If you have any interesting projects you’d like to promote, hiring needs, etc., send them to me and I’ll include them in the next edition of SpiersList, which is read by “affluent, well-educated influencers.” Which is new media code for “small.” But you never know.

{ Elizabeth Spiers newsletter, August 2, 2010 }

illustration { Bessy & Combes }

An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves.

The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.

“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”

{ Wired | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kalvar }

Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years

Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

{ Social Science Research Network | via The Situationist }

photo { Bill Owens }

{ Four hexagonal robots, each with a propeller at its center, hook up using magnets to create one stable flying machine. }

{ Apple’s iPad Competition | Related: Apple, AT&T Cite Record iPhone Sales }

Tracing paper is a type of translucent paper. It is made by immersing uncut and unloaded paper of good quality in sulphuric acid for a few seconds. The acid converts some of the cellulose into amyloid form having a gelatinous and impermeable character. When the treated paper is thoroughly washed and dried, the resultant product is much stronger than the original paper. Tracing paper is resistant to oil grease and to a large extent impervious to water and gas.

Tracing paper is named as such for its ability for an artist to trace an image onto it. When tracing paper is placed onto a picture, the picture is easily viewable through the tracing paper. Thus, it becomes easy for the artist to find edges in the picture and trace the image onto the tracing paper.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Anyone pondering the future of television programming and related business models had better talk to my son Carson.

At the ripe old age of 18 months, he’s already a veteran iPhone and, now, iPad user. Having watched Carson control his exploration of media for nearly six months, I’m now convinced that there is no future for passive video consumption on any device — at least not once marketers become interested in him.

This isn’t going to be a gradual shift. This isn’t about migrating video to internet connected TVs or other devices. This definitely isn’t about moving some media dollars to support a schedule of :30s on Hulu or a home page roadblock on YouTube.

This is about how a generation feeding on absolute control and connectivity will have a completely different perception of media overall, and video in particular. The ramifications for programming and advertising are far more significant than anyone inside the current ecosystem is prepared or equipped to address. (…)

Here’s what we’ve found most interesting: While our son still has some tolerance for passive video watching on a television or mobile device, when given the choice, he almost always chooses the interactive experience. (…) I suspect that my son and other children of his generation will demand a seismic shift in programming — from static, passive video to immersive, interactive and intertwined content available on-demand and on any device.

{ Mike Henry/AdAge | Continue reading }

photo { Bill Owens }

President Obama has secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US special forces carrying out search-and-destroy missions against al-Qaeda around the world, with American troops now operating in 75 countries.

The dramatic expansion in the use of special forces, which in their global span go far beyond the covert missions authorised by George W. Bush, reflects how aggressively the President is pursuing al-Qaeda behind his public rhetoric of global engagement and diplomacy.

When Mr Obama took office US special forces were operating in fewer than 60 countries. In the past 18 months he has ordered a big expansion in Yemen and the Horn of Africa — known areas of strong al-Qaeda activity — and elsewhere in the Middle East, central Asia and Africa.

According to The Washington Post, Mr Obama has also approved pre-emptive special forces strikes to disrupt terror plots, and has given the units powers and authority that was not granted by Mr Bush when he occupied the White House. (…)
The aggressive secret war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups has coincided with a surge in the number of US drone attacks in the lawless border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, an al-Qaeda and Taleban haven, since Mr Obama took office.

Just weeks after he entered the White House, the number of missile strikes from the CIA-operated unmanned drones significantly increased, and the pattern has remained. In Iraq, US forces have killed 34 out of the top 42 al-Qaeda operatives in the past 90 days alone. (…)

The order also allowed for US special forces to enter Iran to gather intelligence for a possible future military strike if tensions over its alleged nuclear weapons programme escalate dramatically.

The seven-page document states that the surge is designed to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” al-Qaeda and other militant groups, and to “prepare the environment” for future military strikes by US and local forces.

{ Times | Continue reading }

Just as the Defense Department and its suppliers worry about dependence on foreign oil, they also must be concerned about growing needs — and potentially declining supplies — of rare earth metals.

Rare earth materials are used in commercial and military systems for their magnetic and other unique properties. They include rare earth ores, oxides, metals and alloys.

According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, worldwide availability of these materials may be limited to a few overseas sources, primarily China. GAO noted that the Defense Department is in the early stages of assessing its dependency on rare earth materials and is planning to complete a study by September 2010.

