Kira’s emdublog

The question was posited in the last class: What sort of device would you want to help you in your life? The sky’s the limit. So, What would I want? Well, besides the obvious application of a teleporter, I would LOVE to have something that remembered where I put things. Basically I need something that will organize my life for me. Because I don’t have that skill. Maybe something that will think for me sometimes too… lol, j/k.

As for a device to transfer our thoughts to the page, I wonder if there couldn’t be a nefarious use for this type of thing. Like warrantless wiretapping, but into yout brain. Bad stuff.

In the book Rant, by Chuck Palahniuk, movies have been upgraded to this thing called “boosting”. It’s video on acid. You not only see what’s happening, you actually experience it, in a sort of virtual reality type thing. Everyone has a port in the back of their head to upload experiences and to “boost peaks”. This can also be affected by advertizers, like one time when the characters drive past a fast food place, they get a craving for that food. NEFARIOUS!

Okay, so I just got back from DC and my JET interview. It actually went a lot better and was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I had two former JETs and a thirty-something Japanese guy. They asked a few questions about my interest in Shinto and Buddhism and then what I know about the Japanese school system. Then the Japanese guy asked what my favorite movie is. I said it was Stardust and then had to explain the plot because none of them had heard of it, or maybe that was the point. It’s a bit frustrating that I won’t know until April whether I’m going or not, but I think it’ll be worth it either way.
I kind of felt like I was saying the same thing over and over, but we’ll see what happens. It also really sucks that I’m sick and had to down Halls from 6-10am to keep from coughing during the interview. But it worked and I don’t think I sounded sick.
I got there really early and ended up having to drive around to find somewhere to go to the bathroom at around 8am. I got lost for a few minutes and then ended up parking outside the Hilton on Mass Ave to use their bathroom. When I got back I only had about a half hour to wait to go in and ended up crowded in with all the other interviewees for 20 minutes while the interviewers all had a meeting in the actual waiting room. It was cool though.
Anyway, I’ll update you guys on the situation in April.

Nelson and Engelbart have a few points on which there is huge disagreement. They don’t agree on who should be able to use computers: Engelbart wants it to be restricted to a select few so they can do the most advanced work so no time or resources are wasted on trivial pursuits, Nelson says “Everyone should understand computers.” I’d really like to get both of them in a room and watch them go at it.

Nelson’s idea of shared media and computers being used to create media is seen today in the many music and artwork sites but I wonder how he would feel about things like flikr pictures being used without permission for advertising and all types of pirating going on.

I really liked that the drawings were included and appreciated that he did them in the first place. His point about the importance of media (and interest in how people absorb information) really came through in his drawings.

My Gaia Online kissing card

My class project is working with Gaia Online which I have posted on del.icio.us. There is a Valentine’s Day event going on right now and I am participating by “kissing” other users and have posted to get kisses.

In reading the intro to this article, I was reminded of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. The mice built the first computer, called Deep Thought, to give them the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. It gave them the answer, but they didn’t know what it meant. They needed to know the question, so Deep Thought tells them how to build a much more complex computer that will give them the question. This is sort of an example of bootstrapping, but it was the tool itself that created the better tool.

It is hard for me to imagine computers being any other way than they are today. Therefore, it’s kind of hard to see exactly what the goal of Engelbart and ARC’s research was leading to. It went from an academic, exclusive medium to a commercial system available to anyone with enough money and minimal training. It seems that computers and the internet as we know them today was, as many things are in America, built on the idea of How can we make money from this?

The gulf between those who write programs and those who use them (with the exception of shareware/freeware) is also the gap between those who wrote the original version of a program and those who write version 4.0. It has been said in calss that there are useless lines of code in programs like Word because no one who is working on it now can find or recognize those codes.

I’m not sure if this was deliberate or just an editing mistake, but the heirarchy of the article was messed up in some places, the most obvious case being 3b5 in the same line as 3b4cl (which was maybe supposed to be 3b4c1).

Big men putting screwdrivers into things - turning them - and adjusting them!

I feel lost sometimes in this big web. I get frustrated when I can’t do things on my own and have to ask for help, especially with anything computer (specifically internet) related, because I feel like I should be smart enough to figure it out on my own. Most of the time I am. Sometimes I am not.

Watching Engelbart’s demonstration of his system helped me understand a bit better. It seems that there is a combination of heirarchical information and webs of information connected through commonalities. The more exemplified of these is the web, it is the internet. Some things are nested, but the movement between pieces (or groups) of information is through similarities in them. Take Wikipedia for example: People spend hours on that site because they read one entry and then click on a link in that entry to another and so on and so forth and then they look up and see that they’ve been wiki-ing for three hours.

While I may not understand all the terminology he uses, I believe I understand the concept that Engelbart is conveying. We aren’t there yet and it may take another information revolution to get to the point that he envisions.

Groups never work out for me, so I have decided to work on my own for this project. It’ll be more work for me, but at least I won’t have to rely on anyone else for my grade and no one else will be relying on me. I went to the class meeting and actually learned more than I thought I would. There were subjects of study that I hadn’t thought of like Skype (and VoIP in general),  forums, MMORPGs, &c.

I have decided to do my project on GaiaOnline. My sister participates in this, which is where I got the idea, and it’s an interesting combination of anime-style MMORPG and forum posting. I have joined and found out a few things about the company itself. It’s a good beginning I suppose.

So, to be honest: I didn’t understand a lot of what Licklider was saying because I don’t know the terminology. With that in mind, I did understand some of the possibilities for HCI that he envisioned. I was also put in mind of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from “The question is not ‘What is the answer?’ The question is ‘What is the Question?’” from Poincaré. The possibility of a computer as complex as Earth itself is mindboggling, yet still concievable. Not just HCI, but Human Computers.
Again the fact that anyone could have concieved of the possibilites that have actually come to pass in the world of computers is amazing. It makes me think: What are computer scientists predicting right now that will come to pass? And: What are they predicting that will seem rediculous in the future (i.e. jetsons-esque tech)?

Vannevar Bush reads like a technological Nostradamus. He may not have gotten everything right, but the things that he did are eerie. If he had been shown the modern computer, what would he have said? Of course, we haven’t quite gotten rid of that mechanical step between the electrical impulses of the computer and the brain, but I’m sure he’d be proud of our progress. Our computers serve several of the functions that Bush described for different machines. The Voder/Vocorder, calculator, electronic databases, even the endless library of the memex can be contained on one machine.

The other aspect of this article I took in was the fact that we take many of the technological advances we have at our fingertips for granted. Less than 70 years ago, the kind of things we do on a daily basis were nearly unimaginable. It makes you wonder, what will we be capable of in 50 years? Will we have finally gotten rid of that laborious and time-wasting mechanical step?

The introductions were pretty obscenely long. I realize that you have to know some of the history of a subject before you can really talk about it, but jeeze. I think the first introduction could have been broken up a little better so that it didn’t look like just columns and columns of text. The second introduction was much easier to read and didn’t feel so listy. Reading the intros for this book is important because it does give you a lot of background knowledge for what we’re about to study. I found the most interesting parts to be the discussion of “the art of science and the science of art” bits. Seeing how the two approaches to organizing and conveying information came together was really remarkable.

Borges’s story would definitely have confused me if I hadn’t read the introduction to it. Although I think it lost something because it was already all figured out for me. I really like discussions of time and especially nonlinear time. Although, this was sort of linear, but I liked the idea that the separate realities or lines of time could rejoin at a later point. Overall, I liked the story but the fact that the main character was a nazi spy (or something?) was kind of distracting.