techno
Online Education and Apple
09/19/2011 10:19
This is an interesting story, below. Also, I watched a Steve Jobs presentation at last June’s Worldwide Developer Conference, on Apple’s new iCloud. On that basis, I predict that my next iPod touch will have a 3G data plan. I also predict that my next Macbook Air will also have one. 3G data, always on, is necessary to make iCloud work. And iCloud is Steve Jobs’ last major product as leader of Apple, so there’s tremendous pressure to make it successful. And Apple is the biggest richest technology company in the world. So, done deal. Go ahead, AT&T, try to say no. Actually, why would they? This way, they get a data plan on EVERYTHING.
Will this hurt iPhone sales. Yep. I’ll buy the iPod and use Skype or FaceTime. So what? Smartphones were catching up. This changes the game again.
Will I buy another iPod or iPad? Unlikely. Will I buy another Air? Almost definitely. I talked with a Linux guy the other day, and it took me back. And when you step back from the Steve Jobs hoopla, a lot of the stuff Apple is making now is more toy than tool.
AND, I had an external drive fail and found out that (despite it being in the manual) Apple’s Time Machine did not back up my files. So how much faith do I have in Apple’s ability to get iCloud right? Not a lot. Add to that I had to BUY Keynote today for my Air, even though I HAVE it on my iMac at school…these guys have deliberately hosed everything up so they can SEEM to be offering a solution. Do I want to reward that? Nope. Don’t use iCloud: learn FTP.
iTunes U Hits 600 Million Downloads
Thursday September 8, 2011 8:06 am PDT by Eric Slivka
The Loop reports that Apple's iTunes U education portal has topped 600 million downloads since its official launch four years ago. The milestone reveals a significant acceleration in activity, with the service having passed 300 million downloads just a year ago.
According to Apple, iTunes U has had more than 600 million downloads since it first launched in 2007. What’s even more impressive is that they’ve had more than 300 million in the last year alone — a testament to the growing popularity of the service. Currently, iTunes U boasts more than 1,000 universities with active accounts. Schools contributing to the program range from big to small and include some of the world’s most prestigious institutions like Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, University of Melbourne and University of Tokyo.
Open University and Stanford University top the list of most popular sources for iTunes U users, with each registering over 30 million downloads. iTunes U is available in 123 countries, with 30% of traffic reportedly coming from iOS devices.
Will this hurt iPhone sales. Yep. I’ll buy the iPod and use Skype or FaceTime. So what? Smartphones were catching up. This changes the game again.
Will I buy another iPod or iPad? Unlikely. Will I buy another Air? Almost definitely. I talked with a Linux guy the other day, and it took me back. And when you step back from the Steve Jobs hoopla, a lot of the stuff Apple is making now is more toy than tool.
AND, I had an external drive fail and found out that (despite it being in the manual) Apple’s Time Machine did not back up my files. So how much faith do I have in Apple’s ability to get iCloud right? Not a lot. Add to that I had to BUY Keynote today for my Air, even though I HAVE it on my iMac at school…these guys have deliberately hosed everything up so they can SEEM to be offering a solution. Do I want to reward that? Nope. Don’t use iCloud: learn FTP.
iTunes U Hits 600 Million Downloads
Thursday September 8, 2011 8:06 am PDT by Eric Slivka
The Loop reports that Apple's iTunes U education portal has topped 600 million downloads since its official launch four years ago. The milestone reveals a significant acceleration in activity, with the service having passed 300 million downloads just a year ago.
According to Apple, iTunes U has had more than 600 million downloads since it first launched in 2007. What’s even more impressive is that they’ve had more than 300 million in the last year alone — a testament to the growing popularity of the service. Currently, iTunes U boasts more than 1,000 universities with active accounts. Schools contributing to the program range from big to small and include some of the world’s most prestigious institutions like Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, University of Melbourne and University of Tokyo.
Open University and Stanford University top the list of most popular sources for iTunes U users, with each registering over 30 million downloads. iTunes U is available in 123 countries, with 30% of traffic reportedly coming from iOS devices.
No Singularity
07/14/2011 20:40
Linden’s big argument with Ray Kurzweil, though, is that Ray applies Moore’s Law not only to science and technology, but to the insights they produce. Linden concedes that the data sets may be increasing at an exponential rate, but he insists that our understanding of the brain and consciousness is “stubbornly linear.” This is also the case in other fields with exploding data sets, Linden says. How many real “aha” moments have come from the genome project so far? Well okay, one big one: that Europeans are 4% neanderthal.
My quibble with Ray is slightly different. I’m always surprised that no one ever seems concerned about the distributive justice question when we get to talking about mind uploads. I'm pretty sure that means that only rich white guys with connections to silicon valley VCs need apply, right?
But actually, I've always suspected that if Ray ever did manage to upload his consciousness to the cloud, it would only take him about a nanosecond to become Skynet from the Terminator movies. Just a thought...
Dictating
05/06/2011 11:07
This has been incredibly valuable to me in transcribing all of these old letters from the 19th century that I’m using as my primary sources. Previously, I would read the letters through and then type a brief synopsis and maybe quote a few lines. Now it’s just as quick to dictate the entire letter. This is especially helpful in the long letters my subjects write to each other, describing their business strategies; and also for getting a much better sense of the language and tone they use with each other. And I can get them done about four times faster than if I was typing them.
I do feel a little bit like a telemarketer, sitting here with this thing on my head. But it’s not the first time I’ve worn a Plantronics headset, and as I get better at it, I expect it to go even quicker. Donna love technology… yeah, okay. I said, “Gotta love technology.” There’s a little learning curve. But I edit anyway, so it’s not such a big change.
