Lots going on the last few weeks. Work, writing, travel. But the biggest of all was that I finally dumped my Palm Centro, which I’ve actively loathed since the day I got it, for a shiny new HTC Hero. Now this is a 21st-century device. I’m still sorting out all that I can do with it, but none of it is the hard slog that it was with the Palm.
There’s a blog post about interconnectedness brewing in the back of my head, partially inspired by the new device. Something about the parallel between the ever-denser connections between people and the connections between neurons in the brain. I know, I know, it’s been done. Which is why I haven’t done it yet; I’m trying to come up with a new angle.
Actually, I’m considering starting up a separate blog for my wonkier philosophical ideas. There’s a lot of weirdness floating around in my head, and somehow this doesn’t seem like quite the place for it. I still own verystrangeloops.com, but I may buy a new name instead. We’ll see.
Anyway, that’s it for now, methinks; I know it’s not much, but it’s late. Tomorrow we go to Harbin once again (only for one night, alas), and so sleep is badly needed. We’ve both been running at full speed for the last few weeks, so even this short of a break will be welcome.
I bought a new digital camera yesterday. My previous one–a Samsung NV10–got its zoom lens crunched in November in what I’m referring to as the NaNoWriMo Bathroom Incident (don’t ask). It had already been having problems, so I’d been thinking about a replacement, but now I actually needed to get one.
One thing that impressed me as I was shopping is that elements of smartphone design are starting to filter back to digital cameras. For example, Nikon’s new Coolpix S70 has an OLED touch panel over its entire back, with an icon-and-gestures interface for nearly all its functions–obviously taking a cue from the iPhone. And it and many other current models had accelerometers, so they could rearrange menus and such based on how the camera was oriented.
I was sorely tempted by the Nikon, especially since its zoom lens is entirely self-contained–and therefore far less vulnerable to abuse than my old Samsung. But that lens was in the upper left corner, where it was far too easy to cover with a finger. And the interface was wonky in some other ways too. I think this makes sense as a direction for the future, but it’s not quite there yet.
In the end, I decided to leave the flash for my next smartphone and get another workhorse–a Canon PowerShot SD960 IS. Small, light and simple, with incremental advancement of features over the previous unit–but probably with more reliability. We’ll see how it goes.
And now, because you just had to have it, a cute-dog picture.
So, anyone got any use for a broken Samsung camera?
This afternoon, I participated in an online conference (I refuse to call it a “webinar”) sponsored by ALA TechSource, covering technology issues that came up during ALA’s 2010 Midwinter meeting. It was a lot of fun, and I have to say, it felt good to reconnect with the profession a bit. I should do more of these while I’m looking for library work.
The topics were many and varied, from ebooks to mobile discovery tools, from open source to API’s. One topic in particular, however, is near and dear to me: augmented reality. This term is still new enough that many reading this may not know what it means; the best definition I’ve heard is from MIT educational technology professor Eric Klopfer, who calls it “a digital layer of information spatially overlaid on the real environment”. A good, though rough, example might be Google Earth, which takes the physical world and adds all kinds of spatial information onto it, such as roads, political and economic data, and user data as well–right down to decent places to eat.
The reason I call Google Earth a rough example, however, is that normally “augmented reality” refers to seeing the data on top of the real world, or at least at the same time. Usually this means using a location-aware mobile device to add information to whatever you happen to be looking at. The best current example of that might be Layar, an Android and iPhone app that uses your phone’s camera, GPS, compass and accelerometer to figure out exactly where the camera is and how it’s oriented, and can then show you the same view with added data from a variety of sources.
That might sound confusing, so here’s Layar’s first promotional video, from last summer. It’s still a pretty good introduction.
And the latest version adds 3D graphics, which leads to such weirdness as this:
Which may seem silly, but imagine the possibilities. Moving your car navigation system to your windshield, for example, and having it show you where to go by projecting arrows right on the street in front of you. (Of course, transparent display technology isn’t quite there yet, but it soon will be.) Or, if you’re looking for a restaurant, simply pointing your phone down the street and having it color-code every restaurant it can see according to the reviews it’s gotten.
Or–and this is where I think it gets really exciting–games. Or artworks (like the Beatles image currently on the Layar home page). Or historical images. What did that Scottish castle over there look like when it was new?
