stop again.

The system works using a technique called ‘magnetic resonance coupling.’ You can think about resonance as the phenomenon that allows an opera singer to smash a glass using only the power of their voice. In that case, when the singer hits a note that has the same resonant frequency as the glass, they couple and energy begins to build up in the glass, eventually causing it to smash.

Instead of using acoustic resonance, the Stanford team use the resonance of electromagnetic waves. A coil in the road that is connected to a power line is made to vibrate with the same resonance frequency as the coil on the bottom of the car, allowing energy to flow between them.”

“Thirty Years Ago, Robert Trivers Disappeared”

March 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of John Brockman’s Edge essay about influential if eccentric evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers, which reads like a hallucination:

“Thirty years ago, Robert Trivers disappeared.

My connection to him is goes back to the 1970s. He had left Harvard and was roaming around Santa Cruz when I was introduced to him in a telephone call by our mutual friend Huey P. Newton, Chairman of The Black Panther Party. Huey put Robert on the phone and we had a conversation in which he introduced me to his ideas. I recall noting at the time the power and energy of his intellect. Huey, excited by Robert’s ideas on deceit and self-deception, was eager for the three of us to get together.

We never had the meeting. Huey met a very bad end. I lost track of Robert. Over the years there were rumors about a series of breakdowns; he was in Jamaica; in jail.

He fell off the map.

But during his thirty year disappearance, the influence of his ideas has grown and transcended the purely scientific arena. And through all his ups and downs, he never stopped working on his theories.”

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“In The 21st-Century, Telephone Lines Will Unlock The Knowledge That Will Help Us Learn, Keep Us Well And Set Us Free”

March 14, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Predictions about 2003 tech from an AT&T film made a dozen years earlier.

“It’s Really Just Two Triangles, A Circle And Some Lines”

March 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Our ability to project our emotions onto computer code makes video games possible. From “Creating the Illusion of Emotion, or Why You Care About Ones and Zeroes,” by Brian Crecente in the Vancouver Sun:

“David Mark, president of AI design consultant Intrinsic Algorithm, spent about half an hour last week walking game developers through what he called the psychology of artificial intelligence. He used to time to give the game-makers tips on how to make gamers feel like they’re in a world populated by real people instead of digital automatons.

The key, he said, is to find a way to get gamers to project their own emotions and psychology onto the game’s characters.

‘In the absence of defining information people project what they believe should be there,’ he said.

To prove his point, Mark showed the Heider-Simmel demonstration, an animated video created by psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel in the 1940s to explore the ‘attribution of causality.’

The short video shows two animated triangles, an animated circle and a box. There was no audio, just the crude line drawings moving around. After showing the video he said that most viewers saw the video as a couple and a bully; or a mother, a child and a bad guy; or a father and a couple. Each viewer created their own, sometimes elaborate back story for the simple drawings.

‘It’s really just two triangles, a circle and some lines,’ Mark pointed out.

In the absence of information, viewers created their own fiction, their own emotional attachments. But movement and positioning, he added, does help shape context.”

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Heider-Simmel Demonstration, an experimental study of apparent behavior:

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“The Machine Is Not Like Other Machines”

March 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “A Voyage to the Sun,” a really nice piece of writing from 1999 by Michael Paterniti in Esquire, about extreme science in the New Mexico desert:

“See, the Machine is not like other machines. It’s not a Saab with heated leather seats and a refrigerated glove compartment. It demands security clearance. It demands care and reverence. And if you’re Chinese–or if you’re a Toblerone-loving Swiss, for that matter–you can’t come here. You can’t get past the armed guard at the front gate or the second gate at Area IV or the concertina wire or the ID-activated, secret-combination metal doors to the hangar-sized sandstone building where the Machine lives.

And the people here, Jimmy Potter and his tech crew and the array makers and the laser technicians and the classified team of scientists burrowing in the Habitrail of their own minds for some small epiphany, for some shred of insight into the Machine–the whole lot of them numbering maybe 130–they bring their love, their dizzy, stupid, human love, and their vanity and ambition and dreams, and all of it gets shot into the Machine. Envy, greed, betrayal . . . shot into the Machine. Glory, honor, brilliance . . . shot in. Some shoot in their god, too.

It begins with the simple flip of a cyber switch in a control room at the north end of the hangar. Before a bank of computer screens, a man clicks a mouse, and then electricity, quietly sucked right off the municipal power grid in Albuquerque, floods into the outer ring of Marx generators. Which is when the Machine takes control. A siren sounds, red lights flash, doors automatically lock. The frogmen and the white and blue jumpsuits clamber over the high bay, down the metal steps, and retreat to a copper-coated room behind a foot of cement.

