Banapana

Nice Subtext Catch in the Verizon NFL Mobile Commercials

I second this.

Weaponizing Bits

From Bits to Bullets

For a long time now, my views have been influenced by a remarkable editorial by Nicholas Negroponte in Wired magazine entitled “Bits and Atoms“. In that editorial from 1995, Negroponte spoke of how numerous goods were making and would make the transition from reality to the digital landscape and how the valuation of such digital goods was often wildly inaccurate because of our emphasis on things atomic. To make his point, he tells the amusing story of returning from abroad and having to declare the value of his laptop upon arriving at customs. The value of the laptop was, in his estimation, one to two million dollars. The security agents were, of course, skeptical and after examining the device, estimated its worth at about US$2000. What they missed were the bits. Negroponte, a well-known MIT professor, had a laptop with a hard drive that was no doubt packed with papers, published and unpublished, documentation and certainly software, perhaps even experimental unreleased projects. Surely all those bits were worth something. Still, today, We often overlook bits and how they change the value of goods, or in the case of the weaponization of bits, how they change the value of human life.

Whereas commerce has seen a sneaking and disruptive transition from atoms to bits with regards to its goods, war is undergoing a somewhat different change. That is, the bits of war are having a distinct affect on the material world; namely the de-localization of war and the disintermediation of the suppliers of weapons. Chief among the developments of the weaponization of bits are drones and 3D printers.

Drones and 3D printers are making headlines by allowing the distribution of bits to change what we mean by location and manufacturing. Drones are allowing the military to be anywhere, virtually, and they are making a lot of political waves due to this development (see “Obama To Work On Drone Policy With Congress from the Huffington Post)—including the distressing idea that the US government can justify the assassination of US citizens in some circumstances.¹ 3d printing meanwhile, seen primarily as the next wave in manufacturing technology, has also made possible the printing of guns (see “Ready, Print, Fire” via the Economist). In both cases, the developments have occurred due to our newfound abilities to cheaply and quickly disseminate bits.

Flight and Fight

To take a McLuhan-esque perspective, all media are extensions of our corporal bodies. From this perspective, if in nature we use our hands to kill, then guns give that ability a much greater reach. Add to that extensions to our eyesight and legs (via wireless cameras, GPS and jet engines), and our ability to kill becomes de-localized entirely. We can engage in warfare without even being present. Granted, this is not an entirely new phenomena; drones in one right or another have been around since the hot air balloon. But McLuhan’s point, beyond that media are extensions or ourselves, was that “the medium is the message,” meaning that these extensions of our bodies carry a meaning of their own right, regardless of the intent of the creators and users of the media. What can we take as the message inherent in drones and printers as weapons?

One perspective that McLuhan often took was that of hot versus cold media and the difference in effect found there. He considered the radio and the telephone to be “cool” mediums in that they left a great deal of detail left to the user of the medium. A podcast, for instance, is a cool medium in that it leaves much to the imagination: the size and shape of the room it takes place in, the appearance of hosts and guests, and even their facial expressions. From this point of view, a drone could be defined as a hot medium. Visuals transmitted via wireless cameras are far more extensive than human vision. Location transmitted via GPS systems is, in effect, the scaling up of our abilities to know our location. But how does the medium affect one of the most basic human systems, our fight-or-flight response? When put in dangerous situations, the chemical system that drives the fight-or-flight response has ample cognitive effects, changing our thinking, and yet the stimuli in the environment that would influence this instinctual system are removed entirely in the case of drones. In comparison to what a soldier experiences in real battle, fighting via drone is a cool medium. And to a large extent, this makes warfare easier. That is not an effect to overlook lightly. Drone fighting won’t stay in the air for long and when our soldiers are not materially in harm’s way, what will drive citizens to protest their government’s wars? There was a precipitous drop in protests between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, and much of that could be due to the fact that the government no longer utilizes a draft. To the American public, by and large, if it isn’t our children in danger, then there is nothing to protest.