A potential disruption of supplies of rare earth metals would not only affect the U.S. military’s ability to produce high-end weapons, but would also jeopardize the nation’s adoption of green-energy technologies.

{ National Defense | Continue reading | Thanks Douglas! }

During the winter of 2007, a UCLA professor of psychiatry named Gary Small recruited six volunteers—three experienced Web surfers and three novices—for a study on brain activity. He gave each a pair of goggles onto which Web pages could be projected. Then he slid his subjects, one by one, into the cylinder of a whole-brain magnetic resonance imager and told them to start searching the Internet. As they used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics—the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car—the MRI scanned their brains for areas of high activation, indicated by increases in blood flow.

The two groups showed marked differences. Brain activity of the experienced surfers was far more extensive than that of the newbies, particularly in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with problem-solving and decisionmaking. Small then had his subjects read normal blocks of text projected onto their goggles; in this case, scans revealed no significant difference in areas of brain activation between the two groups. The evidence suggested, then, that the distinctive neural pathways of experienced Web users had developed because of their Internet use.

The most remarkable result of the experiment emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later. In the interim, the novices had agreed to spend an hour a day online, searching the Internet. The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers. “Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small wrote. He later repeated all the tests with 18 more volunteers and got the same results.

When first publicized, the findings were greeted with cheers. By keeping lots of brain cells buzzing, Google seemed to be making people smarter. But as Small was careful to point out, more brain activity is not necessarily better brain activity. The real revelation was how quickly and extensively Internet use reroutes people’s neural pathways. “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate,” Small concluded, “but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”

What kind of brain is the Web giving us? That question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise—and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain. (…)

What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting.

{ Nicholas Carr/Wired | Continue reading }

In an ideal world, I would sit down at my computer, do my work, and that would be that. In this world, I get entangled in surfing and an hour disappears. (…)

For years I would read during breakfast, the coffee stirring my pleasure in the prose. You can’t surf during breakfast. Well, maybe you can. Now I don’t have coffee and I don’t eat breakfast. I get up and check my e-mail, blog comments and Twitter.

{ Roger Ebert/Chicago Sun-Times }

photo { Stephen Shore }

Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account.

The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

“The step after ubiquity is invisibility,” my old friend from Apple Al Mandel explained to me years ago. And it’s true. Telephone service was once rare but is now universal and anything truly universal eventually become a commodity. No wonder phone companies no longer make money from long-distance calling nor — as Verizon’s sale of its New England landlines business confirms — even make enough money from local phone service. Now it is all about mobile and thank God for texting and ringtones, the telco execs say… for awhile. Well I think the same thing is about to happen to Facebook — privacy issues or no.

Facebook is huge with 350 million members but that’s not the problem. The problem is that my Facebook friends list is too long and so is yours. I have 809 Facebook friends. My wife has friend envy because she thinks my friends are generally more interesting than her friends. I wouldn’t know because I’m only on Facebook once or twice a week for a few minutes. But even that’s enough to know my friend list is too long. (…)

Facebook is being really stupid lately about making money from its traffic by violating user privacy. (…) If Facebook really wants to get profitable it needs to get smaller by kicking-off users who don’t make it money. (…)

Facebook is useless to me. We’re all too connected to really connect.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

video { Thanks Tim }

{ Because of security concerns about hacking attacks and viruses, Google has been ending its use of Windows since January | Forbes | Continue reading | via Richard }

Is it possible that all the bungling that took place in Microsoft’s entertainment and hardware division was actually sabotage? In World War II, Germany sent a secret “fifth column” behind enemy lines to disrupt defenses during its invasions. Corporations have engaged in similar activities, and a series of “mistakes” that were beneficial to Apple has me wondering who’s really been calling the shots in Redmond.

Last week, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) passed Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) in market capitalization for a number of reasons. I agree with Gary Marshall, who argues in “Apple beats Microsoft? Not so fast, Fanboys” that the two companies aren’t even in the same race. I’d even add that the only reason Apple moved ahead in valuation is because we don’t count stock owned by employees, and Bill alone has around US$40 billion of that.

However, I also agree with much of what Geoffrey James says in “Top 10 Reasons Apple Beat Microsoft” — essentially, that Apple’s relative success really has more to do with decisions made at Microsoft than decisions made at Apple. Having said all of that, Microsoft is still the most profitable company in the segment, and as Jobs himself would point out, it is all about profit.

