Nate's Nabobs

So this is it, the last Thing.  It almost feels anticlimactic to talk about photo sharing at the end.  It’s just so common place now.  You could argue that only Net savvy people use things like RSS feeds and alerts, but everyone knows how to upload images and everyone searches for images.  I’m even fairly certain that there are at least a couple of pictures of everyone that is in CPSC 104 with me available for our viewing pleasure.  Pictures end up on the Net all the time, with or without the person in the picture’s permission.

On a side note, the whole issue of privacy comes to mind.  I’ve been thinking about this today because I just finished reading Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig.  In the last chapter, he talks about how privacy was once the norm because of how cost prohibitive it was to keep tabs on people.  That was before the days of the World Wide Web and privacy is no longer the standard.  It is supposedly easier to keep track of what people are doing on the Net than not to.  So of you are concerned about this, do something to protect yourself.  Practice safe surfing!

It is rather difficult, however, to prevent your “friend” from posting that rather embarrassing pic of you last summer at that house party.  There are so many pictures out there.  And I guess that’s what makes it a good place to end.  Photos are what ties it all together; they are a part of every other Thing in some way.  Photos make blog posts more interesting (though admittedly, I use this tool very little, out of laziness really) and they are most certainly an essential part of life on Facebook.

And all of that just goes to show…..you can justify anything of you’re clever.

This was not clever:

Also, this is my favorite video right now.

Thanks for reading, and don’t worry, I’m not going away just because there aren’t anymore Things to blog about.

I sometimes wonder if adding more stuff to the internet is a bad thing.  I mean, it seems like the only people that are reading my blog are you all in my class, CPSC 104.  How do you get noticed on this massive series of tubes?  According to hattrickassociation.com, there are likely to be over 150 million blogs currently (this based on information from technorati.com).  So it would seem to me that I have no hope of ever having anyone outside of a small handful of people read this blog.  The odds of this blog becoming popular  seem to me to be rather astronomical.

But then again, the odds of a guy that works at Lowes becoming the lead singer of Boston are also very unlikely, and that happened. I’m not counting on that kind of success, but let’s imagine how it could happen.  After I get finished writing this post, I tag it.  This post is about blogging, alerts, CPSC 104 and maybe a couple of other things.  Someone that is not in my class, maybe someone that is interested in Dr. Ackermann’s work, starts tracking things associated with CPSC 104.  Let’s say he is using Google alerts and sets up an alert for things associated with the class.  He then gets an email about my blog post and reads it. He finds it thought provoking and insightful (this is just hypothetical, remember) and decides to read past posts.  He enjoys these as well, and especially enjoys the post called “With My Head in the Clouds”.  He posts a link on Digg and tells a few friends and colleagues about it via email.  They “digg it” as well, and my post moves to the main page.  An editor for a forward thinking online journal sees it (she checks Digg on a regular basis) and asks me to do a piece about life on the internet.

I think you can fill in the rest.  I don’t really aspire to these things, but it could happen.  And its would all be thanks to Google alerts.  Thanks Google!  Hypothetically, of course.

I was overwhelmed when I went onto Google Groups.  There are entirely too many groups and it seems very difficult to find one related to something I was interested in.  Most of the posts were spam.  I have no doubt that there is some very cool stuff happening on this network, but I didn’t have the patience this afternoon to find it.

Then I got to thinking about the concept of message boards and forums in general.  I’ve never really spent any time on either.  I don’t really know how they work.  I assumed that they were that live type of group interaction where posts fly past you faster than you can keep up; where people are having many conversations in the same space.  I pictured a crowded cafe where people are packed so close that they can’t help but brush up against each other as they move about.  Standing on the outside, not a part of any conversation, nothing makes any sense.  Inside, its very intimate.

But this is not how Google Groups works.  It would seem that it doesn’t happen in real time at all.  That works for me, I suppose, but it means that the purpose is very different from what I originally thought.  Since it doesn’t happen in real time, it’s more like email in that sense, you can devise an answer, work it out.  This kind of group is a great way to share more information than could be shared in real time, but with everyone instead of just a few people.  Great!

