Web 2.0, New Media, and Gadgets
bioephemera | December 29, 2009
"It is the largest thing we have ever built," says Whitesides, "and we have assembled it from transistors--the smallest things we know how to make. It is a chrysalis we are forming around the planet...a table where we sit to gossip, a suq where we buy and sell; a shadowy corner for planning mischief; a library holding the entire world's information; a friend, a game, a matchmaker, a psychiatrist, an erotic dream, a babysitter, a teacher, a spy....The best and worst and most ordinary of us reflected--and perhaps distorted--in a silvery fog of bits."
--George Whitesides describing the Internet…
bioephemera | December 29, 2009There are two contradictory headlines today on Google News, both regarding someone I couldn't care less about. However, they nicely illustrate one of my key concerns about the internet: the pervasive illusion that the "wisdom of crowds" is in fact wisdom, or in fact fact.
Both stories involve the heinous Jon Gosselin, who as far as I'm concerned is a waste of attention. You may have heard that the former reality TV star had his apartment trashed over the holidays, and that no one knows who's responsible. But if one turns to Google News, one can see that People Magazine appears to have an…
bioephemera | December 13, 2009
Dress by Alison Lewis,
Photography by Carlos Linares III.
Read all about it at iheartswitch.
bioephemera | December 3, 2009Ever wonder what the pilot for "Gray's Anatomy:Uncanny Valley" would be like? Well, you're in luck!
If It Weren't For You (I'd Be Sued) from Justine Cooper on Vimeo.
Yes, that was a . . .
music video in which an unseen clinician serenades the mannequins used in medical simulation with an infectious rock ballad. Emoting on the depth of their relationship, the doctor or nurse apologizes to the mannequins for what they go through in the name of patient safety and the improvement of clinical skills, crooning the chorus "If it weren't for you, I'd be sued."
It turns out the video is just part of…
bioephemera | December 2, 2009As many of you know, I've been working for the past couple of years on youth internet health and education issues. While the stereotype is that younger = tech savvier, that's not strictly true. Younger kids may be better acquainted with the internet, may use it more, and may feel more comfortable with it, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have the cognitive skills or experience to differentiate between manipulative content, unreliable content, and good content.
How many of you, as adults, have been tricked into clicking on a deceptive banner ad that looked like genuine content? How many…
bioephemera | November 29, 2009
I really wanted to go to the D is for Digitize conference in New York. I couldn't go, but Harry Lewis did, and according to him, the star was Daniel Reetz of DIYBookScanner.org:
While everyone else at the conference was ruminating about whether Google had a library monopoly or whether Amazon or Microsoft might imaginably be able to compete, along comes this dude with his Rube Goldberg contraption and says, hey, let's all just start doing it, and we'll catch up eventually. (source)
Reetz made the book scanner above from "trash and cheap cameras." Very impressive. But what does it mean for…
bioephemera | November 25, 2009
fog 10Steven Hight
In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers - the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three together equal what I remember.
The November Harper's has a meandering, tragic paean to the lost city newspaper by Richard Rodriguez (quoted above). Unfortunately the full article is subscriber-only, but Marcus Banks links to two articles on the possible future of the…
bioephemera | November 22, 2009Pop quiz: this Google Trends chart represents searches for what word or phrase?
the answer? a word that the vast majority of people never use - except on Thanksgiving.
Go chemistry! :)
bioephemera | November 8, 2009I'm currently attending the Grand Opening of the new Laboratory at Harvard University, "an exhibition and meeting space for student idea development within and between the arts and sciences," for a special colloquium on Art, Science, and Creativity featuring David Edwards (author of ArtScience), Lisa Randall, and others. This is awesome. Stay tuned for a report tomorrow.
bioephemera | November 6, 2009Townephemera? The hamlet of Argleton, UK apparently exists only on Google Maps. The Telegraph reports that Roy Bayfield actually went there to check:
"A colleague of mine spotted the anomaly on Google Maps, and I thought 'I've got to go there'," he said."I started to weave this amazing fantasy about the place, an alternative universe, a Narnia-like world. I was really fascinated by the appearance of a non-existent place that the internet had the power to make real and give a semi-existence."
When Mr Bayfield reached Argleton - which appears on Google Maps between Aughton and Aughton Park - he…
bioephemera | November 5, 2009Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
Last week, at the imagine science film festival in New York, Magnetic Movie won the Nature Scientific Merit Award:
In 2009, the Nature Scientific Merit Award went to the film judged to be not only the most deserving but also the most scientifically accurate, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhard's Magnetic Movie.
