Tag: tools

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Drawbacks of Multitasking

I took a break from IMing with a coworker and turned down my music for a minute to read this NYTimes piece about multitasking. I didn’t get through the whole thing because I got an email but I gather it’s about the downsides of trying to concentrate on several things at once.

The point is well taken when any one task, such as driving, requires quick reaction time. Our brains can only afford enough resources to concentrate on one thing at a time. On the other hand, that email can wait a minute while I surf the web. And newer communications methods like IM tolerate asynchrony better.

Both the technology and the social protocol expect up-to-the-minute, but not up-to-the-second, updates. When using these new technologies, we do sacrifice real-time responsiveness, but in return we get multiple collaborative modalities of near-real-time communication.

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Apple TV Hacked (Already)

It’s only 3 days old, but already the Apple TV has been hacked to play content that Apple’s iTunes doesn’t normally play, e.g. XviD-encoded movies. This was fairly simple after opening the case.

The Apple TV, like the upcoming iPhone, runs a stripped-down version of OS X. By adding a few files to the onboard hard drive, other services can be run. This technique should be generalizable to running other software not intended or supported by Apple. Which means that, if you’re willing to get your hands dirty, you can get a really nice little computer for $300. If you have a monitor/TV that uses HDMI, it seems like a really good idea.

Apple is generally pretty relaxed about people hacking its devices. For instance, they have made no efforts to stop people from running Linux on iPods. Of course, their software isn’t open source, but they do take a moderate stance that seems to be good PR, especially since it’s possible to hinder but not really to prevent this type of hacking.

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tech

Crowdsourcing Journalism

Wired and NewAssignment.net have started a cool new open collaborative journalism project called Assignment Zero. “Crowdsourcing” is the method originated by open source software developers to freely collaborate on projects. SourceForge is a good example of software development by self-organized teams of interested participants. But, using web technology, that method quickly spread to other subject areas, and is especially useful in journalism, where collectively the audience usually knows more than the writer.

Assignment Zero will take crowdsourcing as its model and its first topic. They built an attractive and functional-looking web platform for the project and already have several leads and next steps outlined. Anyone who is interested can join and work on a subtopic; they suggest that teachers can assign their classes to a chunk of the story. There are still editors but what is investigated will not be centrally controlled. The contents will be under a Creative Commons license rather than owned.

One of the most interesting aspects of crowdsourcing is how social dynamics take over in the absence of explicit power relations among the team members. There is definitely less coercion involved in, say, a SourceForge project than within a commercial software development company. In journalism, there is fairly little focus (at least explicitly) on the story as a solution to an engineering problem; rather journalists still think of themselves as exposing the truth. I wonder how this idea will change when the story itself becomes radically dependent upon a diversity of subjectivities.

I’m very curious what Assignment Zero will come up with. Whether the result is good or bad, something will be learned about the workings of the process, laying the groundwork for a whole new way of clarifying and putting together our collective knowledge.

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Open Source in Education–Background

Slashdot posts this nice background article with links on Open Source in Education.

I have touched on, and will continue to clarify, why I think the Open Source and Free software models have a particular affinity of interests with liberal arts education. The link above is more to establish that these models are viable, and increasingly provide functionally preferable products–even in direct competition with proprietary distribution and licensing models.

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NetVibes

NetVibes is a customizable home page. It puts your RSS feeds, calendar, to-do list, Delicious bookmarks, and other useful tools into a slick web interface.

NetVibes handles RSS feeds really well. I exported all my subscriptions from Vienna as an OPML file and imported. Then I arranged the little feed reader boxes around my NetVibes desktop, added a calendar and pointed it to a shared departmental webcal, set the weather update to NYC, and set the Gmail reader to my account.

Since I moved my web bookmarks to Delicious, I’ve been able to get to the stuff I need from other people’s PCs, but my workflow was always a little awkward. With NetVibes I can get to my personalized desktop from anywhere. The only thing I need a separate app for is a really good mail client, for which I’m still using Apple’s Mail.

Highly recommended!

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tech

Merit-Based Search Results?

This Slashdot post by Bennet Haselton proposes a new direction for search algorithms. The current best, Google’s PageRank, is a trade secret. Although they claim that their “methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult,” in fact Google is in a continual arms race with people manipulating the system — “spamdexing”, i.e. achieving high-ranked search results for reasons other than user satisfaction.

Haselton’s suggestion looks like a good start — an open-source algorithm that uses samples of the user base rather than aggregating all users’ “votes” (clicks). This would certainly render current spamdexing schemes obsolete. Of course, as statisticians will tell you, getting a properly randomized, representative sample is a problem in itself. Usually, in order to factor out influences you don’t want to measure, you need to gather some demographic data from participants — raising privacy concerns.

And what is “merit” anyway? Is popular reaction its best measure? How can an algorithm distinguish sincere offerings from click greed?

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Why Web 2.0 is a big deal

As Eben Moglen writes, “one of the most lucid pieces of artful public instruction I’ve ever seen.”

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Industry Standards and Free Software

What is Free Software?

Why use Free Software?

These two essays by Richard Stallman cover a lot of ground, and I think he does a great job of laying out the issues as both ethical and empirical questions. While the ethical questions are perhaps inherently debatable, the empirical ones are not. It is neither necessary nor in our long-term interests for software to have owners.

So the question is, why do we still use commercial software? In the SLC Digital Media Lab, which I set up, we use a closed, commercial operating system (Mac OS X) as well as several software packages which have built-in restrictions on copying, use, and modification (Adobe Creative Suite, Autodesk Maya, Apple iLife and Final Cut, etc.). On the other hand, we also use free software (Audacity, Blender, Firefox, Jahshaka, NeoOffice, VLC, etc.).

At one time, free operating system software (GNU/Linux) was not up to snuff in stability and compatibility. Beating Windows in stability was not a high hurdle, but it was a quite valuable achievement, as evidenced by the commercial success of Red Hat Linux in the mid- to late 1990s. And since the advent of OpenOffice.org (formerly StarOffice, released in 2000), there has been no really valid excuse to run Microsoft’s office suite, much less its OS.

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Wikio

Combine the content customization of Google News with the social tagging of Del.icio.us, wrap it in a pretty Web 2.0 interface, and you have Wikio. I have a tab set up to track tech news, another for world events, and a third for “intellectual property” issues… each feeding me RSS.