Citizen-Generated Media (CGM)

What Lurks Unseen Inside Your Computer?

As computers get more powerful, the gremlins that inhabit them also grow stronger and harder to detect.  Ever the maker of lists, PC World has assembled “The Ten Biggest Security Risks You Don’t Know About.”  From purloined data appearing on the web to fraudulent but persuasive phishing schemes, this list is enough to bring out the paranoid streak in even the most well-adjusted individual.

Bighorn Sheep and Giraffes, Oh My!

If you ever smugly thought that homosexuality was a crime against nature, Stanford’s Joan Roughgarden has some animal behavior stories to tell you.  She is a biology professor who claims to have identified over 450 species that regularly engage in homosexual acts, and she documented all this in her book Evolution’s Rainbow.  Her transgender status and this radical break from Darwinian sexual selection have led to hostile critiques of the book, but you can decide for yourselves without having to slog through hundreds of pages.  Seed Magazine has just published an article by Jonah Lehrer entitled “The Gay Animal Kingdom,” to which you can repair for stories about homosexual tendencies among Japanese macaques and Eurasian oystercatchers, among many others.

Eternal Verities of the Digital Ecosystem

Geoffrey Moore has come up with his list of ten – “Top Ten Truths About the Digital Ecosystem.”  The first of these truisms is perhaps the most disturbing, although it is an old commonplace among Madison Avenue veterans, namely that “image is king” and words are just so much visual clutter.

Browser Evolution

A dozen years ago, a browser was a slow shopper, then along came the Internet.  How different are the next-generation web browsers likely to be than the ones we rely upon today?  Technology Review provisionally answers that question in a recent article. 

One More Reason To Leave Your Computer On All the Time

David Baker wanted to research AIDS vaccines or cancer cures, but lacked the money to buy or rent the massively powerful computers necessary to depict how proteins unfold at the atomic level.  Baker is a biochemistry professor at the University of Washington, and was dimly aware of how the SETI Foundation had recruited volunteers in their efforts to detect intelligent signals from outer space.  Using the same software, Baker has created a similar volunteer effort for biochemistry that he calls Rosetta(at)home.   Technology Review recently published an article on Baker’s work, and it’s pretty clear that the idea of a network of volunteer tech heads practicing distributed PC computing is going to expand into other areas rapidly.

It Was the Best of Tech, It Was the Worst of Tech

PC World is at its snarky best, creating two lists that could start a fight in any Geek Bar.  “The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time” and “The 100 Best Tech Products of 2006” may be subjective, but they will start the disputation genes flowing. Note that the 2006 list was published when only half the year had elapsed; they must be setting themselves up for a sequel.

E-Mail Good. Wiki Strange.

Central Desktop addresses the question of why e-mail popularity continues to soar despite its clear inferiority to newer solutions as a collaboration tool. Methinks the arguments presented here will diminish in force as more and more of the information workers become accustomed to these new modalities.  I can recall a time when e-mail was considered a harbinger of a scary new world. 

Stopping Human Rights Abuses One Satellite at a Time

We all know that satellites are crackerjack at spotting marijuana plants in the deepest forest or nuclear facilities in North Korea, but the American Association for the Advancement of Science has recently used satellite imagery to document human rights abuses, this time in Zimbabwe.  Two satellite photos, taken almost four years apart, seem to indicate the forcible relocation of an entire community, Porta Farm, which once housed political opponents of the ruling regime.  The first photo, from June 2002, shows a bustling community of over 800 people, and the second one, taken in April 2006, shows the entire area with all the residences gone, ploughed into the ground.  This evidence was then presented to an Amnesty International panel that was investigating corruption within the Mugabe government.  The Amnesty International panel found that the village was razed in 2005 as a part of Operation Murambatsvina, ostensibly an anti-poverty campaign to eliminate illegal slum dwellings, but actually a political attack on the Mugabe opposition.  The photos will become an important part of a legal case challenging the disestablishment of Porta Farm, brought by the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights

More on the Great Firewall of China

We all reflexively gag when we hear of attempts to censor the Internet, and quickly condemn Google or Yahoo for “diluting” their principles in order to penetrate the gigantic China market.  But perhaps the Chinese “netizens” are more resourceful than the American press gives them credit for.  This is Mark Glaser’s thesis after he interviewed Marcus Xiang at a recent London conference.