technology

Trusting Technology

Claire over at Mummys Bracelet has written about the drawbacks in the blind trust in technology and used a row of fun/scary examples about people who have followed the advice of their satellite navigation systems into dead ends, rivers and other traps. Ignoring their better judgment and the evidence of their own eyes.

This is the kind of stuff I have written about before but it reminded me that I had a book chapter called “Trust & Technology” in Swedish which has never been online so I decided that it was time to but the preprint where it belongs – unfortunately it’s in Swedish but I was very happy with the way in which the chapter turned out.

The basic point of the article is that we should not trust technology more than necessary and, more importantly, we should not allow experts exclude us from discussing the pros and cons of technology.

Posted on by mklang

Silly Friday

The Mayor of Graz in Austria has reacted to polls showing that almost half of the people in the city felt that listening to other people’s mobile calls highly irritating – he has now ordered that mobile phones have to be put on silent mode when their owners get on a bus or a tram. (BBC Online)

Sure it is irritating listening to other peoples mobile phone calls, but why limit ourselves to public transportation? Why not make it illegal in parks and public buildings? I am also irritated by bad taste in clothes, body odors, drunks, boisterous kids, angry pensioners and people who insist on standing in the way. So why don’t we ban the all?

communication age
Creative Commons License Communication Age by credit: Dom Dada

Attempts at banning mobiles on public transport have been tested before and failed. In Stockholm the attempts failed and now the subway has excellent mobile coverage instead. Trains have silent compartments but this doesn’t stop people from talking on their phones. Its just something everyone will have to get used to.

The Mayor of Graz may not get this and even if he believes his ban it will fail (for so many reasons). All I can say is – thank god it’s Friday!

Posted on by mklang

On BitTorrent Media Distribution

David Erman from the Blekinge Institute of Technology has written an interesting thesis entitled “On BitTorrent Media Distribution”. Well worth download it here.
Abstract:

Large-scale, real-time multimedia distribution over the Internet has been the subject of research for a substantial amount of time. A large number of mechanisms, policies, methods, and schemes have been proposed for media coding, scheduling, and distribution. Internet Protocol (IP) multicast was expected to be the primary transport mechanism for this, though it was never deployed to the expected extent. Recent developments in overlay networks have reactualised the research on multicast, with the consequence that many of the previous mechanisms and schemes are being re-evaluated.

This thesis provides a brief overview of several important techniques for media broadcasting and stream merging, as well as a discussion of traditional IP multicast and overlay multicast. Additionally, we propose a number of modifications and extensions to the BitTorrent (BT) distribution and replication system to make it suitable for use in providing a streaming video delivery service, and implement parts of these in a simulator. Also, we report on a simulation study of the implemented extensions to the BT system, as well as a detailed validation study of the BT simulator itself. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive set of BT models for several important traffic characteristics, at both session and message levels.

Posted on by mklang

Involuntary Detox

Warning this is just me venting my frustration….

Right. Entering my fourth week without broadband at home. Let me assure everyone this is not a voluntary state of affairs. It all began with me being silly enough to want to move to a better apartment. The move went very well but then the broadband company struck. For reasons which are not really clear to me the technician needs to talk to me. Unfortunately I had registered my old mobile number so I missed the call. Naturally this means that the technician could not call me again for the next two weeks. After several calls to my provider I now have a new date in the middle in this week for the installation of broadband. But this naturally depends on the call from the technician.

Three weeks without broadband has not improved my general mood or enabled me to develop a greater enjoyment of analog technologies. For those of you who think that you will read more if you had less access to broadband this theory – in my involuntary experiment – failed miserably. I read more when I have broadband.

Now I tend to collect lots of broadband related tasks and take them to work. Then attempt to remember what it was I was hoping to do when I had a decent internet connection. Bloody annoying. It’s not that I miss anything in particular it’s just the general basic luxury of having access to a technology upon which I depend heavily.