No Knowledge Required

Gun printing results in a gun, an extension of our arms (not incidentally, the likely reason why we call them arms) and a hot medium. But that is not where the disruption caused by 3D printers originates. Whereas drones make presence irrelevant with regard to fighting, the increased dissemination of bits makes knowledge about guns irrelevant. Before 3D printers, in order to make a gun, an individual had to ascertain quite a bit of specialized knowledge. That knowledge was available in books, and given the wherewithal, anyone could manufacture a gun, should they make the effort. In the case of 3D printers, any effort is replaced by the push of a button. Once the plans for a gun are downloaded, the gun is all but made—no knowledge required. Therein, lies the message in the medium. The wide dissemination of bits means that knowledge isn’t something we have to possess; knowledge becomes far more transient. 3D printers make irrelevant the knowledge about how to make all kinds of things, from penrose triangles to—agh!—drones! What happens in a world where manufacturing can occur without the restraint of knowledge? The message of the medium may just be that with the rapid dissemination of bits as knowledge, things just aren’t all that important going forward. Moreover, possessing knowledge is not as important as access to it, devaluing the very people who generate the knowledge in the first place.

To wit, the US Congress wants to ban the plans for printing 3D guns, but banning knowledge has a spotty track record in human history, i.e. it has never worked. Given that I’ve had plastic guns all my life (I’ll grant they didn’t fire bullets but just made gun-like noises) I don’t see the wisdom in trying to stop their manufacture. We’ll have to define the difference between plastic guns that makes noise and plastic guns that kill. The difference, it seems to me, is in the bullet, so really, isn’t that what we should regulate? Going back to Nicholas Negroponte’s US$2 million or $US2000 laptop, the value is in the bits. When it comes to printing guns, the cost of manufacturing them all but falls through the floor, and their value is really construed from the bullets.

Not a New Problem: People Kill People

The weaponization of bits is an unstoppable shift. The increasingly rapid dissemination of bits means knowledge becomes far more easily transferrable. After the New Town tragedy, policy arguments revolved around the idea that we should have more or less guns. The left wants to license and regulate them; the right wants to put them in the hands of every teacher in school. I’m here to tell you that their argument is moot. The ability to make guns, along with the ability to make other kinds of objects (drones included) is quickly going to become ubiquitous, and the meaning behind those weapons is ultimately the devaluation of human life. I wish I had a simple solution to offer, but the solution is terribly complex. We must act as a society to do more to emphasize the value of human life. The day is coming when alibis are irrelevant to murder cases because you won’t have to be anywhere near someone to murder them. Banning the plans for weapons is an expensive proposition to say the least, and one that has a history of failing. The ability to take life, and take as much as possible, is getting cheaper. We need to balance the other side of the equation: we need to make life, and taking it, more expensive.

This is a situation particularly baffling to me because I cannot see how the choice of weapon could or should affect the letter of the law. Regardless of policy or threat, a US citizens should not be executed without a trial. Period. ↩

Banapana In Brief for 2/5/13

Cognitive Restructuring

First off, some nice thoughts. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy finds its roots in the 1970s schism of behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology, and I suppose, in some ways, is an attempt to reconcile the two. In brief, strict behaviorists argue that thinking is merely a side effect of behavior that is driven by external stimulus. If an animal (including humans) receives some stimulus, there will be a resulting physical “output” which includes activities such as thinking. Cognitive psychology research, however, had its roots in reaction to behaviorism by focusing on things like language which appear to be mental activities capable of occurring without external stimulus. To see more on the differences, check out this nice video on the matter. My personal favorite demonstration of the incompleteness of behaviorist theory is Roger Sheppard’s mental rotation problems. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy then, in large part, makes the argument that thinking can change behavior, and in particular, thinking about your thinking. And Psychology Today has a nice summation of some of those techniques. Of interest to the concept of minds on media is that one common tool in all of these techniques is the use of media (yes, that includes paper) record objective measurements of thinking in order to reflect and act on them. The truth is, human memory is pretty shoddy and its easy to remember just the outliers of bad outcomes or be deluded into thinking that bad thoughts and actions are useful. Yet, the simple act of writing down three happy things in a journal at the end of each day improves your overall happiness. And, you guessed it, there’s an app for that and more.