Storage and history
02/17/2011 13:00
Normally, I don’t use the posts I write for THS on my own blogs. At some point, I will write a webpage/manual about research methods and primary sources, that will probably incorporate and expand on my primary source posts. But for the most part, I don’t recycle my material.
There are a couple of things I thought of, however, after sending the post on “Media and message” to Randall the other day. I might not have put them in the post even if I had thought of them earlier. THS isn’t the place to speculate too wildly, after all.
First of all, here’s the post:
Now. Taking up where I left off, with what this tremendous proliferation of information storage and transport capacity does to content...I think it will really help separate story from theory, and clarify the role of each in history.
Why do I say this? I’m looking at the little purple thumbdrive plugged into my USB port, blinking happily (it’s backing up). I can put all the writing I’m ever going to do on the topic of my dissertation, plus all the research files, on this thing and carry it around in my pocket. But let’s get down to what that really is. Not only all the argument and narrative that ultimately becomes part of the dissertation or book, and the supporting evidence I choose to use. All of it. Ten thousand scanned pages or photos. Hundreds of pdfs of books (I’m using a lot of 19th century local histories, as well as newspapers, government documents, etc.), annotated. If I gave people access to it, they could trace my steps and look at what I found. They could examine the questions I asked, the sources I used, and follow my train of thought. Possibly more important, they could see the questions I didn’t ask, the sources I didn’t use, and where my train of thought may have taken questionable turns.
This type of full disclosure of the work process to outside scrutiny would be something new for many historians. It’s par for the course, if you’re a physical scientist. Your work needs to be replicable. But it would be new ground for historians, and it might not be a change all will welcome.
I think the ability to show our work might tend to make historical monographs more like scientific works -- but I’m not sure that’s the same as saying they’ll become more “objective.” Objectivity is a term a lot of historians argue over, but I don’t think it’s really as central to what we do as people like Novick and Haskell suggest. I think it’s more of a convenient way into ideas they want to explore, but not the main point (which in both cases, I think has to do with professionalism and paradigms).
But in any case, I think there would be an opportunity to explore the elements that go into historical articles and monographs, and compare them with the elements of histories. If you have a particular historiographic point to make, you may need to make it more quickly and directly than before. And with more, and more widely sourced evidence. The terms and conditions of debate may change a whole lot.
On the other hand, we may find that histories don’t change that much. They’ll still be substantially made up of narratives. A story isn’t going to tell itself much faster, if it moves from print to digital media. If anything, the ability to branch and explore tangents or side-stories, or to circle around to backstories and detailed background and then rejoin the narrative, might actually lengthen the word-counts of our histories substantially, even if it doesn’t alter the narrative through-line. I think the ability to hypertext off into “bonus materials” is an exciting new development for historians, made possible by shifting to digital.
Some major changes will have to happen to the way archives “own” their materials, before researchers like me are able to publish all of our source documents, even to the web. But, setting aside issues of quality control, the movement seems to be inexorably toward making more info publicly available. I know several town historians and historical society people who are annoyed that their local history is available on Archive.org, because they’d like to sell them in the gift shop. I sympathize, but they’re swimming against the tide.
I’m looking forward to the research and writing process, as I put together this dissertation and book. It will be interesting to see, a year from now, what type of materials I’m able to put onto a companion website for the project. In the long run, I think these materials and supplementary sites could be as important as many of our histories. Especially if they invite readers to explore on their own, ask their own questions, and find their own answers.
There are a couple of things I thought of, however, after sending the post on “Media and message” to Randall the other day. I might not have put them in the post even if I had thought of them earlier. THS isn’t the place to speculate too wildly, after all.
First of all, here’s the post:
Now. Taking up where I left off, with what this tremendous proliferation of information storage and transport capacity does to content...I think it will really help separate story from theory, and clarify the role of each in history.
Why do I say this? I’m looking at the little purple thumbdrive plugged into my USB port, blinking happily (it’s backing up). I can put all the writing I’m ever going to do on the topic of my dissertation, plus all the research files, on this thing and carry it around in my pocket. But let’s get down to what that really is. Not only all the argument and narrative that ultimately becomes part of the dissertation or book, and the supporting evidence I choose to use. All of it. Ten thousand scanned pages or photos. Hundreds of pdfs of books (I’m using a lot of 19th century local histories, as well as newspapers, government documents, etc.), annotated. If I gave people access to it, they could trace my steps and look at what I found. They could examine the questions I asked, the sources I used, and follow my train of thought. Possibly more important, they could see the questions I didn’t ask, the sources I didn’t use, and where my train of thought may have taken questionable turns.
This type of full disclosure of the work process to outside scrutiny would be something new for many historians. It’s par for the course, if you’re a physical scientist. Your work needs to be replicable. But it would be new ground for historians, and it might not be a change all will welcome.
I think the ability to show our work might tend to make historical monographs more like scientific works -- but I’m not sure that’s the same as saying they’ll become more “objective.” Objectivity is a term a lot of historians argue over, but I don’t think it’s really as central to what we do as people like Novick and Haskell suggest. I think it’s more of a convenient way into ideas they want to explore, but not the main point (which in both cases, I think has to do with professionalism and paradigms).
But in any case, I think there would be an opportunity to explore the elements that go into historical articles and monographs, and compare them with the elements of histories. If you have a particular historiographic point to make, you may need to make it more quickly and directly than before. And with more, and more widely sourced evidence. The terms and conditions of debate may change a whole lot.
On the other hand, we may find that histories don’t change that much. They’ll still be substantially made up of narratives. A story isn’t going to tell itself much faster, if it moves from print to digital media. If anything, the ability to branch and explore tangents or side-stories, or to circle around to backstories and detailed background and then rejoin the narrative, might actually lengthen the word-counts of our histories substantially, even if it doesn’t alter the narrative through-line. I think the ability to hypertext off into “bonus materials” is an exciting new development for historians, made possible by shifting to digital.
