Relevant History

Gregg Zachary on terrorism and technology

My friend Gregg Zachary has a piece in today's Mercury News asking "Why terrorism isn't reshaping technology?" After all, World War II and Sputnik spurred massive investment in science and technology, and had some profound structural impacts on the organization of science in America. That hasn't happened in the last couple years. Why? Gregg explains why, and has this rather wise conclusion:

In the end, an awareness of the limits of innovation probably is good. That there is no technological ``fix'' for the present danger forces everyone to confront social, economic and political issues that elude the net of science.

I'm also quoted in it.

Game Boy Solar

I was too old to ever get into the handheld game thing, but the latest solar-powered Game Boy does something very interesting: its games whether you're in the sun, and how much power you're drawing, and adjusts the game-play accordingly. Some weapons are made stronger, or are recharged, by sunlight; there are enemies that appear or hide depending on the strength of the sunlight; and the enviroment changes with exposure to sunlight (puddles dry up, it gets windy).

It might sound gimmicky, but I suspect they're onto something here. There's a lot you could do with context- and environmental-sensitivity in gaming.

[via In-duce.net]

[To the tune of Eric Clapton, "Let it Rain," from the album Crossroads (Disc 2).]

Reviews of The Passion

The reviews are hitting the blogosphere....

[via Gawker, and absolutely neither work safe nor safe for children who haven't been exposed to profanity. Now go enjoy]

Speaking at Hayward next week

It looks like I'll be giving a talk at Cal State Hayward next week on emerging technology and the future of new media. Hayward has a graduate program in multimedia, and a speaker series that brings some pretty notable people in to talk about their work and experiences; and now that all of them have already visisted, they've asked me.

It should be an interesting time. My years at Britannica provided grist for several articles about technology and new media (an overview piece on how electronic publishing changed encyclopedias; a case study of timeline development; a broader piece on hypertext theories), and I've been doing a lot at work on how emerging technologies will affect the ways we use computers. So this will be a chance to put those two interests together, and think about how those new technologies, use practices and contexts will redefine the challenges multimedia creators will face.

I also have a personal connection to Hayward. My father taught there when I was a child, and my mother went there, so I have some very fuzzy memories of it from when I was four or five. (Since that would have been 1968-69, I'm sure the place has changed a lot!) For years I've kept meaning to get over there, just to see what it's like now, and never have.

Of course, this is the day I pick up the children from day care and nursery school, so after discharging my parental duties I'll have just enough time to rush over there, find the classroom, and not see any of the campus.

Book reviews coming in

Reviews of my book, Empire and the Sun, are starting to trickle in. I saw a short notice by Jay Pasachoff a few months ago, but as a blurb by Jay actually appears on the back of the book, that one didn't really count. Now I've got reviews from International History Review and some English literature journal (?).

Both the reviews are in the "An interesting but flawed, but hey, nobody's perfect" mold. They complain about some things (not the same things, so far), say some nice things, and that's about it. I suppose that these might be damning with faint praise, but my sense of book reviews is that this is a pretty standard kind of review. I've written my share of reviews for academic journals organized into sections that could be titled, "What this book tries to do," "What's good," What's not good," and "Whether it matters."

I've not yet heard from the crowd that the book was actually aimed at, historians of science. Neither of the reviews discusses the more technical aspects of the book, or talks about it in terms of its place in the historiography of science.

Still, it's interesting that it's even showing up in these other places. Good job, Stanford Press.

It's interesting watching my own reaction to these, because 1) I write a pretty fair number of reviews myself, and 2) I'm so far removed from the book, both personally and professionally, I can read the reviews with a certain degree of dispassion that I couldn't if I were an assistant professor coming up for tenure. They've got me thinking a little about how to approach the next book-- not so much in historiographic or thematic terms, but in terms of the project. Since I finished it, I've seen all kinds of what I could have made it broader and more interesting. While I was on the academic market, I was hell-bent on getting it into shape to be accepted by a press. Once I had started my post-academic life, finishing it became something of a hobby, or a point that I wanted to make to myself: I wasn't going to get any direct financial reward for it, and little in terms of social or cultural capital other than bragging rights or a bit of exotic flavor. Maybe with the next book, the incentive structure I work under will more effectively link the actual completion of the project to its improvement.

The problems faced in a society of hyperabundance

For those who have everything: Absolutely Nothing.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "Going To California," from the album Box Set (Disc 2).]

