Bruce Sterling’s WIRED article on Dumbing down smart objects reminds me of a science fiction short story I read some years ago. I think it was called “A Captive Audience”, and it was possibly written by Ann Warren Griffith in 1953.

The story was that advertising had become embedded in tiny little sound generators, too small to locate and destroy, in all products. Breakfast was accompanied by the cereal boxes singing “Eat me!”, the sofa would bellow “I am soft and comfortable, why don’t you sit down?” and so on.

The key point was that you could not escape: Earplugs had been outlawed as an impediment to commerce and free speech. For some reason, given the current debate about DRM and the recording industry, this doesn’t seem so far out anymore….

Michael Friendly’s Gallery of Data Visualization contains a number of great data displays (and some not too good), including a link to an interesting page on versions of Minard’s map of Napoleon’s march on Moscow. Readers of Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information will recognize much of what is here, but it was news to me that Florence Nightingale achieved at least some of her fame from her clever use of Coxcomb charts.
The site suffers from a few dead links, though. One of those that worked is the link to the CyberAtlas project. Enjoy!

It always takes time to understand how to use a new technology – and my Tablet PC is no exception. I have tended to see the tablet facilites as a cool feature with limited use. But recently, I found a way to use it that takes advantages of the new features – partially inspired by John Seely Brown‘s “handwritten” Powerpoint slides.
Yesterday, I did a presentation at a Concours Summit at Gleneagles in Scotland. Like most presenters, I use Powerpoint from a laptop, and then use paper flipcharts to capture what the audience says and to facilitate interaction. That combination is not ideal: With electronic slides, you easily get bound to one particular sequence and pre-defined content, which is not very flexible. With paper flipcharts, you typically have to stand over on the side, with limited space for writing, and the audience, if large, can have problems seeing what you do. My idea was instead to use the Toshiba Tablet PC, with Windows Journal as an electronic flipchart. Aside from larger projection of what you are writing, it means you have captured the notes directly.
To make it work, I had to fiddle with some details:

• when in tablet mode, the Toshiba has three programmable buttons available – and I set them to “arrow up” and “arrow down” (to flip Powerpoint slides) and the middle one to alt-ESC (to jump between Powerpoint and Journal). (Incidentally, I tried with alt-TAB, which is what I normally use to jump between applications, but Powerpoint will screw that up when in presentation mode)
• set up Powerpoint in presentation mode, changing the cursor to a pen with some vivid color, such as red
• get a lectern, so that the laptop is at a comfortable level for writing – you need to see the audience, not lean over your computer
• set the screen to landscape mode, and pay attention to orientation, so that the picture does not end up upside down or sideways on the large screen
• close down all other applications except Powerpoint and Journal
• lock the on/off button to avoid accidentally hitting it and suddenly shutting down the computer
• PRACTICE! (to make it look natural)

The main advantage of doing presentations this way is that you naturally (at least after a little practice) get into a more relaxed way of presenting, using the pen to circle details on the slides, and flipping over to Journal to capture notes and make drawings or diagrams to illustrate points that you don’t have in your presentation. A side benefit was that I could quickly tidy up the notes after the presentation, print them as a PDF file, and e-mail them.
The whole exercise worked well enough that I will do presentations that way in the future. It makes for a much livelier and more flexible presentation style, and can be a way to generate interaction with the audience. While the technology initially may get a little in the way, since it is unfamiliar to the audience, Journal and the tablet PC writing tools are sufficiently similar to paper writing that the “wow” effect quickly subsides.
And, of course, it looks cool. That’s not unimportant….

Dan Bricklin‘s elegant essay on the lessons for system design and use of on-line and other information sources (Learning From Accidents and a Terrorist Attack) is very informative and makes some excellent points around the ability and availability of the general public as a participant in disaster recovery. It nicely validates what every IT prophet has been saying, in one form or another, since the early 90s: Increases in communications and information processing capability will lead to more consumption of that resource, enabling organizations to quickly respond to outside changes – indeed of “spontaneous” organizations to quickly form to address issues. We communicate rather than plan, and can mobilize quickly. Dan makes some great points around what this means for systems and component design.
However, there is one problem with using open tools, such as RSS feeds, blogs, wikis and open conference calls: Their very openness makes them a path for a future terrorist. A group of terrorists wanting to do something akin to the 9/11 action could now learn from what happened then, and include a number of on-line participants with a role in spreading misinformation, increasing fear and diverting resources. There were instances of misinformation during 9/11 – I remember news items about a carful of bombs being stopped on some bridge in New York for instance – and the news channels normally apply some form of fact-checking. While the Wikipedia model works great when there is time – and people check changes against a contributor’s past behavior, I think we should be careful with too much openness in a time-pressured situation. Some form of validation needs to be in place, perhaps some form of peer-validation that draws on the public’s increased communications capability one wants to tap into in the first place.
(Also posted at RISKS Digest 23.52)