Some major changes will have to happen to the way archives “own” their materials, before researchers like me are able to publish all of our source documents, even to the web. But, setting aside issues of quality control, the movement seems to be inexorably toward making more info publicly available. I know several town historians and historical society people who are annoyed that their local history is available on Archive.org, because they’d like to sell them in the gift shop. I sympathize, but they’re swimming against the tide.
I’m looking forward to the research and writing process, as I put together this dissertation and book. It will be interesting to see, a year from now, what type of materials I’m able to put onto a companion website for the project. In the long run, I think these materials and supplementary sites could be as important as many of our histories. Especially if they invite readers to explore on their own, ask their own questions, and find their own answers.
1/1/11 is Dump Facebook Day
01/01/2011 17:18
This has been a long time coming. I wasn't crazy about the "people from high school you didn't like enough to stay in touch with" aspect of facebook. But I thought it was a useful way to connect with people far away who might share interests. I was willing to put up with being tagged in yearbook photos, in order to do the occasionally useful peer-to-peer social networking.
But in the last few weeks, it seems that something has changed. Maybe these were just things I hadn't noticed before -- or maybe facebook has turned some type of corner. First, there was the total stranger (a friend of a friend I thought I'd deleted) who commented on pictures of my dog. Really, dude -- you don't have anything better to do than make fun of someone's dog pix you've never even met? Then, there was the "new profile." I looked at some people's new profiles, and wondered whether I really wanted that much info on the page. It's optional now -- but for how long?
And lately, I've started noticing a lot of those "Like" buttons showing up everywhere. I didn't think much about it, until I was looking at the underground pictures on Sleepycity.net the other night, and saw a little note next to the button. It said, "If you can see this text facebook is able to track your online behavior outside facebook." It had a link to a page describing how to prevent this. But I still thought it was pretty creepy of facebook.
Today I learned that our 18-year old made a New Year's resolution and deleted her facebook page. She decided she was wasting too much time finding out when her friends took a dump. Looking at the same pics over and over. I thought about that and realized, I never look at anybody's page. Never read the news feeds. Don't really have the interest or the time. So maybe social networking isn't really for me.
Finally, this afternoon I found out there was an article about Charles Bradlaugh published in 2003 that I have never seen. I searched for it online, and found it on a site called Scribd. I clicked to download it, and it asked me to log in. Rather than set up an account, I used my facebook account. I thought this would be similar to using my gmail account to log into blogger: that it would capture my info, for use by the people who own the sites. But it has another, much more alarming aspect.
Before I had even finished reading the article, I got an email message from Scribd telling me that two family members who are facebook friends had "subscribed" to my reading habits on Scribd. I tried to find out what type of notification they had seen, but I wasn't able to see it on Facebook. But apparently, anything I chose to read on Scribd would be broadcast on facebook for everyone to see! In this case, it was only an article about Bradlaugh and the freemasons. But do I really want everybody to know about every article I look at on the web?
Needless to say, I deleted the Scribd account. At least, I think I did. How can you really tell? And I sent out a message to my facebook friends that I was deactivating my account in 24 hours. But then Steph found this site that explained how deactivating wasn't really effective (because facebook keeps your stuff up on the web). It included directions on how to really delete your account. So I went ahead and did it immediately. Hopefully, it works.
Paper gear sculpture
12/25/2010 15:40
This is made of paper. Really! Here are the plans, in Japanese. Here's an English translation. The trial gears look difficult enough, I don't think I'll ever need to try the heart. Nice to know people can do this type of thing with paper, though.
Google, stick to your knitting
08/08/2010 19:25
Tesla was right
06/13/2010 09:52
It is possible to broadcast electrical power wirelessly.
Hmm...What else was he right about? How many other technologies have not been deployed, simply because they wouldn’t be in the short-term best interests of the powers that be? WIMAX comes to mind. The technology has existed for nearly ten years. But they can't figure a way to fit it into the telecom model -- or rather, to prevent it from trashing the telecom model and establishing the possibility of wireless peer to peer networking.
Somebody should write a book about the ways technology has been channeled by the pursuit of profits. It could begin with the dumping of the Minneapolis streetcars into Lake Minnetonka.
Getting to know Tinderbox
05/01/2010 08:30
Looking at the first few minutes of a presentation Mark Bernstein made at the Boston weekend event, I was struck by a couple of things. First, by what Tinderbox doesn’t want to be: powerpoint or mindmap (which is good, because there's something creepy about productivity tools that claim to be based on a profound insight into cognition supplied by pop psychology). Second, by the idea of incremental refinement, which is what Tinderbox does want to be a tool for.
That’s a fancy way of saying that a lot of the time, you’re working with information before you know what it means. I’m hoping to use Tinderbox along with Endnote as a way to store and organize things I’m working on, with an eventual goal of outputting information in the form of Comprehensive Exams, a dissertation, and a book. I'm not expecting spontaneous combustion, but I am hoping for flames.
(This is a rough map of books that appear in more than one bibliography of the core books I’ve looked at so far. I had to do this manually, but I assume once I understand the app., I'll find there's a cool agent that will do this for me. I feel like I'm in Hiro's office in Snow Crash. As I accumulate more books, I’ll hopefully begin to see patterns. I’ve already discovered some interesting things about who uses the same background texts and who doesn’t...)
I like the idea of knowing what went into a book, and where it fits in the “lineage” of a particular field. Rural History will probably draw from a couple of related fields. Ag. History and Enviro. are the obvious ones, but there will probably be books from Labor History, Political, and even general history that I’ll want to include. Everybody’s talked about the populists and progressives, for example. I’ll want to include things like Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R., which is a mainstream text. But wanting to include (or at least look at) a wide range of titles has resulted in an Endnote file that already includes 421 titles. So I need some way of thinking about these that helps me actually work my way through them!