So I decided to do a little more digging.  While I was on Google Groups, I searched for a Logic group (Logic being the recording software, not the mode of thought) but found little that looked useful.  So I then searched on the web and found LUG, the oldest Logic users group on the net (at least so they say).  This site offers all kinds of services to Logic users besides just their very active forum; things like events, articles and downloads.  Very cool!

Then I thought, “there has to be other great uses for these types of groups.”  This kind of question always leads me to TED.com.  I remembered a talk by the guy who created 4chan.  4chan is an image board, but it works a lot like any other forum or message board.  Except the users are anonymous.  This means that there is no censorship either and things can get pretty  hairy.  But if you watch the video with the creator, he makes a convincing case for the site.

Well, there it is, another Thing to think about.  Thanks for reading!

Clouds are great.  I especially like storm clouds and I especially like storm clouds right after they are finished storming.  They begin to part, the sun peaking out from behind, but not blinding.  Everything is wet from the rain and the air is slightly crisp.  Breathing feels different, better.  The air is cleaner, fresh and sweet.  You can smell it, even if just for a minute or two.  I suppose this in when you might see a rainbow, or two rainbows.

I also rather enjoy being above the clouds, when they stretch out before you like an effervescent tundra of semi-solid air.  I picture special shoes that allow me to walk in this unexplored, ever-changing land.  My very own cloud shoes.  I realize that I would also need a breathing apparatus and maybe a special suit so that I don’t freeze to death.

Death.  A movie plays in my minds eye.  Two young men, close friends, are cloud surfing together, as they have done since they were small.  One, slightly taller than the other and skinny, is laughing.  This is living, he says.  The other, stockier and with a darkness about him (he’s always been that way and the taller, happier one points this out more often than is good for him), shrugs.  I suppose it is.

He feels the response before it is uttered.  The darker man reacts with a quickness and a fury that bewilders the other.  The taller man can not comprehend what is happening.  The blade pierces his face mask, enters his body through his right eye socket (the smaller man is left handed), pierces his brain, effectively stifling any protest the taller man might utter.  His life signs vanish quickly, triggering emergency response.

Police and medical personnel swarm the scene within minuted.  The man left standing makes no attempt to flea; he still held the murder weapon in his left hand.

No matter how hard they try, analysts can not determine why the shorter man murdered his friend.  He is reprogrammed and the whole ordeal is swept under the rug.  Perception of Utopia must not be lost.

I sometimes, often really, wonder if the expansion of the cloud, of the machine, is more good or more evil.  Either way, it seems inevitable.  I firmly believe that the democratization of information, and of innovation, storage, processing, etc., is a good thing. But how long before a very clever, evil person, figures out how to use it to enslave us?  Maybe that won’t happen, I mean I hope it doesn’t, but history seems to hint that it will.

If Ray Kurzweil is right and we completely merge with our technology in forty years, there won’t be any turning back.  Can we handle such dramatic changes in such a short amount of time?  If Kurzweil is right, and he’s been right so many times already, our waking lives will be spent in the cloud.  It won’t just be the home of information, but of consciousness.  We can live in what ever world we want to create and the outside world will matter less and less.

These ideas are exciting and terrifying.  We should be preparing ourselves for this.  Instead, our government is defending the interests of self-appointed demigods.

Well. I’m sufficiently depressed.  If you are as well, watch this video from TED.com.  Maybe it will take your mind off of it.

Thanks for reading!

The easier the internet gets to use, the more clutter there is in my life.  I guess I’m glad its only virtual clutter.  I’ve been on Google reader for less than an hour, and now I have 80 blog posts to read.  80!  If those posts were printed out and stacked on my desk, I would have an unavoidable desire to burn the whole stack straight away.  I don’t like clutter.  I like to throw things away or give them to Good Will.  This is a fight in my house.  My wife likes to keep things, all kinds of things.  ”I might need it some day” she’ll say.  ”You will never need T-shirts from summer camp when you were in elementary school,” I reply frigidly.

