Archive for Technology
Can some dude without a PhD out teach MIT in math and engineering?
Technology can lower the barriers to entry for many industries. Writers without formal journalism training start blogs, break news, and attract readership that rivals major news organizations. Citizens without formal political training organize Tea Party rallies through the internet, run for office, and even beat establishment candidates in some cases, as election returns showed earlier this week.
But could some dude without a PhD teach college math and engineering? And history and biology? And beat MIT?
Well today, the Chronicle profiles Salman Khan, a 33 year-old former financial analyst, who has created 1,400 educational videos and posted them to YouTube, teaching math, engineering, history, biology, and other subjects that he finds interesting. His “Khan Academy” gets more views than MIT, famous for its early “open courseware” experiment, according to YouTube’s educational section. Iconoclast technology guru Jason Fried of 37signals has even invested in Khan Academy, arguing:
The next bubble to burst is higher education. It’s too expensive for people—there’s no reason why parents should have to save up a hundred grand to send their kids to college. I like that there are alternative ways of thinking about teaching.
Of course, breathless pronouncements about the power of technology have certainly been overstated before. And among businesses that are slow to change, certainly academia must rank among the slowest. But just how fast could academic entrepreneurs like Khan shake things up? I’d be eager to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Is the internet making us stupid?
Over at my humble podcast, I interview “Is Google Making Us Stupid” author Nick Carr about his new book, The Shallows, and what the internet is doing to our brains. Nothing good, he argues.
Carr’s publicist deserves a gold medal because the NYT today is running a series of articles on the “trend” that Americans are coming to the conclusion that gadgets and always-on connectivity is turning their brains to mush (one, two, and three). What’s more, on its Bits blog, the NYT is asking for volunteers to unplug from the internet and then report on their experience. And Carr had op-eds in the WSJ on Saturday and the WaPo yesterday.
So this is all to say, listen to my podcast. But also to ask, do you feel more distracted, unfocused and forgetful since the rise of the internet? For some of us “before the internet” is a meaningless distinction. Do you find it hard to concentrate on deep reading? Do you read as much as you used to?
Clay Shirky’s media diet longview
Clay Shirky describes his media diet to the Atlantic. The whole thing’s a good read (and at the end there are links to media habits of other interesting people), but here’s the part that caught my eye:
In general, there’s no real breaking news that matters to me. I don’t have any alerts or notifications on any piece of software I use. My phone is on silent ring, nothing alerts me when I get a Tweet and my e-mail doesn’t tell me when messages arrive.
I also don’t read any of the big tech aggregators. Knowing that, for instance, Google just bought Blogger, isn’t that useful for me to hear today rather than tomorrow. Some of Michael Arrington’s stuff I think is an example of the worst kind of breaking news. The kind of Apple Insider stuff where they publish something every day to satisfy the news cycle. It’s gossip coverage like following movie stars and it distracts me from thinking longer form thoughts. …
For decades, I religiously read the op-ed pages of the New York Times but recently I’ve stopped because every op-ed is so closely tied to a newspeg that the thinking never gets very far from current events. So I’ve recently gotten away from the daily news cycle. I’ve got a weekly clock cycle and a monthly clock cycle. Time is a precious commodity. Increasingly, I’m trying to maximize it.
Several things strike me about this. First, I’m happy to find a kindred soul who doesn’t read news. People are surprised when I tell them that I don’t read newspapers and simply get my “news” from the ether. It’s a great way to make conversation: “So what happened with some baseball umpire yesterday?” Related to this is what I perceive as the increasing futility of the op-ed, or even blogging about current events, especially the latest policy turn in the tech or telecom sectors that I follow. It’s the same script, over and over, same arguments, slightly different sets of facts.
Finally, it seems like Shirky is accepting Nicholas Carr’s argument that the internet is distracting us and changing the way we think to the point where we can’t think deep thoughts any longer. At the same time, he’s offering a solution: turn it off. You don’t have to check it every five minutes. Unfortunately for most people, that’s easier said that done and requires lots of discipline. But, being aware of the issue is the first step toward addressing it.