I love Magnetic Movie, too - but what think you about the scientific accuracy angle? See what I had to say about it in my Art vs. Science series, earlier this year:
Art vs. Science, Part One: Semiconductor
Art vs. Science, Part Two: You want raw data…
bioephemera | November 1, 2009*That's the Amazon rainforest - not Amazon.com!
Check out this interview from MAKE with Google's Rebecca Moore, who helped an Amazon chief use Google Earth to fight illegal logging.
Lots more here.
bioephemera | October 25, 2009
"Mechanical heart"
Bill McConkey
Collage of a digitally enhanced pencil drawing of the human heart and photographs of different brass instruments. Digital artwork. From the Wellcome Image Awards 2009 - see the other winners here.
Last week was Open Access Week, which meant I got to hear a great talk from John Wilbanks of the Science Commons (you should subscribe to their blog!) I've been thinking a lot this week about the legal challenges of data sharing, which is giving me a headache. But there's an easier way to celebrate Open Access Week: by visiting the Guardian's a multimedia show about…
bioephemera | October 18, 2009
From the NIDA media guide
Jared Diamond and the New Yorker's parent company have denied all charges in the "Vengeance is Ours" scandal:"
The defendants' attorneys listed 34 reasons, called "affirmative defenses," why they should prevail in the lawsuit. Among them are the contentions that the plaintiffs were not defamed and had not suffered any harm or actual injury to their reputations; that Diamond and The New Yorker had not acted with "actual malice" or with knowledge that The New Yorker story was false; that the article was "substantially true" and thus protected under the First and 14th…
bioephemera | October 15, 2009So it's finally happened: the government is taking blogs so seriously that the FTC is cracking down on us! As you may have heard,
Bloggers who offer endorsements must disclose any payments they have received from the subjects of their reviews or face penalties of up to $11,000 per violation, the Federal Trade Commission said Monday.The agency, charged with protecting consumer interests, had not updated its policy on endorsements in nearly three decades, well before the Internet became a force in shaping consumer tastes. The new rules attempt to make more transparent corporate payments to…
bioephemera | October 9, 2009One of the arguments I generally make about Web 2.0 is that, if you are an organization who happens to screw up, you should apologize and move on. Don't try to cover your tracks or shut your critics up - you'll just invite mockery and even more attention than you did before.
Unfortunately, Ralph Lauren apparently doesn't agree with that strategy. They've demanded that Photoshop Disasters and Boing Boing take down images of a Ralph Lauren ad that was so badly photoshopped, many thought it was satire.
The ad depicted a model who was so grotesquely emaciated and doll-like (her head was bigger…
bioephemera | October 7, 2009Just got in from a really interesting talk by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schonberger's concern is that with a shift to digital modes of storage, we've transitioned from a biologically hardwired default of forgetting information, to a default of remembering. It's literally gotten harder to erase certain types of information than it has to retrieve it. Many types of ephemera just aren't ephemeral anymore.
Why is this a problem? In addition to swamping us with unwanted, outdated information we'd all rather forget (high school…
bioephemera | October 7, 2009
This stunning photo was taken not by the Hubble space telescope, but by some guy (Rogelio Andreo) out in the desert. Sure, he needed several thousand dollars in digital camera equipment to do it, but still - that's well within the reach of many hobbyists. Are we seeing a surge in amateur earthbound astronomy photography?
Read this Wired article to find out all about Andreo's process. If you happened to read my earlier post about data and scientific visualization ("You want raw data? You can't handle raw data") you know that I think filtering and processing data is an inevitable part of both…
bioephemera | October 1, 2009Okay, everyone, here is something intriguing. The following video is amateurish, bizarre, has terrible production values, and appears to be the work of either a master performance artist or someone who lacks any self-consciousness whatsoever (shades of Little Edie Bouvier Beale).
But, if you start the video, then click over to some other window (go check your Gmail) and just listen to the audio without video, you're suddenly listening to a dusty, scratchy gramophone record that documents a forgotten, eccentric self-taught Appalachian folk musician from the turn of the century. Or something…
bioephemera | September 20, 2009
Stanley Fish writes a provocative essay in the NYT on whether curiosity is tantamount to "a mental disorder," or even a sin:
Give this indictment of men in love with their own capacities a positive twist and it becomes a description of the scientific project, which includes among its many achievements space travel, a split atom, cloning and the information revolution. It is a project that celebrates the expansion of knowledge's boundaries as an undoubted good, and it is a project that Chairman Leach salutes when he proudly lists the joint efforts by the University of Virginia and the N.E.H…