From history to ethics

One of the main things I worked on at Stanford was a site documenting the early history of the Macintosh. Via Raines Cohen, I just found that some of the primary documents on it were used in a course on Information Age Ethics.

It's always nice to see people making use of your stuff. And it looks like an interesting class.

[To the tune of Bill Evans Trio, "Blue In Green [Take 2]," from the album Portrait In Jazz.]

But what about the Known Unknown Technique

It's not there, but now you can see lots of other examples of Rumsfeld Fighting Technique. They're very funny.

[To the tune of Baby Einstein Music Box Orchestra, "Piano Sonata In B Flat, K570, 3rd Movement," from the album Baby Mozart.]

Sick kid

I'm at home today-- and running to the pediatrician, and the pharmacy-- with a sick kid. Elizabeth woke up in the middle of the night with an earache, and was up until 4. One of those times I'm glad to be a knowledge worker: give her some crayons and a drink, and me an Internet connection or something to read, and I run the risk of being able to get something done. A remarkable difference from when I was sick: if Mom had to take a day off, that was a lost day at the factory, with no chance to time-shift and make it up later.

Fortune cookie ads

Tonight, while opening fortune cookies for my son-- who's two, and doesn't actually eat the cookies or read the fortunes, but is very big on the process (a very Silicon Valley kid)-- I came across fortunes that had advertising on the back, rather than the usual random assortment of lucky numbers. I guess it's no surprise that advertising is everywhere. Still....

Random thought of the day

Is it just me, or do the female centaurs in the "Pastoral Suite" scene in Fantasia bear a striking resemblance to Paris Hilton?

Wouldn't that explain a lot?

Emergence as excuse?

Some thoughts on the overuse of the concept of emergence, at The Register and lago (and lago again).

[To the tune of The Doobie Brothers, "How Do the Fools Survive?," from the album Minute by Minute.]

From Zenith to Nader

Apparently Ralph Nader is going to run again. Wonkette sums it up nicely.

(And no, there's no "zenith" in this post. I'm just trying to make a pun... on... "nadir"...

Oh, never mind.)

[To the tune of Peter Frampton, "Do You Feel Like We Do (Live)," from the album Frampton Comes Alive!.]

Kids today

Apparently kids don't like CDs.

But there's hope. Kids, here's what you do, according to www.whatacrappypresent.com (but go to the site-- the step-by-step illustrations are worth it!):

1. Complain about it with your friends.
2. Try to find the receipt. A parent's wallet or purse is a good place to start looking.
3. Get yourself to the mall and return the CD. Even if you don't have the receipt, some places will give you store credit (especially if you act real sad).
4. Find the biggest pack of CD-Rs you can get for the price of the CD (usually 25 or 50). Now you're back in charge of your music. Rock on!

[via Memeufacture]

[To the tune of Traffic, "Empty Pages," from the album Feelin' Alright: The Very Best of Traffic.]

Memogate

For those haven't been following it, there's a really interesting Capitol Hill scandal in the making, over the theft-- well, let's say unauthorized access-- of several thousand documents by Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The story is heating up because the Senate's Sergeant at Arms is about to release his report on the affair, which is likely to recommend a criminal investigation.

I'd not been playing much attention to the affair until Dahlia Lithwick wrote about it, and Slate ran an article on how conservative activists are attacking Orrin Hatch (Orrin Hatch! conservative activists! attacking! Orrin Hatch!) for letting the investigation proceed. This morning Josh Marshall has a piece on how Republican senators are telling those activists to back down.

Now that the Kerrysex rumors have pretty much withered, and we have a few days until the March 2 primaries, we can spend our political attention on this. At least until Michael Jackson tries to hijack a plane, or goes to San Francisco and tries to marry Janet, or something.

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Wild Is the Wind," from the album Station to Station.]

The WHAT thesis?

Okay, so the title of that last post might have been a tad obscure.

The Duhem-Quine thesis holds that theories are underdetemined by facts, or as Naturalism in Legal Philosophy puts it, "there is always more than one theory consistent with the evidence."

And I promise, no more attempts at "Sex and the City" references.

Sex and the Duhem-Quine Thesis

How many different ways could you interpret this:

Women Tailor Sex Industry to Their Eyes

Experts say demand by women — both heterosexual and lesbian — is driving the growth of all sorts of sex-related ventures, from stores, catalogs and sex toy companies to adult Web sites, pornographic films and cable television shows.