FYI: Nick Carr will be the guest on my interview podcast on Monday and Clay Shirky will be the guest the following Monday (6/14). You can subscribe on iTunes.
Japan is building a moon base
Japan is building a moon base. Actually, it’s building robots that will build a moon base.
An ambitious $2.2 billion project in the works at JAXA, the Japanese space agency, plans to put humanoid robots on the moon by 2015, and now official backing from the Prime Minister’s office says the Japanese could have an unmanned lunar base up and running by 2020.
Key to all of this, of course, is the robots themselves, and who better than the Japanese to dream up and realize the kind of intelligent, self-repairing, multitasking bots that will be needed to fulfill such a mission.
As currently envisioned, the robots that will land on the lunar surface in 2015 will be 660-pound behemoths equipped with rolling tank-like treads, solar panels, seismographs, high-def cameras and a smattering of scientific instruments. They’ll also have human-like arms for collecting rock samples that will be returned to Earth via rocket. The robots will be controlled from Earth, but they’ll also be imbued with their own kind of machine intelligence, making decisions on their own and operating with a high degree of autonomy.
When the robots control the moon, what’s to keep them from weaponizing it and using it to destroy Earth?
What are you waiting for? Why haven’t you purchased robot insurance yet?
Ex-Hacker Adrian Lamo Institutionalized for Asperger’s
According to Wired’s Threat Level, noted hacker Adrian Lamo was institutionalized against his will for 9 days last month. He was released with a diagnosis of Aspberger’s. The whole article is an interesting read, but what fascinated me is how folks on the autism spectrum can go for so long without being diagnosed and how they’re surprised when they find out. From the article:
Also anecdotally, people with Asperger’s are frequently diagnosed in adulthood, even into their 50s, according to the U.S. Autism and Asperger’s Association. As in Lamo’s case, the diagnosis often follows a run-in with the police, says Dennis Debbaudt, an independent consultant who trains law enforcement agencies on interacting with people on the autistic spectrum.
Facebook’s autism
Until I read Tyler’s book, I never realized that autism had such a bad connotation associated with it, aside perhaps from it being considered a disability with which you wouldn’t want your child diagnosed. Now I see these views everywhere. Here are two from the last day, and interestingly they are both about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
Jason Calacanis in his email newsletter:
Last year, when I realized that Zuckerberg was an amoral, Asperger’s-like entrepreneur, I told Zynga CEO Mark Pincus that Zuckerberg would try and slit his throat.
Dan Lyons in his Newsweek column:
Based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, it portrays Zuckerberg as a borderline autistic, entirely ruthless conniver.
Perhaps there is a class of folks on the autism spectrum who use their ‘powers’ for evil, and this is where the prejudice originates? And perhaps Zuckerberg’s recent troubles, if he is autistic, stem from misreading Facebook’s users?
Who would you Twitter pwn?
If you have ever wanted Oprah Winfrey to follow you on Twitter, you might have been able to make that possible early Monday morning, when a software bug surfaced on Twitter’s Web site. … The bug was first revealed by a Turkish man who wanted to tell his friends on Twitter about a band, “Accept,” that he enjoyed listening to. When the man typed “Accept pwns” into the update box on Twitter, he noticed that a user by the name of @pwns was now following him on the site.
That’s from an NYT post on the Twitter bug that allowed one to add themselves to anyone else’s following list. If you could make someone else follow you, who would it be?
Six degrees of Jesus
An intellectually stimulating iPhone and iPad game:
The basics idea behind Wiki Hunt is that you start on a Wikipedia article and try to make it to the target article in as few clicks as possible. You can play a completely random game where Wiki Hunt chooses your start page and your end page, a custom game where you pick the start and end, or my personal favorite: Six clicks to Jesus.
I wonder if something exists like this that automates Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon using the IMDB API. Read the whole article at Touch Arcade.
The best paragraph I’ve read today
On the front page of the New York Times today about formspring.me:
While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.
Facebook, I can’t quit you?
I am this close to closing my Facebook account. They continue to make incomprehensible changes to their privacy policy and settings, so that it’s completely unclear to me which of my actions will be observable by whom.
