In November 2005, David A Vise wrote “What Lurks in Its Soul?” for The Washington Post. Google doesn't need all that computer power to help us search for the best Italian restaurant in Northern Virginia. It has grander plans. The company is quietly working with maverick biologist Craig Venter and others on groundbreaking genetic and biological research. Google's immense capacity and turbo-charged search technology, it turns out, appears to be an ideal match for the large amount of data contained in the human genome. Venter and others say that the search engine has the ability to deal with so many variables at once that its use could lead to the discovery of new medicines or cures for diseases. Sergey Brin says searching all of the world's information includes examining the genetic makeup of our own bodies, and he foresees a day when each of us will be able to learn more about our own predisposition for various illnesses, allergies and other important biological predictors by comparing our personal genetic code with the human genome, a process known as "Googling Your Genes."
“Soon after moving into their new offices in Palo Alto, Google expanded to eight employees and struggled to keep up with the growing number of daily searches. Its unique system of computing, which adapted cheap PC parts and custom software into a small supercomputer, gave it the power to handle a rising number of search requests and ever larger downloads of the Web.”
- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story
“We have been wrong on lots of occasions. It was the quality of the service that Google provided that was demonstrably better than you could get anywhere else. That is why we invested. And as the Internet developed, we thought search would be more important, not less important.”
- Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital
The Googleplex
In November 2005, Janet Maslin wrote “Sorting the World by Design” for The New York Times. "The Google Story," by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, describes the lava lamps, AstroTurf, beach volleyball, celebrity-caliber fried chicken and touch-pad-controlled toilets that have given Google's cloistered Googleplex campus in Mountain View, Calif., its much-vaunted Peter Pan atmosphere. On a different note, "The Google Story" also includes an aerial view of the Googleplex taken from a B-24 bomber, with a machine gun visible in the foreground. Sunny or sinister? Either is a way to describe Google's fast, unstoppable rise from humble academic beginnings at Stanford University to (in the words of the author of "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture," John Battelle) "holding the world by the thoughts."
“Moritz had first met Brin and Page through Yahoo’s David Filo back when they were stil students at Stanford. Moritz and his firm, Sequoia Capital, and backed Yahoo with $2 million and reaped a big gain from Yahoo’s $32 million IPO in 1996. Around that same time, Brin and Page were gathering information about starting a company, including valuation methods and other techniques, so they could work out an agreement with Stanford that would facilitate the patenting of PageRank and enable them to license it from the school.”
- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story
“With tech-savvy early investors such as Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos to provide them with advice, Brin and Page decided to reach out simultaneously to two of the most established and prestigious venture capital firms in Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Sequoia Capital. If Things went well, their goal was to get both firms to pump cash into Google while leaving neither in charge of the company.”
- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story
In January 2006, John Lanchester wrote “Engine trouble” for The Guardian. Google is the only multi-billion-dollar company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Back in the palaeolithic era (that's the palaeolithic era in the internet sense, i.e. autumn 1997), its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate computer science students at Stanford. They were working on an insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10100: google. They looked up the name on the internet, found that it wasn't taken, and registered their brand-new brand, google.com. The next morning they found that the reason the name hadn't been taken was because it should be spelled googol - and that googol.com had, of course, already been bagged. Lesser men might have considered that a bad omen, but Page and Brin are not bad-omen kind of guys. A little more than eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world - with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $129bn. Page and Brin, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10bn each.
“Brin and Page were persuaded that they had found the path toward a Ph.D. thesis by applying PageRank to the Internet. By early 1997, Page had developed a primitive search engine that he named BackRub because it dealt with the incoming—or “back”—links to Web pages. Ever thrifty, Page put his left hand on a scanner, converted the image to black and white, and the new BackRub site had its logo. Page, Brin, and Motwani all contributed ideas to the evolving project. Motwani said that it would soon become clear that what they had created together was more than just a way to further their academic research. Without intending to, the trio had devised a ranking system for the Internet.”
- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story
Theodore Newton Vail, born July 16, 1845, was a U.S. telephone industrialist. His philosophy of using closed systems, centralized power, and as much network control as possible, in order to maintain monopoly power, is what’s come to be known as Vailism. He served as the president of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) between 1885 and 1889, and again from 1907 to 1919 (the company was named “American Telephone & Telegraph” before 1894). Vail convinced President Woodrow Wilson that the telephone as a medium of communication would spread more rapidly if brought under one monopoly, so as to ensure uniform provision of services throughout the country. He called this "one system, one policy, universal service."
“Mr. Vail is a big man.”
