"The notion that something is unquantifiable is alien to the mindset of the modern economist. Tell them it’s not quantifiable, and they will hear that it has not been quantified yet. This mistake matters, because economists and their business-school colleagues are very influential in the formulation of public policy. If economists rather than biologists decide what is good biology through supposedly quantitative, objective evaluations, you get worse biology. If economists decide what makes good physics, or good chemistry, you get worse physics, and worse chemistry. If you believe, as I do, that scientific progress, broadly speaking, is good for society, then making economists the arbiters of what is and isn’t useful ends up hurting everybody."

"The Rewilding is a vision of radical removal of agency from the world: the flowers bedew themselves, nobody ordered the motion of the planets, not even the mysterious agency known as Scientific Law; evolution is design without a designer, computing is thought without a thinker, and there is no mathematical reality separate from the physical world. In the Rewilding, civilization advances by systematically blurring or even erasing the border between the artificial and the natural; the more efficient an artificial system is, the more it resembles (or even is) a natural one. That is, our surroundings becomes increasingly wild (self-willed) rather than having to be willed by us. Agency, so long marching forward, begins to retreat."

With or without WikiLeaks, the personel, technical know-how, and ideological will exists to enable anonymous leaking and to make this information available to the public.

Yet the debate over WikiLeaks has proceeded as if the matter might conclude with the eradication of these kinds of data dumps—as if this is a temporary glitch in the system that can be fixed; as if this is a nuisance that [will] go away with the application of sufficient government gusto. But I don't think the matter can end this way. Just as technology has made it easier for governments and corporations to snoop ever more invasively into the private lives of individuals, it has also made it easier for individuals, working alone or together, to root through and make off with the secret files of governments and corporations. WikiLeaks is simply an early manifestation of what I predict will be a more-or-less permanent feature of contemporary life, and a more-or-less permanent constraint on strategies of secret-keeping.

"Criminals are by definition not enemy soldiers but people who have been arrested, charged with a crime, indicted, and convicted. If we call them "criminals" in the drone porn we distribute, in effect we are saying that we are not fighting a war but killing suspects convicted without a trial.

It raises serious questions about the war itself: Are we in Afghanistan to fight a religious sect because 10 years ago, when it was in power, it sheltered al-Qaida and might again in the future? Are, therefore, all members of the sect legitimate military targets? Are there no civilian Taliban, who, repellant as some of their practices are, nonetheless deserve protection from drone strikes?

Putative war crimes, repellant videos, porn mentality, the counterproductive creation of generations of terrorists: On grounds both moral and practical, the drone attacks must cease. Stop them now."

It's tempting to call a stop to deployment of such emerging technologies. But that approach promises to be as successful as "Just Say No" was in the war on drugs, or as the original Luddites were at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The United States will develop these strange and alarming new technologies, but not, perhaps, for the reasons that many suspect.

"An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves.
The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition."

"SF, at its best, is an exploration of the human condition under circumstances that we can conceive of existing, but which don't currently exist (either because the technology doesn't exist, or there are gaps in our scientific model of the universe, or just because we're short of big meteoroids on a collision course with the Sea of Japan — the situation is improbable but not implausible).

Star Trek and its ilk are approaching the dramatic stage from the opposite direction: the situation is irrelevant, it's background for a story which is all about the interpersonal relationships among the cast. You could strip out the 25th century tech in Star Trek and replace it with 18th century tech — make the Enterprise a man o'war (with a particularly eccentric crew) at large upon the seven seas during the age of sail — without changing the scripts significantly."

"Now you begin to understand why you watch The Office. The cubicle life is amorphous. What are you actually making? How do you know if you are advancing at your job? Does sending e-mail all day help the brand? Does my boss think I am a good guy? It's an absurd situation, and "self-referential irony supplied by pop culture" helps one cope with that absurdity. Crawford looks around at the sociologists who have studied office life and concludes that the office is best approached as a "place of moral education" with managers acting as therapists, concentrating on helping us become team players. The "team" is what launches the product, lands the account, drives the business. "The individual feels that, alone, he is without any effect," writes Crawford. And worse: "He has difficulty imagining how he might earn a living otherwise." The team makes us passive and helpless."

