William F. Garrity

[Another old item meant to blog about...] 

This article in the July 21, 2010, The New York Times received a lot of attention--about our social web pasts living forever.  

The Web Means the End of Forgetting

By JEFFREY ROSEN

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.

... 

It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

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[Old item meant to blog about...] 

IBM has developed a trivia question-answering supercomputer.  Story here from the June 16, 2010, The New York Times; try to beat the machine here. 

Frederic Filloux, of Monday Note, writes in reaction to Chris Anderson's piece in Wired that "the web is dead."  He includes the very interesting prediction from Morgan Stanley that in 2012 smartphone shipments will exceed PC shipments. 

The future is mobility! 

A Toolkit for the Cognitive Container

August 29, 2010

We now live in an apps world. “The web is dead” shouts Chris Anderson, Wired’s editor-in-chief. To make his point, he teamed up with Michael Wolff, a Vanity Fair writer. According his latest theory, the internet is taken over by mobile applications, and the web as we know it, will be soon dead. Wired produces a Cisco-originated graph (below) showing the decrease in “web” traffic, down to a quarter of the traffic of the internet. The other 75%, says Anderson, include video, peer-to-peer, gaming, voice-over-IP telephony, a large part of it encapsulated in apps, blah-bla-blah.

Well. Two things. To begin with, Chris Anderson isn’t the first to notice the rise in applications used to access the internet. Every news outlet’s digital division witnesses a sharp increase in its apps-related traffic. Here in France, Le Monde just said its iPhone apps now contribute about 20% of its entire traffic; its iPad application (a bit crude but efficient reader) has been downloaded 150,000 times. This is just the beginning as publishers are working on new apps, for the iPhone, the iPad, but also for Android, Windows 7 for Mobile and even Bada, Samsung’s proprietary OS. Many publishers forecast a share of 30% of their traffic originating from mobile devices. This is consistent with Morgan Stanley’s predictions of smartphones shipments overtaking the PC two years from now (see below).

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For a language nerd like myself, this piece in The New York Times  is fascinating. 

August 26, 2010

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

By GUY DEUTSCHER

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?

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No comment. 

In The Economist: 

Who innovates more, Apple or HP?

Aug 24th 2010, 14:18 by S.D. | LONDON

REMEMBER those great television ads for Apple computers—the Mac guy versus PC guy ones? (Since I no longer watch television—definitely not a necessity for me, by the way, which has nothing to do with a recession—I don't know if these are still running, but they were very funny.) They did a good job of building up Apple as a brand that was more sophisticated, easier to use, less prone to crashes, etc. Having been a Mac user for several years (I bought my first Mac in 2004, I think, or maybe 2005), I clearly believe some of this: compared with my last PC laptop, my Macs have been far less prone to crashing, for example.

Nevertheless, it's an open (and interesting) question what, apart from their being "cool" (and, I'd venture to say, better designed and more user-friendly), lies behind the Apple price premium. That, as most people who have considered switching know, can be considerable. In terms of processing power, speed, memory, and so on, how do Macs and PCs actually compare? And does Apple innovate in terms of basic hardware quality as often or less often than the likes of HP, Compaq, and other producers? This question is of broader interest from an economist's point of view because it also has to do with the age-old question of whether competition or monopoly is a better spur to innovation. In a certain sense, Apple is a monopolist, and PC makers are in a more competitive market. (I say in a certain sense because obviously Macs and PCs are substitutes; it's just that they're more imperfect substitutes than two PCs are for each other, in part because of software migration issues.)

It may appear at first blush that the answer is obvious—competition, naturally. But arguments on either side are plausible. Schumpeter argued long back that because a monopolist reaps the full reward from innovation, such firms would be more innovative. The case for patents relies in part on a version of this argument: companies are given monopoly rights over a new product for a period of time in order for them to be able to recoup the costs of innovation; without such protection, it is argued, they would not find it beneficial to innovate in the first place. On the other hand, others have argued that competition spurs innovation by giving firms a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors (in a way, creating something new gives a company a temporary, albeit brief, "monopoly"). A new paper (http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr462.pdf)  from economists at the New York Fed uses the Mac-vs-PC divide as a way into these questions. It's results are probably of interest to anyone who uses either kind of computer (ie, virtually everyone).  The paper uses data on the frequency with which Apple introduces new models, how it prices, and so on and compares it to what PC manufacturers, who are directly competing with each other but only indirectly with Apple, do.