This is an interesting phenomenon because our roles are reversed when it comes to our computers.  I have 14 icons on my dock (we have Mac books), she has 11, four of which are folders, keeping her applications nicely organized.  ”Why don’t you use folders for all of your programs?  You have three browsers there, you could put them all in one folder.”  I get these kinds of questions almost ever time she looks at my screen.  My response would be “I’m lazy,” if I were really honest, but I usually try to rationalize.  ”I can’t use folders because it would be too hard to keep track of what I have open.”  I don’t think she buys my excuses.  Oh well!

I suspect that the snakes will steal my reality, leaving me to exist in a virtual world only.  One of the blogs I subscribed to is a webcomic called xkcd that only posts three times a week.  This sort of blog is good for me, and now that its on my homepage, it will take even less time to read it.

That, however, is not the end of the story.  I also subscribed to Gorilla Vs. Bear and Brooklyn Vegan.  These are the snakes, or maybe leeches (but leech doesn’t start with ‘s’).  They are actually indie music blogs and I have to imagine that I will want to read these entirely too often.  They will steal my life from me, or at least my time and I won’t be able to get it back.  Oh well, maybe now I will watch less TV.

Thanks for not reading someone else’s blog and reading mine, even if you read their’s after you get done with mine.

Here are a few of my favorite videos:

This Too Shall Pass

The Snow Show

Telephone

The Fish Slapping Dance

Podcasts are like drugs and I’m addicted.  I have to listen to at least one a day, and one inevitably leads to another which inevitably leads to a binge.  There’s nothing like a podcast binge to keep you from doing anything productive.  I have “expensive taste” when it comes to my drug of choice.  I’m not fond of most small scale operations.  I want the premium brand, the “good stuff”.  Podcasts are like gourmet dining or fine wine; I desire excessive care in presentation and a complexity of flavor.

I am currently subscribed to 21 podcasts, though I think I would be subscribed to more if I had more time to listen to them.  There are currently 73 new podcasts in my iTunes podcast folder.  Two weeks ago, I hit a record high of 108 new podcasts in my podcasts folder.  Its nothing for me to listen to ten in one sitting.  I have a bad tendency to try and listen to a podcast while doing things like typing my blog posts.  This does not work.  I am not able to multi-task with information.

I really like to listen to podcasts while I’m working out.  Really, I like to try to listen to podcasts while I’m doing just about anything, but doing so usually detracts from the thing that I am doing that is not listening to podcasts. The podcasts always win. I can, however, listen to podcasts and work out quite effectively.  I realized a long time ago that I am more of a radio person than a TV person.  I would much rather listen to something than watch something.  This works out nicely for me because I also don’t like to sit still for too long.  I can listen to podcasts and clean at the same time!  In fact, I don’t think I would clean without a podcast on.

So here are some of my favorite podcasts:

Radio Lab

This American Life

Fresh Air

The Moth

All Songs Considered

Planet Money

Thanks for reading!

I don’t understand Second Life.  Its not that I don’t understand the appeal.  That makes perfect sense to me.  People need a way to release pent up energy and de-stress.  People need a place where they can be themselves by being whoever they want to be.  In something like Second Life, it seems like you can create yourself anew.  I think that this a great form of self-expression.  Second Life allows its users to build and imagine and share with others.  They are not help back by social constraints and can therefore have any degree of freedom within the world that they want.

But I still don’t understand it.  I don’t get how it works.  I spent a little time exploring a few different places in the world, but couldn’t really wrap my mind around it.  I think that I may be virtual-world-deficient.  I wonder if they make a drug for that.  I played World of Warcraft for about three months because my wife, Amanda, wanted to check it out.  I wasn’t particularly good at it.  I just couldn’t sit at the computer long enough to do anything significant.  Things in that game take a long time.  We would do a dungeon and by the end of it, I would be completely fried.  I quit pretty quickly.

I don’t really think that there is anything wrong with WoW or Second Life, but I do know that they are not for me.  My escape is music.  I can practice one of my instruments for hours in the same way that someone else can spend the same amount of time clearing a dungeon.  Rather than obsessively leveling up, I’m obsessively looking for a new artist to be into or checking out the stats on the latest recording software/hardware.  I don’t thing that they are that different.  It just depends on what you’re into.

