Jaron Lanier has an Op-Ed in the August 9th issue of the New York Times, titled, “The First Church of Robotics.” It is a brief revisitation of some ideas from his recent book, You Are Not a Gadget, which was reviewed in the Times earlier this year. What Lanier has to say about artificial intelligence … Read more Jaron Lanier Op-Ed on AI
As technology is more and more the means of surveillance and control and not just information access and interaction, the role of the Hacker has become central to new scenarios of freedom and rebellion. That’s why I’ve always loved 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. I recently saw the Spring 2010 issue and was glad to see … Read more 2600 piece on the Voyager ILS
Ron Day and Hamid Ekbia of the IU library school have an article in the new First Monday titled, “(Digital) experiences.” The article looks at three types of “digital experience” using analytical perspectives on modern “experience” coming from Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Day’s and Ekbia’s work gets at the roots of some of the … Read more Ron Day and Hamid Ekbia on “digital experiences”
A Space for Hate: The White Power Movement’s Adaptation into Cyberspace Author: Adam Klein Price: $25.00 Published: June 2010 ISBN: 978-1-936117-07-9 A Space for Hate speaks to the media and information topic of hate speech in cyberspace, but more specifically, how its inscribers have adapted their movement into the social networking and information-providing contexts of … Read more New book: A Space for Hate: The White Power Movement’s Adaptation into Cyberspace
Many librarians, when asked what is involved in being a librarian besides checking out books, will say something to the effect of, “I don’t know the answers, but I know how to look them up.” Where a doctor has knowledge of medicine, a librarian has knowledge of how to find out knowledge of medicine. (Or … Read more Knowing how to find out
Today’s New York Times has an informative little item comparing the environmental impact of producing an ipad versus that of a paper book: “How Green is My iPad?“
I just bought a Motorola Droid, which is Verizon’s Android-based smart phone, Android being Google’s OS for mobile devices. Its integration with Google gives me a lot of “power” to integrate my online tools with my mobile device, which is very satisfying. I experience it as empowering, and my attention is focused on learning what … Read more The Power of Google is Power
The talk I gave in Alberta on February 5th was recorded. The recording is now on the web in mp3 form. Toni Samek’s introduction feels a bit grand, but the real me will be on the mic shortly. The recording itself came out all right. Not all of the audience questions are audible, but as … Read more Podcast of Alberta Talk: Disintermediation 2.0
Notice that I am not using the word “ontology.” I’ll get into why later, but if you’ve read any Heidegger you can guess… Hope Olson, Sandy Berman, and many others who have done work based on theirs, have shown how classification systems tend not to represent all users well. Hope Olson has described the problem … Read more Quick note on taxonomic transparency
Jaron Lanier has a new book, You Are Not a Gadget (NY Times review), which I have to add to my reading list and bump up a few notches. There is an excerpt from it in the February issue of Harper’s: “The Serfdom of Crowds.” He’s writing along the lines of some of what I … Read more Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget
Slides to go along with my talk at the University of Alberta in Edmonton this morning…
My friend Ramona Islam shared with me an interesting blog post by chemist Jean-Claude Bradley, discussing the reliability (or non-reliability) of scientific reference sources that are considered trusted within the discipline. I find it especially interesting in terms of implications for projects like Wolfram Alpha and other attempts to build automated reasoning systems around inconsistently-defined … Read more A chemist on “trusted sources”
For those of you who in the Edmonton, Alberta area, I will be giving the keynote speech at the Forum for Information Professionals at the University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies next month. I will be speaking in the morning on Friday, February 5th.
For fun on a Friday, a couple of recent New Yorker “Shouts and Murmurs” columns related to our world: Live Your Life and Subject: Our Marketing Plan
Adorno and Horkheimer might have something to say about this, too. I thought I had noticed this beginning to happen and was actually planning to post something about it soon, but Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has the full story: “Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention.” Read through this and … Read more Google splits apart the search
Uhhh… Hey Beavis. This scholarly recommender service wants to know how I rate this article.
From Salon: “Is the Internet melting our brains?” “No! The author of “A Better Pencil” explains why such hysterical hand-wringing is as old as communication itself.” By Vincent Rossmeier. From The Australian: “
From “How Technology Changes Society,” by: William Fielding Ogburn. Published in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 249, Social Implications of Modern Science (Jan., 1947), pp. 81-88. Between the patenting of an invention and its use, the old adage is appropriate: there is many a slip betwixt the cup and … Read more An illustration of the difficulty of being a good futurist
Leveraging our impact with technology means certain things. It means substituting machine processes, which are good at certain kinds of thinking, for intellectual processes, which are good at other kinds of thinking. In terms of “recommender engines” or other systems intended to connect people with information automatically, it means relying on aggregate data and averages. … Read more People and Machines