technology | writing notes

FSCONS fast approaching

The real countdown has now begun for the FSCONS conference in Göteborg 24-26 October. The FSCONS has turned into one of those cool conferences with a good mix between the geek developers and the geek analysers.

Since any programming skills I may have are largely imaginary I attend the conference to listen to the latter group. Among them this year are

John Buckman from magnatune who will be talking about Squeezing the Evil out of the Music Industry, Rasmus Fleischer will present Copyright in an Historical Perspective, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén has written two books on her topic and I am looking forward to her talk on Digital Commons throughout history, Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons is presenting a talk on How far behind is free+open culture? which should be good. Smári Mccarthy has a talk entitled Digital Fabrication and Social Change & Denis Rojo is presenting on Free software and the freedom of creation, Victor Stone is going to demonstrate Tracking Attribution Across the Web & Oscar Swartz is talking about The End of Free Communications?

And these are only the geek analysers! Most of the really fascinating stuff is stuff I don’t understand.

So it’s an easy guess to see that this years FSCONS is going to be really, really good.

Posted on September 26, 2008 by mklang

Dogshit DNA

The city of Petah Tikva (near Tel Aviv) is creating a DNA database of local dogs. At first this may seem like an exotic or advanced research project but the purpose of the DNA database is to have a way to check up which dog owners do not pick up after their dogs (via BBC).

The whole system requires the collecting of DNA samples from all local dogs. These must then be analysed and entered into a database. Then when a dog turd is found a sample must be taken analysed and checked against the database.

All this seems like a large investment to keep the city clean.

Poop Free Zone! by Daniel Greene (CC BY-NC-ND)

Posted on September 20, 2008 by mklang

Voodoo Science

In what is one of the best examples of voodoo science and the gullibility of the law that I have seen in a long time (ever?) a court in India has accepted a scientist claims that his machine can measure guilt.

The International Herald Tribune reports a case concerns a woman who was accused of killing her former fiancé by poisoning him.The legal system decided to test the Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test of Neuroscientist Champadi Raman Mukundan.

The test to measure her guilt consisted of placing 32 electrodes on the accused head. They interrogators then read aloud their version of events, speaking in the first person along with with neutral statements. From this the software distinguishes memories from normal cognition. Even if the accused said nothing her brain reacted when the crime was described. The judge agreed that the scans were proof of “experiential knowledge” of having committed the murder, rather than just having heard about it.

Obviously there are too many reactions to this! But let’s ignore the obvious lack of technical reliability, the need to prove the technology and the differences in legal and scientific methods and standards of proof.

Lets just say that the accused may have a guilty conscience in relation to the victim for several reasons other than the fact she may or may not have poisoned him. In addition to this she may lack any emotions of guilt even if she poisoned him.

The scary part is that the dignity of science is accepted without too many pertinent questions by the court and create real consequences.

Voodoo Fetish Market, Lomé by themanwithsalthair

Posted on September 16, 2008 by mklang

Universities pimp out students

Information and news tends to come from many strange source but I was really surprised to find a nasty piece of news in the Göteborg Uni student newspaper. To put it bluntly Göteborg University has made a series of larger or smaller errors. Some just bad ideas while others really bad ideas.

In order to ensure that all students can be reached and to be able to take full advantage of information technology someone decided to provide all students with “official” emails ending with @student.gu.se – on the face of it this may seem like a good idea but I really have no idea why. It would have been better to allow/demand/require all students to register an email address but I don’t want to get into that part right now.

The second mistake was to decide to manage the email system themselves. Which resulted in a couple of years of mismanagement, a lot of frustration and a final collapse of the whole system. Ok, so I am exaggerating it was not a collapse but basically the university admitted defeat – and it is here where the local student newspaper comes in – and have handed the administration of the email to Google.

Now this is a development which has been happening without much fuss all over the world Trinity College Dublin, Arizona State University and Linköping University (another Swede) but it kind of hits me square in the nuts when my home university adopts the scheme.