(This is a timeline of major historians. It’s interesting, when in their lives they published the books I’m reading)
For the general US History reading list, I was trying to figure out who were the big names? People I need to be familiar with, in order to be credible. Some names were familiar, but others not so much. Looking at them on a timeline helped me a bit. One of my fellow students at UMass uses Beedocs Timeline to map out the events he’s working with -- I noticed there’s some info from the Boston event on exporting to timelines.
(This is a list of the letters I’ve transcribed or paraphrased so far. Interesting how they fall in time -- can’t see that when they’re just a set of files in a folder)
For the primary data, I haven’t done that much yet. But I was surprised to find out how my documents were distributed in time, which I didn’t know until I moved them around on the screen. I’m working with the surviving subset of a series of apparently daily letters written from one brother to another. It’s helpful to see that in some months (like November 1845), I have a lot of letters, while for other months I have none. I’ll be able to see when the writer was obsessing about money, and when he was worried about their railroad lawsuit, etc. And -- most importantly -- I should be able to find anything I need, rather than wondering where it was I saw that info...
That’s a fancy way of saying that a lot of the time, you’re working with information before you know what it means. I’m hoping to use Tinderbox along with Endnote as a way to store and organize things I’m working on, with an eventual goal of outputting information in the form of Comprehensive Exams, a dissertation, and a book. I'm not expecting spontaneous combustion, but I am hoping for flames.
(This is a rough map of books that appear in more than one bibliography of the core books I’ve looked at so far. I had to do this manually, but I assume once I understand the app., I'll find there's a cool agent that will do this for me. I feel like I'm in Hiro's office in Snow Crash. As I accumulate more books, I’ll hopefully begin to see patterns. I’ve already discovered some interesting things about who uses the same background texts and who doesn’t...)
I like the idea of knowing what went into a book, and where it fits in the “lineage” of a particular field. Rural History will probably draw from a couple of related fields. Ag. History and Enviro. are the obvious ones, but there will probably be books from Labor History, Political, and even general history that I’ll want to include. Everybody’s talked about the populists and progressives, for example. I’ll want to include things like Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R., which is a mainstream text. But wanting to include (or at least look at) a wide range of titles has resulted in an Endnote file that already includes 421 titles. So I need some way of thinking about these that helps me actually work my way through them!
(This is a timeline of major historians. It’s interesting, when in their lives they published the books I’m reading)
For the general US History reading list, I was trying to figure out who were the big names? People I need to be familiar with, in order to be credible. Some names were familiar, but others not so much. Looking at them on a timeline helped me a bit. One of my fellow students at UMass uses Beedocs Timeline to map out the events he’s working with -- I noticed there’s some info from the Boston event on exporting to timelines.
(This is a list of the letters I’ve transcribed or paraphrased so far. Interesting how they fall in time -- can’t see that when they’re just a set of files in a folder)
For the primary data, I haven’t done that much yet. But I was surprised to find out how my documents were distributed in time, which I didn’t know until I moved them around on the screen. I’m working with the surviving subset of a series of apparently daily letters written from one brother to another. It’s helpful to see that in some months (like November 1845), I have a lot of letters, while for other months I have none. I’ll be able to see when the writer was obsessing about money, and when he was worried about their railroad lawsuit, etc. And -- most importantly -- I should be able to find anything I need, rather than wondering where it was I saw that info...
Cool Tools
04/24/2010 14:12
Okay, I admit to still being impressed by technology. While I don’t think tools are more important than work, I think a good set of tools makes the work easier, better, and more enjoyable.
I’ve just started using Tinderbox. For a long time, I was trying to convince myself that Endnote was really all I needed (yeah, I know. Need is a relative term. I do have a pencil and a pile of 3x5 cards, so I really don’t need any of this). Endnote, after all, is a killer reference app. You can import from just about everyplace, you can sort in complicated ways and save the searches. Attached to a Word outline, you can sort-of represent the way books and ideas network through, say, a historiography.
But not really.
I resisted Tinderbox for quite a while. The learning curve is very steep, I’ve read. There’s a problem with images in the present version on the Mac. It isn’t clear to me how to create a page that incorporates a timeline with a sort-of “internet-cloud-diagram” that will allow me to fly through my data, turn on the types of links I want to look at (responses, disagreements, lineages of ideas, etc.)...I’m not saying Tinderbox doesn’t do this. Actually, I suspect it does; but that it will take some time to get there.
In the meantime, I’m really happy with what I have figured out how to do, so far. I can map the bibliographies (or the parts I’m interested in) of the books I read. I can group the books by topic and put them on a timeline (I hadn’t noticed, from looking at the biblio in the book, for instance, how many of Patricia Limerick’s secondary sources were published in the ‘70s). I can easily find the books that keep popping up on everybody’s biblio, and promote them to my own field reading list.
I'm really impressed so far. I'm thinking of each of my maps of individual books is like one 2D layer -- when they all get slapped together, I'll have a 3D historiography.
And this is just day three, and the comps reading. The primary material...it’s going to be insane.
I’ve just started using Tinderbox. For a long time, I was trying to convince myself that Endnote was really all I needed (yeah, I know. Need is a relative term. I do have a pencil and a pile of 3x5 cards, so I really don’t need any of this). Endnote, after all, is a killer reference app. You can import from just about everyplace, you can sort in complicated ways and save the searches. Attached to a Word outline, you can sort-of represent the way books and ideas network through, say, a historiography.
But not really.