The Monoculture

I’m always grappling with why the concept of the monoculture bothers me quite so much. On the one hand, there is something unsettling about billions of people all going to the same restaurant to eat the same subpar meals. Where is the uniqueness of life in that picture. On the other hand, the idea that even McDonald’s is a homogenous thing the world over is pretty handily dismantled by this entertaining posting over at the Awl petitioning for the creation of a “McWorld” restaurant in Times Square that features all the different food fare from McDonald’s around the world.¹. Still though—and I’m still scouring the science on this one—it seems to me that healthy brains like new things and the Monoculture seems to work against the creation of brain healthy environs in that regard. So, if you’re like me—a little suspicious of the monoculture—be sure to increase your awareness of corporate infiltration in your like with this excellent graphic from Visual.ly that illustrates how most of your household products are produced by only five firms: Five companies that make 60 household products

Droning On and On

When taking a McCluhan perspective on media (as this blog frequently does) one sees media developments as extensions of the human anatomy and senses. Writing extended (over distance) our communication and roads extended our legs. It is no wonder that one of the most powerful empires of the ancient world was Rome, which made extensive use of roads and writing. Turning to a more modern empire, we have the United States, and its particular brand of sense extension in the drone. Drones have been quite the trending topic this month with people becoming more and more aware that this is a weapons delivery system out of control of the usual checks and balances of the US government. Let me be perfectly clear: You, as a US citizen, can be put on a kill list by the CIA, by executive order, and executed by drone attack. That’s why there’s a lawsuit. And don’t think this couldn’t happen, it has and other innocent US citizens have been caught in the crossfire. If you want more details on the rise of the drones, I highly recommend this article from Time; “Drone Home.”

Of course, different by no means implies healthy. ↩

Banapana In Brief for 1/29/13

Terrorist Twitterers

Boing Boing reports that a twitter account associated with Somali terrorists has been suspended. The terrorists have issued statements to the effect that they believe this has occurred because the West is afraid of them getting their message out through non-mainstream channels. From Reuters:

“They shut it down because our account overpowered all the Christians’ mass media and they could not tolerate the grief and the failure of the Christians we always displayed (online).”

Aside from it being somewhat humorous that they sound like incensed teenagers, I find it hypocritical that they don’t seem to recognize Twitter as an invention of the West. It’s kind of hard to believe that if they had their desired caliph-state (see Afghanistan pre-2001) that they would have come up with Twitter… or the Internet for that matter—kind of a Western-scientific invention, that.

On That Note

The Internet is going to transform the way that government works. No, seriously, it is, one day. That’s sort of the topic of Clay Shirky’s engaging Ted talk. From Ted:

“Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible — with deep social and political implications.”

Clay Shirky’s best idea yet (IMHO) is that the Internet is creating spare cognitive cycles that he calls a cognitive surplus. In short, the human race (in first-world counteries, anyway) have been largely a consumption-oriented group because of the nature of our broadcast media. The Internet has largely turned that idea on its head and is maker producers of us all, as well as allowing for the coordination of groups across the world to create markets that would otherwise be relegated to obscure micro-niche status. How McCluhan! He details this in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. I haven’t read it yet, but this is definitely on the short list of books to review here on Banapana.

Is Siri the Future?

