Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

Micro-targeted ads were only the first step; now companies can easily link anyone's social media profile to their web-browsing habits, and sell that information to anyone who's interested. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and others are, predictably, jockeying for lead position

Transformations of this magnitude are never confined to the market. Eventually, they spill over into the realm of politics and society. It's a familiar pattern: new technology enables new business practices. These practices, in turn, raise important social, political, and

Transformations of this magnitude are never confined to the market. Eventually, they spill over into the realm of politics and society. It's a familiar pattern: new technology enables new business practices. These practices, in turn, raise important social, political, and legal questions

Since 2007, the US federal minimum wage has been set at $7.15 an hour, yet workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—many of whom live in the US—make an average of $2 (according to the estimates of Mechanical Turk researcher Alex Quinn).  As illustrated in the above image, Amazon, itself, encourages businesses (at least implicitly) to pay workers (or “turkers” as they are called) less-than-minimum wages.  Moreover, to even qualify for these low-paying tasks called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), turkers are often expected to complete unpaid training sessions that can last for up to an hour.  Also, because turkers receive micro-payments for each task and because the time to completion for each task is rationalized to the second, turkers receive no pay during normal periods of rest during the workday.

Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing platform that allow anyone to recruit laborers for short online tasks, which cannot be effectively completed by computers.  For examples, turkers might compile contact information for various businesses, sort through images and tag offensive ones, or participate in university research experiments.  Because of the piecemeal and spatially-disembedded nature of the work, it is virtually unregulated. Can we simply dismiss this subversion of labor laws—as some commentators have—on the grounds that “$2 an hour is a decent wage in India?”  Even if we are angered by this exploitation of turkers, is it even possible to regulate an international platform of this sort?

i have a few complaints about the use of “augmented reality.” the first is primarily semantic. it seems (to me at least) like the term it implies some kind of (pre-digital?) “non-augmented” reality. this is more or less explicit when we refer to things like “augmented revolution” or “augmented conference.” it seems like the idea of augmented reality was introduced to make a point against a false binary (“digital dualism”) and i agree that this is important, both academically and in real life (see what i did there?). but i think the way we talk about augmented reality is sneaking a version of that binary back in. not the naive real v virtual but maybe something like real v “real+” and i think that is a mistake. and it is a strange mistake to read here, on a blog called “cyborgology” that proclaims (rightly i’m sure) that we have always been cyborgs. our friends from sst especially, i think, are sensitive to how reality has always been “augmented” if we are paying attention. so quoting sst hero latour:

If we wanted to project on a standard geographical map the connections established between a lecture hall and all the places that are acting in it at the same time, we would have to draw bushy arrows in order to include, for instance, the forest out of which the desk is coming, the management office in charge of classroom planning, the workshop that printed the schedule that has helped us find the room, the janitor that tends the place, and so on. And this would not be some idle exercise, since each of these faraway sites has, in some indispensable way, anticipated and preformatted this hall by transporting, through many different sorts of media, the mass of templates that have made it a suitable local—and that are still propping it up.* and he goes on for literally pages. he starts on p 200 (where the quote is from) and ends somewhere on p 203. then he picks it up again on p 206 with more. by 207 he is talking about the “plug-ins”, “patches” and “applets” that actors in a lecture need to make sense of what is happening. and cyborgs:

As we have witnessed so many times throughout this book, information technologies allow us to trace the associations in a way that was impossible before. Not because they subvert the old concrete ‘humane’ society, turning us into formal cyborgs or ‘post human’ ghosts, but for exactly the opposite reason: they make visible what was before only present virtually. In earlier times, competence was a rather mysterious affair that remained hard to trace; for this reason, you had to order it, so to speak, in bulk. As soon as competence can be counted in bauds and bytes along modems and routers, as soon as it can be peeled back layer after layer, it opens itself to fieldwork.