I resisted Tinderbox for quite a while. The learning curve is very steep, I’ve read. There’s a problem with images in the present version on the Mac. It isn’t clear to me how to create a page that incorporates a timeline with a sort-of “internet-cloud-diagram” that will allow me to fly through my data, turn on the types of links I want to look at (responses, disagreements, lineages of ideas, etc.)...I’m not saying Tinderbox doesn’t do this. Actually, I suspect it does; but that it will take some time to get there.
In the meantime, I’m really happy with what I have figured out how to do, so far. I can map the bibliographies (or the parts I’m interested in) of the books I read. I can group the books by topic and put them on a timeline (I hadn’t noticed, from looking at the biblio in the book, for instance, how many of Patricia Limerick’s secondary sources were published in the ‘70s). I can easily find the books that keep popping up on everybody’s biblio, and promote them to my own field reading list.
I'm really impressed so far. I'm thinking of each of my maps of individual books is like one 2D layer -- when they all get slapped together, I'll have a 3D historiography.
And this is just day three, and the comps reading. The primary material...it’s going to be insane.
What does the flat world mean?
08/12/2009 21:26
Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat talk at MIT, May 16, 2005
This is an interesting talk, given by an evangelist of globalism (and foreign affairs writer for the New York Times), to an audience of MIT true believers. The talk is mostly about the “incredible new forms of collaboration” available across vast distances, as a result of the proliferation of the fiber-optic backbone during the dot-com boom.
That’s true, of course. The video itself, offered as part of MIT’s OpenCourseWare portal, which is a free portal of over 600 MIT video lectures. It’s like TED, and other free portals that offer a more selective menu of videos than YouTube. And it’s cool (of course, so’s YouTube). But (like George Gilder, Ray Kurzweil, and lots of other tech prophets) Friedman seems to see only the coolness, and none of the weirdness technology brings.
Friedman describes (beginning about 14:55) a pilot program begun by MacDonalds around Washington DC, “where if you go up to the drive-in window…you’re not actually speaking to that MacDonalds. You’re speaking now to a MacDonalds call center in Colorado Springs, that’s taking down your order, and taking your picture, and then zapping your picture and your order electronically back to that MacDonalds, where your picture and order are matched up when you drive up to the drive-in window. So the world is being flattened,” Friedman goes on to explain, without reflecting anymore on the meaning of what he just described. But it deserves reflection, before we rush to embrace Friedman’s thesis that “flattening” is the next great event in the inevitable evolution of technological culture.
Why is it better to have people in suburban Colorado Springs taking your MacDonalds order? What’s the ratio of white to black customers at these “pilot” locations? What’s the ratio of white to black call center operators in Colorado Springs? What’s the average educational level of MacDonalds employees in Washington? What’s MacDonalds’ contribution to the educational infrastructure in Washington?
Seems like there are a lot of unacknowledged assumptions lurking beneath Friedman’s flat earth. Corporations are free (and should be free, it seems) to evade any responsibility for the communities in which they do business. Used to be, corporations were viewed as a “fictional persons” – Friedman seems to have upgraded them to sovereign nations.
Walmart, Friedman announces, would be China’s 8th largest trading partner, if it was a nation (29:30). That puts Walmart “ahead of Canada and Australia” in terms of trade volume with China. But what does that mean? “Walmart’s the biggest company in America --- and they don’t make anything.” Dang! So, are we being invited to think about interacting with Walmart, as if it was a sovereign state? Robert Reich said (or implied) something similar in Supercapitalism. In both Reich’s and Friedman’s discussions, we seem to be invited to step away from any idea of having a one-on-one relationship with anything so immense and complex. After all, little people like us don’t manage our own relationships with smaller entities – like Canada or Australia. So how could we expect to do so, with Walmart?
There are other interesting stories, like the one where HP tries to “do business” with people in rural India who have no money (about 55:00). Again, I’m not sure the message he sees in these examples is the only possible one. Or the most important. Connect the dots for me, Tom. How are micro-payments going to make HP’s business model work in places where people make a dollar a day, and have no discretionary income? Another example at about 1:12: EBay is “the closest thing to a virtual country there is: $100 billion economy, 38 million people…” But that’s where the analogy falls flat. What else about EBay is like a country? They provide no services to “their people” beyond facilitating purchases and sales. Is that all countries do in Friedman’s mind?
I think it’d be interesting to look at Friedman’s audience and fan-base, and try to understand whose agenda he’s pushing. He brings up a lot of interesting technological change, but the direction he takes this discussion seems like an attempt to evade an awful lot of hard questions about the implications of a flat world. Maybe there’s more of that serious stuff in the book (which I downloaded from Audible on 4-26-2005, and haven’t finished listening to yet)…
Retro-futurist Anticipations
03/25/2009 16:58
Things to track down:
HG Wells Anticipations and Wells’ life.
Other people to consider? Oscar Wilde?
Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) (also built the Crystal Paris, Santiago rail station, etc) and also.
Also Edison’s life in pics (Pop Sci 1929)
Maybe the thing that killed the airship was its military use in WWI. If not for that, it may have prospered, and the French and British may have continued working on it, as well as Count Zeppelin. Also, and here’s a brief timeline:
Sir William Ramsay (1895) discovers helium in rock – large concentrations found in France.
In 1896, “Public Opinion” reprints an American military article on “The Influence of the Air-Ship on War.”
1901 Smithsonian article on “Count von Zeppelin’s Dirigible Airship.”
1903 Outing presents “Yachting Among the Clouds.”
In 1909, McClure’s Magazine featured a long article on “The Aërial Battleship.”
1919 artcicle on “Commercial Production of Helium”
Pop. Sci 1923 was talking about US airships and helium…
Even 1945 Pop Sci was still hoping for a new airship age…
And then there’s real transportation for the people – bicycles!
And the occasional steam-bike.