Steve Fox’s request for IT myths made me remember something my students tell me whenever I talk about the beginning of the Internet: That it was designed to withstand an atomic attack (through redundancy and automatic rerouting.)
That is a myth which refuses to die – and it may be that the fact that Internet and messaging worked after the September 11, 2001 attacks may have something to do with it. Though Paul Baran mentioned this as a side effect in a paper on packet switching, it was not a factor in deciding on creating Arpanet – until someone came across Baran’s paper and created the myth years later. (Reference: Hafner, K. and M. Lyon (1996). Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet.)
The main motivation for the Internet, according to the same source, was getting rid of the need for multiple terminals – that is, if you were using a remote machine via a telephone line, you had to have a dedicated terminal to it. Initially the hosts were going to interface directly, but for performance reasons, a dedicated subnet with PDP-8s was set up. BBN got the contract.
And the rest, as they say, is history. But I have to convince my students. Every year.

I followed Eirik Newth‘s recommendation and listened to the Gillmor Gang’s discussion of the ramifications of Microsoft’s announcement that Longhorn will be missing the WinFS file system when it comes out in 2006. Setting aside that this is further evidence that Microsoft has become 1980s IBM (including the practice of preemptive announcements and the time-honored “midlife kicker”), an interesting comment made by one of the particpants intrigued me: That Microsoft by having this delay may give away a large market to Google.
Despite having worked with computers for quite a while now, I still have problems getting used to what we can do with abundant processing, storage and communication. Google’s 1Gb Gmail, coupled with blogging/wikiing/blikiing technology and (still for a while) graphics processing at the desktop, can presumably mean a return to the mainframe topology – that is, all your apps and all your data can be on Google.
This is not as far-fetched as it sounds – essentially, the problem of storage is not size of files, but duplication. I have hundreds of presentations, but probably also hundreds of copies of my favorite slides. A networked information format, with component-based information items linked together to form documents – across users, accounts, and organizations, could conceivably be stored on the 100,000 and counting servers that Google has. A very clean Wiki-based interface could be the preferred way to go for those of us who want deeply functional, simple software.
Many years ago, Lotus had a wonderful product called Agenda – text-based, freeform, lightning-fast (and, apparently, still available). The problem was unsupported file formats and limitations on content size – and the product eventually was abandoned in favor of the elephantine Lotus Notes. Imagine an Agenda-style software, stored in one place, with little duplication and a very simple interface. XML-based content, separation of content and display, sensible design choices and global search.
Well, one can dream, but I think this is getting a little closer to reality once we let go of the client-centric model of computing we seem to be clinging to. Fun.
Incidentally, I will listen more to the Gillmor Gang and the other stuff at ITconversations.com. Interesting stuff, picked up in a format that reminds me that all these bloggers and digerati out there are real people, available for a teleconference if only the topic and the audience is interesting enough.

I thought I was living digitally (wireless network at home, teleconferences and cellphones, blogging and wikiing and teaching electronically), but Joi Ito has a degree of connectivity that is couple of standard deviations further out.
In the end, he asks whether he is a freak, or whether this is the way people will work. I think he a bit on the edge, but less for his use of technology than for the disjointed way he works, jumping from one conversation to the other, because he can. In the end, more people will use the technology, but most people will not jump between conversations the way Joi does.
New technology will always be used first by those with the highest need for it. Joi Ito is a venture capitalist and a technologist – and as such, may need to talk to three groups of people as soon as he wakes up in the morning. The first users of a technology also shape its design – and the introduction of the ability to talk to many people fast means that more of us are going to talk to more people, fast.
The interesting thing, as far as I am concerned, is how we can use the technology in the slower lane. Realizing that increases in quantity and convenience is a quality in itself, how can the technology help us increase the quality of our conversations?

The Guardian has a story about how Microsoft has lost money and reputation because their employees don’t know geography (via Techdirt).
In all fairness, I didn’t think these mistakes were that bad. First of all, they have little to do with geography, and more about political history and culture. Secondly, for a company that does as much software as Microsoft, over so many years, this isn’t really that much, and the mistakes not that huge. And with a workforce to draw on that does not know where the Pacific Ocean is (you would in Redmond, or at least in Seattle), it is pretty much a wonder they manage to do anything international at all…..
Not that the Grauniad themselves have that much to brag about….