Another switch is flipped, another mouse clicked. To the piercing sound of an alarm, a countdown in the Marx generators ensues, or rather a count up, in kilovolts. Comes in a monotone, almost hollow voice beneath the frantic alarm. The man in the control room on a tinny loudspeaker, the Machine speaking through the human.

‘Twenty kV. . . .’

‘Thirty kV. . . .’

‘Forty kV. . . .'” (Thanks TETW.)

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“Things Like Traffic Lights Become Completely Redundant”

March 14, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

If driverless cars can communicate with one another at all times, brake pedals have diminshed utility. From IEEE Spectrum: “It’s not just the sensor-driven skills that will soon be common to individual cars that will shape the future of automotive transportation, but also the ability for cars to communicate with each other, sharing constant updates about exactly where they are and where they’re going. And with enough detailed information being shared at a fast enough pace between all vehicles on the road, things like traffic lights become completely redundant.”

“It Has Decided Not To Print What Would Be The 2012 Edition”

March 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An image of glorious ruins from the 1911 "Encyclopaedia Britannica" edition.

I actually didn’t realize the Encyclopaedia Britannica was still publishing a print version, but that anachronism is no more. From Computerworld:

“After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica will cease publishing its flagship encyclopedia and concentrate on its digital offerings.

“We’d like to think our tradition is not to print, but to bring scholarly knowledge to the people,” said Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Britannica has printed the encyclopedia, which now runs to 32 volumes in length, since 1768. The 2010 edition was the last edition the company published. It has decided not to print what would be the 2012 edition, which would have been out by the end of the year. The company has about 4,000 sets of the 2010 edition still available for sale. Overall about 2 million sets have been printed through the entire run of the encyclopedia.

Britannica’s move to stop printing encyclopedias is a telling moment in this point in history, when print is being superseded by websites and network-connected applications.”

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Richard Feynman in 1959: “Why can’t we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin?”

“It Opens Up All Devices To The Potential Of Being Connected All The Time”

March 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

If I had to bet on one aspect of our lives about to change drastically, I would go with batteries. Whether or not Apple is really working on hydrogen batteries as whispers sometimes suggest, I think the term “long-life” is about to change significantly for the better. And products and processors will be made to require less and less juice, adding to the efficiency. No longer will we be tethered to a wall. From Leo Kelion of BBC News:

“Arm Holdings has unveiled what it describes as the ‘world’s most energy-efficient microprocessor’ design.

The firm says that microcontrollers based on the ‘Flycatcher’ architecture will pave the way for the ‘internet of things’- the spread of the net to a wider range of devices.

It suggests that fridges and other white goods, medical equipment, energy meters, and home and office lighting will all benefit from the innovation.

Two firms have licensed the technology.

They are NXP Semiconductors and Freescale.

‘It opens up all devices to the potential of being connected all the time,’ Freescale’s Geoff Lees told the BBC.

‘It’s allowing us to provide connectivity everywhere. So anything from consumer appliances, MP3-music audio docks, kitchen equipment with displays right through to remote sensors in rain monitoring equipment or personal medical devices – an area where ultra-long battery life allied to high performance and safety is becoming more and more important.'”

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“Oy!”:

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“Shoppers Use A Touchpad To Personalize The Lighting And Music In Dressing Rooms”

March 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Some stores and brands are embracing the change." (Image by Thomas Edwards,)

I’m not a materialistic person, but I would rather go to a good store than a good museum. Both are commenting on the world right now–even an exhibition of antiquities is interesting to us at this moment for some reason–but I think retail outlets with well-designed products are more stimulating, communicating more directly to us about who we are, for better or worse. 

Question: Are there shops that have an app that allow you to use your smartphone to scan any item’s tag and get info and videos about products on your phone? I haven’t seen it yet, but my guess is “yes” or they will soon exist. From Stephanie Clifford’s recent New York Times article about modern shopping:

“For a generation of shoppers raised on Google and e-commerce, the answer to ‘Can I help you?’ is increasingly a firm ‘no,’ even at retailers like Nordstrom that have built their reputations around customer service.

But instead of getting defensive, some stores and brands are embracing the change by creating new personal touches that feature gadgets rather than a doting sales staff. Bobbi Brown has touch-screen televisions to demonstrate the perfect smoky eye, something that was once the exclusive domain of makeup artists. The basketball star LeBron James’s shoe store in Miami has 50 iPads to describe its merchandise. Macy’s is testing cosmetics stations where tablets offer reviews and tips. And at C. Wonder, shoppers use a touchpad to personalize the lighting and music in dressing rooms (there is also a button in case, olden-days style, they need to call for help).

The self-service theme, which started years ago with checkout at groceries, has progressed to the point where shoppers can navigate entire stores without once having to say, ‘Just looking, thanks.'”

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