Okay. Back to the causes of WWI. For my purposes, this might be boiled down to basically, Bismarck and the isolation of France from GB. The 3rd Republic , probably some good things in the Boulanger and Dreyfus crises (and) – this would be a good way to incorporate CB, Thiers, the Paris Commune, Zola, and even to flash back to Disraeli, Rothschild, and Paine v. Burke.
HG Wells Anticipations and Wells’ life.
Other people to consider? Oscar Wilde?
Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) (also built the Crystal Paris, Santiago rail station, etc) and also.
Also Edison’s life in pics (Pop Sci 1929)
Maybe the thing that killed the airship was its military use in WWI. If not for that, it may have prospered, and the French and British may have continued working on it, as well as Count Zeppelin. Also, and here’s a brief timeline:
Sir William Ramsay (1895) discovers helium in rock – large concentrations found in France.
In 1896, “Public Opinion” reprints an American military article on “The Influence of the Air-Ship on War.”
1901 Smithsonian article on “Count von Zeppelin’s Dirigible Airship.”
1903 Outing presents “Yachting Among the Clouds.”
In 1909, McClure’s Magazine featured a long article on “The Aërial Battleship.”
1919 artcicle on “Commercial Production of Helium”
Pop. Sci 1923 was talking about US airships and helium…
Even 1945 Pop Sci was still hoping for a new airship age…
And then there’s real transportation for the people – bicycles!
And the occasional steam-bike.
Okay. Back to the causes of WWI. For my purposes, this might be boiled down to basically, Bismarck and the isolation of France from GB. The 3rd Republic , probably some good things in the Boulanger and Dreyfus crises (and) – this would be a good way to incorporate CB, Thiers, the Paris Commune, Zola, and even to flash back to Disraeli, Rothschild, and Paine v. Burke.
Turn of the Century Tech
03/24/2009 18:08
Ideas from today’s research:
William Thomson: Transatlantic Cable – Lord Kelvin
1851 Dover-Calais cable.
1853 Port Patrick-Donaghadee cable
1856 Atlantic Telegraph Co., William Thomson a director.
1858 Ireland-Newfoundland cable. Proves Thomson’s mirror galvanometer, but quickly fails.
1865-6 Two attempts, 2nd a success (plus recovers the first cable and completes it). Thomson knighted.
1892 Victoria creates Thomson (then Pres. of Royal Society) Baron Kelvin of Netherhall.
(Alexander Russell, Lord Kelvin: His Life and Work, 1912)
Paris Pneumatic post network
1867: Wheatstone Automatic telegraph – “electric Jacquard” used morse code on punched tape.
1874: Jean Maurice Emile Baudot’s 12x line multiplexer uses 5-unit binary electrical pulses. Baudot’s apparatus was very stressful to operate, due to the timing requirements. But in general, technological improvement changed telegraphy from a high-skill to a low-skill job.
The telephone completely eliminated need for skilled intermediary. June 1877: 230 phones, July: 750, August: 1300, 1880: 30k.
Samuel FB Morse and Jedediah Morse – Illuminati conspiracy.
A couple more books on Tesla (and also on Edison, Westinghouse, Steinmetz, etc.) came in today, so there’s info to process…
1905: “How to recognize the Autos of Today” and. Also the Berliet “French Mercedes”, How to recognize buses, and, and; taxis (and their history). Edison, batteries, more batteries and White Steam Cars
In the air, the Davidson Aeroplane, the Lebaudy airship (and a wiki) and the Antionette Co. (Fr) made planes and efficient gas engines 1903-12. An Antionette engine powered Paul Cornu’s first helicopter in 1907. The Wright Bros first flight and Alberto Santos Dumont (Brazilian airship maker and first European flight), and, and , and, and a wiki. And of course, Count Zeppelin.
Finally, a Renault racer, an Oldsmobile Van, a Steam Motorcycle, and Sir Marcus Samuel Bart., who started Royal Dutch Shell.
William Thomson: Transatlantic Cable – Lord Kelvin
1851 Dover-Calais cable.
1853 Port Patrick-Donaghadee cable
1856 Atlantic Telegraph Co., William Thomson a director.
1858 Ireland-Newfoundland cable. Proves Thomson’s mirror galvanometer, but quickly fails.
1865-6 Two attempts, 2nd a success (plus recovers the first cable and completes it). Thomson knighted.
1892 Victoria creates Thomson (then Pres. of Royal Society) Baron Kelvin of Netherhall.
(Alexander Russell, Lord Kelvin: His Life and Work, 1912)
Paris Pneumatic post network
1867: Wheatstone Automatic telegraph – “electric Jacquard” used morse code on punched tape.
1874: Jean Maurice Emile Baudot’s 12x line multiplexer uses 5-unit binary electrical pulses. Baudot’s apparatus was very stressful to operate, due to the timing requirements. But in general, technological improvement changed telegraphy from a high-skill to a low-skill job.
The telephone completely eliminated need for skilled intermediary. June 1877: 230 phones, July: 750, August: 1300, 1880: 30k.
Samuel FB Morse and Jedediah Morse – Illuminati conspiracy.
A couple more books on Tesla (and also on Edison, Westinghouse, Steinmetz, etc.) came in today, so there’s info to process…
1905: “How to recognize the Autos of Today” and. Also the Berliet “French Mercedes”, How to recognize buses, and, and; taxis (and their history). Edison, batteries, more batteries and White Steam Cars
In the air, the Davidson Aeroplane, the Lebaudy airship (and a wiki) and the Antionette Co. (Fr) made planes and efficient gas engines 1903-12. An Antionette engine powered Paul Cornu’s first helicopter in 1907. The Wright Bros first flight and Alberto Santos Dumont (Brazilian airship maker and first European flight), and, and , and, and a wiki. And of course, Count Zeppelin.