A while back there was an app making the rounds that published to the world who visited your profile most frequently. I was identified as a frequent visitor of some friends profiles, and some people were revealed as frequent visitors to my profile. I’m not sure how they determined frequency, but it certainly shattered any conception of anonymous browsing I might have had.
Yesterday I logged in after not having done so in quite a while and was soon presented with a screen that asked me to link my profile with “pages” related to things I had listed in my profile (e.g. my high school’s page, band pages, TV show pages, etc.). There were only two choices given to me: accept “linking” my profile to the dozens of pages Facebook had chosen for me, or choose which pages I wanted to link individually. Not wanting to link to any damn thing, I chose the latter option. I was taken to a screen where all the pages were listed with a pre-checked box next to each one. In order to link to none I would have had to painstakingly uncheck all those boxes. Defaults matter and this was incredibly presumptuous. I closed the window without doing anything and I have no idea if I’m linked to any pages or not.
Now comes word from TechCrunch that a security flaw in Facebook allows anyone to see any of their friend’s live chats as they happen. Unbelievable.
Government regulation is not needed to discipline Facebook. Consumers will grow tired of being jerked around by such an insensitive and juvenile company and will find better service elsewhere. Twitter, for example, has incredibly simple and respectful privacy options.
So what’s keeping me from quitting? I don’t know really. A sneaking suspicion that I’ll miss out on something if I do. An invitation or the ability to easily look up an acquaintance’s email address. But I think I might just be exaggerating. Perhaps like James Sturn has done with the whole Internet, I should quit Facebook for at least a while and report back the consequences. Is there anything valuable I’d be giving up?
Tumblr: Autism for the rest of us
The American Prospect has a great profile of Tumblr as a medium:
It’s this built-in community — a more formal linkage than most traditional blogs have — that leads to Tumblr’s focus on curation. According to Tumblr’s Web site, each month the average user creates 14 original posts, half of which are photos, and reblogs three. If you follow someone because you love her impeccable taste in vintage photos of Stevie Nicks, you might find that she is frequently reblogging from another Tumblr — and then start following that tumblelogger, too. It’s akin to the way that taste organically develops; you like a band, and you hear them mention an influence, and then you go out and buy that record, too.
If you don’t know what Tumblr is, I suggest you check it out. Here is my tumblr, here is Dan Rothschild’s, here is Robert Reich’s and here’s Merlin Mann’s. The article makes the point that the unlike blogs, tumblelogs are not about original content so much as about curation of other people’s content. My tumblr is an idiosyncratic collection of things I like or find amusing. If you share my tastes, you’ll enjoy it. Other tumblrs curate a particular topic. There are many “Fuck Yeah” tumblelogs, such as Fuck Yeah DC, Fuck Yeah Lost, Fuck Yeah Leonard Nimoy, and one of my favorites, Fuck Yeah Owls. It therefore surprises me that the ratio of original to reblogged content is so high.
Reading Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy a while back, I thought he might as well have been writing about Tumblr. The (autistic) notion of breaking down culture into tiny fragments and then ordering them however makes sense to us is basically what Tumblr is about. In many ways Marginal Revolution is a lot more like a tumblelog than a typical blog.
The community aspect of Tumblr that the American Prospect article lauds is possible because Tumblr combines the best parts of the open web and walled gardens like Facebook. Unlike Facebook, your tumblelog is visible to the wider web and anyone can view and link to you. You could visit a tumblelog and not realize that it’s hosted at Tumblr. However, if you are a Tumblr user, you will know that you’re looking at a Tumblr site and you can choose to “follow” or subscribe to the site. You then experience the content inside of Tumblr’s interface, which makes much easier and enjoyable to consume lots of content, much like Facebook’s news stream. And like with Facebook’s interface, it’s easy to “like” and reblog content, and that’s where the community forms.
Other great tumblelogs: Soxiam, Westworld, Stare Hard, Yeah, I Was in the Shit.