Is it

• A triumph of capitalism (giving the consumer what she wants);
  
• A triumph of feminism;
  
• A retrograde triumph of chauvinism dressed up as feminism;
  
• [Insert interpretation here]
  

Discuss.

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "Conchita/Lament," from the album Siesta.]

Prolific Oven

I spent the morning at Prolific Oven, a cafe in downtown Palo Alto. When I was a postdoc, this was one of the places I spent an immense amount of time in. Somehow it became the place I would always go when I was trying to make sense of Barbara Stafford's work, an enterprise that frankly was never successful. But my lack of success in surfing the cutting edge of art theory can't be blamed on the place.

The place has changed a little bit since I was here a dozen years ago: the furniture is nicer, and the pastries are a little higher-end. But there are still a lot of graduate students here, backpacks spilling out onto their tables, nursing two hour-old small lattes.

What a life that is. I loved it when I was doing it, but I don't think I could do it again. Being a postdoc is an institutionalized form of marginality: you're no longer a student, but you're not yet a professor (or some other kind of adult). It's designed insecurity. As such, it's great for someone young, who can afford (both financially and emotionally) to live the life of an academic ronin, and can still find nobility in voluntary poverty.

In my first pass through the Bay Area, I never really assumed I'd stay: I would have loved to, but knew that the odds of getting an academic job here were near zero. I spent a fair amount of my life moving from one place to another, or living in places I couldn't imagine staying in my whole life. And now I'm so back, I'm paying property taxes and dropping off my daughter at her impossible-to-get-into school. And I can imagine sitting in the Prolific Oven ten or twenty years from now. At some point I put down roots, and didn't notice it.

[To the tune of Counting Crows, "Sullivan Street," from the album August & Everything After.]

Professional responsibilites

Sometimes it's easy to forget one's responsibilities as a futurist, but this post reminded me of them:

I am sick and tired of waiting for the personal jet packs we were promised when we were growing up in the 60’s! All those black and white films I saw in school of what the future would be like INCLUDED PERSONAL JET PACKS! It’s 40... years later and even our cars still require that WE STEER THEM (also a lie from those films about the future).... I want my personal jet pack! WHER IS MY PERSONAL JET PACK!

Ummm....

I don't know what to make of this:

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

"May we live long and die out"

Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense.

This appears to be for real. Though maybe I should query snopes.

Buy your own damn president!

The punch line (sorry, I've ruined it for you) to a confusing piece of political theater in New York, as related on Wonkette.

Queer Eye for thye Medieval Man

This is funny.

Amateur scientists and Benkler's peer production

A while ago I posed the question of whether "historians of science made use of the literature on social networks and open exchange systems-- e.g., Woody Powell's work on networks, Yochai Benkler's studies of open source, etc.?" In the course of reading Benkler's "Coase's Penguin," a couple thoughts on the subject came to me.

Of course, the notion that nonscientists could contribute to scientific research projects is not new, and in the world of peer-to-peer systems, is definitely old news: just think of projects like SETI@Home, which send pieces of radio astronomy data to desktops for analysis. But with SETI@Home (and Stanford's protein folding project), the person doesn't really do anything other than contribute processor cycles: all the actual analysis is done by a piece of software that users download to their computers. What's more interesting is the question of whether peer-to-peer networks and other tools that facilitate "peer production" (to use Benkler's term) could help create a new role for amateurs as active contributors to science.

Benkler himself mentions a couple examples of projects that have used untrained volunteer to do basic scientific analysis. The great example is NASA Clickworkers (no longer active, but described in articles in American Scientist, Space.com, BBC Tech, and elsewhere) a system that allowed volunteers to do routine analysis of Martian landscapes. The results were pretty good, and as Benkler put it, showed "how complex professional tasks that required budgeting the full time salaries of a number of highly trained individuals can be reorganized so as to be performed by tens of thousands of volunteers." (Benkler, "Coase's Penguin," 16)

Now, until the early 20th century amateur scientists-- meaning people who didn't have formal training in science, or make a living doing scientific research-- were able to make significant contributions to most disciplines, and one of the great narrative threads in the history of science in the 19th century is the emergence of a significant status distinction between amateur and professional scientists. Professionals had access to instruments that were increasingly sophisticated and specialized, and too costly for amateurs; they had resources for analysis and publishing that amateurs didn't; and they had the training and skills that amateurs could no longer cultivate.