Finally, a Renault racer, an Oldsmobile Van, a Steam Motorcycle, and Sir Marcus Samuel Bart., who started Royal Dutch Shell.
Tesla
03/19/2009 19:45
“Eighteen clean linen napkins were stacked as usual at his place. Nikola Tesla could no more have said why he favored numbers divisible by three than why he had a morbid fear of germs or, for that matter, why he was beset by any of the multitude of other obsessions tht plagued his life.” (Margaret Cheney, Tesla, Man Out of Time (New York: Dorset Press, 1981), 1) Cheney identifies Tesla pretty clearly as what we’d call obsessive-compulsive. Is this accurate? She tends to skirt over many of the main elements of her story. Could be from lack of conclusive evidence – maybe she’s doing the best she can with scant documentation. Or maybe she feels this adds to the drama of the story.
“The strange thing about this tube lighting was that it had no connection to the loops of electrical wiring around the ceiling. Indeed, it had no connections at all, drawing all its energy from an ambient force field. He could pick up an unattached light and move it freely to any part of the workshop.” (2) Another frustrating element of the story. It’s unclear to me when Tesla developed this technology, and a complete mystery how it worked. I find it hard to believe that NO ONE has figured it out in over a century. I suspect the technique requires excessive amounts of electricity to work – which would make it practical for Tesla’s lab but not for commercial or residential applications.
In many cases, I wonder if this is the key to Tesla’s ambiguous position in science. His ideas were revolutionary, and most of them worked. But many were ridiculously impractical. The later competition with Marconi could be seen in this light too: the worldwide broadcasting capability was conceptually meaningless to people who didn’t see a market. If you’re looking for the ability to send a simple message point to point, then the worldwide web and 500 channels of TV aren’t worth paying for. Modern readers prefer Tesla’s solution, because we know where communications technology led.
One of Cheney’s main sources is Tesla’s short book My Inventions. It seems to be a promotional pamphlet, and Tesla probably exaggerates a little. He says “If memory serves me right, it was in November, 1890, that I performed a laboratory experiment which was one of the most extraordinary and spectacular ever recorded in the annals of science. In investigating the behavior of high frequency currents I had satisfied myself that an electric field of sufficient intensity could be produced in a room to light up electrodeless vacuum tubes. Accordingly, a transformer was built to test the theory and the first trial proved a marvelous success.” (55) Again, what might be a marvelous success in Tesla’s lab might also be completely impractical for lighting the apartment next door.
Some of Tesla’s ideas found there way into science fiction. As a young man, he had the idea for a “gargantuan elevated ring around the equator. At first it would have scaffolding. Once this was knocked away the ring would rotate freely at the same speed as the Earth.” (17) It’s a visionary idea, but Cheney seems uninterested in the fact that a vision isn’t the same as an invention. This may be the problem with many of Tesla’s other ideas.
In his 1891 Columbia lectures, Tesla showed a “button lamp” (55) which was a forerunner of the electron microscope. It might be interesting to speculate what might have happened if people (if Tesla) had understood what he had, and used it! Tesla’s European contemporaries were Henri Becquerel, the Curies, J. A. Fleming, Sir James Dewar and Lord Kelvin. These people could have taken his ideas farther into their own fields.
Cheney seems to suspect Tesla was gay, but she doesn’t want to come out and say it. She is adamant that he never had a sexual relationship with any of the women known to be his friends. But he did “at one period maintain an apartment at the luxurious Hotel Marguery on the west side of Park Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets at the same time that his residence was at another hotel; and he once told Kenneth Swezey that he used it for meeting ‘special’ friends and acquaintances.” (84)
Tesla apparently believed in the therapeutic effects of electricity. He told a reporter “I don’t believe I could have borne up but for the regular electric treatment which I administered to myself. You see, electricity puts into the tired body just what it most needs—life force, nerve force. It’s a great doctor, I can tell you, perhaps the greatest of all doctors.” (107) Tesla also believed in the power of oscillating vibrations, as a way of boosting electrical power as well as doing physical work. He boasted to reporters that he had a pocket-sized oscillator that he could use to destroy the Empire State Building or Brooklyn Bridge (116, the ESB was built in 1939 – like many of Cheney’s statements, these lack a specific time and place. So it’s hard to know when he made these claims, or whether he continued making them for decades).
Chauncey McGovern of Pearson’s Magazine in London wrote a May 1899 article called “The New Wizard of the West.” He wrote regular sci/tech articles for Pearson’s, and seems like an interesting character in his own right. A more recent writer, Leland Anderson (1977), suggested “Tesla’s 1903 patents 723,188 and 725,605 contain the basic principles of the logical AND circuit element.” (131) These patents, although they were devoted to preventing interference of radio-controlled weapons, have made it difficult for later applicants to receive patents on AND gates. This is an interesting element of intellectual property law that I was completely unaware of. Cheney later says Tesla’s 1901 patents “in which he describes the supercooling of conductors to appreciably lower their resistance…is yet another instance in which his pioneer work has gone unacknowledged—possibly because it might open a door for the U.S. Patent Office to invalidate later claims.” (153)
“World Telegraphy [Tesla elsewhere calls this the World System] constitutes, I believe, in its principles of operation, means employed and capacities of application, a radical and fruitful departure from what has been done heretofore. I have no doubt that it will prove very efficient in enlightening the masses, particularly in still uncivilized countries and less accessible regions, and that it will add materially to the general safety, comfort, and convenience, and maintenance of peaceful relations. It involves the employment of a number of plants, all of which are capable of transmitting individualized signals to the uttermost confines of the earth. Each of them will be preferably located near some important center of civilization, and the news it receives through any channel will be flashed to all points of the globe. A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one’s pocket may then be set up anywhere on sea or land, and it will record the world’s news or such special messages as may be intended for it. Thus the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts. Since a single plant of but one hundred horse-power can operate hundreds of millions of instruments, the system will have a virtually infinite working capacity, and it must needs immensely facilitate and cheapen the transmission of intelligence.” (179, same text found in 1904 Public Opinion article.