Here’s a couple of places that I go to get the latest music news:

All Songs Considered

synthtopia

Jazz.com

Thanks for reading!

In the past, I have avoided encountering all the propaganda on the web by turning to scholarly journals for all of my research needs. This is boring, although probably appropriate for research related to college level work.  Its much more interesting to watch people like the Nazi Party try and get one over on the unsuspecting public.  I only say this because I feel that the vast majority of people aren’t fooled by these types of trickery.  Its funny as long as not too many people are hurt by it.

Its still funny if some people get ‘hurt’ because we can assume as outside viewers that they were only hurt because of their own ineptitude.  An example of how this plays out in our culture is the Fail Blog phenomenon.  This is great because we can laugh at people’s stupidity and no one is hurt in the process.  We generally don’t know who the stupid person is.  They don’t make it in the shot, usually.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I can only assume that people aren’t affected negatively by propaganda on the internet.  The truth is more likely to be that peoples opinions are in fact swayed a great deal by what they see on the web.  A great example of this happened during the last presidential election.  A large number of people tried to claim that Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen of the US.  This was a huge controversy that a lot of people bought into.  Ultimately, it didn’t affect the election, but I remember hearing about it for months during and immediately after the election.

The video I linked to is interesting and after doing a little research, I discovered some interesting things about Philip J. Berg, the man featured in the video.  First and foremost, he has a website,  so I checked it out.  There, I saw that he has made crazy sounding claims about another US president, George W. Bush.  Berg was a key player in bringing about the suite against President Bush that claimed he was complicit in the 9/11 attacks.  I’m no fan of Old Bushy Brows, but I don’t think he had anything to do with 9/11 directly.

So, lesson learned.  Check ou the credentials of the authors you read on the internet!

Thanks for reading!

According to dictionary.com, microfinance is “a means of extending credit , usually in the form of small loans with no collateral, to nontraditional borrowers such as the poor in rural or undeveloped areas.”  Its not a new idea, but it seems to me that it has been getting a lot more press recently.  This is probably due in large part to Muhammad Yunus winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Yunus pioneered the idea of microfinance in the 70′s after realizing that most of the world’s population was barred from acquiring credit because that had no collateral to begin with (reference.com/browse/Muhammad+Yunus).  In 1983, he started the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh as part of his on going effort to change this.

Since then, many other banks have used Yunus’ model to start microfinance infrastructures in other parts of the developing world.  In recent history, some not-for-profit organizations have partnered with these banks in order to allow lenders from more affluent parts of the world to lend money to entrepreneurs who need it.  One such organization that I personally have become interested in is Kiva.  If you watch shows on Hulu as much as I do, you’ve probably seen this ad.  Also, check out Bill Clinton talking to Fox News about Kiva.

Kiva, according to their website, is trying to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.  Its a kind of global networking tool that allows business owners in the developing world to get the funding that they need so that they can get out of poverty. Here’s a video about how it works:

A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.

I loaned $25 dollars, the minimum amount, to Juan Vicente in Bolivia.  He asked for $1000 total  in order to expand on his house so that his children could have a bedroom.  Me and 19 other people fulfilled this request.

What I love about Kiva is that it allows me to help someone in a long term way.  I’m not just throwing money at the problem and hoping something sticks.  The business owners need the money for something specific. I can see that on the Kiva site  and get to decide who I want to lend to.  And it is a loan; I will most likely get the money back.  I can then reinvest it, or withdraw it.  I can also keep track of the loan and the person I loaned it to from the Kiva website.  Its all very easy and straight forward.

In Kiva’s case, no one on this side is making a profit.  The lender, me in this case, gets back what they put in.  Kiva is a non-profit and operates on donations.  The banks that are partnered with Kiva make money, but interest rates are low because the people getting the loans do not have/make much money.  So in some ways this is still philanthropy, but with much more intentionality and purpose than just giving money to people in need. Give it a try.  According to the Kiva site, the current average repayment rate is 98.15%.  So if you try it and decide its not for you, you’re 98.15% likely to not loose any money on the deal.

Thanks for reading!