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ARCHIVES -- MAY 2010

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MAY 24, 2010 -- MAY 30, 2010

FACEBOOK FARRAGO OF PRIVACY AND PROFITS

Nothing in the letter says anything about rolling back the mass public-defaulting that happened.

So basically Facebook is going to make it a little easier to control the few privacy settings you have left? That doesn't answer the criticisms that information that was once private is now public. Making privacy controls easier doesn't mean your social graph will stop being public, for example.

Facebook is using 2 of the slimiest sales tactics, bait-and-switch, and overpromising / underdelivering. Read the article TECHCRUNCH/Mort Zuckerberg on Facebook's privacy controls: "We just missed the mark."

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When does this sensationalism end? Zuckerberg and FB have been completely upfront and transparent about the privacy setting changes, and regardless of how tragic the media tries to paint the circumstances, it all comes down to the inability and/or laziness of users to manage their settings. So, coming soon: Privacy Settings For Idiots. Maybe now the sensationalist reporting will end, but I suspect not, as the media continues to exploit ignorance and laziness for ad eyeballs.

Read the article TECHCRUNCH/Mort Zuckerberg on Facebook's privacy controls: "We just missed the mark."

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"Social" Networking. If you want your posts to be private, you should maybe use a "Non-social" tool. If you put something in to the public domain, accept that the public may see it. Suppose you only let Mr X see your post, well that's good and secure. What if Mr. X shares that post? It's a social network, get over it

And Facebook is an evil corporation with adverts on it - oh my god, what will we do? Let's see, they have banks of servers, lots of staff providing Facebook for 'free'. Because they love us? They have to pay for this technology. Subscriptions would not work, so they advertise. I have to say I like the adverts as they are so targeted - I have found a few local companies and events that I would have not known about without them.

Is Facebook perfect? No, not by a long way. Does Facebook handle privacy correctly? No, it has a way to go yet (a long way) but that said, what do you expect? You do get what oyu pay for.

Some vote with their feet and leave, as we all have the right to do. I am still happy with FB, it's not perfect, but the pros out weigh the cons for me, so I will keep using it until they dont (again, for me , a personal decision).

Read the article CNET/Facebook's privacy crisis must thrill Hollywood

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"...in Facebook, you're publishing"

If Facebook made it very very clear to everyone that pretty much everything they put on there was being published to the whole world you might have a point.

But Facebook seems to go out of its way to make it look like distribution is limited - and then opens it up without saying anything to anyone? The Internet is "not inherently private" unless the designers of a web site work to make it as secure as possible.

Facebook seems to have done just the opposite. But I frankly have nothing to complain about. I never put anything up there that I didn't want published - which means the very minimum possible. There are too many shisters out there trolling for whatever information they can find to sell. Just sorry that Facebook is just another one of them.

Read the article HUFFINGTON POST/Why Facebook and all social media privacy is oxymoronic

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I never understood the big deal with FB, or how it was possible to spend more than 5 minutes at a time on the site, unless you were trying to fiddle with settings. 

It was kinda cool at first seeing old friends online, but the creation of the newsfeed killed all desire in me to login. It's utter trash. I think it's cool to know my best friend from high school just ran the Boston Marathon. But I could not care less about the powerbar she just ate after a routine morning run. It's trash.  
 
I sincerely doubt that there are 500 million active users on FB. We know a lot of the profiles are fake from the guy who was trying to sell them. A simple name search will turn up screen after screen of people with no photo and no friends. Active indeed!  
 
It's just boring. And the privacy debacle was the last straw for me.

Read the article TIME/How facebook is redefining privacy

STEPPING STONES TO SYNTHETIC LIFE

What concerns me most about synthesizing life is that once life can be manufactured, life will become devalued to the point of being a commodity. Nothing sacred about it. Not that life is sacred any way (at least in Texas). But when life loses all its mystery, it loses the kernel of being precious. What's next? "Soul found in the fruit bat genome."

Read the article NPR/Scientists reach milestone on way to artificial life

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It does not sound as if this technology could easily produce a plague. It sounds expensive and difficult. That said, it is more likely to be used to create something that would produce a great deal of money, like a new fuel, or a critter that will eat garbage and excrete fuel. I think we are still a long way from that. However, the fear of something artificially created that does not play nice with other creatures and their ecosystems is valid. It may sound like a good idea to create a critter that would digest the plastic we are drowning in, but if they start eating the plastics we are not ready to toss out... Something to consider.