Bibliography:
“Nikola Tesla,” T. C. Martin, The Century, 1894.
“Tesla’s Oscillator and Other Inventions,” T. C. Martin, The Century, 1894.
“Nikola Tesla and the electrical Outlook,” The Review of Reviews, 1895.
Cochrane, Charles Henry. The Wonders of Modern Mechanism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1896) Just past the article on Tesla is a longer article on Electric Locomotives.
Routledge, Robert. Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1896)
Tesla, Nikola and Thomas Commerford Martin. The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla (New York: The Electrical Engineer, 1894) Includes the Columbia, London and Paris lectures.
Tesla, Nikola. Electrical Communication with the Planets, 1902
Tesla, Nikola. Transmission of Electric Energy Without Wires, 1904
Tesla, Nikola. “The Future of the Wireless Art,” Massie, Walter W. amd Charles R. Underhill, Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1909)
“Home Workshop: Simplified Tesla Coil,” Kenneth M. Swezey, Popular Science, Dec. 1934.
“Cigar-Box Tesla Coil Works Weird Wonders,” Tracy Diers, Popular Science, Jan 1946.
Wind in NH!
02/15/2009 20:43
On the way to watch the horse skijoring at the 93rd annual Newport NH winter festival (longest-running winter fest in the US), we happened upon these really cool windmills in Lempster, NH.
Went online to find out what’s up, and I really couldn’t find out a lot of good information, because the web was swamped with BS from a group that calls itself the “Industrial Wind Action Group.” Apparently these folks are up in arms at the idea that America is going to pollute its environment with wind energy stations.
No, REALLY.
Their website says “Industrial Wind Action Group seeks to promote knowledge and raise awareness of the risks and damaging environmental impacts of industrial wind energy development. Information and analysis on the subject is available through its website, www.windaction.org.” I wonder where they get their funding…
It’s clear where they get their science, though. From the people who brought you the arguments for “Clean Coal.” The folks against the turbines on Lempster Mountain were supposedly afraid a turbine blade would break loose and land in granny’s bedroom. Hmm…I wonder how they’d feel about a coal-fired plant or a nuke in their neighborhood. Oh wait, that’s the difference! Those dirty, dangerous power plants are always in someone else’s neighborhood. Not to mention those nasty mines. When you think about the number of people we’ve gotten used to dying for the coal power industry, it makes the whining of the anti-wind folks sound a little weak, doesn’t it?
In any case, they got it done somehow. In spite of the fake environmentalists and concerned grandchildren who tried to block it. Way to go, Lempster!
Went online to find out what’s up, and I really couldn’t find out a lot of good information, because the web was swamped with BS from a group that calls itself the “Industrial Wind Action Group.” Apparently these folks are up in arms at the idea that America is going to pollute its environment with wind energy stations.
No, REALLY.
Their website says “Industrial Wind Action Group seeks to promote knowledge and raise awareness of the risks and damaging environmental impacts of industrial wind energy development. Information and analysis on the subject is available through its website, www.windaction.org.” I wonder where they get their funding…
It’s clear where they get their science, though. From the people who brought you the arguments for “Clean Coal.” The folks against the turbines on Lempster Mountain were supposedly afraid a turbine blade would break loose and land in granny’s bedroom. Hmm…I wonder how they’d feel about a coal-fired plant or a nuke in their neighborhood. Oh wait, that’s the difference! Those dirty, dangerous power plants are always in someone else’s neighborhood. Not to mention those nasty mines. When you think about the number of people we’ve gotten used to dying for the coal power industry, it makes the whining of the anti-wind folks sound a little weak, doesn’t it?
In any case, they got it done somehow. In spite of the fake environmentalists and concerned grandchildren who tried to block it. Way to go, Lempster!
New Tech Gripes
01/21/2009 23:25
So I upgraded the ISP service, and bought a new web design package, RapidWeaver. Inevitably, I spent the entire day trying to get the things to work, separately and together. The email on the new server isn’t quite working yet. I managed to get the web software to actually publish the pages I designed. Buried deep in the Support Forum’s thousands of posts, is a suggestion that worked. It wasn’t a user-error sort of thing. You have to delete some cache files from a Library file in your User file. Not the type of thing you’d stumble over, even if you were a certified UNIX hacker and C programmer with 20 years experience. Maybe they should’ve mentioned it a little more prominently? Would’ve saved me a couple hours of frustration - and I can’t be the only one...
It’s a good thing, after all, that there’re simple solutions like iWeb. Sure, you get herded into the dot Mac world, and woe betide you if you want to do things your own way. But even so, the themes in iWeb are easier to customize than the themes in RapidWeaver. If iWeb could’ve synchronized with a third-party ISP, rather than forcing me to publish the whole site every time and ftp it to the server, I’d probably never have switched. Cuz I’ve got to say, even after all the frustration getting it going; once I changed a couple things on the site and it uploaded only the changes in a second or two --- THAT was COOL!
This photo is apropos of nothing, but I like it.
It’s a good thing, after all, that there’re simple solutions like iWeb. Sure, you get herded into the dot Mac world, and woe betide you if you want to do things your own way. But even so, the themes in iWeb are easier to customize than the themes in RapidWeaver. If iWeb could’ve synchronized with a third-party ISP, rather than forcing me to publish the whole site every time and ftp it to the server, I’d probably never have switched. Cuz I’ve got to say, even after all the frustration getting it going; once I changed a couple things on the site and it uploaded only the changes in a second or two --- THAT was COOL!
This photo is apropos of nothing, but I like it.