There are a few specialties in which amateurs still dominate: most asteroids and comets are discovered by amateurs, and amateurs can also do reputable work in variable star astronomy. But they can do so precisely because these are specialties in which you don't need big telescopes (or they're within the economic reach of a very dedicated amateur who's willing to invest heavily in her hobby); in which you could build systems for quickly alerting professionals of your discovery; and in which the observational skills are not as demanding as they are for, say, quasar research (in a formal sense at least-- it still takes very sharp eyes to see an asteroid, or even to see the trail on a photograph).

Here's the question: Will advances in smart dust, cheap sensors, lab on a chip, ubiquitous wireless, etc., bring the cost of certain kinds of instruments down enough to make it possible for amateurs to conduct research in areas that today they cannot? Would it be possible to develop other kinds of massive data analysis projects in which data can be analyzed by people with little formal training and time-- projects that, as Benkler put it, aggregate and "mobilize a vast pool of five-minute increments of human judgment"? (16) Will new technologies make it possible for amateurs to reliably make certain kinds of tricky observations that they cannot today?

My instinct is to say "Yes," and to say that the first areas you'd see these new niches for amateur scientists will be in the field sciences (field zoology, geology, geography), and in areas that can mobilize considerable public support or sympathy (cancer research, global warming, ecology). But I'm keen to hear other thoughts on the subject.

Fun with Zempt

Words that are missing from the Zempt spell-checker: blogging, Zempt.

I guess it must be some generic list of words that it's checking against. Or so I hope!

Trying Zempt

Having become addicted to Kung-Log for my Mac blogging, I decided to look for a Windows equivalent. Of course, there's not really an equivalent for anything on the Mac, but Zempt looks pretty good. I'm giving it a try.

Minority Report @ Shibuya

dottocomu, which does a terrific job of following the latest Japanese technology, reports that

NTT is planning an experiment into interactive advertising in the new Minato Mirai subway linking Tokyo's Shibuya with Yokohama: it will have a system set up in a concourse tunnel that detects pedestrian movements via a brace of TV cameras and uses the information to alter the images (art, local information, and advertising) projected on the tunnel walls by eight high-spec projectors linked to PCs that are in turn fed by NTT's VAAM content distribution server.

I can't decide if this kind of tailored interactive ad regime is creepy or cool, or just both. I think I'll have to experience it to decide.

[To the tune of Seal, "Prayer for the Dying," from the album Seal.]

Halavais gets your attention

From a recent post:

As a graduate student, I took a seminar with Tom Furness. Before he came to Seattle to run the HITLab, Furness designed advanced cockpit systems for the Air Force. One of the greatest dangers to pilots was something pretty dumb: forgetting to put the gear down before landing. In a very busy cockpit, it was essential that such an error get (to use a computer analogue) a higher interupt value. The warning had to rise above the cacophony and flashing lights of an already crowded informational area. After trying a wide variety of approaches, they found the one that would work.

Engineers recorded a message from a test pilot's daughter, with the sound coming as a whisper from behind the left ear: "Daddy, put the gear down or you will crash." When Tom tells the story, it gives you shudders to think of it, and that was exactly the intent.

It would get my attention.

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "Orbits," from the album Miles Smiles.]

Coase's typewriting monkeys

Reading Yochai Benkler's "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm," an influential study of peer production systems (most famously the open source movement).

One point he makes is that peer production systems succeed when they do a good job of 1) breaking up a big job into lots of small parts, and 2) using scale-- a very large number of contributors-- to correct for defects, either by having proofreading/testing, or by statistical averaging of contributions.

It strikes me that one quality that peer production, evolving species, and many other cooperative systems share is the freedom to be profligate with some critical resource. With evolution, you're profligate with individuals. The larger its population and the more your random mutations, the faster a species will be able to adapt to changes in its environment. With computer systems that use evolutionary techniques to solve difficult problems (like the traveling salesman problem), you're profligate with processor cycles: you don't have to be particularly smart or elegant when you can let the system try out a billion different possibilities. With peer production, you're profligate with creativity: you have a lot of little tasks, and a lot of people, and so each task is bound to be taken up by someone. (And duplication is good, because contributors can double-check each other.)

As someone once said, monkeys sitting at typewriters would, if given enough time, randomly write the collected works of Shakespeare. This is true, but in Benkler is right, they'd get there a lot faster if they had an equal number of monkey proofreaders volunteering small bits of their time to look at a few lines of the typists' work.