- Thomas Edison
According to Columbia University, professor and policy advocate Tim Wu (Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World), the great information empires of the 20th century have followed a clear and distinctive pattern: after the chaos that follows a major technological innovation, a corporate power intervenes and centralizes control of the new medium: the master switch. Tim Wu chronicles the turning points of the century’s information landscape: those decisive moments when a medium opens or closes, from the development of radio to the Internet revolution, where centralizing control could have devastating consequences. To Tim Wu, subjecting the information economy to the traditional methods of dealing with concentrations of industrial power is an unacceptable control of our most essential resource. He advocates not a regulatory approach but rather a constitutional approach that would enforce distance between the major functions in the information economy—between those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the venues of access—and keep corporate and governmental power in check. By fighting vertical integration, a Separations Principle would remove the temptations and vulnerabilities to which such entities are prone. The Tim Wu book is engaging, a remarkable historical narrative that makes for a compelling and galvanizing cry for sanity—and necessary deregulation—in the information age.
“History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel—from open to closed system.”
“Wireless is going to be a big problem because as these smart phones develop into more complex devices, I think the consumers will expect the same kind of experience on their wireless device than they expect on their wired connection at home. There may be a performance difference, but you wouldnt expect that you would be told you cant use certain applications.”
- Scott Jordan, professor at the University of California at Irvine
In December 2010, David Leonhardt wrote “From Hobby to Industry” for The New York Times. AT&T is the star of the new Tim Wu book, an intellectually ambitious history of modern communications. The organizing principle — only rarely overdrawn — is what Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, calls “the cycle.” “History shows a typical progression of information technologies,” he writes, “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew. The Master Switch covers the history of phones, radio, television, movies and, finally, the Internet. All of these businesses are susceptible to the cycle because all depend on networks, whether they’re composed of cables in the ground or movie theaters around the country. Once a company starts building such a network or gaining control over one, it begins slouching toward monopoly. If the government is not already deeply involved in the business by then (and it usually is), it soon will be. Tim Wu argues that the government has little choice. Not only are communications businesses particularly prone to consolidation, but the political effects are far greater than they would be in other industries. The Tim Wu book’s title comes from a line by Fred Friendly, the longtime CBS News executive, in which he distinguished between free-speech laws and “exclusive custody of the master switch.” They are two different things, but either has the ability to shape the flow of information. The same cannot be said, Tim Wu notes, “of orange juice, heating oil, running shoes or dozens of other industries, no matter their size.”
“The reason people like Google or Facebook is it's just simpler. If we go back to AT&T in the 1910s, we had a monopoly for 70 years, and why was that? It was easy—you picked up the telephone, and it worked. There's nothing wrong with that. But our desire to follow the leader does tend to lead to monopolization.”
The recent changes that technology has made to books, reading, and the way we relate to each other are unprecedented and transformational. Tech guru Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants; digital visionary Nicholas Negroponte; David Kirkpatrick, founder of Techonomy and author of The Facebook Effect; and The New York Time's Nick Bilton, author of I Live in the Future and Here's How It Works, discuss technology and its impact on how we live. Moderated by public radio's John Hockenberry. Listen to the podcast.
From the Daily Kos: As we shuffle in this morning, we're all gathering on a plane of electrons, held together by... well, for most of us it might as well be library paste and fairy dust. But hey, who needs to understand how all this technical stuff works? After all, you don't need to know how a television works to catch Law & Order: Yet Another. You don't need to know how a combustion engine works to drive your car to work. Why should you need to know anything about the programming behind the pixels just to get around the web? Because, as Douglas Rushkoff reminds us in this slim volume, the web is different. It's both medium and content. It delivers us to work, delivers our entertainment, hosts our conversation, and more often than not, shapes our opinions. It's medium and message, highway, vehicle, post office, confidant, and huckster. We don't just put our ideas into the web, we also draw ideas out. And the difference in being able to place messages in the medium, and realizing how the medium shapes the message, is the difference between tossing a pebble into water and digging a canal. This is not a coffee maker you're using, and the web is not the Sunday paper. What you do in here can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. We like to think that we're old hands at the information age, but what Douglas Rushkoff shows is that those who march into the web thinking that knowledge of the outside world will be enough to use this new conduit, have been sadly mistaken over and over. Retail powerhouses in the brick & mortar world find that not only are they unable to easily leverage the web to their advantage, simply putting their prices online makes it easier for companies that only exist in this new universe to quick trump their prices and take their customers. Newspapers find that their ability to aggregate information can't keep up with tools available to their (former) readers. Politicians find that rather than giving them a simple super-phone-bank-money-extractor, operating in the web can also mean being mired in a bog of electronic overload and inaction. What's the difference between being able to operate in the web, and being able to thrive there? The difference is in being able to understand the how and why of this new world. In ten chapters or commands, Douglas Rushkoff lays out how to live in this new world. Some of this advice will seem straightforward, some of it will need explanation, and some of it will seem more than a little counterintuitive. But all of it is delivered with verve and insight that makes you rethink your interactions on the web. Are you driving your life here, or only a passenger? If you want to get your hands on the wheel, this book is a good place to start.
