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.

Con't

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. 

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).

Con't

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?

Con't

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.

Con't

So there. 

• 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

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.

Con't

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

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.

Con't

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.

Con't

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.

Con't