Perhaps the most exciting possibility of all is social data. Currently, this is a fairly cumbersome thing to do with these tools, but it can and will become easier. I’ve seen one example lately. I’ve been playing around with a Chinese mapping tool called City8, which gives street-level views of a number of Chinese cities. It’s very similar to Google Street View. But what’s most interesting to me is that they make it very easy for people to add informative placemarks and share them. The following video shows how easily it can be done (in Chinese, subtitled in English; the shared placemarks are at about 1:25):
There’s no reason Google couldn’t do the same, and I wish they’d copy it. Imagine having this kind of social data, combined with Layar’s locational awareness and 3D graphics, all at your fingertips.
As usual, science fiction writers have been the first ones to think about the implications of this. In Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, people are able to subscribe to seamless virtual-reality environments that completely replace their view of the world–and yet still allow them to interact with the rest of us. William Gibson’s Spook Country has augmented reality artworks–recreating famous crime scenes in the actual locations where the crimes took place. And in Charles Stross’ Halting State, these technologies have grown to be an accepted part of the everyday landscape, with everyone from police to spies to hackers using them routinely to collect information at all times.
Of course, the world usually turns out to be far weirder than even SF writers can imagine, especially when it comes to a technology as potentially disruptive as this. Prediction is a dangerous business. But personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on this stuff (oh, for the day I trade my Palm for an Android!), and I’m looking forward to seeing what applications people come up with.
Today, my spouse and I somehow got into a long discussion of the Chinese Room argument, and I thought I’d share a little here of what I came up with.
If you don’t know, the Chinese Room (proposed by John Searle in 1980, and summarized nicely at the above Wikipedia link) is a thought experiment about artificial-intelligence work, having to do with the level of “understanding” that can be achieved by an AI system. The idea is this:
Imagine a computer that can understand Chinese. It can read Chinese characters, process them, and produce an appropriate response, that can be read by a native Chinese reader and understood well enough that the reader cannot tell the responses from those that would be given by a human fluent in Chinese.
Now imagine that instead of a computer, you have a printout in English of its algorithm, and a human (who does not understand Chinese) who executes the instructions with pen and paper, and produces the same results. Searle’s argument is that functionally, there is no difference between the computer and the human; and, that since the human operator doesn’t understand Chinese, the computer can’t be said to understand Chinese either–and, without “understanding”, the computer can’t be said to be “thinking”.
I won’t rehash the vast range of discussion that we had about this (particularly since I didn’t take notes). But I do have a reply, which is this: the “intelligence”, if there is any, resides in the instructions, not in the person or machine executing those instructions.
Of course, that would seem to put me in the dualist camp–saying that there’s mind and there’s body and never the twain shall meet. But the experiment, to my mind, is missing one detail: the brain is constantly reconfiguring itself according to new input and data. There are feedback loops between the various symbols in the mind, and these particularly come into play when modeling the behavior of other minds (and most especially when modeling itself). How these symbols are expressed in the brain’s architecture is far from clear, but what is clear is that the hardware responds to changes in the software.
Of course, there’s really no way to answer these questions at all until we figure out what consciousness is, and there are so many competing theories about that that we might be a century or more choosing between them. If it’s not clear from the previous paragraph, I’m a Hofstadterian; I believe that consciousness arises from self-sustaining, self-referential patterns of interaction between the various symbols in the brain. I also think that strong AI might in principle be possible; however, I’m also willing to throw a bone to Penrose and consider that the complex interactions between the brain’s hardware and software might be impossible to duplicate on any other substrate.
But, as I said, it’s hard to find the answers when we’re not even sure how to figure out what questions to ask.
Anyway, this is a pretty good example of the kinds of stuff I get into with my sweetie. I’m definitely with the right person.
(Incidentally, she’s currently reading Peter Watts‘ novel Blindsight, and she got very excited while I was reading her the Wikipedia article on the Chinese Room, because Blindsight apparently deals with many many of these issues relating to the nature of cognition. It’s pretty clear that I’m going to have to read the book–if I can ever squeeze it in among all the other stuff I have to read.)
Yesterday, as previously announced, I deleted my account on MySpace. I thought long and hard about it, but I finally decided I just didn’t need it anymore. Most of my contacts there were also on Facebook, and neither I nor the rest were spending any time there; I hadn’t gotten a wall post in over a year. So, goodbye MySpace.
I sent messages a couple of weeks ago to my remaining contacts there who weren’t on Facebook, letting them know I’d be leaving and giving them contact info. Most of them read the message; one of them replied. So I feel like I did my duty as far as notification.
It’s interesting, though, that I started worrying toward the end about intentionally removing myself from that segment of the online population. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you might remember this post about social and class divisions online. There’s a very clear class difference between MySpace and Facebook, and I hate the thought that I’m cutting myself off from the so-called “lower” class–even if I don’t really know anybody in it any more.