From Wikipedia: Douglas Rushkoff (born 18 February 1961) is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems. Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media theorist, and known for coining terms and concepts including viral media (or media virus), digital native, and social currency. He has written ten books on media, technology, and culture. He wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture for The New York Times Syndicate, as well as regular columns for The Guardian of London, Arthur, Discover, and the online magazines Daily Beast, TheFeature.com and meeting industry magazine One+. Douglas Rushkoff currently teaches in the Media Studies department at The New School University in Manhattan. He has previously lectured at the ITP at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and taught a class called Narrative Lab. He also has taught online for the MaybeLogic Academy. Rushkoff graduated from Princeton University in 1983. He moved to Los Angeles and completed a Master of Fine Arts in Directing from the California Institute of the Arts. Later Douglas Rushkoff took up a post-graduate fellowship from the American Film Institute. He is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University's New Media Program, writing a dissertation on new media literacies. Rushkoff emerged in the early 1990s as active member of the cyberpunk movement, developing friendships and collaborations with people including Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Paul Krassner, Robert Anton Wilson, Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, Genesis P-Orridge, Richard Metzger, Grant Morrison, Mark Pesce, Erik Davis, and other writers, artists and philosophers interested in the intersection of technology, society and culture.
In December of 2010, The Jewish Week (New York) asked the author this: In your book “Program or be Programmed,” you write that one either figuratively creates the software “or you will be the software.” Which sounds like a new way of saying that a person without vision, who lacks guiding principles, is spiritually lost. Is the Jewish community creating its own software? Who is, who isn’t? The author replied: I think too many Jews are more comfortable thinking of Torah and Talmud as the word of God, as sacred and locked down, rather than mutable creations of human beings. They would rather be driven by Torah than partner with Torah. Today, the Reconstructionist community seems the best at maintaining this awareness — that Judaism is a process. But I’m finding many Modern Orthodox practicing in highly evolved and open-minded ways; many Reform shuls engaging with Torah and totally rethinking their approach to their after-school programs; many Conservative synagogues revitalized by embracing gay and lesbian constituencies.
In September of 2010, Douglas Rushkoff wrote "Why Johnny Can't Program: A New Medium Requires A New Literacy" for the Huffington Post, in which he said this: Ask any kid what Facebook is for and he'll tell you it's there to help him make friends. What else could he think? It's how he *does* make friends. He has no idea the real purpose of the software, and the people coding it, is to monetize his relationships. He isn't even aware of those people, the program, or their purpose. The kids I celebrated in my early books as "digital natives" capable of seeing through all efforts of big media and marketing have actually proven *less* capable of discerning the integrity of the sources they read and the intentions of the programs they use. If they don't know what the programs they are using are even for, they don't stand a chance to use them effectively. They are less likely to become power users than the used. Amazingly, America - the birthplace of the Internet - is the only developed nation that does not teach programming in its public schools. Sure, some of our schools have elected to offer "computer" classes, but instead of teaching programming, these classes almost invariably teach programs: how to use Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, or any of the other commercial software packages used in the average workplace. We teach our kids how to get jobs in today's marketplace rather than how to innovate for tomorrow's. Just last year, while researching a book on America's digital illiteracy, I met with the Air Force General then in charge of America's cybercommand. He said he had plenty of new recruits ready and able to operate drones or other virtual fighting machines - but no one capable of programming them, or even interested in learning how. He wasn't even getting recruits who were ready to begin basic programming classes. Meanwhile, he explained to me, colleges in Russia, China, and even Iran were churning out an order of magnitude more programmers than universities in the US. It is only a matter of time, he said - a generation at most - until our military loses its digital superiority.
Publisher-provided book-description: Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists, who are already inventing the future in their labs, Kaku—in a lucid and engaging fashion—presents the revolutionary developments in medicine, computers, quantum physics, and space travel that will forever change our way of life and alter the course of civilization itself. His astonishing revelations include: The Internet will be in your contact lens. It will recognize people’s faces, display their biographies, and even translate their words into subtitles; You will control computers and appliances via tiny sensors that pick up your brain scans. You will be able to rearrange the shape of objects; Sensors in your clothing, bathroom, and appliances will monitor your vitals, and nanobots will scan your DNA and cells for signs of danger, allowing life expectancy to increase dramatically; Radically new spaceships, using laser propulsion, may replace the expensive chemical rockets of today. You may be able to take an elevator hundreds of miles into space by simply pushing the “up” button. Like Physics of the Impossible and Visions before it, Physics of the Future is an exhilarating, wondrous ride through the next one hundred years of breathtaking scientific revolution.
