Interesting Snippets

EMOTIONAL TECHNOLOGY — … humanity translated through 1s and 0s. Artfully crafted technology has the potential to touch us like any other art form. The web takes cinema and turns it into a two-way conversation with the viewer. We are at the inception point of a brand new art form that will provide us with the great canons of the next century. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out what to make with it.

Outbox … securely intercepts and scans physical, letter-sized mail, catalogs, bills, and anything else that one would receive in the mail. With same-day turnaround, the service then pushes the email to your iPad, where the mail can be read, tagged, and stored indefinitely… The user can then decide to have the mail sent physically – more common for personal, handwritten letters that have sentimental value – or can have the mail shredded.

(In Q1 2012) the BBC recorded 190 million requests for its content per month (incl) over 140 million for TV and around 46 million for radio shows.

During that time, smartphone and tablet devices accounted for 15% of total programme views, with Internet-connected devices — including your Smart TV, games console and Blu-ray player — contributed a further 11%.

The figures are impressive when you factor in that mobile device use almost doubled (94%) in one year and Internet-connected devices saw 57% growth from April 2011.

Facing a sea of infinity, it’s easy to despair, sure that you will never reach dry land, never have the sense of accomplishment of saying, “I’m done.” At the same time, to be finished, done, complete—this is a bit like being dead. The silence and the feeling that maybe that’s all. For the marketer, the freelancer and the entrepreneur, the challenge is to level set, to be comfortable with the undone, with the cycle of never-ending. We were trained to finish our homework, our peas and our chores. Today, we’re never finished, and that’s okay.

Fujitsu is developing a smart dog collar and cloud-based monitoring service that will let you keep closer tabs on your animal’s health. The lightweight collar can be worn 24 hours a day, collecting information on how many steps your connected dog is taking, how much he’s shivering, and the ambient temperature

We become cavalier about preservation, not just because Google serves as an outboard brain, but because we are conditioned to assume that the stuff we care about will automatically stick around. You’d think that would be liberating. And, for the most part, it is. (The history! The timeline! The cloud!) But there are also drawbacks to digital omniscience. It’s telling that people diagnosed with hyperthymesia have described their limitless memories not as blessings, but as burdens — ones that are “non-stop, uncontrollable, and totally exhausting.” Near-perfect recall of their experiences doesn’t make these people smarter; it makes them miserable. Same deal, to a large extent, with the web. That’s one reason people decry “information overload,” not to mention a reason for proposals of digital sabbaths and the like…

Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way.
This has been driven by the rise of ‘easy participation’: activities which may have once required great effort but now are relatively easy, expected and every day. 60% of the UK online population now participates in this way, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.

6 percent of adult Americans admit to having sent a “sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude photo or video” using a cellphone. Another 15 percent have received such material. Three percent of teenagers admit to sending sexually explicit content.

I think journalism is being replaced… We used to peruse the entertainment section of our favorite magazine for movie reviews and recommendations. Now most of us use IMDB or the recommendation engines behind Amazon and Netflix. Same thing for music: people still find new music through Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, but services like Spotify and Rdio actually replace music journalism for many… Quora looks like a simple Q&A site, but it’s also a reinvention of the ask-an-expert column you can find in almost any newspaper and magazine… Wikipedia has, for pretty much everyone, replaced news organizations as the place where you go to get in-depth information about anything that didn’t happen today or yesterday…

In 5-10 years’ time, the way scientists will communicate will be unrecognizable from the way that they have been communicating for the last 400 years, when the first academic journal was founded. The first change will be instant distribution for all scientific ideas. Some sites, such as arXiv, Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate have brought instant distribution to certain sub-fields of science recently, and this trend is going to continue to all fields of science. In a few years, scientists will look back and will struggle to believe that they used to exist in a world where it took 12 months to circulate a scientific idea around the world… Bringing instant distribution to science will have a similarly transformative effect on scientific progress.

The future of science: rich media

Historically scientists have written their papers as native desktop content. They have saved their papers as PDFs, and uploaded the files to the web.

Over the next few years, scientific content will increasingly become native web content, and be written natively for the web. Scientific content will be created with the full interactivity, and richness, of the web in mind… Scientists will share content in whatever format makes sense for the piece of content in question. They will share ideas in the form of data sets, videos, 3-d models, software programs, graphs, blog posts, status updates, and comments on all these rich media.

The ways that these content formats will connect with each other will be via the hyperlink, and not via the citation. The citation will look like an ancient concept in a few years.

There was a time, not that long ago, when games lived in the game cabinet. The canon included Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, a deck of cards and a backgammon set. Over the last 25 years, the game cabinet has been slowly replaced with the game console, the computer, the smartphone and now the tablet. Games became ubiquitous, but they were still mostly for fun. Now games are trying to make another big leap, from the world of recreation to the world of deadly serious. A rash of new games seeks to help you lose weight, save energy, cope with your chemo or cut back your drinking.

The definition of what makes someone an expert is changing. They search for expertise in Wikipedia’s pages, and they find it, but what they’re looking for — what they call expertise — uses different signals to project itself. Expertise, to these researchers, isn’t who a writer is but what a writer knows, as measured by what they read online.

Anonymous authors. No editors. No special privileges for experts. Signs plastering articles detailing the ways they fall short. All the disagreements about each article posted in public. Easy access to all the previous drafts—including highlighting of the specific changes. No one who can certify that an article is done and ready. It would seem that Wikipedia does everything in its power to avoid being an authority, yet that seems only to increase its authority—a paradox that indicates an important change in the nature of authority