Adam Greenfield writes:

Everyware is problematic because it is hard to see figuratively

If its physical constituents are literally too small, too deeply buried, or too intangible to be made out with the eye, there are also other (and potentially still more decisive) ways in which everyware is hard to see clearly.

This quality of imperceptibility is not simply a general property of ubiquitous systems; for the most part, rather, it’s something that has deliberately been sought and worked toward. As we’ve seen, the sleight of hand by which information processing appears to dissolve into everyday behavior is by no means easy to achieve.

There are two sides of this, of course,. On the one hand, this is what Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown set out as the goal of their “calm technology”: interfaces that do not call undue attention to themselves, interactions that are allowed to remain peripheral. if a Weiserian calm technology appears as the result of a consciously pursued strategy of disappearance, it does so because its designers believed that this was the best way to relieve the stress engendered by more overt and attention-compelling interfaces.

But if they contain enormous potential for good, such disappearances can also conceal what precisely is at issue in a given transaction, who stands to benefit from it and whose interests are at risk. MasterCard, for example, clearly hopes that people will lose track of what is signified by the tap of a PayPass card — that the action will become automatic and thus fade from perception. In one field test, users of PayPass-enabled devices — in this case, key fobs and cell phones — spent 25 percent more that those using cash. (”Just tap & go,” indeed.)

As computing technology becomes less overt and less conspicuous, it gets harder to see that devices are designed, manufactured, and marketed by some specific institution, that network and interface standards are specified by some body, and so on. A laptop is clearly made by Toshiba and Dell or Apple, but what about a situation?

This is the flipside of the seeming inevitability we’ve considered, the argument against technodeterminism. Despite the attributes that appear to inhere in technologies even at the very moment that they come into being, there is always human agency involved — always. So if RFID “wants” to be everywhere and part of everything, if IPv6 “wants” to transform everything in the world into a node, we should remember to ask: Who designed them to be that way? Who specified a networking protocol or an address space with these features, and why did they make these decisions and not others?

Historically, its opacity to the nonspecialist has lent technological development and entirely undeserved aura of inevitability, which in turn has tended to obscure questions of agency and accountability. This is only exacerbated in the case of a technology that is also literally bordering on the imperceptible.

Most difficult of all is the case when we cease to think of some tool as being “technology” at all — as studies in Japan and Norway indicate is currently true of mobile phones, at least in those places. Under such circumstances, the technology’s governing metaphors and assumptions have an easier time infiltrating the other decisions we make about the world. Their effects come to seem more normal, more natural, simply the way things are done, while gestures of refusal become that much harder to make or to justify. And that is something that should give us pause, at the cusp of our embrace of something as insinuative and as hard as everyware.

Everyware, pages 135-136

Today, for some reason, it occured to me that the Internet has many lonely, windswept spaces.

Perhaps it’s merely the encroaching cold whispering melancholy nothings into my ear.

Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low voice, `Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a RED rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and if the Queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we’re doing our best, afore she comes, to–’ At this moment Five, who had been anxiously looking across the garden, called out `The Queen! The Queen!’ and the three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces. There was a sound of many footsteps, and Alice looked
round, eager to see the Queen.

First came ten soldiers carrying clubs; these were all shaped like the three gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and feet at the corners: next the ten courtiers; these were ornamented all over with diamonds, and walked two and two, as the soldiers did.

After these came the royal children; there were ten of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along hand in hand, in couples: they were all ornamented with hearts. Next came the guests, mostly Kings and Queens, and among them Alice recognised the White Rabbit: it was talking in a hurried nervous manner, smiling at everything that was said, and went by without noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the King’s crown on a crimson velvet cushion; and, last of all this grand procession, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.

From Nasa’s Earth Observatory:

In the summer of 2006, the conflict between Israel and Lebanon caused an oil spill along the coast of Lebanon. Damage to the Jiyeh Power Station in mid-July 2006 spilled thousands of tons of oil into the nearby Mediterranean Sea. Continuing hostilities delayed cleanup efforts along the Lebanese coast, and evidence of the oil slick was still apparent in early August.

GeoEye’s IKONOS sensor collected these images of Beirut on August 5, 2006 (top), and December 24, 2001 (bottom). The top image shows the aftermath of the spill, where oil coats the shoreline in an opaque layer of black. Although the oil is apparent along the beach, the black-looking surface of the water should not necessarily be interpreted as an oil slick. A satellite sensor may not be directly over an area when it makes an observation; often, it views the area at an angle. IKONOS not only acquired these images at different times of year, but also from completely different angles. Notice that the buildings in the top image seem to lean strongly to the left while, in the bottom image, they appear to lean slightly upward. They also cast different shadows. Such changes in angle and lighting can make the water surface look very different.

[...]

full

Lebanon.

Death, destruction, chaos, shadowy geopolitics – the usual blood splattered muddle. Have we learned anything of lasting value? Morally, probably not. We’re stubborn creatures, we learn our lessons hard and eagerly repeat. But tactically, quite a bit has already been learned and quickly absorbed.

Armour penetration behind ERA, mm 800

Warhead types tandem hollow-charge, HE

Firing range (day/night), m: maximum 1500, min 80

Missile calibre, mm 130

Average missile speed, m/s 180

Weight, kg: missile 13.8 launcher 10.0

IR system weight (with power supply cells and bottles), kg 6.0

Operating temperature range, °C -30 … +50

Warhead tandem HEAT, thermobaric

Armor penetration, mm 850 – 900

Firing range, m:

maximum 1,500

minimum 80

Guidance semiautomatic with commands transmitted

over wire link

ERA penetration ensured

Time into and out of action, s 10 – 20

Rate of fire, rds/min 3

Weight, kg:

launcher 10.5

container with missile 13.8

Overall dimensions, mm:

missile caliber 130

container length 980

Weight of packs, kg:

№ 1 (launcher and missile/thermal sight) 25.1/18.5

№ 2 (two missiles) 28.6

The METIS-M ATGM system is designed to defeat modern armoured targets with improved protection, including those equipped with explosive reactive armour, as well as fortifications and weapon emplacements, and other pinpoint targets.