Michio Kaku (加來 道雄 Kaku Michio, born January 24, 1947) is an American physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, the co-founder of string field theory, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books on physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television and film and writes extensive online blogs and articles. Michio was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan, so spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his brother was born. Kaku attended Cubberley High School in Palo Alto in the early 1960s and played first board on their chess team. At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a B.S. degree in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972 and held a lectureship at Princeton University in 1973. During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his U.S. Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced infantry training at Fort Lewis, Washington. However, the Vietnam War ended before he was deployed as an infantryman.
From Wikipedia: Michio Kaku was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and New York University. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and American Men and Women of Science. He has published research articles on string theory from 1969 to 2000. In 1974, along with Prof. K. Kikkawa, he wrote the first paper on string field theory, now a major branch of string theory, which summarizes each of the five string theories into a single equation. In addition to his work on string field theory, he also authored some of the first papers on multi-loop amplitudes in string theory, the first paper on the divergences of these multi-loop amplitudes, the first paper on supersymmetry breaking at high temperatures in the early universe, the first paper on super-conformal gravity, and also some of the first papers on the non-polynomial closed string field theory. Many of the ideas he first explored have since blossomed into active areas of string research. His most recent research publication, on bosonic quantum membranes, was published in Physical Review in 2000. Kaku is the author of several doctoral textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory and has published 170 articles in journals covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. He is also author of the popular science books: Visions, Hyperspace, Einstein's Cosmos, and Parallel Worlds, and co-authored Beyond Einstein with Jennifer Thompson. Hyperspace was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Parallel Worlds was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in the UK. In Physics of the Impossible, he examines the technologies of invisibility, teleportation, precognition, star ships, antimatter engines, time travel and more—all regarded as things that are not possible today but that might be possible in the future. In this book, he ranks these subjects according to when, if ever, these technologies might become reality. In March 2008, Physics of the Impossible entered the New York Times best-seller list, and stayed on for five weeks.
From the Science Channel: Dr. Michio Kaku holds the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York and also the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He graduated summa cum laude, and first in his physics class, from Harvard, and received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Calif. at Berkeley. He has taught at Harvard, Princeton, and for over 30 years at the City Univ. of New York. He has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is the co-founder of string field theory. His Ph.D. level textbooks on string theory are required reading at many of the world's leading physics laboratories. He has appeared on the Larry King Show, 60 Minutes, 20/20, Good Morning America, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and BBC World. He has done numerous interviews with PBS's Nova, the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel. Dr. Kaku has also hosted numerous science specials. He hosted a 4-part series about Time for the Science Channel. He hosted a 3-part series about the future called 2057 for the Discovery Channel. He hosted a 3-hour series called Visions of the Future for BBC, soon to air in the U.S. on Science Channel.
In June 1863, Samuel Butler wrote (but signed “Cellarius”) “Darwin among the Machines” for The Press, a newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand. The article raised the possibility that machines were a kind of “mechanical life” undergoing constant evolution, and that eventually machines might supplant humans as the dominant species. The article ended, urging this notion that “war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race.” This article, along with later writings by Butler on “machine evolution,” was probably largely satirical in intent, although he may have been using these fanciful writings to allude to or explore deeper philosophical issues, such as the question of whether biological life and evolution can be explained in purely mechanical terms.
“We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.”
- “Cellarius,” Darwin among the Machines
“Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims.”
In November 2010, Jerry Coyne wrote “Better All the Time” for The New York Times. The thesis of Kevin Kelly’s bold new book begins with its title. How can technology — an inanimate collection of human inventions — want anything? According to Kevin Kelly, a professional tech-watcher and former editor of Wired magazine, it’s because technology is like a living organism, animated by the same evolutionary forces that resulted, over eons, in the human brain. Moreover, for Kevin Kelly, the whole process has been progressive and predictable: the eventual appearance of the BlackBerry was immanent in the Big Bang. Kevin Kelly argues convincingly that this expansion of technology is beneficial. Technology creates choice — compare the supermarket’s shelves with the pantry of a colonial farm — and therefore enhances our potential for self-realization. No longer tied to the land, we can become, in principle, what we want to become. He sees evolution — both biological and technological — as an inexorable and predictable process; if life were to begin again on Earth, he argues, we’d see not only the re-evolution of humans, but humans who would invent pretty much the same stuff. To support his claims, Kevin Kelly describes parallel inventions on different isolated continents (the blowgun and the abacus, for example), and the presence of near-simultaneous inventions in modern times (the light bulb was invented at least two dozen times).
