Group items tagged

Black boxes: not just for airplanes anymore... And these should actually be black.

Even though Dibs is right in saying that erasing your history does not essentially change anything, if you want to access a utopian fantasy, this could be helpful.

Netflix CEO gives a brief rant about the Comcast data limit and how it applies (or not) depending on which app you use for your content.

I've only given cursory attention to this site (when I checked it out, I found it less useful than I had thought it would be), but we've talked about technology monitoring people, breaking their identity into tiny bits of data, etc. and this website encourages people to do that to themselves to live a productive life ... in some ways it is kind of like the guy who photographs all his food, combined with an OCD, capitalist mindset. See also: any website that tracks your miles run, your calories consumed for the day, etc.

This is an article that discusses the views of professional historians regarding wikipedia. I think it makes a number of interesting claims both regarding the management or historical data and wikipedia's role in promoting a particular historical paradigm.

This is a pretty straightforward, simplistic article (it is How Stuff Works ... I mean, come on) that deals with tracking computer use in the workplace. While not directly related to the Kirschenbaum, I thought it connected enough to post. It seemed like a potential point to launch into discussions on the permanence of data, and it reminded me of a year or two ago when Michelle sent out an e-mail asking people to stop using the resource room computers to look at porn. 

Lawmakers are finally putting a stop to this practice. Since we broached the topic of rhetorical strategies in making arguments in class, the argument one law expert makes is interesting: ""It lays down boundaries on what you can and can't do. It takes a gray area and makes a bright line ... The bill is a win for employees who want to protect their data security and their personal content passwords. But it's also a win for employers. ... Employers don't want to have access to this content. With access comes responsibility."

I thought this might be interesting, especially as we head toward the section of the class where we discuss games. Here is an excerpt from the default blurb: "Victor has worked on experimental UI concepts at Apple and also created the interactive data graphics for Al Gore's book, Our Choice. In the talk Victor showed off a demo of a great real-time game editor that makes your existing coding tools look primitive at best."

There have been a lot of posts about web tracking in light of the recent changes in Google. This is an interesting article, but one of the things I like the best is the Collusion display of who's tracking your data.

This is a page off the official website of Tim Berners-Lee, and here he explains the Semantic Web, which involves "using the WWW infrastructure to create a global, decentralized, weblike mesh of machine-processable knowledge."

McLuhan and Bogart would probably enjoy this article because it involves procedural rhetoric. It examines how "gamification strategies"--using games to change behavior in real life--can promote energy efficiency. Companies like SimpleEnergy are creating apps that let users track their energy usage, find ways to improve, and compete with friends and neighbors for spots on a leaderboard. Gamification succeeds because apparently social pressure can motivate people even more than monetary incentives, and these initiatives combine both types of incentives: An energy usage competition at the University of Hawaii led to some dorms cutting energy usage by up to 20 percent. This specific method also allows users to save money and conserve energy without "radical infrastructure changes" or the corruption and waste that often results from government subsidies to politically-connected "green" companies like Solyndra and possibly Sapphire Energy. In addition, the apps provide large-scale energy usage data that researchers can use to measure both change over time and the impact of energy usage on other variables.