Almost a year ago, at the beginning of the presidential campaign, I put forward an argument against the conventional wisdom that states “that the internet has not yet reached its peak of influence and probably won’t reach that peak before Nov. 2008, but maybe the during the cycle after that we will start to see the internet come into its own as the central medium for political discussion.” My argument was twofold: 1) The internet has flourished across the demographic spectrum. As far as market penetration, the internet is ready to compete with established media sources. “… it is simply inappropriate to appeal to the discrepancies between political discussions on the internet and other media sources as evidence that the internet is out of touch with the general population.” 2) The apparent power of the mainstream media is a self-fulfilling illusion. This illusion can be broken by simply ignoring its influence, and instead appealing to the internet. The internet must stop making excuses for its perceived impotence and realize that the conditions are already in place for a dramatic shift in the balance of power… I believe the public is sympathetic to these appeals and are ready for an alternative framework. This framework is already largely in motion on the internet. I admit, the argument seemed rather idealistic at the time, or at least implausible. The conventional wisdom was strong; the internet was not ready. But even though the primaries have yet to be decided, I think I can safely say that I was right even back in June of ’07. Specifically, Obama has been running his campaign using the internet as the primary means of communication, exactly as I suggested. Consider, for instance, his recently released fundraising numbers: Online Fundraising: * More than $45 million raised online in February […]

Cyber Goggles: High-tech memory aid Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a smart video goggle system that records everything the wearer looks at, recognizes and assigns names to objects that appear in the video, and creates an easily searchable database of the recorded footage. Designed to function as a high-tech memory aid, these “Cyber Goggles” promise to make the act of losing your keys a thing of the past, according to head researcher professor Tatsuya Harada. Make this tech interoperative with the Internet of Things, and you get the spimey world of the future in one step. Thanks, Steve!

From A Robot in Every Home by Bill gates One such technology will help solve one of the most difficult problems facing robot designers: how to simultaneously handle all the data coming in from multiple sensors and send the appropriate commands to the robot’s motors, a challenge known as concurrency. A conventional approach is to write a traditional, single-threaded program–a long loop that first reads all the data from the sensors, then processes this input and finally delivers output that determines the robot’s behavior, before starting the loop all over again. The shortcomings are obvious: if your robot has fresh sensor data indicating that the machine is at the edge of a precipice, but the program is still at the bottom of the loop calculating trajectory and telling the wheels to turn faster based on previous sensor input, there is a good chance the robot will fall down the stairs before it can process the new information. Concurrency is a challenge that extends beyond robotics. Today as more and more applications are written for distributed networks of computers, programmers have struggled to figure out how to efficiently orchestrate code running on many different servers at the same time. And as computers with a single processor are replaced by machines with multiple processors and “multicore” processors–integrated circuits with two or more processors joined together for enhanced performance–software designers will need a new way to program desktop applications and operating systems. To fully exploit the power of processors working in parallel, the new software must deal with the problem of concurrency. The problem of concurrency is essentially a problem of coordinating multiple systems to work together simultaneously with a single, unified goal. This is a problem that biological systems solved millions of years ago. It seems a bit to hasty to suggest […]

The concept of a comprehensive encyclopedia of life on the Internet proved too popular. Its computers were overwhelmed and couldn’t keep it alive when it debuted Tuesday. The encyclopedia, which eventually will have more than 1 million pages devoted to different species of life on Earth, quickly crashed on its first day of a public unveiling, organizers said. Scientists at the Encyclopedia of Life sought help from experts at Wikipedia for keeping their fledgling Web site going despite massive — and anticipated — interest. The site went back up Tuesday afternoon, but with expectations of more problems, although only temporary ones. “We’ve been overwhelmed by traffic,” encyclopedia founding chairman Jesse Ausubel said. “We’re thrilled.” www.eol.org still doesn’t load right for me. This idea of working with wikipedia, instead of in competition with wikipedia, to provide a more detailed look at a particular area of knowledge, makes me very excited. I am particularly taken with the enthusiasm we have for marking up our technology with our knowledge about life.