“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”
In October 2010, Susan Jane Gilman wrote a review of the Kevin Kelly book for NPR’s All Things Considered. The provocative new Kevin Kelly book, What Technology Wants, claims that technology is an extension of the human body — not "of our genes, but of our minds." Everything that humans have thought of and produced over time — which Kelly dubs "the technium" — has followed, shaped and become integrated into human evolution — so much so, in fact, that it's now a part of evolution itself. As such, Kelly argues, the goal of the technium — its "want," if you will — is to foster progress ... human betterment ... and even a portrait of God. While Kelly stops short of arguing that a MacBook, an opera or Hammurabi's Code are the equivalent of, say, a live chicken, he comes close. "However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue or flesh," he writes, "but in the intangible organization of energy and information contained in those material forms." Because the technium is all about organizing energy and information, it, too, is an evolving form of life — beholden to the forces of the cosmos.
Public Radio International recently had the author on its "How We Got Here" program. The story and segment was called, "Drones – The New Normal." The webpage for this story says this: P.W. Singer, the author of Wired for War tells us about the use of drones (robotic, or unmanned, or remotely-piloted aircraft) — in war. He says the fact that pilots can engage in war from thousands of miles away and without risk to themselves represents a fundamental change in the nature of warfare as it has been waged for thousands of years. He also likens the development of the drone to the development of the airplane itself–that each followed similar stages of evolution. As for the political, legal, and ethical dilemmas they pose–he points out that the technology is moving faster than the ability of human organizations to keep up with the implications. Just as it has been with the computer. This week’s How We Got Here is full of insights from a scholar who says flying robots are no longer the futuristic stuff of science fiction; they are the new normal.Download the podcast to that show, here. See also: Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, Updated Edition (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs).
The Santa Barbara Independent recently mentioned the book and author in a piece titled, "A Kinder, Friendlier Predator? The Risks and Rewards of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles."
P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and 21st Century Conflict, told me in an email that he believes the proliferation of UAVs in civilian life will outstrip the legal framework for dealing with their ramifications just as has happened with militarized UAVs. (There are no clauses in the Hague Conventions that address unpiloted, missile-launching airplanes, cruising through Asia, controlled by operators in a trailer outside of Las Vegas.) The civilian example Singer offered comes from law enforcement: “I recall a conversation I had with a federal District Court judge who talked about the deep questions of privacy and probable cause raised by a system that carried out unblinking observation from above. A law enforcement agency for instance could easily and even inadvertently gain info that it previously needed a warrant for. He predicted we’d soon have some Supreme Court cases on this as the technology began to be used more and more.”
The Boston Globe recently wrote about the book: “Virtual Words,” by Jonathon Keats, who writes the Jargon Watch column in WIRED magazine. We might even be able to argue that his book is from at least a few minutes in the future — these are the jargon words that might become consumer-grade English. “Virtual Words” isn’t really a dictionary, but a collection of essays on new terms, and Keats makes no claim to be a lexicographer (although his author photo includes a very lexicographical bow tie). Instead, he refreshingly divides his book into six categories: Discovery, Innovation, Commentary, Promotion, Slang, and Neologism.Find that Boston Globe article here. From NPR's Talk of the Nation, Science Friday; "How Science and Technology Influence Language:" FLATOW: How do certain words catch on when other words don't? Mr. KEATS: It seems to me that the words that catch on are those that are probably least clever, that call least attention to themselves and that really kind of percolate from general usage, whereas the words that are particularly fun or funny, they may come into existence, and they may go viral, but they tend to die out almost as quickly as they came about. FLATOW: Do you have some favorite new words from this year? Mr. KEATS: Yes, I've been watching, as a result of my work in Wired, and one word that I really like right now is hygroelectricity, which is not hydroelectricity, it's spelled H-Y-G-R-O, and what it refers to is electricity that is taken from the humidity in the air, much as lightning is a lightening is a manifestation of this. And what I like about it is that it makes concrete in a word an idea that is very new and really right now is in the earliest prototyping stage in a laboratory. And it has, I think, great potential as an alternative energy source, and because there is a word, there is something that we can call it, we can start talking about it and promoting it, tweeting it, if you will, and I think that that can really be as important as the technology itself in terms of whether it catches on.Find that NPR webpage here.