Technology in Higher Education
I’ve pre-ordered a copy of Anya Karmenez’s new book, DIY U, addressing the hot topic in higher education these days–whether technology will change the higher education marketplace much as blogs and Craigslist have changed the media marketplace. The Chronicle has a interview where she speculates:
Technology accelerates disaggregation or unbundling of services. For the newspaper industry, it meant the stock scores went to one place and the classifieds went to Craigslist, so all of a sudden the features of the newspaper were being provided by a bunch of different places. And I see the same type of thing happening much more easily in education, through technology. So now at MIT the best physicists in the world provide free lectures, but you might still need one-on-one tutoring.
This is not exactly a bold prediction. And based on Kerry Howley’s review of Karmenez’s previous book, Generation Debt, I suspect that her reporting will be on firmer ground than her advocacy. Nonetheless, looking forward to reading.
More on academic entrepreneurship at Washington Post and AEI.
A note to Jeff Bezos
Hey Jeff,
How’s it going? Long-time fan, first time open-letter writer. Huge fan of your operation, despite your sometimes silly abuse of patent laws.
And for the last few months, I’ve been a huge fan of your Kindle. It’s literally changed the way I read. Every Sunday, for instance, I cruise through the New York Times in a matter of an hour or so. I literally couldn’t turn the pages in the paper edition in that time. And the best part is it only costs seventy-five cents.
I’ve been reading more fiction, too, since I got a Kindle. Better fiction, as a matter of fact. When I get the idea I want to read something, I go to the Kindle store and get it. I start reading a minute or so later. So when I have the momentum to start a new book, I can start it more or less immediately. No more reading about it on Sunday, ordering it, receiving it on Wednesday, and never getting into it. Old-school folks might criticize this as being a result of our on-demand culture, but I think it’s great.
The Kindle is a great piece of hardware. And for those of us who like to settle in with a book, newspaper, or magazine for more than a few minutes at a time, e-ink is vastly superior to the backlit, have-to-move-your-finger-across-the-screen-to-change-the-page interface of the iPad. When I open a book or magazine on my Kindle, I forget in seconds that I’m not reading a traditional book.
I love the way that I interface with newspapers and magazines, especially; I can get a table contents for each section or leaf through article-by-article. And none of the “Continued on page A12″ nonsense. It’s all there in the most easy-to-read format imaginable. The newspaper metaphor stands in a way that newspapers on the web just don’t. For magazines, I love paging through The Atlantic or Reason on my Kindle.
But I’ve been wondering recently: Are you pulling a Pete Rose and betting on the opposing team? Are you heavily invested in Apple stock?
I ask because Amazon seems to have made some decisions to make the computer-based aspect of the Kindle suck as much as possible.
Take your recent Kindle for Mac application. The other day at work I used the app to open a book I’d bought on my Kindle device to search for a phrase I remembered. But guess what? No search. You don’t offer it on the Windows version either. What gives? I can’t imagine Apple releasing an app without search. I know you say you want to have it in a future version. But that doesn’t do a lot of good right now. How hard could it have been to put this functionality into your current version? And what’s with the font rendering on Macs?
I know, I know, you wanted to get something to market, and you’ll fix it later. But that’s the problem. For those of us between about 25 and 45, “get it to market and fix it later” is what we’ve come to expect from Microsoft’s storied line of mediocre operating systems. The usual MS MO seems to be to release something and then, a couple of service packs or a paid upgrade later, it finally works as advertised.
Your competition now is Apple. They don’t release half-ass products into the market (anymore). Later versions improve on previous versions, but they don’t release products in glorified alpha state. In other words, Steve Jobs wouldn’t pull the crap you’re pulling now with your desktop applications.
And the Kindle store on Amazon.com. Where do I begin? You’re getting more Kindle newspapers listed all the time. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how one is supposed to find out what papers have been added recently. Same for magazines. If you even have a page up in the Kindle store with these listed, I can’t find it. I don’t think it would break the norms of e-commerce to have a page highlighting new listings. That seems, well, pretty damn obvious.
And books. Oh, books. Through your Amazon Associates program, you give commissions to people like bloggers who link to Amazon books and get people to buy. Not so for the Kindle. The Amazon API is powerful, and if you gave people a profit incentive to use it to create new ways to display your content, much of what I’ve outlined wouldn’t be an issue, since people would take care of it for you. But you haven’t done this. Why not? You get between 30 and 65 percent of the purchase price of books. It’s not like paying a four percent commission to someone who came up with a neat way to sell your books would be a deal killer.