It reminds me of one time when I was in Las Vegas, and the person I was visiting took me to see The Lakes, a planned community in the western part of the city that’s built around a large manmade lake. We didn’t go inside. We couldn’t go inside, because the entire lake and everything around it was carefully walled off from the likes of us.
But every once in a while there was a break in the wall, where you could sit on a bench and look through a fence at the lagoon. And so I looked in, and saw a collection of extremely large houses surrounding the lake. Each house had its own dock, and there were a number of boats out on the lake, enjoying the breeze.
And I looked in on this playground of the rich, that had thoughtfully provided a place for those outside the wall to look in on the wealthy at play, and I swore a solemn vow that I would never live in a gated community. I would never buy into the idea that I was so much better than my fellow humans that I deserved to cut myself off from them.
So, by leaving MySpace, am I now doing this very thing online?
This is a good example of technology creating an issue that we never really had to think about before. Used to be it was difficult for even a dedicated sleuth to know where a particular person was at any given moment. (An example that leaps to mind: detective stories are full of scenes where the protagonist goes to the target’s neighborhood and asks around the local bars, looking for him.)
But now, many of us are carrying around devices that broadcast information about our location to anyone who cares to look. iPhones and other smartphones know roughly where they are by checking for nearby cell towers; people who have to pay tolls regularly can get devices for their cars that talk to the toll gate and debit an account; and many people deliberately reveal their location to search for nearby businesses or to make themselves findable by their friends. These services are useful, but they also make it far easier for us to be found, or to have our movements tracked, when there’s no good reason to do so.
For example, since most with toll passes don’t turn them off (or even have the ability to do so), some police departments with a flexible notion of civil liberties have taken to passively scanning various locations to collect information about who drives by. Street-corner cameras with facial recognition software allow the same kind of tracking for pedestrians. And transit cards, if they’re individually identifiable, allow anyone with access to the data to reconstruct a person’s route through a city. Usually, these systems have little or no privacy controls built in to them.
Not to mention what a sufficiently motivated individual might do, just with some clever searching. In January, Wired magazine put out this article in which their writer tried out a number of location-aware apps. At one point, he watched a random woman taking a photo in a park with her iPhone. Using the time and location, he was able to find the photo later on Flickr, and from the geotags on her photos he was able to deduce her home address. The usefulness to stalkers should be obvious.
Not that I think these apps are necessarily a bad thing; they just have to be used with a bit of thought. The solution, I believe, is simply to educate people about the privacy implications of their activities, so that they can make good decisions about what data they put out there.
Personally, I don’t yet have a camera that uses geotagging, but when I do, I plan on turning it off by default, and then turning it on only for shots I want to be locatable. And you can bet that if I ever have a FasTrak pass, I’ll figure out how to turn it off when I’m not near a bridge.
Okay, so when I wrote about the possibilities for an alternate Twitter protocol the other day, I was unaware of the solutions that already exist. A couple of days ago, Wired published an article detailing the various alternatives that people are working on.
One system, Laconica, seems to offer pretty much everything that I had in mind in that post. And sites using it have already sprung up–notably Identi.ca, which essentially duplicates Twitter in open-source. And most of these systems offer things Twitter doesn’t, such as trackbacks and image & video support. Most of all, it appears that these microblogging platforms would be immune to the kind of DDOS attack that took down Twitter last week.
I’ve just gotten my account on Identi.ca, but haven’t posted anything on it yet. I’m going to play around with it a bit first, and in particular, I want to be able to crosspost to Twitter (and possibly Facebook, which will be even more powerful once they integrate Friendfeed).
I’m looking forward to seeing how these things develop. Microblogging is an incredibly useful concept, and it will be even more so once freed from Twitter.
So, word is spreading that the DOS attacks on Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal yesterday (still causing problems today) were apparently targetedagainstasingleindividual: a Georgian blogger calling himself cyxymu. Since cyxymu generally writes nasty things about Russia, speculation is rife that the sites were attacked by the Russian government to shut him up.
If this is true, then it’s fairly important. After all, these are sites used by hundreds of millions of people every day. Including Russians. That somebody wouldn’t think twice about taking down a significant chunk of the Internet to go after a single blogger–and somebody who’s not particularly well known, at that–is disturbing, and it does not bode well for the future.