In September, 2010, the author opined within the context of an NPR story on U.S. foreign policies and the Obama Administration; James Traub writes: George Friedman, head of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, recently wrote that "the most significant effect of 9/11" was that "the United States became obsessed with a single region." He concedes that this was inevitable in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Today, though, he argues, it is necessary to ask: "What does the United States lose elsewhere while it focuses on the future of Kandahar?" Friedman shares the Afghanistan Study Group's skepticism about the consequences of military failure there, but he also makes the cold-blooded assertion that "the United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States." Kibitzers like Friedman, or me, don't have to deal with U.S. public opinion, of course. Another terrorist attack would make it even harder than it already is for Obama to advance a post-post-9/11 strategy. And I don't think Friedman is right in claiming that, for example, Russia exploited U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East to attack Georgia in 2008. But there are undeniably grave costs to that preoccupation, and not only in blood and treasure. Doubling down in Afghanistan has further ratcheted up the public sense of menace — they'll attack us here if we don't stop them there — while the failure to make headway has deepened public cynicism about America's capacity to shape a better world. Obama has adopted from Bush the premise that the United States must find a way to tame the Islamic world, though he has tried to go about it in a very different way. But though this may be true in the long run, in the short run it has turned out to be a thankless task. Read that full NPR story here.
Johnson--writer, Web guru, and bestselling author of Everything Bad Is Good for You--delivers a sweeping look at innovation spanning nearly the whole of human history. What sparks our great ideas? Johnson breaks down the cultural, biological, and environmental fuel into seven broad "patterns," each packed with diverse, at times almost disjointed anecdotes that Johnson synthesizes into a recipe for success. A section on "slow hunches" captivates, taking readers from the FBI's work on 9/11 to Google's development of Google News. A section on error takes us through a litany of accidental innovations, including the one that eventually led to the invention of the computer. "Being right keeps you in place," Johnson reminds us. "eing wrong forces us to explore." It's eye-opening stuff--although it does require an investment from the reader. But as fans of the author's previous work know, an investment in Johnson pays off, and those who stick with the author as he meanders through an occasional intellectual digression will come away enlightened and entertained, and with something perhaps even more useful--how to recognize the conditions that could spark their own creativity and innovation. Another mind-opening work from the author of Mind Wide Open.
The figure of the lone genius may captivate us, but we intuit that such geniuses’ creations don’t materialize in a vacuum. Johnson supported the intuition in his biography of eighteenth-century scientist Joseph Priestly (The Invention of Air, 2009) and here explores it from different angles using sets of anecdotes from science and art that underscore some social or informational interaction by an inventor or artist. Assuring readers that he is not engaged in “intellectual tourism,” Johnson recurs to the real-world effects of individuals and organizations operating in a fertile information environment. Citing the development of the Internet and its profusion of applications such as Twitter, the author ascribes its success to “exaptation” and “stacked platforms.” By which he means that curious people used extant stuff or ideas to produce a new bricolage and did so because of their immersion in open networks. With his own lively application of stories about Darwin’s theory of atolls, the failure to thwart 9/11, and musician Miles Davis, Johnson connects with readers promoting hunches and serendipity in themselves and their organizations.
Steven Berlin Johnson (born June 6, 1968) is an American popular science author. Steven Johnson has graduate degrees from Columbia University in English literature, and as an undergraduate studied semiotics at Brown University, which is a part of its modern culture and media department. Steven Johnson has worked as a columnist for magazines such as Discover Magazine, Slate, and Wired. He co-founded the early webzine Feed Magazine in 1995, and the Webby-award-winning news discussion site Plastic.com in 2001. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is the author of the best selling book, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005), which argues that over the last three decades popular culture artifacts (like television dramas and video games) have become increasingly complex and have helped to foster higher-order thinking skills. On March 5, 2009, he appeared on The Colbert Report to promote his new book, The Invention of Air. In 2006, he announced a new online service, Outside.in, which he described as "an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood". Steven Johnson is married and has three sons. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.
For most cooks, food is a question of how. How many teaspoons? How many pounds? How many degrees? For geeks, food is fundamentally a question of why. Instead of "How do I brine a turkey?" it's "Why does osmosis push moisture back into the bird?" Instead of "How should I brown these potatoes?" it's "Why does a Maillard reaction make food tasty?" Food geek Jeff Porter delves into these questions and more in his book "Cooking for Geeks" (O'Reilly, $34.99), an excellent walk through the science of food and the basic techniques to turn that knowledge into flavor. Now, to be sure, Harold McGee (who appears in an interview in the book) traveled down the science portion of this path already in his seminal "On Food and Cooking." But Porter taps into the trend of food experimentation and gadgetry that has invaded our kitchens. "Overly intellectual. Obsessed with details. Going beyond the point where a mainstream user would stop," Porter writes. "A geek is anyone who dwells with some obsession on why something works and how to make that something better. And it's become a badge of honor to be a geek."