However the one saying I’ve made famous is that “perception is 100 percent of reality,” and the perception is that Apple did and continues to beat Microsoft. The executive Microsoft had positioned against Apple was Robbie Bach, who ran Microsoft’s entertainment and hardware division, a division that became a vampire division, and this got me thinking that Apple’s greatest strength may be its secret fifth column.

{ TechNewsWorld/Rob Enderle | Continue reading | via Richard }

{ The biannual Top 500 supercomputer list has been released | More }

What do brains and computer chips have in common? Not that much. Sure both use electricity, but in neurons the origin of electrical pulses is chemical while for computer chips it comes from electrical currents. Neurons are highly plastic, rearranging their connections to adapt to new information while computer chips are locked in their arrangement for their entire existence. But one thing they do share is the pattern of connections in their overall structure, specifically both brains and computer chips use the shortest and most efficient pathway they can to avoid the costs associated with taking long detours for the signals to get to their destination. Evolution and chip designers seemed to have reached the same conclusions when bumping up against the same very basic and very important limits, says a recent research paper from a small international team in PLoS. (…)

First, the human brain, the nematode’s nervous system, and the computer chip all had a Russian doll- like architecture, with the same patterns repeating over and over again at different scales. Second, all three showed what is known as Rent’s scaling, a rule used to describe relationships between the number of elements in a given area and the number of links between them.

The first finding confirms the research being done on intelligence and cognition in insects and mammals. (…) The second finding also seems to confirm something we know about evolution, mainly that natural selection tends to trim down waste and excess if it can and over a long period of trial and error, it will eventually arrive at efficient solutions to basic problems.

{ Greg Fish | Continue reading }

video { Jackson Pollock painting, 1950 | more }

Apple Passes Microsoft as No. 1 in Tech.

Ecowar: Google Maps shows North Korea logging endangered tigers’ protected forest.

The Pac-Man game Google put on its home page gobbled up almost five million hours of work time, suggests a study.

Facebook Bows to Pressure Over Privacy. Related: The Real Reason Facebook Changed Its Privacy Rules.

{ Identity chip implanted into man gets computer virus | BBC video | Illustration: R. Crumb }

YouTube made two fascinating announcements recently: 1) viewers are now downloading an average of two billion videos per day on the service, and; 2) YouTube is almost showing a profit for Google, its owner.

Think about the glorious inefficiency embodied in that latter statement: two billion downloads per day just to break even. And this is supposed to be the future of television? Hardly.

I think the future of television is Veetle.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

photo { Werner Amann }

When the Conficker computer “worm” was unleashed on the world in November 2008, cyber-security experts didn’t know what to make of it. It infiltrated millions of computers around the globe. It constantly checks in with its unknown creators. It uses an encryption code so sophisticated that only a very few people could have deployed it. For the first time ever, the cyber-security elites of the world have joined forces in a high-tech game of cops and robbers, trying to find Conficker’s creators and defeat them. The cops are failing. And now the worm lies there, waiting…

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading | Thanks Daniel }

Green Buildings: Dow says many buildings are actually getting less efficient

Mike Kontranowski, Strategic Marketing Manager of Dow Building Solution’ Thermax brand of rigid insulating board, presented a sobering analysis of the direction of building efficiency during the Summit. Although buildings of all types have become more energy efficient on a per square foot basis for the past 50 years, many buildings constructed over the past decade have bucked the trend and have begun regressing on energy efficiency. This reversal comes despite newfound interest in “green building” among governments, occupants, and the building owners themselves, and despite the plethora of insulation, window, equipment, and other devices that yield far greater efficiencies. More surprisingly, many of the buildings are LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certified, because energy efficiency is only one of many metrics that accrue points needed for certification.

The proximate cause of the backslide in efficiency is a switch to less expensive aluminum wall studs in place of wood or block in recent years. Because aluminum is such a good conductor of heat, walls that are otherwise well-insulated – with insulation batts installed between the studs – see an overall insulating R-value of the wall drop in half, from 11 or more to 5. Thermal images of walls are particularly poignant, showing relatively small amounts of heat escaping from between the studs, while the studs themselves were lit up like Christmas trees.


{ Lux Research Analyst Blog | Continue reading | via Josh Wolfe }