There have been rumors for quite a long time that the cracker underground has a kind of “gentlemen’s agreement” where the Internet is concerned: that, while they’re capable of shutting it down, it’s so important to society–and to they themselves–that they would be shooting themselves in the foot. Essentially, an online version of Mutually Assured Destruction. I have no idea if this is true, but it sounds plausible to me.
But now, if this scenario is true, we have a major world government that is perfectly willing and able to cripple their own citizens’ online capabilities in order to silence one dissident. In other words, they don’t see themselves as being bound by any such scruples about preserving the Internet for themselves or their opponents.
This is going to be seen as a watershed event, I think. But who knows where it’s going to lead.
Like millions of other Twitter users, I’ve been highly annoyed today to watch Twitter struggle to its knees after suffering a denial-of-service attack. It’s been interesting watching the various parts of the site going in and out of operability; generally, the API has worked while the website hasn’t (at least for me). I presume that they’ll get things under control before too long, but this is the worst outage they’ve had in quite a while.
And, given how many people depend on Twitter now, it might be high time to consider how to establish these kinds of real-time updates as a separate Internet service, independent of any one company or centralized system. Twitter-the-company, sadly, has shown itself to be not all that reliable when it comes to maintaining their core service.
So, how can we decentralize one-to-many text messaging? The obvious model would be the old Usenet newsgroups. Possibly a new protocol could be created, based loosely on NNTP.
But somehow I doubt if that kind of system could scale to the number of “groups”–one per user–that would be needed, even if each message were restricted to 140 characters. Estimates vary and Twitter isn’t telling, but there appear to be somewhere around seven million to 11.5 million users, sending Eris-only-knows-how-many tweets per day. If Twitter-the-company can’t get six sigma uptime with that, how is a distributed system going to?
Anyway, this is just idle speculation. I’m not enough of a hacker to design a distributed microblogging protocol that could replace Twitter. But I do think it’s time to seriously rethink our dependence on this fun but flaky company. Anybody out there got any ideas?
Update, the next day: It occurred to me during the night that one could easily roll a custom microblogging solution with RSS: simply write a lightweight application that would let one update an RSS feed through a web page, and then anyone interested in reading it could subscribe to the page. I could easily do it myself as a proof of concept, but I won’t have time in the next few days.
However, if the rumors are true that this was caused by a political attack against a single person–see my next post, above–then no such system would be able to defend against it. Sadly, it looks like Twitter and Facebook and the like will simply have to figure out how to beef up their systems.
So here it is, a few days after my post about the Kindle/1984 fiasco, and as karma would have it, Nicholson Baker (one of my favorite writers) has a lengthy essay about the Kindle in the New Yorker. Being a lover of books and interested in the future thereof as Amazon would have it, he decided to buy one and try it out.
His impression? Generally negative. He discusses the development and evolution of the Kindle’s e-ink technology, the various iterations of the device itself, the handicaps imposed by DRM (though he doesn’t directly attack DRM by name), and, most importantly, the reading experience itself. He strives mightily to be fair, comparing Kindle editions to paper and making a point of reading an entire novel on the thing. But, generally, he seems to find the task to be most unpleasant:
I tussled with a sense of anticlimax.
The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.
This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?
This largely jibes with my own encounters with the Kindle. It’s usable, but that’s all. The contrast is unacceptably low, and the (non-backlit) screen is often dim and washed out. I haven’t tried to read an entire book on it, but honestly, I don’t want to.
Not to mention that anything involving graphics suffers terribly; Baker goes on about this at some length. Charts, maps, illustrations of all kinds are largely deleted; where they do exist, they’re muddled and difficult to read. This would seem to be a problem for one of Amazon’s target markets: students. Yes, textbooks are heavy and inconvenient. But if you’re going to create a device to replace them, you’d better provide functionality as good or better. Students need useful illustrations, and if the Kindle can’t provide them, it’s going to be hard for them to justify the expense.
Finally, Baker talks an awful lot about newspapers (one of his pet interests, as anyone knows who’s read his Double Fold). The Kindle, particularly the large-size DX, advertises itself as the salvation of newspapers. But according to Baker, it instead leaches out all that is enjoyable about newspapers:
It’s enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography—and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.
Baker does admit, at the end, that after some effort he was finally able to engross himself in one book enough to read it all the way through. But it wasn’t easy for him, and I really don’t have the patience to push myself that far. Not when I could just get the damn thing on paper and save myself a lot of trouble–not to mention money, when you factor in the initial cost of the reader.
Thanks, but no thanks. Yes, books are heavy, and hard to store, and a massive pain in the ass to move. But I won’t be trading them for a Kindle anytime soon.