The nifty-keen thing here is that Web 2.0 is a web. It's a web of bubbles and squares. A glorious thing -- but that is not a verbal argument. That's like a Chinese restaurant menu. You can take one bubble from sector A, and two from sector B, and three from sector C, and you are Web 2.0. Feed yourself and your family!

Web 2.0 theory is a web. It's not philosophy, it's not ideology like a political platform, it's not even a set of esthetic tenets like an art movement. The diagram for Web 2.0 is a little model network. You can mash up all the bubbles to the other bubbles. They carry out subroutines on one another. You can flowchart it if you want. There's a native genius here. I truly admire it.

This chart is five years old now, which is 35 years old in Internet years, but intellectually speaking, it's still new in the world. It's alarming how hard it is to say anything constructive about this from any previous cultural framework.

Professor Ed Felten and his team of researchers have been working on security and anticounterfeiting measures from a different angle. Instead of incorporating additional watermarks and dyes into the paper, Felten has focused on uniquely identifying the paper itself, and he uses commodity hardware to do it.
Felton points out that if you scan a document, blow up one corner, digitally enhance it, and then do this from different angles, one can "map out the tiny hills and valleys on the surface of the paper."Compute the surface texture, and Felten reports you can then create a fingerprint "which can survive ordinary wear and tear on the paper, such as crumpling, scribbling or printing, and moisture. You also want to understand how secure the technology will be in various applications. Our full paper addresses these issues too. The bottom-line result is a sort of unique fingerprint for each piece of paper, which can be determined using an ordinary desktop scanner."

Charles Stross finally reads about Bruce Sterling's Spime idea. I was convinced that he had been influenced by it a couple of years ago...

The goal of the Virtual Company Project is to build online tools to help groups create and implement governance rules necessary for successful collaboration. The project is premised on the belief that the right graphical interfaces can translate the structures of the group into clear and intelligible procedures that will enable teams to make decisions, control assets and enter into contractual relationships with third parties. The Virtual Company project is creating the interfaces and designing the back-end functionality that is needed to enable group participants to see themselves in relation to the group as a whole, allocate roles, establish accountability to the group, make collective decisions, and administer group assets, expenditures and distributions.

Unless or until inventors can come up with a substance (or substances) that can replace all of the products that are refined from a barrel of crude oil—from gasoline to naphtha and diesel to asphalt—then the United States, along with every other country on the planet, is going to continue using oil as a primary energy source for decades to come. And that will be true no matter how much corn gets burned up in America's delusional quest for "energy independence."

In attacks that escalated from the 1970s through Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists exploited and demonstrated a huge advantage over life-valuing societies: [...] they're more willing to kill and die than we are.

In the last few years, however, we've developed a countermeasure: drones. By sending mechanical proxies to do our spying and killing, we avoid risking our lives. The terrorists can't kill the pilots who operate the drones from the United States. But the terrorists can kill local civilians, thereby generating political pressure on the local government to pressure the United States to call off the drones. [...] the terrorists win. The drone controllers are more sensitive to death than the terrorists are.

[...] the simplest way to re-establish the drones' supremacy is to release them from our command, turning them into real robots. [...] Then we can finally stop worrying about the terrorists ... and start worrying about the drones.

This article is a brief primer on the key location technologies that are emerging.

Scott McCloud's webcomic explaining Google's Chrome web browser project.

A $12 computer of sorts - a cheap keyboard and Nintendo-like console - already exists in India, where people hook the devices to home TVs to run simple games and programs. Lomas and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology symposium hope to soup up the systems - which are based on old Apple II computers - with rudimentary Web access and more. A six-member team at the MIT conference is working on writing improved programs and hooking the devices to the Web through cell phones. The group also wants to add memory chips - which the devices currently lack - to allow users to write and store their own programs.

Traditional IT departments and practices—corporate desktops, networked shares, strict IT policies, etc.—will persist in companies and sectors where they make sense, but more startups will embrace IT consumerization, and established businesses will be

The more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.