Read the article NPR/Scientists reach milestone on way to artificial life

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Of course, it's hyped. This isn't synthetic life, it's synthetic DNA. A biological system, the host bacterium, was needed to express the code. I also suspect that parts of the synthetic code were included without knowing exactly what they do, on the basis that the host wouldn't work without them ie that were simply copied from a known bacterial sequence.

Craig Venter has not created a synthetic cell, he's created an advertising opportunity. It isn't clear to me which parts of this process are patentable, as it represents a logical fusion of well-established genetic, chemical and cell biological procedures.

Hard work, but not particularly clever. It's interesting that ethicists and philosophers seem more impressed than scientists..

.Read the article GUARDIAN/Craig Venter creates synthetic life form

CREATIVITY -- FOR RICHER OR POORER WITH YOUTUBE?

An example of the best and worst technology can offer.

User created content celebrating the freedom of information - for better or worse.

I'd recomend LiveLeak as well - a little more 'politically charged' sometimes, again...for better or worse.

Thanks for the 5 years YouTube, and thanks for me getting me through saturdays back days when I was a slave in a call center, and spent the entire day watching 80's cartoons, which may have kept me from loosing my marbles.

Read the article CBC NEWS/YouTube -- An ambitious five year old

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This new monetization of everything on YouTube is what's making it so bad now. YouTube is completely dominated by big names, and the site is no longer focused on allowing the little guys to show off their stuff. Yes, people have figured out how to make themselves popular. That's excellent, but then when YouTube goes off and supports only them, their channel's simply a business, not entertainment only.

It also seems as if the culture of YouTube has been sliding a little too. The Featured Videos are no longer what they used to be. I'm consistently surprised at the kind of content YouTube itself decides to highlight as "worth watching."

Read the article CNET/YouTube and the new creative class

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There is no new creative class. This is only a meme created by those trying to monetize on others' works via owning distribution online for advertising.

People had pencils. crayons, clay , and all sorts of "creative" tools for centuries...only 10 percent created anything for the other 90 percent. Nothing has changed. Before the telephone people "wrote" letters, and had diaries... they weren't a creative class - just a. literate "upper" class.

What we have is not a creative growth, in fact, we have the reversal over the last 50 years of "rerun" tech media. What we have is a visual media literacy -- post literate -- culture that is only communicating with the building blocks they grew up with: video /audio imagery and memes... since the same Johnny can't read or write or do much rhythmic..:) -- the old literacy used to monetize...

The fact that a few server owners want to monetize America's Stupid Videos for advertisers 24/7 as opposed to the 20-year Sunday night America's Funniest Videos isn't evidence of any new creative class..

Just a new control of media class - that got creative by devaluing creativity.

Read the article CNET/YouTube and the new creative class

YouTube taught me something in 4 minutes my dad tried to teach me for years.

How to tie a tie.

Never looked back, you want to know how to tie a half windsor? Let me know I will show you.

Read the article CBC NEWS/YouTube -- An ambitious five year old

Things I've learned on You Tube:

1) How to cut and install tile (did the bathroom)

2) How to play CSNY, "Suite Judy Blue Eyes"

3) How to shoot phony UFO pictures.

And a thousand other things. What's not to love about YouTube?

Read the article CBC NEWS/YouTube -- An ambitious five year old

MAY 10, 2010 -- MAY 23, 2010

JUMPING JUPITER! WHERE'S THE BELT?

THE PLANETARY SOCIETY

Wow! So now we await the SEB revival. This cycle (SEB fade/SEB revival) is a regular feature on Jupiter, and the revival is much, much more spectacular than the fade, with activity at a level not often seen on the planet. Trouble is, we may have to wait a number of years for it.

Read the article THE PLANETARY SOCIETY BLOG/Jupiter has lost a belt

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“They go all the way down, tens of thousands of kilometers deep, where the pressure gets so great the gas just sorta gradually turns into a liquid.”

I hear it is metallic hydrogen.