This one’s been being bandied about for a while. I wrote about it in 2005 along with DJ Adams over at Openp2p primarily asking the question if a language user-interface (LUI) might be the next real option to the graphic user interface (GUI). I think so, but the cognitive power behind these systems really still has a ways to go, as evidenced, I think, by the fact that we were asking this question in 2005. Still, Kontra, of CounterNotions adds to the debate pointing out some new developments such as Siri operating without a screen in cars as adopted by nine different automakers. To me, processing power in the client device is still a big stumbling block for this interface. Play a game with a friend to see my point. Arm yourself with iPhones and try to answer some inane question¹ like “What was the name of the comedian that starred with Kevin Bacon in ‘A Few Good Men’?” All results will get you to the IMDB page for “A Few Good Men”—definitely where the answer is. (Hint: the comedian’s name is Kevin, too.) To put it mildly, Siri will take longer, but not, because the answer is elusive, but rather because parsing that particular question takes a while—it’s a long question is my point. I suppose that if you’re not great at thumb-typing, the advantage is moot. Looks like it’s time to update my LUI editorial.

Really inane. There are still lots of simple questions that totally stump Siri and Google Now ↩

Data-driven Willpower

In a world where many of us have our attention dominated by computer screens, debates rage about whether doing so has made us more productive or less, Are they helping us to socially connect or keeping us from making deep connections? These screens of ours have helped us calculate, helped us to communicate, but there is a new category of computer application that seems to be on the rise: applications that help us to decide things. They can be as simple as telling you to bring an umbrella to how to get where you’re going. So far so good, but is there any way that this breed of decision apps might work to make us healthier, happier or wiser by strengthening our willpower?—or perhaps even substituting for it.

As a species, we can be bad at decision making when it comes to our own welfare, and we can do so for notoriously simple reasons. In a well-known research experiment, Dr. Baba Shiv of Stanford University showed that people could be made to make poor diet choices when asked to memorize sequences of digits. Our working memory, the part of our memory that is the most salient, is typically described as being able to hold 5 plus or minus 2 chunks of information; numbers, words, names, etc. Students in the Stanford experiment were asked to memorize a series of digits between two and seven digits and then walk down a hallway where they would report the number they memorized. The experiment occurred when the students were stopped midway on their trip and told that in thanks for their contribution to the experiment, they could choose a snack for themselves: fruit or chocolate cake. Students trying to remember longer sequences chose chocolate cake nearly twice as often. So the question is, what if they didn’t have to make the decision. What if they could have asked an app?

There is some debate as to why this effect occurred. Some researchers argue that the working memory is utilizing a lot of resources of the prefrontal cortex (where a lot of your planning functions are located) and this makes it less able to fight off more basic urges like a desire for chocolate cake. On the other hand, the effect may stem from a brain in need of glucose because it’s working hard. A second experiment by Roy Baumeister and colleagues at Florida State and co-author of the book Willpower showed that students who were given lemonade with sugar versus lemonade with a sugar-substitute were better able to succeed at a series of self-control tasks. Baumeister and his colleagues have even shown that feeling bad about yourself can reduce your willpower. You can read more about that effect, referred to as “ego depletion” on David McRaney’s excellent blog, You Are Not So Smart. Even making lots of decisions can leave you with “decision fatigue!” So given all these potential willpower traps, it seems some help would be nice here.

So if weather data feeding into a simple decision app can help you decide to bring an umbrella with you on your daily routine, what sort of app would help you with the “cake or fruit” problem posed above? One solution seems obvious: enter the number into your mobile phone and forget about it until you get down the hallway and report it. But let’s say you have a lot on your mind anyway, what then? Even if you were using an app like Lose it! that tracks your caloric intake, all it can do is give your more information about the decision; it can’t grant you willpower. And if this particular decision-making conundrum comes down to you just needing some glucose because your brain is hard at work, no amount of calorie counting is going to make that urge go away. In fact, based on the research mentioned here, it would look like sifting through data would actually make a decision harder due to the additional information involved, which would lead to a greater likelihood of taking the cake.

