Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
• MY OPINION
o Peer process depends on large scale collaboration of experts
o Falling salaries – patent office employees not valued
o What is incentive for experts to review patent in 3 months?
o We need revamping of whole patent system, won’t happen because
humans resistant to change
Oil companies hold patents for solar technology
Pharmaceutical companies patenting drugs… me too drugs versus
true innovation.
Lots more money taken from sales than R&D
Collective intelligence wouldn’t let pharmas do this
• Digital Divide
o 6% of internet bandwidth is used for educational purposes
o If low income families don’t have computers, does the wireless do any
good?
o Isn’t there a lot of wireless already out there?
o Gender is a large digital divide around the world
o Has there been a peak in internet access? Distribution levels off at 60%
• Wireless Philadelphia
o Goal was to reduce price of wireless, make it available for everyone
o Bring jobs and raise money
o Provide cheaper wireless to small businesses
o Pros
Important for education
Helps bridge digital divide
Advances technology
Aid small business
o Cons of cheap wireless
Hurts large TelCo companies
Unforseen costs – charge taxpayers $$
Failure of Wi-Fi cells
Most important service for low income?
• MY OPINION
o Project is effort for government to take control
Earthlink has monopoly over Philadelphia
Maintained by non profit agency – the government?
• Issues of privacy – long term promise of information
o Financial, personal, communicative
direct democracy over represented democracy
o project allows ISP to control internet space of consumers
lead to geographically bordered web experience
• allow for specified web experience
• but can it unite a community? No, internet breaks
boundaries of location
• citizens registered as member of town
o groceries, bank, school. Etc
o swipe card to do stuff
o government monitors citizen’s every move
o lead to retinal/fingerprinting/ chip technology
o behavior and spending analysis
o no privacy!
Questions**
1) how can blogs reach a wider audience?
2) Is the internet a reliable source of political news and information?
3) Historically media has been in control, and now losing it to individual. What will
media do to assert power? (howard dean’s downfall)
• Web 2.0
o What is web 2.0?
Netowork as platform, spanning all connected devices
Software that gets better with more people using it
Consuming and remixing data from multiple sources
Personalization
Creating network effects through architecture of participation
All to create rich user experience
o characteristics of web 2.0
dyanamic information, not static pages
participative
beta (release new versions as they come out)
Open (for anyone to use)
Remix and mash up (new interfaces)
Network effects (grows and gets better with more ppl
participating)
• Copyright issues
o Is it a good idea to have a database of everyone’s information?
• Online communities and the wisdom of crowds
o Commons Based Peer Production:
New model of economic production in which the creative energy
of a large number of people is coordinated (usually with internet)
into large meaningful projects mostly without traditional
hierarchiacal organization or financial compensation
• “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”
• dangers of following the crowd
o hive mind
o comformity and decline of individual opinion
o lowest common denominator
o easy to appear authoritative on the web
o memes and swarms are easy to start but hard to stop
o trolls and vandals!
o Too imitative
• quality control?
• MY OPINION
o Networks: pushing people farther apart? (facebook)
o Change way people relate to information and to each other
o Define social customs, control what information others see
o We can keep up to date with others lives without actually having to deal
with another human being! Changes idea of friendship
o Rule of 150
o Next step in online advertising – generation Y = 60 million
o Users have large say in their social space (news feed => privacy features)
o Reed’s law: utility of large networks scales exponentially with the size of
the network
• Wikipedia:
o There aren’t as many eyes as we think! Same people…
• MY OPINION:
o Public free database of human knowledge create quality gradient of
information and create market for digital books
Digital books prevalent on college campuses, become new way to
carry information and take notes
Libraries rendered useless, just social spaces
If students using search engine as primary source info, problematic
Visualization of Information
• Information Design
o Design looks at function and experience of object and asks how learners
can interact with object… form matters!
o Visualization of information allows us to see patterns simeotaneously
• Guilds
o Guild: an association of people of the same trade to protect mutual interest
and skills of certain art
PixelCore: global industry guide for next generation digital
craftsmen. Offers
• Software
• Training
• Community
• Production training
Devised to create a global production community capable of
generating around the world
• Prepare artists for media revolution
• Provide clear guidelines learning digital media
• Access to production training and experience
• Inexpensive and ongoing education in the business of
digital media
• MY OPINION
o Questionable if PixelCore can help Africa
o Digital media market might make more self sufficient
o Political corruption and war are in the way
Government has media control
• There is no freedom in media
• is a humanitarian effort? Or just getting cheap labor…
• are we even recruiting Africans? Lots of foreign experts are coming to Africa,
and brightest Africans are leaving.
o If recruitment is done by internet, then we are limited by who has that!