It is but that’s *much* lower down. Jupiter (like the Sun) is mostly composed of hydrogen and helium (plus a few slight impurities which provide the colour) in different phase states depending on the altitude or depth and consequent pressure level that the H & He is at. Just above the core which is at an extremely high temperature and pressure the H / He is solid and in metallic hydrogen form then it becomes liquid further up and eventually gas which make up the cloudy surface we see.

Arthur C. Clarke in his Space Odyssey books – notably 2010 – had a good imaginative voyage through these layers and speculated about the core of Jupiter being a solid diamond – which, alas, I think has been ruled out since based on Jupiter’s chemical composition although that idea still remains in play for the outer gas giants, eg. Neptune.

Read the article DISCOVER MAGAZINE/How will Jupiter hold up his pants?

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We could see both bands on Jupiter last year with my little telescope (£50 from Lidl) as well as the 4 largest moons that Galileo saw belting around it. Now it seems there is less to see this year. Good that even with a supermarket telescope it is possible to see something interesting happening in space from the back garden. Makes the back garden seem bigger.

Read the article DAILY MAIL/Jupiter loses on if its stripes and scientists have no idea why

WHO'S THAT NEANDERTHAL I SAW YOU WITH?

If this concept of modern human and Neanderthal interbreeding is supported by further evidence it will imo have huge implications for our understand of the development of prehistoric human culture and human behavior.

The previous more simplistic idea about Neanderthals was that modern humans never interbred with them and that the modern humans major involvement with Neanderthals was to push them to extinction. This older consensus might now be able to set aside. Instead if interbreeding is shown through further evidence to be an accepted concept, our understand of the relationship between these two human groups (which lasted thousands of years) would be much more complicated .

Also, if this idea of modern human and Neanderthal interbreeding is pretty much shown to be correct, then humanity today can not look at the Neanderthal the same way again imo. Part of them is us and part of us is them. We would not just be distant cousins separated by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Instead they would be our long lost brothers and sisters.

Read the article   ARS TECHNICA/ Genome hints humans, Neanderthals rolled in prehistoric hay

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For the longest time, scientists thought that Neanderthals were NOT our ancestors - they were a completely separate species (i.e. no interbreeding). They thought humans and Neanderthals shared a common ancestor but that the two different species split off from each other long ago, so that one wouldn't expect any Neanderthal DNA in modern humans. This new study is totally mind blowing (well, to evolutionary biologists, at least =^) because it refutes that long-held theory and suggests that Neanderthals were indeed one of our ancestors.

A crude analogy would be if someone made the discovery that at some point in history, lions mated with wolves such that 1 - 4% of most lion DNA is actually derived from wolves - not very common sense at all (and very complicated!).

Read the article BOSTON GLOBE/There's a little Neanderthal in us

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As a biologist, I love this stuff. There are some great questions being asked in this forum too!

Neanderthals and modern humans probably experienced 'allopathic speciation' that is, the further apart individuals of one species live apart from each other, the less they share genetically over time because any new mutations or different gene combinations have to move across many individuals to get to the other end of the population. If the population gets split, like from a river or new ocean between them, they become separate species in time.

One great example of this today lives across the U.S.; Individual song sparrows from the north can't directly mate with individuals that come from the south, but they can with neighboring birds - the entire population is considered a single species, but there are exceptions on this between individuals living far apart from each other. That's why we also identify organisms using the term 'sub-species'.

I wonder if perhaps Neanderthals and modern humans were more like a closely related sub-species than a true species here... the differences were pronounced that made them identifiable as a group, but not genetically enough to make them that different from us.

Read the article NPR/Hey Good Lookin': Early humans dug Neanderthals

GOOGLE E-BOOKS IN TIME FOR SUMMER READING

Presumably, the books are going to be bought but then kept in the cloud (much like Amazon's Kindle offering - the books can be deleted off the device at any point but they're available from the Amazon site for re-downloading.

It wouldn't make sense for Google to pursue a strategy of putting everything in the cloud (see Chromium) but then pursue downloading books onto peoples' hard drives (to do so would be presumably short-sighted). Books are small enough to be cached to their new Chromium devices for off-line reading, so it makes an ideal first step for them

Ultimately, they'll provide your personal bookstore using your Google account. Anyone who's buying a book from the Google store for the first time will be required to set up an account with google, meaning they then have more detailed information about you than they previously did. Information is power. The other thing is that they may be providing a subscription based model - how about paying £10 a month to read as many books as you like? Works with Spotify...