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Outside," from the album Outside.]

Games games games

Not exactly a Churchillian enigma wrapped in a riddle, but: BBC News reports that a clever player of the Sims Online has developed an application that lets virtual residents of Sims Online to play a version of SimCity.

That's right, characters in a video game can now play a... video game.

Personally, I can't wait for a first-person game in which your character isn't a robot, sniper or Mafia driver (hey that rhymes!), but a 17 year-old video game addict who you have to guide through an arcade. You could even have different levels representing different decades: you'd start with Pong in 1975, move up to Joust and Pac-Man, then onto console games....

[To the tune of Journey, "Stone In Love," from the album Time Cubed.]

RIP Webmonkey

Webmonkey is no more. Their articles on frames and CSS were among the best pieces of technical writing I've ever read.

[To the tune of Parliament, "P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)," from the album The Millennium Collection: The Best Of Parliament.]

The genius of iTunes shuffle

Following Alex Ross' article (see below) I decided to see what the "shuffle" feature would do with my collection. I tend to listen to my own playlists, and to lean heavily on half a dozen or so, so there are large swaths of my music collection that I've probably never actually ever listened to since ripping.

The result is fun: some weird segues, but more often than not the program makes interesting choices (is it completely random? I have a hard time believing that it is), and inspires those "Hey, I haven't heard that in ages" moments. A pleasant change even from one's own music programming.

Update 1/12/2005: The thread on iPod, the shuffle, and interesting ways to listen to music continues in:

• Wired News on iTunes shuffle
• Smart playlists
• Spreading iTunes sharing
• If Proust had iTunes
• Hypertunes
• What should be after the iPod shuffle?

[To the tune of Lynyrd Skynyrd, "I Aint The One," from the album Millienumium Collection.]

The deep meaning of the iPod shuffle feature

From Alex Ross' essay, "Listen to This," in the latest New Yorker:

I have seen the future, and it is called Shuffle—the setting on the iPod that skips randomly from one track to another.... There is something thrilling about setting the player on Shuffle and letting it decide what to play next.

Sometimes its choices are a touch delirious—I had to veto an attempt to forge a link between György Kurtág and Oasis—but the little machine often goes crashing through barriers of style in ways that change how I listen. For example, it recently made a segue from the furious crescendo of “The Dance of the Earth,” ending Part I of “The Rite of Spring,” right into the hot jam of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues." The first became a gigantic upbeat to the other.  For a second, I felt that I was at some madly fashionable party at Carl Van Vechten’s. [Ed: But who hasn't had that feeling, frankly?]

On the iPod, music is freed from all fatuous self-definitions and delusions of significance. There are no record jackets depicting bombastic Alpine scenes or celebrity conductors with a family resemblance to Rudolf Hess. Instead, music is music.

It seems to me that a lot of younger listeners think the way the iPod thinks. They are no longer so invested in a single genre, one that promises to mold their being or save the world. This gives the life-style disaster called “classical music” more of a chance....

Update: This great essay has inspired me to play around with the shuffle feature myself, with good results.

Update 1/12/2005: The thread on iPod, the shuffle, and interesting ways to listen to music continues in:

• Wired News on iTunes shuffle
• Smart playlists
• Spreading iTunes sharing
• If Proust had iTunes
• Hypertunes
• What should be after the iPod shuffle?

[To the tune of Kate Bush, "Deeper Understanding," from the album The Sensual World.]

The Human Web

This weekend I picked up John and William McNeill's The Human Web. (John McNeill is an environmental historian and author of Something New Under the Sun, a history of environmental change in the 20th century; his father William is the dean of world history. Full disclosure: I vaguely know both: I corresponded occasionally with William during my tenure at Britannica, and spent two weeks in Korea with John.) The book's big idea is that

Today... everyone lives inside a single global web, a unitary maelstrom of cooperation and competition. The career of these webs of communication and interaction constitute the overarching structure of human history.

We think of communications webs as being relatively new things-- think the World Wide Web-- but the Human Web makes the case that what we're living through now is a supercharging of a global web that has existed since the 16th century. Thousands of years ago technological and cultural innovations were capable of moving across the globe-- bows and arrows are everywhere, and song and dance are ubiquitous-- and we've only gotten better at diffusing innovations. As they note, agriculture was invented in a number of places, but the steam engine only had to be invented once.