Richard Muller is a guy who thinks spouting fun physics facts will make you the life of the party. And his new book, "The Instant Physicist: An Illustrated Guide," may just convince you he's right. Who knew, for example, that liquor, by law, must be radioactive? Or that you really can get your clothes whiter than white? Or that the earth is travelling through space at a million miles per hour? These are some of the astonishing facts Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, explains with the help of witty cartoons by illustrator Joey Manfre. "When I was a kid, I used to love ‘Ripley's Believe it or Not,'" Muller said. The 2011 book's anecdotes are like Ripley's amazing tidbits, "but with a real explanation. I think this is a new approach to teaching physics. If you know ten-year-olds, giving them a copy of this book will begin to make them fascinated by science. But the book is equally liked by physics professors," he added.
In his 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, author Steven Levy profiled some of the personalities whose work brought PCs to the people, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Levy discusses his book, recently reissued, and hacker ethics in the Internet age.
MIT's periodical, "Technology Review," recently said this about the anniversary edition of the book: "In Hackers, Captain Crunch shows up primarily as an adjunct to the nascent Apple computer company, where he was briefly employed to create a circuit board that, when connected to a phone, could enable an Apple II to reproduce his feats of phone hacking. Fearing legal entanglements, the board was never released, and Captain Crunch didn't last long at the fledgling company, but the "blue box" on which the board was based became the workhorse of the phone hacker "phreaking" community." See that TR article here. Pair the Hackers book with the movie, "Pirates of Silicon Valley." Note: "Hackers," starring Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller, is not as relevant.
In 2007, William Powers wrote an essay, "Hamlet's Blackberry." The paper was a part of the Discussion Paper Series, out of Harvard University. The subtitle and underlying theme to the essay is that "... Paper Is Eternal." Powers writes:
We live in an age obsessed with new technologies. The sophisticated modern consumer knows the fine points of all the latest media devices. There are countless popular magazines dedicated to helping us stay abreast of our media devices, and they cover every imaginable kind of technology except the one on which the magazines themselves are printed. Paper is the most successful communications innovation of the last 2000 years, the one that has lasted the longest and had the profoundest effect on civilization. One can easily make the case that without the technology that is paper, there would be no civilization. Yet most of the time, we don’t even think of paper as a technology. And so we don’t ask the questions we routinely ask about other technologies: How does it work? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Is it easy and enjoyable to use? Paper doesn’t seem to require much consideration because it’s so simple: a thin, flexible material that reflects light, crisply displaying any marks you make on it. What more is there to say?
Find that essay here, on Harvard's servers. In July NPR's Morning Edition covered the book and author. The story's webpage prefaces the subject with a series of questions: "Do you find yourself checking Facebook as soon as you wake up in the morning? Do you answer e-mails on your Blackberry while surfing the Web? Even as you read this article, is your right index finger twitching on the mouse, just itching to click on something new?" The webpage continues: "Powers' book is not a Luddite manifesto. The writer may question the way we use our gadgets, but he certainly doesn't condemn it. ("With a few keystrokes, I can bring up an old manuscript from the British Museum. That is miraculous," he says.) He does, however, recognize the downside of constantly being flooded with new information — or what he calls the "conundrum of connectedness."" Read from that feature story's webpage here, from/on NPR.org.And download that Morning Edition podcast here. Powers was also a guest on This Week in Mobile; YouTube video below.
In this longer debate on bloggingheads.tv, Wu raises a few good counter arguments that concern him about the industry’s future. And they hit home because they are two things I worry about too: Silicon Valley’s increasing reliance on acquisitions for exits and apps running on top of platforms like the iPhone and Facebook for distribution. We also talk about the distinction between the computer Web and the mobile Web when it comes to openness.
[2010-12-13 12:00:00] Who actually owns the internet and all the information that flows freely on the world-wide-web? We'll explore issues surrounding net neutrality this hour with Tim Wu, the Columbia Law Professor and policy advocate who coined the term. His new book is "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" (Knopf, 2010).