Increase divide by helping higher class
PixelCore is in English!
• Digital Art
o Easier to reproduce, organize, correct, cut costs of company by 85%
o Both digital and traditional art share same principles
o Computer screens alter colors
o Success really depends on creativity and time commitment of designer
• MY OPINION:
o An increased population makes flu outbreak dangerous
o People are traveling a lot more
o Government might choose morale over morals
o If in hands of the media, we’re in trouble, but now individual has power!
• Digital Audio
o Reasons for Sound
Conveying information
Setting a mood
Capturing attention
Explaining a process
Providing personal contact
Information Technology and Engineering and Commerce
• Video Games
o Intellectual Property
Dispute over character ownership
Players “time for money”
Ownership of “data”
Rules of the house
“rape” in everquest
• machinima: video clips from games in movies
• Sonification of Information
o Remapping the visualization of music so we don’t see notes or scale, we
see code
o Tuning is a lot harder
• Information Processing
o Getting real information from indirect measurements.
o Extracting useful information from limited amounts of raw data which
may be a representation of a complex phenomenon, distored, distributed,
or marked with auxiliary features
Oil slick problem
• Could communicate data to single point for processing and
analysis
o Doesn’t work because millions of sensors make
conflicts and one sensor could be far from rest –
require lots of energy for transmission
• have local processing between nodes, talk together and then
transmit picture
o uses less energy
o retains efficacy of procedure
Infopomophic Paradigm
• Infopomorphism: the idea that human beings are one stop in an evolutionary
process that will continue to accelerate towards other forms
• Anthropomorphism: in religion, the perception f divine beings as having human
qualities both physically and emotionally. In this case humanity would be divine
the ultimate form, and no improvement would be possible or necessary.
Evolutionary Development
Evolution
• chaos, replication, and variation
• new computational phase space opening development
Development
• emergence, selection, and convergence
• well explored phase space optimization
• the marbles (systems) roll around on the landscape, each taking unpredictable
(evolutionary paths) But the paths predictably converge (development) on low
points (MEST compression) the “attractors” at the bottom of each basin
o Skinks extra eye
Innovation vs Sustainability
• humanity needs to keep innovation manageable in order to make sure that it
continues to be focused towards achieving its purpose
• developmental sustainability without innovation creates sterility
• innovation without sustainability creates chaos
Raymond Kurzweil
Accelerating Change
• Scientists disagree about the major advances that mark significant technological
breakthroughs but agree that they are occurring more rapidly
• According to Gerald Hawkins many of these breakthroughs, which he calls
“mindsteps” were resisted at the beginning.
• Amount of time between each change is going down!
• Hard takeoff as predicted by Vernor Vinge and movies such as Terminator or The
Matrix is when the development of one ultra intelligent machine that can improve
itself leads to an explosion in AI
• Soft takeoff as predicted by Kurzweil is when the rate of acceleration is constant
before and during the singularity
Personality Capture
Controlling Development
Limits to Technology
Oil Slick
Problems: too much information, too much energy (batteries) too expensive
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS!
1) Why might the US patent system be broken? What is “peer to patent system,”
and could it work? Problems vs potential gains…
2) What are the implications of a wireless city? What will be the eventual outcome?
Is this fair to large TelCo companies?
3) How has the internet affected political campaigns, and what are the long term
implications? Who has the power? What are the pros and cons?
4) Is it possible to preserve all of human knowledge? What are the gains? What is
stopping us (problems?)? What are the dangers in having universal access to this
knowledge? How does the wisdom of crowds affect the retention of human
knowledge?
5) What is the conflict between the music industry and access to free information?
6) What is Braess Paradox? How does user choice contribute to it? What is a
network? (social, transportation,) and how are they similar? Different?
8) How could modern visualization tools have been used to help with the 1918 flu
pandemic? What would happen if a pandemic occurred today? How would the
public respond if a country’s government tried to suppress information? How can
information visualization be used to educate public?
9) What is the value of gaming technology in the educational process? What is the
reason for gender bias? What are risks of this gaming culture, and implications of
social networks that develop in these games?
10) How can music enlighten the sciences? What is supercollider? What is an audio
illusion example and how does it work? What information analysis is facilitated
by the sonification of information?
11) What is the legitimacy between digital art and traditional art
12) What is the new normal, and how will it help in my career?
13) Compare and contrast industry fabrication with personal fabrication. How will
personal fabrication impact commerce as we know it today? Can the personal
fabrication divide be compared to the digital divide?