Some of the book has more of an old-fashioned, world history overview tone, but the idea of thinking of human history in terms of a history of webs, cooperation and competition strikes me as one that has a lot of promise. You can fold lots of familiar stuff into that framework, but also see some new things.

[To the tune of Sting, "The Pirate's Bride," from the album You Still Touch Me.]

New Yorker on Halliburton

The New Yorker has a great article on Halliburton in its latest issue. It includes this priceless quote (at the very end of the paragraph), about private companies (like Halliburton) that have won big contracts to rebuild postwar Iraq:

It is not surprising that Cheney, after five years of running Halliburton, a company that considers war as providing growth opportunities," regards winning the peace in Iraq as a challenge for private enterprise as well as for government. Yet it is reasonable to ask if Cheney’s faith in companies like Halliburton contributed to his conviction that the occupation of Iraq would be a tidy, easily managed affair.... Many of those involved, however, see themselves as part of a democratic vanguard. Jack Kemp’s spokesman, P. J. Johnson, told me, "We’re doing good by doing well."

I normally hear the term invoked for things like water-purification technology businesses, so it was a bit of a jolt to read it in this context. But it does demonstrate the rhetorical brilliance of today's conservatives.

On a related note, Naomi Klein has a piece in the Guardian on the Research Triangle Institute, a North Carolina-based think-tank, and its work in postwar Iraq. The opening paragraph:

On March 4 last year, with the military campaign just 15 days away, the United States agency for international development asked three American firms to bid for a unique job; after Iraq had been invaded and occupied, one company would be charged with setting up 180 local and provincial town councils in the rubble.

Heads-down at work

I've been pushing hard these last few days to finish up two major projects, both of which are going out the door early next week. Hence the light, indeed frivolous, posts.

[To the tune of The Rolling Stones, "Let It Loose," from the album Exile on Main Street.]

History of American oratory, chap. 55

From Senator Zell Miller's comments on Janet Jackson and various other signals of the decline of American civilization:

I'm not talking just about an exposed mammary gland with a pull-tab attached to it.

Not exactly William Jenning Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, or Mario Savio's Free Speech Movement speech. But memorable, nonetheless.

[via Wonkette]

[To the tune of Yes, "And You And I (Live)," from the album Yesyears (Disc 4).]

Google weirdness

To whoever got here by Googling "the background history of dental technology in nigeria": I'm sorry you probably didn't find what you were looking for (and the history of dentistry isn't as popular as the history of medicine), but Google gets weird sometimes. (I come up seventh on the search results!)

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "Amandla," from the album Amandla.]

Is this for real?

I'm not sure if this is from a joke issue of the Crimson, or what....

Committee Approves Porn Magazine
H Bomb will feature nude pictures of undergraduates

After flipping through the pages of Squirm, a Vassar College erotica magazine, the Committee on College Life (CCL) voted to approve a student-run magazine that will feature nude pictures of Harvard undergraduates and articles about sexual issues at its meeting yesterday....

[Cofounder] Katharina C. Baldegg ’06... [said] that she does not object to H Bomb being called porn.

“It’s a sex magazine that will hopefully be run by students of all sexual orientations and backgrounds,” Baldegg said.Baldegg said she expected the magazine, which will also include art and fiction articles, to garner a lot of attention.

“I guess student porn is sort of an underground thing,” she said.

There's also a too-obvious-to-make Vassar joke here.

Assistant Dean of the College Paul J. McLoughlin, a CCL member, said he consulted University General Counsel Robert W. Iuliano ’83, the University news office and University spokesperson Robert P. Mitchell before the decision.

“I needed to see if there were liability issues,” McLoughlin said.

In order to avoid liability, students will not be able to take nude pictures inside of Harvard buildings, according to McLoughlin.

I love that last bit!

[To the tune of Misia, "Wasurenai Hibi," from the album Greatest Hits.]

Tech Live

I think the show is actually Tech Live.

Of course, we don't get TechTV, and I've been on it once already. I must make a point to only appear on networks I watch... which would limit me to Disney, PBS, and BBC America. Scratch that.

TechTV Live

If anybody gets TechTV, there's the chance that I may be on it tomorrow, on the show "TechTV Live." They're running a piece on the future of Internet protocols-- really it's a piece on the notion of the Internet of Things-- and they needed someone who could give them a few quotes. Apparently every other talking head in Silicon Valley is unavailable (are they all at some conference that I didn't get invited to?), so they sent a crew out to the house, and I talked to them while Elizabeth played in the background.