In a nutshell:

The three "PC" manufacturers (Hewlett Packard, Sony and Toshiba) have short product cycles, frequent staggered entry, and declining prices over the lifetime of the good. In contrast, Apple has long product cycles, less frequent and more uniform entry, and flatter price contours.

... 

Broadly speaking, therefore, the average Mac available to buy at a randomly selected point in time would embody significantly older hardware technology than a corresponding PC.

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So there. 

Several seemingly contradictory stories in today's Silicon Alley Insider: 

• Sorry, The iPhone Isn't Revolutionizing Medicine – Yet
  Mohana Ravindranath
  Apple's iPhone has gotten people using the Internet and apps more than any other phone. Could it also become a mainstream tool for medicine?
• IT BEGINS: Apple's iPads Are Invading The Corporate Market And Killing Microsoft's Laptops
  Henry Blodget
  In the start of a potentially world-changing trend, corporations are beginning to buy Apple's iPads and develop applications for them
• Apple: Short Term Winner, Long Term Loser
  Fabrice Grinda, OLX
  There is no denying Apple has had an incredible run

In the July 7, 2010, Silicon Alley Insider:

This Android Chart Should Scare The Bejesus Out Of Apple

Henry Blodget

Diehard Apple fans remember what happened last time:

• Apple invented an amazing new product (the Mac) that revolutionized the PC industry
• Developers and consumers went bananas
• Everyone concluded that Apple was going to take over the world
• Apple insisted on controlling every aspect of its product--from hardware to software to distribution--instead of opening up the platform and trying to achieve ubiquity
• A much-less-loved competitor (Microsoft) copied Apple's software (badly) and sold the software to every PC vendor who wanted it
• Developers went bananas about the size of Microsoft's (inferior) platform
• Microsoft took over the world
• Apple was relegated to a niche market and left for dead.

And now diehard Apple fans can be forgiven for wondering if it's deja-vu all over again.

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As always for any article that dares to take Apple to task, read the comments.

In yesterday's The New York Times, an article about a web-based approach to reviewing scholarship. 

Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review

By PATRICIA COHEN

For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.

Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.

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In Slate, Emily Yoffe writes that "searching" or "seeking"--manifest as search (Google), social networks (Facebook), texting, Twittering--are basely addictive behaviors. 

Seeking

How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous.

By Emily Yoffe

Posted Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009, at 5:40 PM ET

Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."

We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls.

In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned. They would stick an electrode in a rat's brain and, whenever the rat went to a particular corner of its cage, would give it a small shock and note the reaction. One day they unknowingly inserted the probe in the wrong place, and when Olds tested the rat, it kept returning over and over to the corner where it received the shock. He eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.

Olds, and everyone else, assumed he'd found the brain's pleasure center (some scientists still think so). Later experiments done on humans confirmed that people will neglect almost everything—their personal hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz.

But to Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, this supposed pleasure center didn't look very much like it was producing pleasure. Those self-stimulating rats, and later those humans, did not exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos or repeatedly having orgasms. The animals, he writes in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, were "excessively excited, even crazed." The rats were in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects described feeling sexually aroused but didn't experience climax. Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, "where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy" (and Panksepp wasn't referring to Bing).

It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, "Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It's why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin writes in Animals Make Us Human, experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.

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An article from Bloomberg Businessweek about the work cultures at both companies as seen by a developer. 

GigaOm August 17, 2010

Google Is from Mars; Facebook Is from Venus

A developer who has worked at both companies describes the marked differences in their cultures

By Mathew Ingram

One of the notable things about the question-and-answer site Quora is the quality of answers that are posted to interesting questions. One recent example is the in-depth response posted to the question: Which is better to work for, Google or Facebook?  The answer comes from David Braginsky, who worked as a developer at Google for four years, then moved to Facebook, where he has worked for three years. His take? The search company is like graduate school, filled with big brains working on complicated problems, while the social network doesn't think as much about the deep implications of things; it just does them.

Braginsky says when it comes to culture, Google is more technically focused, in that its staffers "value working on hard problems and doing them right … things are often done because they are technically hard or impressive, [and] on most projects, the engineers make the calls." He adds that when projects are undertaken at the search company, "the code is usually solid, and the systems are designed for scale from the very beginning. There are many experts around and review processes set up for systems designs."

At Facebook, however, the attitude is "something needs to be done, and people do it. Most of the time they don't read the literature on the subject or consult experts about the 'right way' to do it. They just sit down, write the code, and make things work." This can cause problems at times when things are rushed into production, he says: "Sometimes the way they do it is naive, and a lot of time it may cause bugs or break as it goes into production. And when that happens, they fix their problems … and (in most cases) move on to the next thing." Although he's talking about programming, this seat-of-the-pants approach could help explain some of Facebook's backtracking on privacy features and other elements of the service.

