You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy? - NYTimes.com

You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy? - NYTimes.com:

People and organizations, he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another through digital means that record traces of those interactions. “This allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could do,” he said.

ONCE based on networked personal computers, collective intelligence systems are increasingly being created to leverage wireless networks of digital sensors and smartphones. In one application, groups of scientists and political and environmental activists are developing “participatory sensing” networks.

This type of work with this interconnected network of cell phones, computer networks, and GPS networks creates a new discipline that Dr. Pentland calls "reality mining" -- in reality an extension of data mining tapping into public data.

Issues of privacy and control of one's personal data, and big-brother type surveillance become important, issues which Steve Steinberg articulates in his .CSV blog in April 08

This emerging area doesn’t have a catchy moniker yet, but you can think of it as an amalgamation of crowd theory, human terrain mapping, and social simulation. It is the science of groups; it is a new kind of quantitative political science.

The tools and theories needed to analyze social interactions are just now reaching the level of sophistication — in accuracy, in robustness – necessary to leave the lab and enter commercial duty. We are in a period analogous to the early 1970s, when developments like the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Black-Scholes equation transformed finance, changing it from an art to a science, and opening enormous new markets in the process. Now, new equations describing “crowd dynamics” are about to change our lives. And not always for the better. This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it may also be one of the most pernicious. (.CSV)

Search Engine | CBC Radio | Is Canada becoming a digital ghetto?

Search Engine | CBC Radio | Is Canada becoming a digital ghetto?:

1. Last week the CRTC sided with Bell against a group of small Internet Service Providers who want to offer their customers unthrottled connections where what they download is their own business and not subject to interference.

2. In last week’s throne speech the Conservative government renewed their intention to “modernize” Canadian copyright law. Their effort to do so last session was Bill C-61, a woefully unbalanced and retrograde piece of legislation that led to the greatest citizen backlash to any proposed bill in recent memory. Yet there has been no indication from new Industry Minister Tony Clement that a much-needed public consultation will take place. The best he has offered is the possibility of a “slightly different” version of the bill.

So much for net neutrality as far as Canada is concerned...

Beloit College Mindset List

Beloit College Mindset List:
Number 31 on the Mindset list for the class of 2012

These students,

have never been able to color a tree using a raw umber Crayola.

It has been that many years, and I still feel peeved that they would eliminate raw umber.

70 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube | Open Culture

70 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube | Open Culture
Perhaps it is because "YouTube unfortunately makes these collections difficult to find" but it is only recently that I have stumbled across some amazing content on YouTube, for example, just the other day I found some interviews with J. G. Ballard. I have also enjoyed some of the @GoogleTalks, listed on the oculture page.

William Gibson Interview « Void Manufacturing

William Gibson Interview « Void Manufacturing:

UG: In Spook Country, the net is introduced in a quite specific way; it is somehow turned inside out and projected into real space. You have invented a new art form for that purpose called locative art. For example, you describe a virtual monument on the site of River Phoenix’s death. Why did you choose to write on GPS?

WG: I wanted a way to visualise the extent to which something has changed since I started writing about information technology. When I coined the word cyberspace, cyberspace was there, and everything else was here. That has reversed itself over the course of my writing. I literally think that cyberspace is now here, and a complete lack of connectivity is now there. If we could see the wireless exchanges of digital information taking place around us, we would be living in a much busier visual landscape. Most of what we do as a society we now either primarily do digitally, in what we used to call cyberspace, or we simultaneously do digitally and in the physical world. If you are driving with a GPS system, you are simultaneously driving your car and manoeuvring your car through a digital construct. I believe that very few of us are aware of the extent to which that has already happened, and I suspect that I’m not aware of it to anywhere near the real extent to which it has happened. So in this book I was looking for a more or less imaginary emergent technology or art form that will allow me to simply bring that up. The conversation in the coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard is a little more grandstanding than I usually do. I don’t think I have had a scene in a novel before where three people sit down and basically talk about a William Gibson novel without ever really mentioning it.

I guess that is the point: "very few of us are aware of the extent to which" large sections of human activity and social life have transferred themselves to what Gibson would once have called cyberspace, and very few of us are aware of the negotiation of "digital constructs" that have merged seamlessly into our experience of the real.

Web 2.0 Summit

Web 2.0 Summit
I especially enjoyed listening to Tim O'Reilly talking to Paul Maritz (VMware, Inc.) and others about cloud computing. Maritz makes the point that we are moving away from a device centric world to an information centric world. This is something we already intuitively know actively assume in our dealings with our data and information. Maritz also points out that putting our information in the cloud (in any way, even by typing a term into a search box) is taking part in an information marketplace. We are giving away some of our privacy and some personal information about ourselves in order that we get some benefit in return (e.g. an answer to our query). On a larger scale, an organization putting its information in the cloud--into that marketplace--and allowing others to add value to it through things like mashups or user tagging can make our information more valuable--to others but also to us.