Posted on by mklang

Technology learning curve

Modernmechanix has this wonderful picture of a woman explaining how the telephone dial works.

It serves as a good reminder how all new technology must be learned and how even the obvious is difficult before we have mastered it. A few years ago I showed a telephone with an old fashioned dial to a six year old who had no problems with mobile telephones and computers. He stared at it and asked: “How does it work?” When I explained the system he looked very condescendingly at the telephone and exclaimed in disbelief “But why wouldn’t you use buttons?”

Technology is not only learned – it must be remembered…

Posted on by mklang

Spellchecker Poetry

Technology such as text messaging and spell checkers are forming our language. Usually I use this as a bad example but this poem comes via techno-culture shows that spell checkers are our friends:

In Praise of Computer Spell Checkers…

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly Marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong

Eye have run their poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew

Posted on by mklang

On the way out

The Washingtonpost.com has a fun list of things and social practices that are dead or at least heading the way of the Dodo. These kinds of lists are usually fun since they reflect many of the ways in which technological changes are driving forward social change which is what my thesis Disruptive Technology was all about.

Remember the Sinclair computer? photo by Barnoid (CC BY-SA)

It is pretty easy to see that tapes are drawing their final breath and with it goes a whole range of social practices like recording from the radio, creating mix tapes, recording spoken tapes and sending them via snail mail and more. With the development of mobile telephones, the way in which we communicate has changed radically but this has also led to the demise of the public phone booth. Some of the predictions may be a bit too futuristic and hard to figure out – why, for example, do they think that shoehorns on their way out?

 

Posted on by mklang

Suspicious travel patterns

The MI5 wants access to the Oyster travel card database to be able to trawl it for possible suspects. Today they may demand the data to track specific individuals under investigation but the change will allow them to search for unknown suspects based on “suspicious” travel patterns.

Systems such as these will make sure that people with strange travel patterns around the metropolis will be seen as being suspicious in general. If you are an oddball (in your movements around the city) you will now be able to be classed as a potential threat to national security.

Another step in the loss of anonymity, not to mention the fact that taking the scenic route to work in the morning suddenly becomes more ominous…

More at the Guardian.

Posted on by mklang

Stallman lecture in Göteborg

Richard Stallman will be in Göteborg giving a public talk entitled: The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide. The lecture will be arranged by the Free Software Foundation Europe, IT University of Göteborg, Chalmers University of Technology and Student union.

Dr. Stallman is the founder of the GNU project and president of the Free Software Foundation. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, Free University of Brussels and Universidad Nacional de Salta. In 1990, he was the receiver of a Macarthur foundation fellowship and has been elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The lecture will take place at Runan, Chalmers (Johanneberg) on Feb 27th 18.00 – only 450 seats so it my be wise to show up on time. Last time he was here over 1000 people showed up.

Posted on by mklang

Paperless? I think not.

The New York Times has published an article about the demise of paper. The article suggests that the change is not only imminent but it is already here. The usual approach of quoting experts is used in an attempt to show that paper is gone and that only wasteful employees are still printing.

The biggest expert is the family of an engineering director at google and the chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The latter however sort of diminishes the general upbeat article by admitting that scanned books are not as pleasant as the old fashioned alternative.

So yes we like paperless tickets and nobody understands why we need to kill forests to print telephone books (but not many seem to be complaining about the Ikea catalogue) but does this mean we are paperless? Looking around my desk I think not. Maybe I am not representative. Looking around the office I still don’t think so. Maybe we are not representative? Looking around the places I live and hang out – I still don’t think so…

Somehow the paperless office still has not made it. It never did. And I doubt that it ever will. Yes, lots of people are prepared to read books on their palms but not all (read excellent article on this here). Lets face it, paper is here to stay. It simply has the best traits…

The article is not all bad though and it does bring up the environmental issues involved with changing from paper to all the electronic gadgets.

Others who have commented on the article are Question Technology, Treehugger and LifeHacker

Posted on by mklang