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It's been a while since I blogged about Twitter. The following illustrate why it's a very important service. 

From Mani Karthik: "8 Useful Infographics on Twitter stats you can't afford to miss!"

1. Timeline of Twitter milestones and usage
2. User statistics in perspective
3. Revenue and valuation 
4. Insights and usage data in perspective
5. Twitter profiles
6. Journey of a tweet
7. Versus Facebook
8. How information spread before and after Twitter

It's great to see this competition. Myself, Bing is my default search engine these days. 

From The New York Times: 

August 1, 2010

Bing and Google in a Race for Features

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and ASHLEE VANCE

Edwin Perello discovered that Bing, the Microsoft search engine, could find addresses in his rural Indiana town when Google could not. Laura Michelson, an administrative assistant in San Francisco, was lured by Bing’s flight fare tracker. Paul Callan, a photography buff in Chicago, fell for Bing’s vivid background images.

Like most Americans, they still use Google as their main search tool. But more often, they find themselves navigating to Microsoft’s year-old Bing for certain tasks, and sometimes they stay a while.

“I was a Google user before, but the more I used Bing the more I liked it,” Mr. Callan said. “It’s more like muscle memory takes me to Google.”

Bing still handles a small slice of Web searches in the United States, 12.7 percent in June, compared with Google’s 62.6 percent, as measured by comScore, the Web analytics firm. But Bing’s share has been growing, as has Yahoo’s, while Google’s has been shrinking.

And while no one argues that Google’s dominance is in immediate jeopardy, Google is watching Microsoft closely, mimicking some of Bing’s innovations — like its travel search engine, its ability to tie more tools to social networking sites and its image search — or buying start-ups to help it do so in the future.

Google has even taken on some of Bing’s distinctive look, like giving people the option of a Bing-like colorful background, and the placement of navigation tools on the left-hand side of the page.

The result is a renaissance in search, resulting in more sophisticated tools for consumers who want richer answers to complex questions than the standard litany of blue links.

The competition is a remarkable and surprising twist: Microsoft, knocked around for so long as a bumbling laggard, has given the innovative upstart Google a kick in the pants. As the search engines introduce feature after competing feature, some analysts say they have set off an arms race, with the companies poised to spend whatever it takes to win the second phase of Web search.

“There is a cold war going on,” said Sandeep Aggarwal, senior Internet and software analyst at Caris & Company, who watches both companies. “Clearly, you can see how Bing’s competition is forcing Google to try and catch up in some places.”

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From The New York Times: 

August 1, 2010

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

By TRIP GABRIEL

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

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jeffbullas writes about the internet of things. The numbers cited are astonishing.

Why The Web Is Becoming Less Social

Written by jeffbullas on August 20, 2010

The web today is continuing to grow at an astonishing rate and it’s not just the humans that are becoming connected at accelerating rates but  ’things’.

This month non-human objects such as GPS devices and Broadband TV’s are coming online in greater numbers in the last 3 months with AT&T and Verizon than new human subscribers according to research analyst Chetan Sharma.

So you thought social networking was the center of the web growth universe?

That laptop that is placed conveniently at arms length from your bed is not the the only connected device that is making an impact on the way we live, interact, work, socialize and play.

Even though our web social interaction has picked up at a fierce pace with Facebook, Twitter and You Tube being our most popular social media interaction channels of choice the ‘things’ we use are having micro chips attached and are being linked and networked via the internet into the world wide webs backbone and nervous system.

So what are some of the facts and figures and predictions that will impact our social web and how we will use the Internet over the next few years and decades.

• The number of devices are that are connected to the Internet is expected to pass 5 billion later this month according to IMS research(this includes digital picture frames, cameras and ebook readers)
• Predictions are that by 2020 that the number of  connected ‘things’ will surpass 22 billion
• Currently over 1 billion computers worldwide are regularly connected to the internet
• Internet connected phones have now passed 1 billion (exceeding the number of computers) and growing far more rapidly
• By 2020 there is predicted to be 6 billion cell phones with most being connected to the net

This 5 minute video from IBM will give you some perspective on this fast growing world of the Internet of things.

If you want to look a little further into the future you may want to consider these predictions by Chief Futurist for Cisco Systems, Dave Evans

• By 2012, 90% of data will be video
• By 2050 a computer with the computing power of nine billion brains will be available for $1,000
• We currently only know 5% of what we will know in 50 years

So there are a couple of considerations we should not ignore in planning your corporate social media marketing strategy and that is video and mobile is definitely going to be a large part of the future.