Read the article THE REGISTER/Google to be bookseller by summer

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I don't have a serious problem with Google pulling a Microsoft and expanding into areas they clearly aren't good at, but I do have a problem with Google trying to gain market share for their inferior products by going with a "loss leader" approach (like giving away Android for free).

I also have a problem with Google's rapidly expanding power, which should be of serious concern to any rational person. If you get tired of Apple's products or services, you go with someone else. Apple doesn't have controlling power over any single market with any of its products. They may have a dominant share in some markets, but they don't have controlling power. You can easily buy music from other sources and put it on non-Apple devices. Apple has no ultimate control over you.

If you get tired of Google, who are you going to go with? They are quickly becoming the exclusive gateway to the world's information. That should scare even the most ardent Google fan.

Read the article MAC RUMORS-FORUMS/Google set to roll out e-books as early as next month

MAY 3, 2010 -- MAY 9, 2010

IS INTERNET EXPLORER'S WORLD SHRINKING?

Microsoft hit their peak in 1995 with Windows 1995. That was a great achievement and made the PC a mass market item. They bundled it with a browser, which Apple did not do, thus yielding the field to Microsoft.If Apple had joined with Netscape, history might have been different. Apple had no browser, Netscape had no operating system. Only Bill Gates understood the need to combine the two. In those days, all the brightest people went to Microsoft.

Nowadays, Microsoft has gone out of fashion and the bright people go elsewhere. So Microsoft is in a downward spiral. Also, linux has finally come of age. I got a PC with Vista on it. I wiped the hard drive and put on Ubuntu 9.04 with Firefox as the Browser. I could not be happier. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Read the article PCWORLD/Microsoft losing browser influence along with market share

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It's definitely the "masses" who just use IE as their default browser on Windows keeping it above 50%.

I manage a number of websites involving professionals and I can tell you that for those in the know, IE is at only 38.55%, Firefox is at 32.79%, Chrome is at 21.54% and Safari at 5.56% (this is on WinningWare.com).

Interestingly, on my blog site, Firefox has 36.40% share, IE slipped to #2 at 35.52% and Chrome is at 19.60%. So the overall IE numbers ARE definitely being propped up by corporate use (where browser type often gets mandated by IT) and by less sophisticated users who don't know how slow and poor their browser experience actually is.

Read the article PCMAG/Is Microsoft internet explorer losing users?

BE AFRAID: STEPHEN HAWKING SEES DANGER IN CONTACTING ALIENS

Hawking may be right. He's extremely intelligent, highly creative and extraordinarily original. But as a practical matter, his point is moot.

Either an extraterrestrial technological civilization discovers us, or we discover them. If they discover us, the ball is in their court.If we discover them, it's only a matter of time before someone says: "hi," irrespective of our safeguards and their intentions. Human discretion has a long history of indiscretion.

Given the choice between safety and contact, we've inevitably chosen contact; quite often, with catastrophic results.And that problem doesn't reside within them, it resides within us.

Read the article ABC/Stay home E.T. - U.K. scientist: Aliens may pose risks

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The again, they could be truly enlightened beings who could give us new technology never dreamed of and scientific advances we've only dreamed of. They could show us a whole new way of living. Of course, if they're too peace loving and not driven by the need to conquer, oppressor or driven by greed and material wealth, we would most certainly have to kill them.

Read the article YAHOO NEWS/Stay home E.T.

What strikes me as odd is that Hawking would believe interstellar travel a possibility for biologically evolved sentients. I agree with him about the dangers of such contact were it to occur, but very much doubt technology could be developed that would allow practical near speed of light travel for any civilization, given relativistic effects and the raw energy such would require. The use of singularities, often visited in sci fi, does pose even more substantial issues of energy production and there is little or no guarantee anything could survive such travel in even recognizable form. The point about event horizons being precisely that no predictions can be made.

That intelligent life exists in other planets is a very strong possibility, given that as rare as the conditions under which it developed on earth may be, there's no sound reason to believe in exceptionalism. However interstellar travel does not appear to me as likely to ever have developed, outside of relatively small distances (Sun to Alpha Centauri for instance) and over very long stretches of time. If there were any such life in our "neighborhood" we probably would have found signs of it already..