So, Jeff, I guess I’m a huge fan of your hardware. But your software is pretty mediocre. That’s kind of ironic, isn’t it, at least in the way that Alanis Morissette butchered that word? Don’t you think? I mean, Amazon built its reputation and business on the web. Hell, you defined what web commerce could be. You didn’t make your name in publishing. You certainly didn’t make it in hardware. But now you’ve built an incredible piece of hardware that has revolutionized publishing. And your web site that supports it, and the apps you’ve put together for desktop computers, are between bad and mediocre.
I really like my Kindle. I want to keep liking it. But in a couple weeks, you’re going to have to compete with something that claims to be a Kindle-killer. And I’m not sure that you’ll be able to compete.
So please, Jeff, don’t saddle me with an (admittedly lightweight, well-designed) obsolete antique that will fall into the where-are-they-now world of hardware. The Kindle isn’t the final word in e-book readers; it’s a proof of concept for what can be. Improve on it, not just in the hardware but in the web and desktop experiences. What you have out right now in hardware — even though Amazon doesn’t have its own line of fanboy-beloved operating systems and computers — can compete.
But it’s going to require a lot more innovation and work that Amazon currently seems willing to put into it.
Thanks for reading.
Just give us the earmark data
Today is the first day of Sunshine Week and I want to tell you about a project Jim Harper, Gunnar Hellekson and I have organized called EarmarkData.org.
Congress recently changed its rules to require members to disclose their earmark requests online. Unfortunately, they don’t disclose these in any consistent way. You have to hunt for where each member has decided to place their disclosure, so there’s no way to systematically analyze earmark data. The White House has promised to give us a unified database of earmarks, but so far hasn’t acted.
EarmarkData.org serves two purposes: First, it’s a petition that you can sign, asking the president and members of Congress to keep their promise and to give us earmark information in a meaningful data format that is truly transparent. Second, it’s a place for techies to help refine a data standard that Congress and the administration can use. We have a draft schema that we’re happy to give to Congress.
Now, I know what many of you are thinking. Why waste our time on earmarks when they only make such a tiny fraction of federal spending? Several reasons. First, I believe in incremental change, and if we can make a difference on this margin, I feel I’m earning my keep. Second, earmark spending may be small, but it is an enabler for bigger spending. Earmarks are how members are often repaid for their votes, and shedding light on this is a worthwhile endeavor. Finally, a more transparent earmark process can only help underscore what’s wrong with Washington and why we need institutional reform.
So check out the site, sign the petition, and tell your friends!
Muni-Fiber downgrades Burlington’s bond rating
Burlington, Vermont’s bond rating has been downgraded from Aa3 to A2 and placed on negative credit watch by Moody’s due to a high debt level. At Digital Society, George Ou places the blame on Burlington’s municipal fiber telecom:
In a city with approximately 20,000 homes and businesses, 4800 of which are municipal fiber subscribers, Burlington Telecom seems to have racked up a $50,000,000 debt. That works out to about $10,417 per subscriber which is a huge tax payer subsidy for relatively affluent homes and businesses that can afford the relatively expensive fiber service. Three out of four Burlington residents don’t subscribe to the municipal fiber service and it is likely that many of them can’t afford the service yet all of them are subsidizing the muni-fiber service with regressive local sales taxes.
Worst still, Burlington Telecom’s deficits and debt are rising which makes the prospect of financial stability more of a dream than reality. This is likely due to the low 24% adoption rate and a dearth of premium high paying customers which makes it extremely difficult to recover the high costs of building out 100% of the residents and businesses. There is even a criminal investigation to determine if millions of dollars have been misappropriated and a lawsuit to reclaim $17 million that Burlington Telecom took in 2008 from the treasury without notifying taxpayers.
Just last year, Burlington was crowing about its Aa3 bond rating and its fiscal prudence, predicting that Burlington Telecom would become self-sustaining in the near term. What a difference a year makes.
Via the Twitter feed of Cord Blomquist, and crossposted from Neighborhood Effects.