Link via Engadget

There Is ‘Design’ In Nature, Biologist Argues “The idea that there is ‘design’ in nature is very appealing,” Miller said. “People want to believe that life isn’t purposeless and random. That’s why the intelligent design movement wins the emotional battle for adherents despite its utter lack of scientific support. “To fight back, scientists need to reclaim the language of ‘design’ and the sense of purpose and value inherent in a scientific understanding of nature,” he said. … Miller will argue that science itself, including evolutionary biology, is predicated on the idea of “design” — the correlation of structure with function that lies at the heart of the molecular nature of life. I agree there is design in nature. Obviously human beings create designed objects, and this is a natural process. The notion of designed being argued for above, that structure is correlated with function, is a fairly benign position to take on design. However, central to the pull of the ID theory is that design is impossible without a designer. So the crux of the argument and the success of this strategy lies in the ability to argue that function and structure can coincide without anything guiding the process. I think that will be quite difficult; without an appeal to a designer, our intuitive grasp on the notion of ‘design’ is lost. The word ‘design’ is, I think, an agential verb, and makes an inherently implicit reference to some agent who is the efficient cause of a designed object. I am currently writing a paper where I argue that the idea of ‘use’ is likewise an agential verb, and is incomprehensible without the notion of a ‘user’. Hence, if tools are objects that inherit their function from use, then the only proper understanding of the objects are in relation to […]

Back to back stories in my reader this morning: Poor People Use Yahoo, Those Better Off Use Google Yahoo is strong in “struggling societies,” “blue collar backbone,” and “remote America,” where as Google obtains higher use in “small town contentment,” “affluent suburbia,” and “upscale America. and 2008 Republican National Convention Names Official Innovation Provider Embracing technology that will propel the 2008 Republican National Convention to the forefront of the digital age, the GOP today announced that Google Inc. will serve as the Republican National Convention’s Official Innovation Provider.

Excellent article on Social Networking from the NYT Freakonomics blog. Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum The big picture: social networking technologies support and enable a new model of social life, in which people’s social circles will consist of many more, but weaker, ties. Though we will continue to have some strong ties (i.e., family and close friends), demographic changes, such as frequent household moves and the replacement of friends and family with market services for tasks such as daycare, are diminishing the role of social ties in everyday life. Weak ties (e.g., casual acquaintances, colleagues) may not be reliable for long-term support; their strength instead is in providing a wide range of perspectives, information, and opportunities. As society becomes increasingly dynamic, with access to information playing a growing role, having many diverse connections will be key. Social networking technologies provide people with a low cost (in terms of time and effort) way of making and keeping social connections, enabling a social scenario in which people have huge numbers of diverse, but not very close, acquaintances. Does this makes us better as a society? Perhaps not — we can imagine this being a selfish and media-driven world in which everyone vies for attention and no one takes responsibility for one another. But perhaps it does — we can also imagine this being a world in which people are far more accepting of diverse ways and beliefs, one in which people are willing to embrace the new and different. Specifically, I need to research the references cited in this paper, so I’m logging this for future work.

Unplugged Forbes Editor in Tears After Two Days thx Jon

Reading through old Dennettalia, I stumbled on this: Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds (3) Robots are artifacts, and consciousness abhors an artifact; only something natural, born not manufactured, could exhibit genuine consciousness. … If consciousness abhors an artifact, it cannot be because being born gives a complex of cells a property (aside from that historic property itself) that it could not otherwise have “in principle”. There might, however, be a question of practicality. We have just seen how, as a matter of exigent practicality, it could turn out after all that organic materials were needed to make a conscious robot. For similar reasons, it could turn out that any conscious robot had to be, if not born, at least the beneficiary of a longish period of infancy. Making a fully-equipped conscious adult robot might just be too much work. It might be vastly easier to make an initially unconscious or nonconscious “infant” robot and let it “grow up” into consciousness, more or less the way we all do. This hunch is not the disreputable claim that a certain sort of historic process puts a mystic stamp of approval on its product, but the more interesting and plausible claim that a certain sort of process is the only practical way of designing all the things that need designing in a conscious being. Such a claim is entirely reasonable. Dennett goes on to argue that this claim is reasonable, because it is a specific case of the more general claim: (4) Robots will always just be much too simple to be conscious. Dennett compares the possibility of building a conscious artifact to the possibility of creating an animation that is indistinguishable from real video. I suggest that Dennett simultaneously overvalues the sophistication of conscious processes, and underestimates the progress of our […]

just words and so much skin