Category: Internet Culture and Technology

Deus In Machina | Exploring Religion and Technology in Comparative Perspective

Image of woman and technologyThis weekend I attended parts of a conference called Deus in Machina | Exploring Religion and Technology in Comparative Perspective that was organized by Jeremy Stolow. The conference started with a great paper by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlett, “Social Sofware and Contemporary Jewish Life” that dealt ways in which new social networking tools are being used to reach out to youth. She talked about the The Open Source Judaism Project and other projects that are supported by ?û?¶?™ ¬ª MATZAT.

iPhone: Is it magic?

Mike Elgan has an article on iPhone: 20 things we don’t know (Jan. 12, 2007) in Digit a magazine about “the future of digital design”. In particular I agree with his questions about the touch screen interface and virtual keyboard – will it be responsive enough for Blackberry users who do push e-mail?

Image of Apple NewtonOne way of asking about the iPhone is to think about the Newton PDA which was also supposed to be a magical reinvention of personal computing. Like the iPhone, and unlike the iPod, it tried to do lots of things and as a result didn’t do anything well. The Palm Pilot got the PDA market right by doing fewer things very well and in a small enough package to fit in your pocket. As pretty and desirable as the iPhone is, I worry that it will be a delicate and fat phone; a slow and poor Internet device; and an expensive iPod with little memory.

That said, it will shakeup the cell phone business. If it doesn’t take off, someone else will get the need for new designs and digital integration right.

Update: Shawn pointed me to an article Apple Ushers in Era of the Fluid UI by Om Malik. Malik correctly, I think, identifies the fluid interface as the important innovation.

Scholarpedia

Scholarpedia is an alternative to the Wikipedia. It is peer reviewed anonymously. It seems to have been seeded by the Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems and Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence. Will it fly as an alternative?

Thanks to Judith for this.

Innovation in Information Technology

Innovation in ITThe 2001 report from the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council (of the National Academies of the USA), Innovation in Information Technology, has interesting charts about how key technologies like the Internet benefited from government research support. See Figure 1. The report introduces the Figure thus,

Figure 1 illustrates some of the many cases in which fundamental research in IT, conducted in industry and universities, led 10 to 15 years later to the introduction of entirely new product categories that became billion-dollar industries. It also illustrates the complex interplay between industry, universities, and government. The flow of ideas and people—the interaction between university research, industry research, and product development—is amply evident. (Chapter 1)

Our Lives in Digital Times

Digital Times ImageOur Lives in Digital Times is a report just out from Statistics Canada. A summary is available from The Daily of Friday, November 10, 2006.

The 23 page study reports:

The paperless
office is the office that never happened, with consumption of paper at an all-time high and the business of transporting paper thriving. Professional travel has most likely increased during a period when the Internet and videoconferencing
technology were taking-off, and; e-commerce sales do not justify recent fears of negative consequences on retail employment and real estate.

The paper further demonstrates that some of the key outcomes of ICTs are manifested in changing behavioural patterns, including communication and spending patterns. People have never communicated more, something exemplified by the explosion in international calling and the massive amounts of e-mails and other electronic communications. (“Abstract”, p. 4)

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are not having the predicted effects of erasing distance, creating a paperless office, ending retail, or finishing off surface mail.

The paperless society, the end of mail, the end of traditional retail and numerous other such proclamations have all been grossly exaggerated with quantification at this point in time proving them faulty.more wrong. This conventional wisdom came crashing down from the very early stages of opening up the markets. (p. 11)

Instead ICTs are enabling talk – “people communicate more than ever and their patterns of associations are wider” (p. 17). ICTs are not helping us withdraw, they are letting us spread out (sometimes too thin.)

It is interesting to note that “This paper represents a new direction in Information Society research and analysis, in an attempt to begin to address the socio-economic outcomes and impacts of ICT.” (“Note to readers”, p. 6)

National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data

The National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data produced a final report (PDF is here) calling for a national research data “archive” called Data Canada. This report has a deja vu feel about it as I was on the National Data Archive Consultation (SSHRC and then National Archive project) that produced a Needs Assessment Report (PDF) in 2001 and then a Final Report (PDF) in 2002. Nothing happened as a result of these, so I think SSHRC is now working with the sciences and health to make the case across the disciplines. Why do we need the sciences to make our case?

We recommend the creation of a task force, dubbed Data Force, to prepare a full national implementation strategy, and mount a pilot project to show the value and impact of multi-person and multidisciplinary access to research data. Once such a national strategy is broadly supported and has obtained appropriate funding commitments, we propose the establishment of a dedicated national infrastructure, tentatively called Data Canada, to assume overall leadership in the development and execution of a strategic plan. The plan would encompass and presumably extend the NCASRD‚Äôs recommendations. (p. 3 of the “Executive Summary”)

digg labs

Swarm Screendigg.com is a social networking site whose tools are showing up in more an more spots. They have some neat visualization tools in their digg labs, including Swarm (see picture to the left.) On their About page they describe digg thus:

Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.

What can you do as a digg user? Lots. Every digg user can digg (help promote), bury (help remove spam), and comment on stories… you can even digg and bury comments you like or dislike. Digg also allows you to track your friends’ activity throughout the site ‚Äî want to share a video or news story with a friend? Digg it!

Thanks to Matt for this.