I'm turning into the Samsung of tech punditry: the lower-cost Korean alternative to better-known American brands. Or rather, Samsung circa 1980. One could have far worse role models.

Freezing cold

For some reason, it was very cold this morning. Which means it was about 45 degrees, which will be today's high in many places I've lived. My blood has thinned a lot.

[To the tune of "Bhima," from The Mahabharata Original Soundtrack.]

I feel safer already!

We had one of these when I was growing up. It always creeped me out a little. Now I know why!

Pressure Cookers: The Explosive Truth

A Department of Homeland Security bulletin issued last week to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. Its title: "Potential Terrorist Use of Pressure Cookers."... Pressure cookers, it notes, can be turned into "improvised explosive devices" with the addition of one ingredient -- explosives.

[via Wonkette]

[To the tune of Ludwig van Beethoven, "Allegro con brio," from the album Beethoven: Symphonies No.5 Op.67 & No.2 Op.36.]

Cat on acid

From Craig's List, this piece on owning a cat who's insane. All I can say is, Marlowe and Tennison have done just about everything that's described there.

[To the tune of Ludwig van Beethoven, "- Andante cantabile con moto," from the album Beethoven: Symphonies N°6 Op 68 'Pastoral' & No 1 Op 21.]

Corporate authorship

i I love my job, for a whoe bunch of different reasons: for example, it exists. (Piece of dark humor that summarizes a moment: What's the hot new status symbol in Silicon Valley? A job.) One thing I always find a little disconcerting is the way things I'll write in internal e-mails, or say in a meeting, will find their way into a research proposal, or one of our articles.

This isn't an illegitimate appropriation of my work-- I incorporate lots of other people's ideas in my work, no doubt-- but a reflection of how different the lines of authorship and attribution are in this world versus the academic one. We have a very collective style of writing here-- sometimes we all work on a piece, sometimes sections are divvied up, and sometimes an article will get revised so substantially by so many different people that it tips from being heavily edited to co-authored. And my name gets on everything I contribute to, so I have no complaints on that front.

But there are research outfits that that deliberately obscure authorship, as via Moore's Lore reports:

There is a "hot new" research outfit in England called Rethink Research. It's headed by Peter White, formerly of Comptuerwire, and Caroline Gabriel, formerly of VNU....

Rethink has no author credits on its reports. It depends entirely on the brand to carry the day. It does this deliberately, to keep any writer from getting too much salary, and to keep successful ones from gaining the reputation needed to go out on their own.

But they don't just shortchange the writers here. They shortchange the customers. I don't know whether this report was done by qualified experts of a bunch of Googling Monkeys.

i I find the middle paragraph pretty chilling, especially given that I've been staying up extra late trying to finish my piece on actor-network theory and pervasive computing, which is part of a campaign to build what Tom Peters calls "the brand of me." But it also raises a question: How much of what's written has authors?

For most of us-- certainly for academics and postacademics-- authorship is a no-brainer. Of course things have authors, unless you want to deconstruct the notion of the "Author." But think of all the texts we encounter in our daily lives that don't have author credit: everything from street signs to forms to encyclopedia entries (the majority of which are unsigned). For all our attention to it, is authorship the exception rather than the rule?

[To the tune of Giovanni Da Palestrina, "Gloria," from the album Missa Papae Marcelli, Missa Aeterna Christi Munera.]

A civilization, crystallized in a moment

Peter Gosselin's recent L.A. Times review of books on the New Economy had this terrific anecdote (first reported in Maggie Mahar's Bull! A History of the Boom, 1982-1999) that, for me, perfectly summarizes the whole dot-com era. (Since it's more than a week old and you have to subscribe to something like five different services to get to it, I'm not going to bother with a link.)

San Jose resident Kathy Rubino... learned how deeply the market's influence had penetrated American society when she awoke one morning, popped on CNBC and recepived an obscene phone call.

As the caller panted lurid remarks, the network's Joe Kernen warned of falling stock prices. "Suddenly," Mahar writes, "the obscene caller interrupted himself. 'Is that Kernen...?' he asked.

"Rubino, stunned, off balance-- and still groggy-- found herself answering him: 'The market has taken a plunge....'

'Jesus,' the anonymous caller responded, 'any word on Cisco?'"

Ah, the roaring nineties....

