technology

Toys for boys

Remember when running entailed pulling on a pair of sneakers, old shorts and a t-shirt? Basically it’s still the same but even something as simple as running has been upgraded and infused with technology. So what does the high tech runner need to be satisfied?

The sneakers – way back in 2005 Adidas launched a high tech sneaker with a 20-megahertz microprocessor in each shoe that gave the shoe the ability to self-adjust cushioning and support. The shoe makes 5 million calculations per second. But even without the computers the running shoe is a feat (sorry bad pun) of engineering.

The clothes breathe and dry. Letting out sweat and bringing in air. The socks are cushioned, supporting and breathing. Sunglasses are optional. There is a whole array of additional items from bandanas to sweat-bands.

But then, it’s where the real high-tech begins. Training software to help the runner keep track and share their results online. Electronic devices include mp3 players, headphones, pedometers, heart-rate monitors, GPS measuring. The list goes on and on. It makes your head spin.

Kind of makes you long for the old t-shirt and running shorts… Well to be honest I kind of like the gadgets!

Posted on by mklang

Obama as tech user

What you understand about technology is intimately related to the way in which you tend to use technology. This is why it always concerns me when non-tech users are put to regulate technology use. It’s a question of understanding.

President-elect Obama is on Flickr and uses a Creative Commons license for his photographs. Naturally this may be someone who works for him but at least he has the knowledge to hire people who “get” technology use.

Posted on 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 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 by mklang

Undone by success

There is a growing trend in Facebook bashing (a type of conservatism claiming that the original versions of Facebook were best), Facebook criticism (Facebook would be better if only one detail or another were changed), Facebook denial (Facebook is never going to be useful/important/worthwhile), Facebook disbelivers (what is Facebook good for) and anti-Facebook purists (Never used, never will use FB).

Whether you are a FB believer or happy user or belong to a basher group it is difficult to ignore the fact that FB is being used to an amazing degree.

Some bashers, for example, Cory Doctorow: “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook“. (Nov 2007) explain that FB will collapse because eventually you will have to accept people you dislike to be your FB friends. Cory writes:

For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please. ”

So I agree with these types of criticism eventually someone, or several someones, will demand to be added. We are back in the seventh grade playground and you are (once again?) no longer the center of your own world – which was the promise of a FB centric world.

My problem, and subsequently my form of FB bashing, is that it is not that the creepy people that concern me but rather all the nice, harmless, friendly, acquaintances that want to be my friends. At present I have just under 200 friends on FB, but the strange thing is that most of my “offline” friends don’t have FB accounts. In reality, and this may be a sad admission, I don’t have almost 200 friends. Many of the people who have befriended my on FB are acquintances (which is ok), online contacts (which is ok) but many are people whom I do not know – which is almost creepy.

Therefore to me the reason FB will fail is that it will never actually do anything. It’s goal, and measure of success is the amount of friends – but achieving this goal is not difficult if you do not care who you add as friends.

But I guess this argument rests on the foundation that Facebook has a point. If it is pointless then I don’t know.

Posted on by mklang

Access to Language

Erin McKean writes an interesting article in the Boston Globe about the creation and use of new words and the unfounded fear of criticism some of the users of these newisms have.

Whenever I see “not a real word” used to stigmatize what is (usually) a perfectly cromulent word, I wonder why the writer felt the need to hang a big sign reading “I am not confident about my writing” on it. What do they imagine the penalty is for using an “unreal” word? A ticket from the Dictionary Police? The revocation (as the joke goes) of your poetic license? A public shaming by William Safire? The irony is that most of these words, without the disclaimer, would pass unnoticed by the majority of readers.

So I get he impulse not to be beaten up and accused of having a shitty vocabulary but really I agree with McKean – who cares! It’s the communication that counts. But never forget who your audience is.

When discussing Free, Open & Propriatary software I am often inclined to talk about language as being a product which we are all free to use, borrow, steal, plagiarise, remix to suit or own needs. In most cases we use and abuse our language to achieve a communicative purpose rather than to appease a dominant system of governance. Naturally some people will argue that there are rules to language and these rules are notto be toyed with.

This is not always so and there have been languages which have been firmly in the control of certain power groups. In this way langauges were used as a method of controlling the users, and often the non-users.

The languages such as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin have all been used as exclusive devices. In many languages  correct vocabulary, right dialect and proper enunciation of words have been used to identify and control insider and outsider groups. Basically if you did not talk like one of us – then you were not one of us. It is amazing to see how such a fundamental social infrastructure can be used to keep groups in check.

Added to this is the topic of language as a form of control in the sense that it controls what we are able to say and communicate to others. If you cannot articulate a word for freedom (as in liberty) and the people you talk to cannot comprehend such a word – then will the idea cease to exist? George Orwell explored this in 1984. Today technology has created two different impulses. Old formal language is being controlled by what is permitted grammar and vocabulary in the spell-check program. An opposite development is the growth of new languages and forms of language (for example slang) online.

