"I see social gaming as a new form of communication that is more interesting than e-mail and AIM [AOL Instant Messenger] in terms of connecting people together," he says. "It drives what we're doing and informs our decisions. We don't want to just stick our finger in the air. We want to create a new category."
Rather than vision just being 'what we experience', it is, in fact, a collection of specific eye-behaviour links ('visuomotor functions') of which our conscious perception of the world is only an evolutionary-recent addition.
The document also shows that Whitehall counter-terrorism experts intend to exploit new media websites and outlets with a proposal to "channel messages through volunteers in internet forums" as part of their campaign.
The strategy is being conducted by the research, information and communication unit, [RICU] which was set up last year by the then home secretary, John Reid, to counter al-Qaida propaganda at home and overseas. It is staffed by officials from several government departments.
I've heard many experts say that the evolution in access to media during the past three decades has been the greatest since Gutenberg time. Yet the reality is that it's much, much greater. The effects this radical increase in the supply of news and information that is readily available to people will have on civilization, nonetheless any one industry, will be much, much larger than anything the invention of the printing press ever wrought.
...the success of the iPhone has encouraged other companies to explore multitouch screens. It might follow that if people like using their fingers on the screen of a cellphone, they would like it even better on the bigger displays of computers. That’s the hope of N-trig (pronounced “intrigue”), an eight-year-old Israeli company that makes a multitouch screen that can be used with a pen as well a finger.
The producers of Web serials — including the name-brand ones like “Afterworld,” “lonelygirl15” and “quarterlife” — seem forever anxious about their audience numbers, and they crunch and recrunch them. The producers of “lonelygirl15,” a thriller about a teenager stuck in a cult, claim that they have attracted 100 million views over more than 550 episodes. Marshall Herskovitz, the creator of “quarterlife,” a repertory drama about artsy 20-somethings, counters that his show has drawn 10 million views over 36 episodes — 50 percent more, on average, than “lonelygirl15.” This is possible, since the unit of success is the flimsy “view,” meaning virtually any click on any part of a series, anywhere on the Web. But it’s clear that we’re not talking about numbers advertisers can remotely trust. Are there really any hit Web serials?
Mr Fincham, who resigned from the BBC last year in the wake of false claims that the Queen had been filmed storming out of a photo shoot, warned that British television could split "like a medieval church", with the BBC and Channel 4, "chastened by public money", being separated from the rest of the industry. He complained of favouritism, saying that "organisations dependent on the public purse... are clasped more warmly to politicians' bosoms than those who say, 'Don't worry, we'd rather look after ourselves'."
According to a poll by the consultancy Deloitte, three in four British people don't trust television. Channel executives must be dismayed. Not simply because of the poll's findings, but because they didn't think of running the poll themselves, as a money-spinning premium-rate phone vote.
Here's the idea. The Numerati is about tracking and predicting people by their data. So why not use a domain of that very science--behavioral advertising--to spread the word to the most likely readers?
That's what we're going to do. In the coming weeks, my publisher, Houghton Mifflin, will be running an advertising campaign for The Numerati on the vast network of sites affiliated with Platform A/Tacoda, a division of AOL. We'll be studying the patterns of the people who click on Numerati ads. Which web sites do they come from? What types of profiles do they have? Do some profiles click more on one type of ad than another?
Stephen is reassuringly honest about the possible outcome:For starters, we'll be looking at two types of people, the datamining types who resemble The Numerati and the arty-literature type crowd that might page through an article about The Numerati in a magazine like The New Yorker. I may have quibbles about those choices. Maybe you do too. But the process has to start somewhere.
We'll make adjustments, and I'll describe the process, step by step, on this blog. I'll also be sounding out readers on the conclusions we reach and the advertisements we distribute. Maybe you can steer us along a more reasonable path. Or perhaps the data will lead us along a path that appears to defy all logic--but still works.
...our group-forming nature, finds ways around control and mediation of all forms.
"If I covered only the newspaper industry, first of all I would have been fired a long time ago; secondly, I would have had to kill myself."
The major one is simply that American newspaper companies have violated the Principle of Supply & Demand by failing to adapt their core product to a radical change in consumers' supply of news and information during the past 15 years.
...the rise of the "Hillary Harridan" is a disturbing development. It unearths a creepy literary type that harms women a lot more than it helps them. The suggestion that irrational, emotional, self-referential women are swinging the election is not a theme any woman should endorse.
...the spy thriller later turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, "reimagined" for the Jason Bourne generation.
...you bet your ass I'd entrust my mission-critical data and apps to this guy. I mean, he even ranks Made in Japan, that ridiculous double-record Deep Purple live album with the 20-minute version of Space Truckin', as the best LP of '72.
"We're standing now on the last generation of the majority of tribal languages in the world," said Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation, noting that an estimated 50 to 90 percent of the world's languages are expected to disappear within this century. "We're losing them so fast."
