Category — General

Color Me Creeped Out.

Researchers Can Track Our Every Media Move

“Technology is hurtling along, offering a wide assortment of Orwellian options to gauge viewing and listening preferences. As with medicine, however, those advances are coming faster than we can sort out their implications and decide how much information we all want our corporate big brothers to possess.

So enter, in a closely monitored test under way in Philadelphia, the 'portable people meter,' or PPM. It's a device the size of a pager that people carry around with them, picking up encoded signals in the media they consume. The individuals need do nothing, with the PPM automatically identifying what the users are watching or what radio station they're listening to.

Creepy, you say? Not so, says Arbitron, which is conducting the trial with the cooperation of Nielsen. After all, the current TV ratings sometimes require letting people install boxes in their bedrooms, and the radio version, almost Jurassic by today's standards, asks you to keep a diary of your listening habits.

'What we're asking people to do is less invasive than allowing meters in their homes,' said Roberta McConochie, Arbitron's director of client relations for the venture, who recently briefed research executives in L.A….

Nevertheless, I felt a chill drift up my spin when McConochie cited the device's ability to track which “retail environments” people patronize — using the same silent code to cross-reference what stores they shop in with their viewing patterns — or perform a similar trick linking TV viewing and movie attendance. Without being paranoid, it all sounds a little like 'The Matrix,' minus the slow-motion….

Yet whether you dread or embrace it, the day is coming when media consumption will be indexed with buying patterns to form one vast database — all in the name of conveying more precise targeting data to those who see the public as a commodity to be bought and sold. That's terrific news for advertisers but a bit scary to anyone inclined to question if Rupert Murdoch and other guardians of pipelines into the home can be trusted not to abuse the privilege.” [Chicago Tribune]

[The Shifted Librarian]

yup, i was telling people that i could pretty much do this now with some software that i have, and they nod along….

Similarity. At the back of the conference are some round tables at which people are sitting, laptops sprawling. They're doing what the rest of us are doing: listening but also IM'ing, checking email from time to time, looking up links. Somehow it reminds me being at a drive-in: there's a movie playing at the front, but attending to it is a social event…. [Joho the Blog]

I'm usually one of these people, in the back either with a video camera(it's faster than notes) or my computer, but i'm usually alone or with one or two other people. I think this is because most academic conferences have different expectations than the current set of software conferences that are occuring.

Intellectually turned on. Few things in life give me greater joy than witnessing (if only from afar) another's intellectual excitement and imagination.Matt Webb is currently reading D&G's A Thousand Plateaus and taking good notes.I'm on a journey to the centre of my world . [Purse Lip Square Jaw]

deleuze and guattari, great material, one of my favorites also, though my notes are indecipherable to others because they tend to be highly referential to other works. I'm not as much of a fan of 1000 plateaus as I am of the combined books and guattari's own work. In Genosko's book on Guattari, there is an interesting bit on transdisciplinarity that is very similar to the disciplinary heretics bit found on purselipsquarejaw. Guattari is much more the social/organizational side of the d&g construct, which plays well against the deleuzian ontological philosophy of actuality and virtuality, though in recent book Delanda disputes Badiou's take on multiplicity, but that's a whole different set of topics, but ramble ramble. Guattari's work alone should be investigated if you really like 1000 plateaus, it is worth the effort. I suggest getting Genosko's book Guattari: An Abberant Introduction, i reviewed it on amazon.. beyond that, nab Chaosmosis, Chaosophy and Soft Subversions. And lets not forget that nearly the whole archive of the journal Chimeras is available online too! nifty..

When terrorism was cool. As a new film about the Weather Underground opens, former '60s revolutionary Mark Rudd wonders whatever possessed him — and America. [Salon.com] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

hmm, terrorism wasn't cool, but sometimes when the wheels of the machine become odious, and there is no other option, one has to insert themself unto them, and prevent their operation.

from the atlantic, through arts and letters daily:

A dependence that's so strong it's almost like a narcotic. You don't question the pusher.” It may sound like the language of drug addiction, but in fact Robert Baer, a former CIA agent in the Middle East, is describing American dependence on Saudi Arabia and its oil. In “The Fall of the House of Saud” (May Atlantic), Baer details the United States's absolute reliance on oil from a country that is deeply, dangerously unstable.

i say the narcosis is latent industrialization and desocialization. by which i mean the industrialization, and replacement of certain aspects of our life with technologies. This is combined with the growing tendency of people not talking to each other, and not being social.

The Effects of Global Aging on the Global Workforce..

The Effects of Global Aging on the Global Workforce from the Hudson Institute. A bit of depth on the formula:

Global Aging
+ Regional Factors
+ Policy Options
+ Wildcards
= Workforce Outcomes

This article, by Hudson's Gary Geipel, cites:

• Beyond Workforce 2020, coming in 2004.
• United Nations (UN) projections 
• The Aging Vulnerability Index

Sorta scary, and the choices aren't attractive. Worth scanning.

[a klog apart]

wow, handy stuff

US Cybersecurity Agency launched. You can all now sleep safely [The Register]

through centralization you can create a monoculture, and through that you end up making your position weaker than a plural and decentralized system…

Not Rocket Science. Simon Willison is collecting his excellent series of writeups on practical CSS magic under the rubric CSS ain‰??t Rocket Science. He should be wrong, it should be like rocket science: predictable, deterministic, with an engineering ruleset saying How To Do It. Except for the tools are broken. To be specific, Microsoft‰??s tool is broken. And in recent news, apparently they don‰??t care. Which is maybe just fine. … [ongoing]

this is nifty, handy, and all that…. the problem of coruse is that rocket sceince isn't very predictible, deterministic, or heavily governed by an engineering ruleset, though many believe it to be. at its heart, it is a science, which means that it is only as determinate as human error allows it to be, it is only as engineered as social structures allow for, and in the end, it is broken and disastrous, but it does make good tv.

Agile programming and analogies. Boundary objects and software development is the topic of one of the papers (pdf) for Analogy Fest. [Link by Tesugen.com.]… [Imaginary magnitude]
sounds like a cool paper….. its a topic I'm intersted in.

STS blogs. Blogs by people in the Science and Technology Studies field: an index… [Imaginary magnitude]

so anyway, i added Gustav to my blogroll, so here is where he linked to me… there has to be more STS blogs out there in the world, come on people speak up.