Read the article YAHOO NEWS/Stay home E.T.

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That's not hard to imagine. Not even from a projection of our own history of intraspecies colonialism or malicious invasions-- just see any invasive (non-native) species on our own planet: It's not hard to throw off an ecosystem and cause havoc and, yes, consequent extinctions.

No doubt even the most well-intentioned alien species -- whatever the that would look or act like, it's difficult (impossible?) to imagine the end-product of billions of years of evolution somewhere else --would pose a very serious threat to humans and to the ecosystem.

Then again, humans have done a pretty good job of being terrible at both, too.

So yeah, let's welcome a visit from intergalactic ship-building crystal slugs. It'd be a cool thing to ponder and study. You know, for the few days it takes until a benign-to-them xenobacterium murders us all.

Read the article GAWKER/Stephen Hawking says aliens are coming to get us

HUBBLE AT 20 -- LIGHT ON THE MYSTICAL MOUNTAIN

HUBBLE

Mr Weiler, Hubble was never an embarassment. You brought it into space, overcome disappointments and extreme challenges and were rewarded with a cornucopia of views, data, thoughtprovoking information and far more new questions than possible to even define in our lifetimes.

The very first book I bought more than 10 years ago presenting pictures taken by Hubble has already disappeared in the course of moving to new places, that much time has already passed. You and your colleagues have gone once more beyond Science Fiction and made dreams reality.Thanks for that.

Read the article HUFFINGTON POST/Edward J Weiler: 10 incredible Hubble telescope images of our universe

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I am always enthralled by these magnificent photos. My first impulse is always to feel very small and insignificant, but then I come to my senses and realize that, yes, I'm small but I'm still part of it all.

Read the article HUFFINGTON POST/Edward J Weiler: 10 incredible Hubble telescope images of our universe

FACEBOOK -- TO LIKE OR NOT TO LIKE THE CHANGES?

Regarding Facebook being creepy, what is so difficult about NOT putting any personal info on there that you don't want people to see? Besides, I used to be a huge conspiracy nut, and after a while the paranoia, distrust, fear and over-suspecting everyone gets so tiring.

Of course I'm not going to put my home address or social insurance number on my FB profile, but none of us are that important; nobody cares about our favourite bands or what groceries we buy.

I don't doubt that the NSA or other law enforcement agency are flagging any kind of communications for potential threats, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't be wary, but at least we're not living in China, Stalinist Soviet Union or the little fascist nations in 1930s-40s Europe.

Read the article ARS TECHNICA/Facebook friends Web likes

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I seem to be missing something too: I don't get the use of the word 'open' in this context. Which definition of 'open' do they mean?

Because to me, it all seems a way of having people put even more content into Facebook where it'll be locked up so they can track users better. Facebook is clearly becoming something that neiter AOL or Microsoft (remember the MSN icon in the default Win95 desktop?) could achieve: a closed-garden version of the Internet completely controlled by one company.

Read the article ARS TECHNICA/Facebook friends Web likes

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Like any other company Facebook is trying to grab as much market share as they can. The market? You. As Randi Zuckerberg ( the founder and CEO's sister) said at SXSW last moon: "Facebook wants to be your login for the Interrnet". AOL tried iT too, Facebook is doing it from a different angle, instead of keeping everything in their silo and creating custom content, they're wrapping eir presence around everyone and everything. Google is no different. Neither has Microsoft been with their goal to own business computing, or Apple's moves to control as much of the mobile experience as possible.

Read the article CNN/What you should know about Facebook's new changes

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I've now removed most of my real info from FB and replaced it with made-up stuff. This is, I think, going to end up being the real legacy of this move. People aren't going to shut off their FB accounts, but the days when you could actually find your friends easily there are going to come to a close. People will start using aliases there along with false info like they already do everywhere else.

FB was the one place on the internet where most people used their real info because of the way they handled privacy. But those days are obviously gone. FB's on its way to becoming the next MySpace, and from there it's only a hop, skip and a jump to irrelevance. Because even if FB collects all this data, it's worthless if none of it's real.

Read the article CNET/What Facebook's latest means for the Web

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