technology
You are viewing stuff tagged with technology.
You are viewing stuff tagged with technology.
Despite its ungainly title, “Saussure, Predictive Text, Cycling Awake and the word ‘Book’” is an interesting article. Here’s the thesis: two unrelated books on your bookshelf can become associated in your memory, simply because they are next to one another. Similarly, two unrelated words on your phone can become associated in your memory, simply because T9 predictive text puts them next to one another. As a result, language grows in richness, because new associations are made on the bookshelves of our phones. It’s a really neat idea, one that has produced real-world results. For example, the word “Zonino” is “text misprediction” for “WooHoo!”
I just read “Electronic Devices Redefine Quality Family Time” at the New York Times. Mykala sent it to me.
When people are sitting in their living room, physically close to one another but absorbed with the goings-ons on different screens, the “parallel planes of existence” idea doesn’t seem so bad… kind of like reading the paper and occasionally looking up to discuss what you article you are reading — that is, they’re not entirely parallel planes… they do intersect.
Three dimensional television is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of. It’s not the glasses that bother me. It’s the fact that the extra dimension is superfluous: two dimensions are perfectly evocative of reality. I believe that adding a third dimension just gives the TV networks and movie studios an opportunity to charge more for their broadcasts and films.
I don’t really have the time to fully parse out “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz at The American Scholar, but holy cow are there some good quotes in there. I’ll follow one of his trains of thought:
I haven’t read an article in a long time with such a gigantic vocabulary. Lot of dictionary use on this one. It is still very understandable, though — so I submit to you The Meaning of Information Technology:
Availability of Wi-Fi, transportation solutions, medical trials, university research and development expenditures, advanced degrees held by the work force, and energy conservation are so far above the national average that in 2005, Popular Science named Minneapolis the “Top Tech City” in the U.S. The Twin Cities ranked the country’s second best city in a 2006 Kiplinger’s poll of Smart Places to Live and Minneapolis was one of the Seven Cool Cities for young professionals.
Telephones, telecommunications, telephone conversations, telemarketers, and even televangelists have become a part of our everyday lives. Like the refrigerator, television, and increasingly the computer, phones are a simple part of everyday life. Few recall (and even fewer care to imagine) what life was like before one’s neighbors were merely a handset away, or when that handset failed to successfully connect. “Only one in 50 …” of the people in the 2000 census did not have a telephone in their homes (Detroit News). So, how has a device with such a stunning impact on our business, consumer, and social lifestyles changed over the years? And, more importantly, how has it changed us?
Suddenly, I am hearing all sorts of rumors about this GMail. I originally read about it at Good Morning, Silicon Valley and immediately went to go check it out. Apparently, Google’s service will focus on archiving messages and then applying their search technology to it. The cost? Free. The space? 1000 megabytes. Yes, 1000 megabytes of email. My Hotmail account contains pretty typical sized collection of emails, and it has stored 317 messages in 930 kilobytes. Thus, 1000 megabytes would store around 340,860 email messages. For free! There has also been a rumor going around that this is an April Fool’s joke. A pretty good joke, if it is.