This is worth watching: A Brief History of Computers, As Seen in Old TV Ads One of the many perversely fascinating things about YouTube is that its users have uploaded a remarkable percentage of those ads to the site, including both famous and obscure examples. Watch enough of them, in the right order, and what you have is a history of the PC in American life. Link via BoingBoing

I always forget this. On October 6th, this blog turned 2 years old. My old blogger site has turned into a graveyard of spammers, and looks quite out of date. I’m actually thinking that my blog could use a face lift too. What do you think? Also, here’s a picture of a robot to celebrate:

Just found this great article that tries to explain the Internet. It should be required reading for anyone who even thinks of regulating the net. A world of ends All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It’s not hard. The Net isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars’ worth of dumb decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You’re at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends. Sure, that’s a feel-good statement about everyone having value on the Net, etc. But it’s also the basic rock-solid fact about the Net’s technical architecture. And the Internet’s value is founded in its technical architecture.

Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute HOW TO OVERCOME PARTICIPATION INEQUALITY You can’t.

I boldly stepped outside of Greg Hall today to attend a talk offered by the Library and Information Sciences Department. I felt the talk, entitled “What’s an Author to Do? Google, Digitization, and the Future of Books”, by Vaidhyanathan, was somewhat scattered, but it was aimed at a Library Sciences audience so that might have been par for the course. The room was certainly packed. The talk was motivated by the ‘public debate’ between Kevin Kelly and John Updike that played out in the NYT over the issues arising from Google Books. Vaidhyanathan dismissed both positions as ‘technofundamentalist’, which as I understood from the talk is roughly the idea that technological change is a kind of inevitable progress, and that whatever unintended externalities arise due to technological change can be resolved by further technological advancement. Updike was simply less optimistic of the change represented by Google Books, and claimed a nostalgia for the days of book stores and libraries. Instead of offering an alternative to fundamentalism, Vaidhyanathan suggested some important questions worth raising about Google Books that are notably absent from the public debate, with help from Lessig’s discussion of cyberspace IP law. Among the suggestions were all the usual suspects: privacy and confidentiality issues, transparency on Google’s end, a more open discussion of the what, when, and how of digital archiving, and so on. On the whole, Vaidhyanathan was cautiously optimistic about the prospects of a great big Google Library. He was very critical of Google’s privacy policy (he said there is no privacy), and was generally skeptical of Google’s closed-door, big corporation approach to the archive process. He did give two, I think very helpful, suggestions to the librarians; first, that ink and paper will never be replaced, nor will book sales be negatively affected by the digitization […]

I messed around with photoshop last night because clearly I have nothing else to do. Follow the jump for the results: boy girl robot

I was inspired to post this picture after it was used in a PowerPoint slide by Siva Vaidhyanathan who today gave a talk today on Google. Details coming soon.

To be expanded later From Hastert’s press conference last week: … our system obviously isn’t designed for the electronic age of Instant Messages. Also: Google and YouTube

Exa is six orders of magnitude above tera. Most Sun readers know about gigabytes and megabytes. But it’s estimated that in the year 2002 we created five exabytes (that’s a byte followed by 18 noughts) of information. |Link| I have trouble imagining that amount of data. I’m sure Eric Schmidt does too, but to him its just a mountain of rough diamonds waiting to be polished by Google. And his plans look, well, ambitious. And then there’s my dream product — I call it serendipity.It works like this. You have two computer screens. On one you’re typing, on the other comments appear checking the accuracy of what you are saying, suggesting better ways of making the same point. This would be good for journalists and politicians too! Impossible you might say. But I’m an optimist about human nature. History has proven that we have the ability and ingenuity to solve problems and improve our lives if only we are given the freedom to do so. And that’s exactly what the Internet does. Sounds innocent and helpful enough, but Schmidt clearly means this as a kind of political watchdog. He predicted that “truth predictor” software would, within five years, “hold politicians to account.” People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct. “One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,” he told the newspaper. |link| Combine this with GooglePAC, and you have the biggest name on the Internet looking to take on Washington. Now, I don’t want to disturb […]

I was strolling around the internet when I happened upon this quote: A recent Pew Internet and American Life Project survey notes that 42 percent of respondents fear that humans will lose control of technology, creating dangers like those in science fiction movies such as “The Terminator” or “The Matrix.” Some even believe that the intelligent robots we create will wind up treating us like pets. |link| After searching around for a while, I found that the Pew foundation recently updated its famous Internet survey (PDF) from the beginning of 2005. The original was rather bright-eyed and optimistic, with the most surprising statistics detailing the vast market penetrability of the internet (upwards of 70%) and broadband (around 40%) in American households. This newest survey is simultaneously more speculative and more reserved, and asks over 700 ‘experts’ in technology and related fields about their predictions for future. Specifically, they posed seven possible (and in most cases, compatible) scenarios obtaining in the year 2020, and asked if they agree with these scenarios. The scenario the media clinged onto was the following: The Future of the Internet II Autonomous technology is a problem: By 2020, intelligent agents and distributed control will cut direct human input so completely out of some key activities such as surveillance, security and tracking systems that technology beyond our control will generate dangers and dependencies that will not be recognized until it is impossible to reverse them. We will be on a “J-curve” of continued acceleration of change. Agree: 42% Disagree: 54% No reply: 4% Although Kurzweil is not among the responders, his influence in this question in particular is obvious. I’m not sure what, if anything, should be made about these results. In fact, most of the scenarios offered are pretty evenly balanced, with a disparity just large […]