In the tradition of much post-Modern theorizing, “augmented reality” offers a new conceptual paradigm, seeking to implode/queer/do category work on the real/virtual dichotomy and make room for a more flexible understanding of social media that allows for recursivity between these two concepts.  A person embedded in augmented reality is a cyborg in the Harawaysian sense.  For this reason, the editors of this blog have proposed – somewhat tongue-in-cheek – that our research is best understood as “cyborgology.”  In augmented reality, the culture is hyper-literally super-imposed on the material.  Our bodies and all other objects in the world become canvases for the digital and its rapid circulation of signs and symbols.  In Bauman’s term, everything becomes a conduit of Liquid (post-)Modernity.  However, the symbolic order expressed through the digital does not emerge out of nothing; it is a reproduction or extension of what has always existed.  The digital and material are always in circulation and neither can be abstracted from the new order of social relations.  That is to say, society is neither online or offline; it is augmented.  Thus, augmented reality and the cyborgs who populate it are now the proper objects of sociological inquiry.

three distinct perspectives perceive the Internet as either virtual reality, mediated reality, or augmented reality.  I argue (in the spirit of Saussure) that these three perspectives are only fully comprehensible defined in relation to one another.

The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line.

And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is “virtual” and the physical world “real.” This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.

geo-tagging (think Foursquare or Facebook Places), street view, face recognition, the Wii controller and the fact that sites like Facebook both impact and are impacted by the physical world to argue that “digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other.” This is opposed to the notion that the Internet is like the Matrix, where there is a “real” (Zion) that you leave when you enter the virtual space (the Matrix) -an outdated perspective as Facebook is increasingly real and our physical world increasingly digital.

Over time, using your smart-phone touch screen becomes second nature, to the point where you can even do some tasks without looking. Researchers in Germany are now working on a system that would let you perform such actions without even holding the phone - instead you'd tap your palm, and the movements would be interpreted by an "imaginary phone" system that would relay the request to your actual phone.

The concept relies on a depth-sensitive camera to pick up the tapping and sliding interactions on a palm, software to analyze the video, and a wireless radio to send the instructions back to the iPhone. Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, says the imaginary phone prototype "serves as a shortcut that frees users from the necessity to retrieve the actual physical device."

Here’s a quick breakdown of the big differences between desktop and mobile platforms: Mobile device hardware is smaller and generally tends to have lower hardware resources than desktops/laptops. Smaller screens bring about different design considerations and challenges. Touchscreen technology introduces new interaction concepts that differ from traditional input devices (keyboard and mouse). With a mobile device, internet connectivity is not always as reliable as a hard-wired broadband connection, which means internet connectivity is a concern and data transfer could be significantly slower. Although these sound as if they are hurdles to get over, with careful thought and consideration, there’s no reason why they should be. Touchscreen technology is exciting. The smaller screen design will really make you think about how to get the user to interact with your mobile web app in the most satisfying way possible. What we should really be doing is looking at the list of differences above and seeing opportunities to deliver our content in a different way. Building mobile web apps will be a paradigm shift from traditional web development and web design.

In the next sections, we will discuss development/design considerations, as well as concepts and techniques for building mobile web apps.

Leveraging CSS3 Mobile web browsers these days are pretty advanced. Android devices use a mobile version of Google Chrome, whilst the iPhone does the same with Apple’s Safari. Some mobile devices come with mobile Opera and others allow you to install a browser of your choice such as mobile Firefox. So we’re talking about some pretty good browsers in terms of CSS3 and HTML5 feature support. CSS3 allows us to render things through code that would previously have required an image. We can use color gradients, draw rounded corners, create drop shadows, apply multiple backgrounds to HTML elements, and more — all of which can help improve performance and decrease development times.

many ways mobile technologies are derivative of their desktop brethren. Your iPhone's e-mail app is like the e-mail client on your desktop, for example. The mobile world is the desktop world in miniature, a "lite" version. But the mobile world is no longer just following; it's leading.

we can expect to see certain aspects of desktop and laptop operating systems start imitating the little upstarts that had initially imitated them.