Some people have taken the idea of the quantification of the self to some pretty exciting (obsessive? nauseating?) levels, but I would argue that having the data is only half the problem. Whereas data tracking in your life (i.e. keeping track of the miles you’ve run, minutes of Yoga/day, or calorie intake) can help you to set goals—which is important—especially when paired with a social network that can cheer you on, it’s not everything. Prevention strikes me as the other half of the problem—getting that information to you right when (or right before) you need to make a decision. For instance, if you track your calories throughout the day, that’s a great habit, but wouldn’t it also be useful if that same program could deliver a message to you at 11:45am—just as you rouse yourself from some task to get lunch—a message that told you that since your breakfast was unusually high in calories, wouldn’t you like a salad. Maybe the program even gives you a suggestion about where to go nearby to get one.

Now research has shown that nagging is ineffective and, in fact, sometimes causes the opposite of a desired behavior. But it’s important to note that nagging involves human-to-human relationships and while you may occasionally get peeved at your machine, the brain knows that they’re not thinking. And in some real sense, isn’t such message really just your past self reminding your future self of some desired outcome? A to-do list, for instance, is a list that you make to keep your future self on track. But an agent-based reminder here is a todo that’s got just a bit of intelligence in it. Because it has the data to know what you’ve been doing, it could have enough smarts to know the right moment to remind you to do something. Timing is only one way that such an agent-based reminder could work. Location-based reminders are a good way too.

All of this, of course, still depends on good habit formation. If you don’t track the data, the data won’t be able to do anything for you. For some tasks, like running or sleeping, even that problem is being resolved by a class of ambient devices (like Jawbone’s Up and Nike’s fuelband) that just monitor you without needing input. So the question as to whether or not these devices and apps can really give our willpower an assist appears to be a qualified yes. And the nice thing is that when all the silly decisions are made for you, you can focus on the interesting ones.

Google Goggles

I’ve been away from the blog a bit working on an academic project for graduate school, but how could I not take time out of my day to comment on Google Glass? This blog is subtitled “Your mind on media,” isn’t it? And the idea of this project couldn’t be closer to that theme. So here’s my comment: I would rather have my eyes removed than put Google in charge of them. Their wonderful little concept video (seriously, Google, do you even make things anymore?) is nothing what this interface will ultimately look like. After the advertisers and marketers and spammers and trolls have had their way with this project, it will likely look much more like this and that concept video should make you want to shed virtual tears. This is Google we’re talking about. They don’t say it outright, but openness to them means curated as little as possible. Anyone can put their software on the Android system and if it happens to exploit your phone and steal your information, that’s your problem. Do they really believe that they can create a clean, curated augmented reality experience? They simply don’t possess the corporate psychology to do so; they’re motives are simply not aligned with such a design project. First known for search, their search results aren’t even that great anymore. Why? Because they are an advertising company, plain and simple. What they are motivated to do is put ads in front of you. Aren’t we kidding ourselves a little bit when the concept video for this technology contains no ads served by the Google Goggles? Yes. We are.

Update: Someone has created a more genuine version of the Google Goggles project video.

Dear Social Networks…

Yeah. Social-Butterfly-no-more should be the name of this category. When I signed up for your stupid service—which you only goaded me into signing up for by getting all my friends to sign up—you didn’t know I was watching. But that’s right, when I signed up for your service, I used an email address specific to you. Like yourservice@mydomain.com

So guess what? When you sold my email to cybercoders.com or some other crap web site, I knew about it. And that is why we are parting ways. You treat my privacy like you own it. But I’m one step ahead of you.

And that, friends of mine, is why I am not on Friendster or Linkedin or Facebook anymore and won’t be signing up again to get your invitations. Sorry if my email address is too inconvenient, but as they say, if you’re not paying someone for the product, then the product is you. The best social network is the one you build yourself.

Don’t believe me? Ask Chris Hardwick

Artful Machines

“Aaron” can paint works of art for you. It’s just that Aaron is not a person. And this haiku isn’t by a person either:

Sashay down the page
through the lioness
nestled in my soul.