[...]

WARFARE.RU

from the Gapminder FAQ…

What is Gapminder?

Gapminder is a non-profit venture that develops information technology for provision of free statistics in new visual and animated ways. In short, it enables you to make sense of the world by having fun with statistics. Our method is to turn boring data into enjoyable interactive animations using Flash technology. Gapminder is a Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. Funding has been mainly by grants from Swedish International Development co-operation Agency, Sida. In collaboration with United Nations Statistic Division we promote free access to searchable public data and our animations of different types of data are freely available at www.gapminder.org.

Where did you get the data?

Right now the application shows data from World Development Indicators 2006. Data from other sources will be added later.

What does the line dividing some of the bubbles mean?

The line suggests that there is no measured data for one or more of the indicators for the country at that point in time. Instead, the position and data values have been estimated using data points from previous and later measurements through interpolation. The years used for estimation are shown below when moving the mouse over the bubble.

[...]

link

For many years I’ve depended upon the uber-geek site, slashdot.org for my (mostly Linux focused) information fix.

Slashdot.org accepts entries from users but there’s a strong editorial filtering process – call it a council of gurus – performing quality control.

More recently, Digg.com has made a large splash, grabbing some attention away from slashdot.org.

Digg is built upon the community participation model – the hive – for its content. A friend refers to this type of content portfolio building (which services such as YouTube also depend upon) as a bake your own bread and circuses business model.

I still see tremendous value in the hierarchical, guru approach but I wonder for how long? The hive-mind technique appears to be growing in strength with each passing day.

In the not really distant tomorrow, will even corporate-created, top-down television, movies and music be, if not replaced, heavily subsidized by the hive-mind?

Americans are encouraged to carefully monitor their credit scores, among other elements of our machine-manipulated identities.

Because identity theft appears to be a growing problem, this sounds like sensible advice. After all, you wouldn’t want to discover, long after the damage has been done, that someone bought a luxury cruise using your virtual-self as the means.

The need to watch how our electronic ghosts are being used, a very new requirement of modern life, fascinates me. Right now, a data version of myself – assembled from artifacts such as social security number, address, age and so on – is working its way through an uncountable number of systems, some government owned but most privately held.

Ideally, system owners would take full responsibility for protecting our electronic existence (which, in a very real way, is critical to protecting our actual existence – at least as members of the above ground classes). Of course in practice, inattention, sloppiness and protection against liability, among other factors, creates a long shadow between idea and act.

Into the labor gap we must go, performing vital, ad hoc security work. But what is this except the transfer of labor from the entities extracting something from us to the great, deodorized masses? ATMs, originally marketed as conveniences (and indeed they are, but there are hidden and not so hidden costs) can be re-thought of as labor-transfer devices as much as ease of cash access machines.

Ursula Huws is, as far as I know, the only person tracking the ways computer technology is being used to re-locate detail work to customers.

Here’s a link to a review of her book (a book I need to buy) “The Making of a Cybertariat”.

And here’s a link to an interview Huws gave to Doug Henwood in 2003.

I was sitting at my desk, wondering about the precise definition of matter (a reverie brought on by nothing in particular except, I suppose, a stray thought: how might a physicist describe the desk?).

People have always had questions, but they haven’t always had Google. I opened a browser window which loads, by default, google.com and typed in the following:

What is matter?

Here’s where things got more interesting.

I expected to see the usual results – a listing of highly ranked websites mentioning, in context, the word “matter”.

Instead what I saw was this:

The Google interface reformed my question, “what is matter?”, into a machine query – define:matter.

Instead of a website-focused listing the results were definition-focused, complete with a sampling of text from each listed site.

Additionally, the results page displayed the following options:

Related phrases: organic matter / white matter / particulate matter / gray matter / dark matter / subject matter expert / back matter / front matter / matter of fact

Which gave me the ability to trace contextually sensitive “related phrases”.

This is Google’s glossary feature. Considering this Internet News article and this EContent article – both appearing in 2003 – the glossary enhancement has been on line for about three years.

Odd I never stumbled upon (or read about) this before. And marvelous it happened, from my point of view as a user, accidentally. A natural language question is automatically reformatted into the proper machine readable syntax and then fed into a glossary query engine (a term I use as a place-holder because I don’t know what Google actually calls the back end).

Intriguingly (and unsurprisingly), one of the most prominent results returned for “matter” is a Wikipedia entry.

Some kind of convergence – a crude, still forming software functional singularity – appears to be taking shape with Google and Wikipedia serving as powerful nodes.

It’s all still very fragile however and vulnerable to short sighted business whims such as the anti net neutrality efforts of American telecoms.

Observe the back-breaking computing gear:

Because the client I’m currently servicing doesn’t have a computer to spare for me…and because I carry gigabytes of applications, utilities and sundry software objects with me (once upon a time it was a luxury, now it’s a necessity) I must lug a bag around that builds muscle even as it builds character.

In a better world, a world of peace, sugary sweet kisses, laughing children and ubiquitous computing, this laptop transport system wouldn’t be needed. Instead of carrying my computing platform with me, it would be everyware.