Technology diffusion from the hospital to the home

Another research-related question. Are there any studies of medical technologies that start out in the hospital, then move to the home?

I've been following developments in the RFID (radio frequency ID) space, and have noticed a number of cases of RFID being incorporated into hospital patient ID systems (those bracelets they put on you when you check in): U. S. Navy hospital ships are using them, and hospitals in Singapore have used RFID-tagged patient bracelets to maintain SARS quarantines. (Hospitals are also potential testing grounds for smart shelves, for using RFID for asset management-- e.g., always knowing where all the defibrilators, incubators, etc. are. Given that hospitals have a lot of stuff they have to keep track of, and some of it is both extremely expensive and very mobile, one can see how this could be quite useful.)

Now, one of the areas people working on consumer applications of RFID think it could be of great use is in the health context. For example, smart medicine chests could keep track of the drugs you're taking, remind you if you've missed a dosage, and bug you to take your entire course of a drug (something like 40% of people don't finish all of a prescription).

My question is, are there studies of technologies or applications that are developed in the hospital, then make their way into the home? To what degree does the hospital serve as an incubator (as it were) for consumer products? I suspect that you could find examples from physical therapy devices, drug bottle designs, tools for chronic disease management, or maternity and infant care. But has anyone written on this?

[To the tune of Jimi Hendrix, "Day Tripper," from the album BBC Sessions (Disc 2).]

This month's Atlantic... um, Monthly

A while ago my wife and I got a subscription to The Atlantic Montly, either as a gift, or when Civilization fell. ( Civilization was a magazine published by the Smithsonian. Not too many of you will remember, because it folded several years ago.)

I regularly find a couple interesting things in each issue of The Atlantic Montly, but the current issue is a must read. Caitlin Flanagan's long essay on "the nanny wars," and how the rebirth of domestic labor saved the women's movement; Keith Gessen's hilarious piece on how the morticians who preserved Lenin have gone into business for themselves; Bruce Ackerman and David Fontana's short article on Thomas Jefferson's peculiar behavior during the counting of ballots for the 1800 election-- it's what people thought The New Yorker was before Tina Brown got to it.

Strangely, though, the book reviews aren't that compelling this month. And I'm not just saying that because, long ago in the mists of time, I published one.

[To the tune of Henryk Gorecki, "I. Lento - Sostenuto Tranquillo Ma Cantabile," from the album Symphony No. 3.]

Scientific communities and networks

This probably just reveals my ignorance, but: have any historians of science made use of the literature on social networks and open exchange systems-- e.g., Woody Powell's work on networks, Yochai Benkler's studies of open source, etc.?

Heaven knows there's tons of stuff written on scientific communities, and lots of work that talk about networks; but when historians of science say "networks," they usually mean "people who know each other" or "people who are linked together in some way" or "people who share some common goals, and work together to reach them."

I've been reading Powell's "Neither Markets nor Hierarchies," and it strikes me that one could profitably think about scientific communities as networks in the way that Powell describes-- or perhaps, as sometimes organizing into networks (e.g. amateur astronomers) and hierarchies (e.g. astronomers at Greenwich). Maybe.

Just a thought.

Wireless in the Palo Alto Library

My daughter is at her ballet class at the Palo Alto Arts Center, and I decided to wander over to the library to do a little work. It turns out they've got an open wifi network here, so I can really get some serious stuff done while my daughter dances. Or, I can write blog entries.

I wonder how long it'll be before finding a wireless network in a public place like this will cease to be a cool discovery, and become just another utility. How long did people say, "Hey, look, lighting!" or "A public bathroom! Cool!"?

Though it's a beautiful day. I might see if the network reaches outdoors.

First "Freedom Fries," and now....

idiolect reports:

In a move designed to make the United States seem more "bad-assed and scary in a quasi-heavy-metal manner," Congress passed a bill Monday changing the nation's name to the Ünited Stätes of Ämerica. "Much like Mötley Crüe and Motörhead, the Ünited Stätes is not to be messed with," said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). An upcoming redesign of the Ämerican flag will feature the new name in burnished silver wrought in a jagged, gothic font and bolted to a black background. A new national anthem is also in the works, to be written by composer Glenn Danzig and tentatively titled "Howl Of The She-Demon."

I just hope it's easier to sing than "The Star-Spangled Banner!"

[To the tune of Oleta Adams, "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me," from the album Two Rooms - Celebrating The Songs Of Elton John & Bernie Taupin.]