Without discounting the importance of new research, paying more attention to incremental improvement refocuses how we think about medical progress. And it's an upbeat shift in viewpoint, indicating that we already have the tools to cure many diseases and

We've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of

We’re a group of entrepreneurs in the Seattle area who give and seek advice on running technology startups. We meet about once or twice a month. This is targeted at founders of, employees of, or those folks interested in joining local technology compan

"The US," the authors warn, "could build for its opponents something that would be too expensive for them to build for themselves: a system that lets them see the US’s intelligence interests, a system that could tell them how to thwart those interests,

The music industry is barking up the wrong tree, however, if it thinks that watermarking is a panacea for its problems. Watermarking can never really replace (let alone improve upon) DRM because watermarking is not a so-called "access control;" it's an id

With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DR

In the comfort of these rooms, you can write a computer program. You can talk about the meaning of life. You can just sit there quietly, reading. The only real expectation at Saturday House, a weekly gathering in Sodo, is "background friendliness." And ev

The difference between high-tech marketing and other marketing is that it’s so difficult and costly to try out and evaluate the product. Because of this, the success of a product is very dependent on word-of-mouth. The lesson is that in high-technology,

The 200 kilowatt Toshiba designed reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and totally automatic and will not overheat. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors the new micro reactor uses no control rods to initiate the reaction. The new revolutionary technology

A lobby group from the free-speech, fair-use side of the tracks just presented a six-step reform program for outdated US copyright laws. Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn presented the plan in a New Media conference speech at Boston University recently

It’s obvious that both Big Brother and the Panopticon are outdated, though they have not entirely disappeared. The question, then, is how do we characterize a surveillance regime that is neither totalitarian nor disciplinary, but depends primarily on th

My buddy at Redfin, Glenn Kelman, decided he wanted to bare his financial soul so that other entrepreneurs could get greater insight into the witchcraft called financial modeling. In this two-part posting, he reveals his numbers and his lessons. They are

The BlackBerry-sized gadget clips to listeners' clothing, eliminating the log. Participating broadcasts are encoded with an inaudible ID code, which is picked up by a sensor in the device.

Our goal is to gather and present unbiased, useful and up-to-date information about the business of software, whether it's microISVs selling desktop software, Web 2.0 sites, or even the big enterprise kind of outfits.

The physicists' map shows each economy in this network of products, by highlighting the products each country exported. Over time, economies move across the product map as their export mix changes. Rich countries have larger, more diversified economies, a

Per-track, not per-purchase, just to detect which p2p leaks are due to the purchases.

UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is record on devices the size of a grain of sand.

Experts who study computer use say the stated yearning to stay abreast of things may mask more visceral and powerful needs, as many self-aware users themselves will attest. Some theorize that constant use becomes ritualistic physical behavior, even addict

A web-based expert system that helped users prepare bankruptcy filings for a fee made too many decisions to be considered a clerical tool, an appeals court said last week, ruling that the software was effectively practicing law without a license.

[His] research interests have historically been real-time computer graphics and real-time computer vision, but I've taken on a more recent focus on human-computer interfaces and machine learning.

To allow browsing of information in a passive and relaxed way, we have developed a prototype personal digital assistant (PDA) terminal with no buttons at all. By operating the terminal with simple tilting and shaking gestures, contents such as movies and

The main research focus of the information dynamics laboratory is on the relation between the local actions and the global behavior of large distributed systems. Areas that we explore are distributed knowledge, social organizations, and novel economic me

Most people use LinkedIn to “get to someone” in order to make a sale, form a partnership, or get a job. However, it is a tool that is under-utilized, so I’ve compiled a top-ten list of ways to increase the value of LinkedIn.

The most technically realistic appraisal of the Internet is also the most humanistic one. The Web is neither an emergent intelligence that transcends humanity, nor a lifeless industrial machine. It is a conduit of expression between people.

Teenagers spend increasing amounts of time immersed in television, video games, and music from their iPods—activities where they listen rather than speak. As a result, they don't get much practice at communicating clearly with others, and they aren't ex

An essay discussing Quiet AI versus older Soft/Hard AI distinctions, and how the cybernetic revolution is unfolding in ways unforeseen by its progenitors. This also ramps into discussions of the exocortical concept and social-computational soft-takeoff si

A site for enlightened pragmatic use of technology for social welfare

Collaboratively edited social links site.

Collaboratively-edited news site with social tagging.

Google Research blog report on their technical demonstration linking people and their content based on what program they're watching, using laptop mic and digital audio fingerprinting and online database matching. Not quite feasible yet, but shows promise