Both art and poetry were created by machines—artful machines. Add to that list, “Emily Howell,” a computer program that writes modern—and sometimes haunting—orchestral music. You can read more about her development and her designer, David Cope, in this solid article from Miller-McCune.com and author Ryan Blitstein. I, for one, have been put off most A.I. generated music. It’s always felt stilted or overly repetitious, or just too close to noise. “Emily Howell” is different. The two examples you can listen to in the article are really quite different. And for piano solos, they are uncharacteristically nuanced for a machine.

Never Let Me Go

Woah. I don’t often bother with movie reviews, but “Never Let Me Go” will affect the way you live your life. Part ethereal, part horrifying. Are you part of the machine or will you demand more? I won’t do spoilers, but this is the best kiss you will see in a long time. This kiss tempers time and longing and finality. An amazing a plot line unfolds through the lives of humans who are ultimately limited. But aren’t we all? It is an alternate history that begins in 1967. It is Orwellian in nature with buzzers and misplaced technology. It’s a story of love unvanquished; it is ungrim given the climate created. It is also awful, the results of a wayward history. From the moment that the pastel colors are put on the screen, you will be transported to a world that never was; is horrible—and love survives it. It is not just science fiction of the past, it is a fairy tale the likes of which the Brothers Grimm could not have imagined. Watch this movie and then go to the closest park you can get to and watch the trees in the breeze.

The Question Mark at the End

We’ve all found some article that we wanted to share with others, and what simpler way could their be than to just copy the URL from the browser and paste it in an email! Just like this:

http://www.good.is/post/at-this-vending-machine-swapping-is-
the-new-buying?utm_campaign=daily_good2&utm_medium=email_daily_good2
&utm_source=headline_link&utm_content=At%20This%20Vending
%20Machine%2C%20Swapping%20is%20the%20New%20Buying

Yuck! Well, I’m here to tell you how to solve this hobgoblin by giving you some information about the question mark “at the end.”—the one that I’ve highlighted in black. For that is not a question mark for the title of the article, but rather the gate to server world.

If you look at the above url, you’ll notice a few things you’re likely to recognize. This domain is unusual for not being a “.com” but other than that, the title of the article is pretty clear. You can read it out loud, “At This Vending Machine Swapping is the New Buying.” But see, that’s a title, not a question. That question mark is the end of the URL and the beginning of a bunch of variables that programmers and publishers can use mainly to see where you came from. I was in my mail program when this article popped up, I clicked on the link, and this URL was sent to my browser, letting the good people at Good Magazine know that I arrived on their doorstep from out of an email they sent to me.

But look, copy only the portion up to the question mark and Voila, the URL still functions perfectly:

http://www.good.is/post/at-this-vending-machine-swapping-is-the-new-buying

Some people prefer to automate this process a bit by using URL shortening services such as bit.ly or goo.gl or, my favorite, is.gd, and I do use them for Twitter. But when sending along an article to a friend, I consider this bad etiquette. In a way, it takes advantage of trust and removes information from the receiver which would otherwise give them a choice to spend their time on your missive or not. Consider the difference here:

Hey,

Thought you would appreciate this article from Good Magazine:
“At This Vending Machine Swapping is the New Buying”
http://www.good.is/post/at-this-vending-machine-swapping-is-the-new-buying

Hey,

Check this out:
http://is.gd/1OgsZz

You see? There’s no context. The second message reads like an imperative. But, people are busy. People may not be more or less likely to go to the link you’ve so generously shared if it’s shortened, but if they put it away for later, chances are they’ll forget it. Instead, the context of the title might be enough to spring something to mind later and they’ll seek it out of their inbox. Besides which, I can’t help but think that courtesy and clarity in email are two things worth striving for.

Publishers!: You should note for yourselves that bad URLs are likely harming your readership. URLs like the first one above often just break in email programs when people try to share them. It’s why URL shortening services exist, but they are not a panacea. Ask your webmaster (are they still called that?) how a reader can land on the site, your URL variables then register with your server, and afterwards direct the reader to a new copy of the page with a nice URL that people can more easily share. It’s not hard to do. (Particularly savvy web masters will use javascript to dynamically update the URL without ever making the reader think they’ve left the page!)