Over eight years in development, the Disk is a physical, microscopic library of information on over 1,500 human languages. 14,000 text and image pages are etched into the surface of a 3” diameter nickel disk, which can be read with approximately 750x (optical) magnification.
The nickel disk has a high resistance to corrosion, and can withstand temperatures of up to 300 oC with little to no change in legibility of the text. Kept in its protective sphere to avoid scratches, it could easily last and be read 2,000 years into the future!
Human beings are social animals, and our first instinct is to trust others. Con men, of course, have long known this - their craft consists largely of playing on this predilection, and turning it to their advantage.
But recently, behavioral scientists have also begun to unravel the inner workings of trust. Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape our sense of someone's reliability.
On Tuesday, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of search giant Google, announced it would try to help spur companies to reach underground to produce clean electricity. It is investing a total of $10 million in a geothermal energy company called AltaRock Energy
All the world's credible news, in one place
"Our algorithms analyze this data, and unlike other social news sites, we use the data to present the news based on quality, not popularity..."
Iraj is a serial entrepreneur from Sweden having worked on multiple technology startups. He was ranked #3 in "Sweden's Top 25 Entrepreneurs 2006" by IT-magazine Internetworld. He's one of the lucky few who found his life's calling at the age of 14 - building beautiful web apps that kick ass. When he's not obsessing about the hottest open-source technologies he loves watching FC Barcelona draw triangles on a football pitch.
Shafqat went the mainstream route. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering and B.A. in Economics and was a VP of technology on Wall Street. He soon realized that titles were meaningless because you could neither eat them, nor trade them in for cash. So he decided to follow his life's passion and dive head-first into the entrepreneureal world.
Both of them are avid news readers and are passionate about new media and the changing face of journalism.
And then there are "pure" films - films that are so essentially of their medium that questions of good, bad or ugliness can be dispensed with. These are films that don't have a trace of the novel, the stage musical or the TV drama about them. They exist in the bliss of the edit, the rhythm of their shots. Eisenstein made pure film, as did Buster Keaton and Alfred Hitchcock. Jean-Luc Godard sporadically made pure film.
“The story of ‘Wind and Vent’ begins in 1940’s and continues until the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Most of the foreign adaptations of the novel are loyal to the theme but we changed it into an Iranian style, which was not an easy task, though,” he explained.
Young people are catnip for advertisers, but they mostly shun TV, and especially news broadcasts. A biannual news consumption study released Monday by the Pew Research Center found that only a third of news consumers younger than 25 watch TV news on an average day. That’s still twice as many as the 15 percent who read a newspaper on an average day.
The gray-haired audiences for television news seem to confirm the statistics. According to Nielsen Media Research, the median age of the top-rated Fox News audience is 63.9 years old, nearly four years older than that of the second-highest-rated news channel, CNN, and eight years older than for the third-place channel, MSNBC.
The median age for the three evening newscasts is 60.5.
With polls showing a surge in primary-season ballots cast by voters under 30, media outlets are out to convert the newly energized voters into viewers.
On the contrary: The explosion of knowledge represented by the Internet and abetted by all sorts of digital technologies makes us more productive and gives us the opportunity to become smarter, not dumber. Think of Wikipedia and its emergent spinoffs, like Wiktionary. Imperfect as they may be, the collective brainpower contained within these kinds of sites — and the hunger for learning and accurate information they represent — is something human history has never known before.
All of which provides an effective blueprint for us to follow circa 2012. First up, the opening ceremony, in which a volcano rises from the Thames, spewing flaming Olympic rings into the night sky while Big Ben - or rather, a genetically enhanced version of Big Ben, one with straighter teeth and bigger tits - pirouettes in the background, miming to the Kaiser Chiefs' latest single. This goes on for 15 hours or until the nearest superpower threatens to bomb us. Then the events themselves begin. None of them takes place in the Olympic stadium because there is no Olympic stadium. We've not bothered building one. Instead, we've got a host of exciting made-up CGI sports. Moon Snooker! Unicorn Wrestling! Quantum Deathball! Dissenter Beheading! Pac-Man with Guns! Naturally, none of the other countries has been allowed to practice any of these games, whereas we've had four solid years to develop and perfect them. So we're guaranteed, ooh, at least three bronze medals. We'll thrash Paraguay, that's for damn sure.
Can anyone become President of the United States without the patronage of Google? It was once a ridiculous question, but not any more. The fastest growing company in history is also arguably the most powerful. It has the potential to reach into every corner of our lives, from the way we get news, watch entertainment and do our jobs to the way we communicate, seek information and comprehend the world. Its clean white homepage and breezy colourful logo have become so embedded in our psyches that we 'google' without thinking (and use 'google' as a verb). I think, therefore I google.
Self-promotion should make you slightly uncomfortable. The best journalists know the absolute necessity of humility; when accomplishments lead to hubris, that's when trouble arrives. (I suppose this is true of every walk of life.) That's why self-promotion should never be motivated by pure ego, or resort to the kinds of slippery tactics that journalists love to expose in other fields.