In "The Master Switch," Wu assembles all of these stories and reframes them as battles in a shifting landscape of high-stakes industrial warfare, from Ma Bell's dastardly campaigns against small independent phone companies to the conquest of every aspect of the movie industry -- from talent and production to distribution and theaters -- by the ruthless moguls of the studios' heyday. He scrutinizes the postwar years when AT&T was treated like a shadow agency of the federal government, and recounts how the Machiavellian head of RCA, David Sarnoff, double-crossed an idealistic old friend to suppress the introduction of FM radio (a technology whose capabilities have yet to be fully explored) for decades. These industries -- "the defining business ventures of our time," according to Wu -- "have from their inception been subject to the same cycle of rise and fall, imperial consolidation and dispersion." Furthermore, "the time has come when we must pay attention" because we are now, with the Internet, "on the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has always begun to swing in the opposite direction -- toward greater control and centralization." And while Wu strives for balance, acknowledging that monopolies can provide seamless service, efficiency, high-quality content and sometimes even lower prices, his heart is clearly with the wild and woolly (if also sometimes scruffy) nature of the wide-open model that currently abides online.
It was one of the more extraordinary instances of Ma Bell’s involvement with Uncle Sam. The company owed its very existence to a favorable federal patent ruling in 1878, which saved it from an early death at the hands of Western Union, the dominant telegraph company then trying to crush its new rival. A little more than a century later, Washington broke up AT&T. But regulators soon allowed many of the company’s parts to merge back together. This consolidation, Tim Wu argues in “The Master Switch,” probably allowed the Bush administration to conduct its wiretapping program in secret for so long. AT&T is the star of Wu’s book, an intellectually ambitious history of modern communications. The organizing principle — only rarely overdrawn — is what Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, calls “the cycle.” “History shows a typical progression of information technologies,” he writes, “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew.
Read that New York Times article, here. Also, a couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post sat down with the author, and offered this introduction to the author:
Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia University, author of the (excellent) new book "The Master Switch" and chairman of the board of Free Press. Oh, and he coined the term "net neutrality" in 2003. He spoke with me from Canada, where he's promoting his book, about the net neutrality rules that Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, outlined this week. A lightly edited transcript follows.
What Faulkner once said about the American South -- "The past isn't dead. It's not even past" -- is now true of tech and telecom policy as well. The perennial Great Divide in tech policy is about the merits of applying existing regulatory models to the latest technology. The question of the moment is about whether and how government should regulate Internet broadband. And the debate is now roaming into lessons-from-history thanks to a fascinating new book, The Master Switch, by Professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School.
Pair Tim Wu with Gerald Sussman. Sussman is a bit more academic, in terms of reading. The book we're suggesting here, "Communication, Technology, and the Politics in the Information Age," can come off as heavy reading over the weekend. It's often assigned at media and sociology of science and technology courses at universities. Sussman is a friend of some of our editors, and a professor to others of ours. But other than that, and the pennies we get in affiliate income from "the bookstore," we're pairing Sussman because in this title in particular, you have something of a Michael Pollan about technology and industrial science here; that is to say, you're presented with a narrative context, enveloped in economics, statistics, historical facts, events, dates, about momentous waves and social patterns in Sussman; and you get this with the more contemporary take, by Tim Wu. It pairs a bit heavy to the academic side, but as is the case with most heavily academic pairings, it's a couple of titles that you can languish over, that you can reread, and reference over and over again, through the years. That's incredibly difficult to say about texts these days, that cover such pertinent, current, and relevant issues as net neutrality and public policies about technology and industrial sciences. See Wikipedia's take on Gerald Sussman, here.
," by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, describes the lava lamps, AstroTurf, beach volleyball, celebrity-caliber fried chicken and touch-pad-controlled toilets that have given Google's cloistered Googleplex campus in Mountain View, Calif., its much-vaunted Peter Pan atmosphere. On a different note, "The Google Story
," John Battelle) "holding the world by the thoughts."
), the great information empires of the 20th century have followed a clear and distinctive pattern: after the chaos that follows a major technological innovation, a corporate power intervenes and centralizes control of the new medium: the master switch. Tim Wu chronicles the turning points of the century’s information landscape: those decisive moments when a medium opens or closes, from the development of radio to the Internet revolution, where centralizing control could have devastating consequences. To Tim Wu, subjecting the information economy to the traditional methods of dealing with concentrations of industrial power is an unacceptable control of our most essential resource. He advocates not a regulatory approach but rather a constitutional approach that would enforce distance between the major functions in the information economy—between those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the venues of access—and keep corporate and governmental power in check. By fighting vertical integration, a Separations Principle would remove the temptations and vulnerabilities to which such entities are prone. The Tim Wu book is engaging, a remarkable historical narrative that makes for a compelling and galvanizing cry for sanity—and necessary deregulation—in the information age.
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," starring Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller, is not as relevant. 