Of the telephone conversations, 37 percent involved deception, while face-to-face conversations included lies 27 percent of the time. About 21 percent of the instant messages and 14 percent of the e-mailing included lies. Hancock also found that experienced e-mail users were more likely to lie more often. (emph mine)
...from an article on Cornell prof Jeff Hancock's study of lies and deception in communications.
So word is already around and about, but a social application based on some of the design and research I was doing last summer is available for download as part of a larger project on urban life and computing.
Just so's you know.
Amazon has a new spin-off, A9, that would seem to be in competition with Google, yet strangely "enhances" their searches with licensed Google technology.
Much of what they're doing is just moving record-keeping functions such as bookmarking and surfing histories to a web service from the desktop. I am, however, kind of interested in this:
Diary: This is the newest and (we think) coolest feature of the toolbar. You can take notes on any web page, and reference them whenever you visit that page, on any computer that you use. Your entries are automatically saved whenever you stop typing or when you go to another page
Unfortunately, we Mac users will just have to wait for a version we can use.
Yes, the colors are vaguely Sanrio-inspired. I went to the Ichiban store on Mott Street and was so taken with all the candy wrappers I decided to quit using the default moveabletype template. Please let me know what you think.
In 1954 Harold S. Osborne, a former Chief Engineer for AT&T made the following prediction:
"Lets say that in the ultimate, whenever a baby is born anywhere in the world he [sic.] is given at birth a number that will be his telephone number for life. As soon as he can talk, he is given a watch-like device with 10 little buttons on one side and a screen on the other. Thus equipped, at any time when he wishes to talk with anyone in the world, he will pull out the device and punch on the keys the number of his friend. Then, turning the device over, he will hear the voice of his friend and see his face on the screen, in color and in three dimensions. If he does not see him and hear him, he will know that the friend is dead"
Conly, R. L. 1954. "New miracles of the telephone age." National Geographic:87 - 119.
Two points:
1) this idea that somehow always-on, socially required telepresence is a good thing seems very much tied to the era when that was still technically impossible
2) baby's first cell phone is, in fact, approaching us swiftly, at the speed of marketing
Via Richard Seyler-Ling, in telecom-cities
So Clay just wrote an essay based in part on a class of his I took called "Social Weather."
I'm very cheered, mostly because I hope that this means fewer people (you know who you are) will ask me in the future to explain what exactly I did to get a master's in "interactive telecommunications."
Even though Clay doesn't use this phrase as such, he's pointing towards a phenomenon I hadn't really thought as such before: software as gifting. That is, as the costs in time and money of setting up simple interactive applications drop, it becomes practical and possible to give them away as a way to affirm and establish close relationships. I'm thinking of the revolution in personal publishing made possible by cheap printing/copying, when suddenly families began to send "holiday newsletters" in bulk to friends and relatives.* One example these days is hosting and blog setup -- an easy and quick favor from a web-literate person to a less technical friend. Or a quick promo website done as a Christmas present.
I don't think that these minor favors will replace design-for-hire. But both of those represent a significant departure from the way online gifting (ie, sending a premade e-card or forwarding lists of dumb jokes) has been happening.
*I will ignore for the moment the question of whether this was actually a good thing.
Bent 2004 (this week, Spaceworks in NYC) is a festival of music produced by "circuit bending" devices like Gameboys and cellphones into musical instruments.
Reed Ghazala, who has been dubbed the "father of circuit bending," got his start when a small battery-powered amplifier shorted out amid the junk in his desk drawer.
"It was 1966 or '67," he said. "I was 14 or 15 years old, a penniless Midwestern hippie kid who'd heard synths on recordings but could never afford one. But this little shorted-out 9-volt amp is sitting there making synth sounds all by itself! Immediately I thought -- if this can happen by accident, what can happen by purpose? And if this can happen to an amplifier, a circuit not supposed to make a sound on its own, what would happen if you did the same thing to keyboards, radios and all the other stuff that already makes a sound of some kind?"
Ghazala said what he had discovered that night was his introduction to an entirely new world of music.
"Circuit-bent instruments are alien instruments," Ghazala said. "We are actually listening to an alien music here! Bent instruments, and their music, are not of human planning. We send probes into deep space for this kind of thing -- to listen to alien worlds. But alien worlds aren't always that far away."
I've never heard the phrase "circuit bending" before, and I like it. "Bending" suggests a very different attitude towards appropriation and re-use then, say, "hacking."