You have to disguise things as entertainment, but still leave a message and some poignancy.
"the least curious and intellectual generation in national history."
Because representative democracy is based on geography, content created by citizens must be identified by place instead of simply organized by issue. Content, from a news story to an online comment to a picture or video, needs to automatically be assigned (or “tagged”) with a geographic place. In addition, content bounded by a state or region or identified as global will be essential.
the British libel laws have "served to discourage critical media reporting on matters of serious public interest, adversely affecting the ability of scholars and journalists to publish their work, including through the phenomenon known as libel tourism".
Democratic politicians receive a 40% increase in contributions in the 30 days after appearing on the comedy cable show The Colbert Report. In contrast, their Republican counterparts essentially gain nothing. These findings appear to validate anecdotal evidence regarding the political impact of the program, such as the assertions by host Stephen Colbert that appearing on his program provides candidates with a “Colbert bump” or a rise in support for their election campaigns.
It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.
"Turns out the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world," Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney wrote in a note to clients. He kept a "buy" rating on the share.
My contrarian view is that just as most digital cameras are now smart phones, most ebook readers are also smart phones. People have been reading books on tiny screens since the days of the Psion and Compaq's iPaq, and it's common on Windows Mobile and similar phones.
So, while the Kindle might be Amazon's iPod, I reckon the iPhone is more likely to be Apple's Kindle - at least until e-newspapers take off.
In my thesis I propose methodological concepts to evoke a de-gendering of IT on the basis of a close analysis of gendering processes. My research identifies practices in technology design, which often lead to “gendered” artefacts. One of these mechanisms is the so-called “I-methodology”, i.e. the implicit assumption made by computer scientists and software developers that users of the technologies they design would share their own interests, preferences, competencies and abilities.
There are no shortage of ways to describe documents, events, people or concepts. The roster of people who will participate in the creation of a standard way to describe them will become increasingly important as machine learning becomes more important in our every day lives. Failing to take this seriously, Bath argues, could lead to the silencing of "minority views, quieter voices, and allows the dominant voice to speak for everyone, which seems highly problematic".
Books are such an echo chamber.
When we talk about the Google age, then, we do talk about a new society and the rules I explore in my book are the rules of that society, built on connections, links, transparency, openness, publicness, listening, trust, wisdom, generosity, efficiency, markets, niches, platforms, networks, speed, and abundance.
The scholarly monograph has been compared to the Hapsburg monarchy in that it seems to have been in decline forever! Many publishers, university administrators and academic researchers are still largely wedded to historical and Balkanized Web 1.0 monograph settings.
Newspaper publishers are facing a perfect storm thanks to three megatrends: rising inflation, America's growing green conscience and disruptive technology. To succeed in this era of great change, they need to think about how to make lemonade out of these perceived lemons. Unfortunately, so far, they haven't. Here's my advice.
RISING INFLATION: As gas prices rise sharply, so do distribution costs. To compensate, many newspapers have announced they are significantly increasing their hard-copy newsstand prices. However, that's a 20th-century reaction to what is a complex, 21st-century problem.
What they should be doing instead is using this as an opportunity to put a hard date on when they will abandon print altogether, close down plants and migrate completely to a digital paradigm. They need to have faith that their brands and quality editorial product will encourage readers who haven't already migrated to do so.
If I have any real problem with Creative Writing courses, it’s that so many of them are run by and for people who see nothing inherently alarming about the phrase, “a dense and difficult but ultimately rewarding book”. Homer, Chaucer, Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Graham Greene, the Brontes, Patricia Highsmith and countless others would have been alarmed by that phrase, Joyce, Woolf and Rushdie wouldn’t - take your pick.
AMID a flurry of diplomatic activity over the conflict in Georgia, European officials are questioning whether they could have prevented the crisis and gloomily comparing the tensions to those seen ahead of the second world war. Some have recalled Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland in the 1930s.
A group of researchers the U.S. and the Netherlands peered into people's brains using fMRI machines while those people were doing a series of three tasks: reading about something disgusting, watching images of something disgusting, and actually tasting something disgusting. Turns out the same regions in their brains activated consistently regardless of whether they were imagining, watching, or tasting disgusting things.
The great, the good, the rich and the technocrats nodded in solemn approval.
And then some of them tried to kill it.
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
The combination of powerful search facilities with the web's facilitation of associative linking is what is eroding Carr's powers of concentration. It implicitly assigns an ever-decreasing priority to the ability to remember things in favour of the ability to search efficiently. And Carr is not the first to bemoan this development. In 1994, for example, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies with the subtitle The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, a passionate defence of reading and print culture and an attack on electronic media, including the internet. 'What is the place of reading, and of the reading sensibility, in our culture as it has become?' he asked. His answer, in a word, was 'shrinking' due to the penetration of electronic media into every level and moment of our lives.