Beloit College's latest annual list of what incoming freshmen know/don't know.  (Search "beloit" for previous lists, or see links at list site.) 

Mindset List for the Class of 2014

Beloit, Wis. – Born when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage, members of this fall’s entering college class of 2014 have emerged as a post-email generation for whom the digital world is routine and technology is just too slow.

Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. The Mindset List website at www.beloit.edu/mindset, the Mediasite webcast and its Facebook page receive more than 400,000 hits annually.

The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since "digital" has always been in the cultural DNA, they've never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat. 

Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them.  A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach the new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older.

Some examples--a few of my favorites: 

1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.  
20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed. 
32. Czechoslovakia has never existed.   
67. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has always sat on the Supreme Court.

There are actually quite a few. 

Alexia Tsotsis in TechCrunch on August 18: There's No Success Like Failure: Google's Biggest Product Flops. 

I think he forgot Google Knol (Wikipedia competitor) and Google Lively (Second Life competitor). 

Kevin Rose (the founder of Digg) offers five tips for dealing with email overload: EMAIL SUCKS. 5 TIME SAVING TIPS.

1. Keep all emails short.  (See the story for full information.) 
2. Type "Sent from iPhone" (or BlackBerry, or Android--whatever) so people don't expect long, well-typed messages. 
3. Filter important messages for greater attention. 
4. Keep spam out. 
5. Simply delete, un-dealt with, email when you have too many messages.  (Email bankruptcy.) 

Geolocation + mobility are where it's at. 

Here are two good representative, starter articles about Facebook's just-released "Places." 

• Facebook launches 'Places,' geo-location service that's both cool and creepy; ZDNet's blog, Between the Lines, Sam Diaz, August 18, 2010
• Facebook Checks In to the World of Locations; The Wall Street Journal's Walter S. Mossberg, August 18, 2010

Into language, words, grammar, like I am?  If yes, you should consider reading Johnson,  the language blog of The Economist. 

Recent posts include items about

• the need for a gender-neutral pronoun 
• language nazis 
• British slang bushwhacking the move, The Last Airbender 
• older people having always been upset about youngsters abusing the language 

One of The Economist's  technology blogs  on why the "internet of things" has been slow to take off: 

The Difference Engine: Chattering objects

Aug 13th 2010, 16:36 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES

WHATEVER happened to that “internet of things” promised a decade or so ago? Everyday objects—from food, clothing, pills and pets to personal electronics, appliances and cars—were to be tagged with tiny radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips and linked together in an open network of objects that would communicate with one another as well as with their users. Running out of milk, losing the car keys or forgetting to take your medicine would be things of the past. The ability to locate anything, anywhere, at anytime, would cause crime to decrease, stores to remain stocked, healthcare to be improved, road accidents to be reduced, energy to be saved and waste to be eliminated. The internet of things (IoT) was going to be transformative.

It has not happened. Well, not in any significant way. The original idea of having all sorts of things reporting their status and location using simple RFID tags and readers promised opportunities galore. Passive versions of the the tags, costing no more than five cents apiece, need no power supply because they harvest the energy required to transmit their data from the radio signals used to interrogate them. They have a range of around 30cm (a foot) or so, and do not need to be in line-of-sight to be read. High-frequency versions can be read from over three metres away, and active ones containing a battery from up to 100 metres.

Back in the late 1990s, the IoT’s pioneers at the Massachussets Institute of Technology talked about lining the edges of the interactive world with RFID readers capable of collecting information and sending it via the internet to servers that would make various transactions happen. Drive through a toll booth and the electronic pass on the windscreen would tell the transit authority whose credit card to charge. Pay for goods at a convenience store by swiping a mobile phone over a reader at the checkout and the cost would be on your monthly phone bill.

Such things have come to pass—in a limited sort of way. By and large, however, the technology has not kept pace with the vision. One problem, says Laurie Lambeth in a recent study* for GigaOM, a technology consultancy in San Francisco, is that the version of the internet protocol currently in use, IPv4, supports only 4.3 billion unique addresses—a fraction of the number needed to assign a name and location to everyone and everything. Some two billion people—almost a third of the world’s population—are already connected to the internet, leaving precious little address space for the trillions of objects on the planet. That, though, should change. The latest iteration of the internet protocol, IPv6, will provide some 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses—more than enough for everything on the planet and the rest of the solar system as well.

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