So why does it bother me that Google has taken over student email at Göteborg Uni? Why does it seem that I am the only one who is bothered by what is supposed to be a comforting fact that the students will still have @student.gu.se as their mail?

What really bugs me is that the university has basically sold its students. Not only that, but the university is a public authority and as such should not be promoting a private company in this way. The University of Gothenburg has approximatly 50,000 students (25 000 full-time students) and 5,000 employees. This public authority is then used to demand of it’s 50 000 clients that they must become reliant on a private company.

As if this wasn’t enough the recent Swedish FRA law allows surveillance of all communications that pass through Sweden. Since Google’s servers are outside Sweden this means that all the students email will be under surveillance.

This is wrong in so many ways but nobody seems to be reacting to the fact that univesities are pimping out their students for the sake of technical simplicity – when this is not necessary!

Posted on September 12, 2008 by mklang

Upgrading the simple pleasures

It was bound to happen but I kind of missed it when it did. The simplest of bath toys the rubber duck has been upgraded.

photo: Rainy Day Duck by Mr Tentacle (CC by-nc-nd)

The updated rubber duck (from I want one of those) comes with twin propellers and a remote control. Which means that it goes around, backwards and forwards. But the poor little duck has been adapted in other ways too. There is even an adult duck version which is pink and runs on batteries… So much for the innocence of bathtime.

Posted on September 11, 2008 by mklang

Personalising technology

At some time or another most of us have given inanimate objects personality traits. It could be as simple as hitting a leg on a table and crying out that the table is malevolent or a complex as naming and talking to objects around us. It’s weird but not so strange.

Part of our relationship with technology entails dressing it up, decorating it perhaps in an attempt to make it more humane, more friendly – but sometimes simply as a way of standing out of the crowd. Big companies have not been slow to catch on. iPods can (could?) be engraved, Nike’s could be custom designed and Mobile telephones can be blinged.

To me this was a recent addition to the mass consumer market. The illusion of personalisation by buying add-ons. The ultimate symbol of this was the ability to switch covers which came with the early Nokia phones. But I was wrong was a part of an older personalisation trend. I realized this yesterday when I came across this telephone cover at the Technical Museum in Stockholm. It’s almost too good. Tacky deluxe!

Photo: Nokia was not the first… by Mathias Klang (CC by-nc)

Click for a large image & admire the detailed retro bling!

Posted on September 11, 2008 by mklang

The world ends next month

CERN is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and on Wednesday (10 September) they will make the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The first injection of the beam into the machine will be between 9:00 and 10:00 a. m.

So what is it?

Wikipedia explains: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

image from CERN

Some claim (and have attempted to use the courts to prevent the experiments) that the LHC experiments could have potentially disastrous results, in particular they could create “micro black holes”- actually the real experiments that some fear will end the world will not be carried out for another month. The fears are exaggerated and CERN says it’s all safe. This end of the world thing will play havoc with my planning but this is not the first time the end of the world threatened to ruin my plans. I suppose we should get used to this…

Posted on September 8, 2008 by mklang

Ignorant waste

OK so energy politics is not my forte but this is too interesting not to bring up. Sweden generates half of their electricity from nuclear power. In the production of nuclear energy water is used…

…to extract the extra heat from nuclear power stations (cooling water). It is not at all radioactive and it could be very easily be channelled into Sweden’s extensive district-heating grid. But no – this water is not even used to provide showers in the nuclear facility. Instead it is poured into the sea, possibly harming sea life and creating lovely clouds of expensive steam.

According to Paddy K this hot water accounts for one-third of all the energy (energy not electricity) produced in Sweden.

If Paddy is right about what he writes then this ignorant waste needs to be changed…

Posted on September 4, 2008 by mklang

Google browser

Google’s browser Chrome is being released soon after 2 years of development – but are we excited? I don’t know the whole browser war is a thing of the past. Oh well bring it on, lets see what you’ve got.

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome…We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

At least they have a colorless cartoon to explain what it does…

Posted on September 2, 2008 by mklang