"It's very likely that PC operating systems will be affected by mobile devices' operating systems—and more broadly, that the lines between the two will increasingly blur," says Michael Dahlin, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, who has expertise in operating systems. "Things have evolved to the point today where the difference between the smart-phone OS and the laptop and desktop OS is narrowing—and really already pretty narrow in terms of capability and core architectures," he

While the focus of this post is not specifically Apple or the iPad, it’s almost impossible to talk about successful mobile strategies without recognizing that the iPad has created a transitional moment for the Learning & Development world. The reasons why have been the subject of countless blog posts, but I think DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, in this video from TechCrunch, says it best:

“[The iPad] it’s the first device that actually is a reflection of me – or us. It’s so revolutionary that it’s no longer about me adapting myself to somebody else’s set of programmings or the way in which a device is going to engage. It is the reverse. It is as though I’m looking in a mirror.”

While it took the iPad to make learner-controlled content a reality, this level of flexibility is now the gold standard for delivery to any device, be it tablets, smart phones or any number of performance support devices.

We’ve changed how we use RSS

The simple truth is we’re less likely to use RSS or email subscription now compared to our RSS usage in the previous era of the Web.  We’re just less into RSS readers and start pages.

We’re using real-time web & social networking more

"The number of 3G cellular subscriptions in North Korea passed half a million during the first quarter, according to the country's only 3G cellular operator. The Koryolink network had 535,133 subscriptions at the end of March, an increase of just over 100,000 on the end of December 2010."

Computer games make teenagers hungry and more likely to become obese,  scientists claim.They stimulate youngsters’ appetites encouraging them to raid the fridge and  cupboards for snacks.Experts believe this may explain why children who spend hours on games consoles  are often obese – it's not just because they don’t exercise.

The Canadian and Danish researchers found that the boys burnt off just 21 extra  calories during the hour they played computer games compared to resting.But they ate an extra 80 calories afterwards – nearly 60 more than they would  have burnt off. 

Workers who don't trust the boss to keep track of their wages can now do it themselves with a new smart phone application from the Department of Labor. But employers worry that the time sheet app, along with other new initiatives, could encourage even more wage and hour lawsuits. The app lets workers calculate regular work hours, break time and overtime pay to create their own wage records. Department officials say the information could prove valuable in a dispute over pay or during a government investigation when an employer has failed to keep accurate records. "This app will help empower workers to understand and stand up for their rights when employers have denied their hard-earned pay," Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said. The app is the latest example of the Obama administration's push for more aggressive enforcement of wage and hour laws. The agency has hired about 300 more investigators to probe complaints of unpaid work time, lack of overtime pay and minimum wage violations.

"Remember the Oqo and other 'ultra-mobile PCs' — full-fledged Windows machines in a cell phone form factor, pushed without success in the early-to-mid '00s? Well, Japan's NTT DoCoMo thinks that they could still catch on, making plans for a Windows 7 computer with a 4-inch, 1024-by-600 screen."

"Thousands of Turkish demonstrators poured into central Istanbul yesterday to protest against the government's Internet censorship. New regulations from Turkey's Internet Technologies and Communications Authority set to come into effect on Aug. 22 will require Internet service providers to offer a choice of four filtering options: family, child, domestic or standard. Many websites are expected to be blocked as a result of the filtering measures."

"HP scientists have made a small breakthrough in the development of a next-generation memory technology called memristors, which some see as a potential replacement for today's widely used flash and DRAM technologies. In a paper to be published today in the journal Nanotechnology, scientists report that they have mapped out the basic chemistry and structure of what happens inside a memristor during its electrical operation."

"British web designer Jonathan Brown tweeted that Drupal creator Dries Buytaert has surpassed 10,000 commits to the open-source content-management system he created ten years ago, Drupal. In a private email, Dries said, 'I'm mostly committing other people's patches: Credit really goes to the community at large.' Still, it's rare for individual to log that many commits. Can anyone claim more?"