This is something I have been kicking around for a long time but I need to develop it much further.

Posted on by mklang

Worlds Tallest Skyscraper

For a technology oriented blog I rarely talk about buildings. But it is hard to ignore the Burj Dubai tower. This is the worlds tallest skyscraper and it is nearing completion This is a monster of a building and it is both awe inspiring and absolutely terrifying!

It is difficult to get the scale of the production but take a look at David Hobcote’s images over at Gizmondo…

(More images and info here)

Some stats from wikipedia

The tower is composed of three elements arranged around a central core. As the tower rises from the flat desert base, setbacks occur at each element in an upward spiralling pattern, decreasing the cross section of the tower as it reaches toward the sky. At the top, the central core emerges and is sculpted to form a finishing spire. A Y-shaped floor plan maximizes views of the Persian Gulf. Viewed from above or from the base, the form also evokes the onion domes of Islamic architecture. During the design process, engineers rotated the building 120 degrees from its original layout to reduce stress from prevailing winds. The tower, at its tallest point, sways a total of 1.2 m (3.9 ft).

The exterior cladding of Burj Dubai will consist of 142,000 m2 (1,528,000 sq ft) of reflective glazing, and aluminium and textured stainless steel spandrel panels with vertical tubular fins. The cladding system is designed to withstand Dubai’s extreme summer temperatures.

The interior will be decorated by Giorgio Armani. An Armani Hotel, the first of four by Armani, will occupy the lower 37 floors. Floors 45 through 108 will have 700 private apartments on 64 floors (which, according to the developer, sold out within eight hours of going on sale). An outdoor zero-entry swimming pool will be located on the 78th floor of the tower. Corporate offices and suites will fill most of the remaining floors, except for a 123rd floor lobby and 124th floor (about 440 m (1,444 ft)) indoor/outdoor observation deck. The spire—itself over 200 m (700 ft) tall—will hold communications equipment.

Check out this comparison chart from Wikipedia

Tall buildings are fascinating but structures of this size are more than simply tall. This tower becomes it’s own ecosystem in the middle of a desert. The official website informs readers that at peak cooling times, the tower will approximately require per hour the equivalent of 10, 000 tons of melting ice per day.

Say no more…

Posted on by mklang

My personal balkanization

In 1995 the term daily me began to be bandied about by some writers and thinkers, Nicholas Negroponte for example discussed the concept in his book Being Digital. The term’s democratic and social implications was developed in Cass Sunstein‘s book Republic.com (2001). In this book (and followed up with Republic 2.0 in 2007) he argued that …the Internet may weaken democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs… (Wikipedia). This process is sometimes known as cyberbalkanization but I feel the latter is a badly chosen term since it implies the need for cyber, which is not necessary.

No matter what term you prefer it is obvious that the daily-me phenomenon can be easily achieved with digital technology. Yesterday I took another step in my personal balkanization.

Already in my work the main part of my reading and writing is based on mainly non-Swedish sources and publications. The blogs I track track across the Internet are mainly non-local, defined by subject rather than geography. For lesuire I mainly read foreign magazines and books. I rarely read newspapers (not even online), seldom watch television (but plenty of DVDs) and since I travel around Sweden a great deal I tend to miss local events.

Together this leads to a negative (or positive – depends on your perspective) spiral and increased disinterest in local affairs.

Yesterday I took another step in my own personal balkanization by buying an Argon Internet radio. I was actually very skeptical to this but after I quick and easy install I now can listen to live radio from anywhere in the world (within the confines of language). My presets include English, American, Spanish, Maltese and Australian stations.

The little radio is perfect in my kitchen and connects easily to my wifi. In addition to this it actually does work as a “normal, old-fashioned” radio, which was a large factor in convincing me to chose this model but I have not felt the need to use it.

The argon even connects nicely to the music on my computer and to my personal selection of radio stations I chose on the radio website. My only gripe so far is that I have not managed to get the podcasts working but I guess I will have to read the manual.

So now it is even easier for me to ignore what is going on around me and focus on the stuff I like. This is becoming more than a daily me or a balkanization but it is definitaly a step in the fragmentization of a society. But at this stage I would like to quote Margaret Thatcher (I never thought that would happen) “Society does not exist“. Thatcher used this provocative statement to promote extreme individualism. But I would like to use this to remind us that “society” is a social construct which has no meaning outside that which we consciously and unconsciously agree to fill it with. But the short sharp Thatcherite version sounds better.

Posted on by mklang

Secure Connection Failed

Clicked on a link and ended up here! Been online for a long time now – never seen this one before…

I have erased the name of the site to protect those involved 🙂

Posted on by mklang