OECD Information Technology Outlook 2004

The Table of Contents and the Highlights PDF of the OECD Information Technology Outlook 2004 is now available. The Highlights document mentions that spam is now estimated to be about 60% of e-mail and the OECD is now coordinating a Task Force on spam (see OECD Work on Spam: Department), they have a “Toolkit” (which you can’t download!) and there are some reports online that nicely summarize things. (See OECD Work on Spam: Publications & Documents: Reports – the Background Paper in particular provides an overview of the growth in spam.) Maybe the OECD will do something about spam. This came to me from a post by Lachance on Humanist.

Computing or Humanities?

From Humanist, an essay on Computing or Humanities? The Growth and Development of Humanities Computing which mentions what is happening at King’s and Willard McCarty and Harold Short’s map of a Methodological Commons.
I tend to take a very different view where Humanities Computing is not an area of computing methods and tools useful to the humanities, but a discipline that brings humanities inquiry to and through computing. The radical idea I would put forward is that computing (or at least multimedia) is a new discipline of the humanities that draws on traditions of the more established disciplines.

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50×15 project from AMD

Matt Patey has drawn my attention to the 50×15 Initiative by AMD to create a PIC (Personal Internet Communicator) that is low-cost and easy to use so that by 2015 we could see 50% of the world’s population connected to the Internet. For a story on this see, AMD’s PC to increase online world / Low-end Internet model would assist emerging countries.
I, like Matt, have problems with the technology choices (Windows CE in a closed box with various preinstalled apps for media viewing.) This is a recipe for expanding the base of consumers not for empowering people to participate as creators on the net. The idea, if I understand AMD’s slides, is to market this through the telecommunication companies – reminds me of Minitel.
While Linux may not be the cure for all ills, why not imagine a project like this based on a cheap Linux laptop like the Wal-Mart $500 linux laptop.

Make Viruses Not Screen Savers

It has been reported in the media that fake software is being circulated on the Internet under the "makelovenotspam" name, which is actually not a screensaver but a computer virus. Please note that the "makelovenotspam" initiative has been discontinued. There is no point in trying to obtain a copy of the screensaver, as it will not function anymore. Moreover, you may be offered a computer virus which has nothing to do with the original campaign, and may actually be harmful to your computer and the data stored on it. You are therefore advised not to download or install any software purporting to be the "makelovenotspam" screensaver, and to remove any copy you may have on your PC.

So ends the first chapter in the sorry make LOVE not SPAM initiative. From screensaver to virus.

Second Chapter
What is interesting is the suggestion from kuro5hin.org – namely that such DoS attacks could be decentralized and built into personal tools like our e-mail clients. Imagine if everyone could set their client to hose servers that annoy them. Imagine if iDoS (personal Denial of Service) systems were widely available and easy to use (just drag an offending spam message to the “harass for a month” applet). A radical idea of the “give everyone a gun and there will be no crime” variety, but an interesting idea none the less. My guess is that taken to an extreme this would slow the Internet down to the point where major players would have to implement a solution to both spam and counter-spam.

Tufte: Visual and Statistical Thinking

Visual and Statistical Thinking is a “textbooklet” by Edward Tufte that Lorna got me (along for a replacement for my missing The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. It looks closely at two examples of how graphs were used to think through a problem in order to recommend action; first John Snow’s analysis of the Broad Street cholera epidemic, and then the decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger. Tuftewrites that his “general argument is straightforward”:

An essential analytic task in making decisions based on evidence is to understand how things work – mechanism, trade-offs, process and dynamics, cause and effect. That is, intervention-thinking and policy-thinking demand causality-thinking.
Making decisions based on evidence requires the appropriate display of that evidence. Good displays of data help to reveal knowledge relevant to understanding mechanism, process and dynamics, cause and effect. That is, displays of statistical data should directly serve the analytic task at hand. (p. 3, copyright 1997, Graphics Press, Cheshire, Connecticut).

Text visualization in the humanities is not, however meant to guide decisions. Literary analysis guides interpretation which does not lead immediately or causally to decisions. What then is point of interpretative analysis (visual or not)? An extreme view would be that it is an art; the art of creating new aesthetic works of a particular genre called intepretation that stand in a particular relationship with other works. Interpretations are made or crafted from abstract matter, namely other works of art. Their appreciation is predicated on knowledge of the “original”.
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Wal-Mart sells $500 linux laptop

InfoWorld: Wal-Mart breaks price barrier with Linspire Linux laptop is a story about a laptop from Linspire for $498 USD for sale at Wal-Mart. While it isn’t a Mac titanium, it has 128 MB of memory, 30 GB hard drive, a 14.1″ LCD panel, and a VIA C3 processor, 1.0 GHz. See the Walmart.com – Balance 14.1″ Notebook Computer with CD-ROM Drive catalog entry.