Year: 2004

Put on your thinking cap

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Neurologists at the Wadsworth Center in Albany have designed a cap that allows people to manipulate a cursor on a screen by just thinking. Previously, this has been achieved only by invasive methods where small wire arrays were placed within the brain to monitor individual brain regions.

The focus of the research is on helping the disabled be able to control computers and by extensions, lights, robotic arms, etc. Personally, I can’t wait until they just release the cap for general use. Not having to push a mouse around would be a big relief to my wrist, but I wouldn’t want to have brain surgury just to be free from the threat of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Tales of the Sausage Factory: Michael Powell on Indecency

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I’m reprinting below FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s Op Ed on indecency that appearedin the NYT on 12-3. As most of you know, I am a frequent critic of Powell’s ownership and broadband access policies, as I find him far too much the libertarian intellectual without regard to the practical impact of his policies. But on the indecency stuff, I think he raises some good points. My comments interspersed with his.

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Tales of the Sausage Factory: CBS & NBC Out Conservative Fox

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Viacom, the network that has vowed to fight the FCC’s indecency fine for the Jackson/Timberlake “Wardrobe Malfunction” all the way to the Supreme Court in the name of free speech, has rejected this advertisement by the United Church of Christ as “too controversial,” as has NBC. Fox, the “conservative network,” had no problems, nor did the ABC Family Channel. What gives? Disturbing implications discussed below.

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Inventing the Future: digital convergence happens

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Croquet is “about” real-time collaboration. A bunch of people can be in the same virtual environment and see the live effects of each other moving around and manipulating things. It seems natural to add audio chat using existing Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. So now you can talk to folks in the same space while you work together. We’re working on Webcam video, too, so that it’s generally suitable for holding distance meetings in a Croquet place. I didn’t think much about displacing land-line telephones. Who cares.

We thought a bit about how you could connect the telephone system so that you could call in to a Croquet place and join a meeting (audio only?) from a cell phone.

But then I read this quote from Patrick Scaglia, Vice-President and Director of the Internet and Computing Platforms Research Center at HP Lab:

“Croquet is a first in many ways. It represents a major step in our vision of computation as a communications platform and service, available anytime, anywhere, from any device. Soon, Croquet will run on everything, from a PDA through a set-top box; persistent Croquet worlds will be ubiquitous on the Internet, routed intelligently to each user through computational services overlays like PlanetLab. This will change the way people think about software and computation, from today’s device-oriented perspective to a perspective of computation as a persistent, pervasive, service”.

It took a day to sink in.

Eventually, people will want and get always-on connectivity for mobile devices, just as over half of American Internet users now get for fixed-position access. After demand evens out, I think device costs are first-order proportional to the number of chips, with the complexity of chips being a second-order effect. So the cost of a PDA capable of running Croquet will someday not be inherently much more expensive then a cell phone such as is now being given away by providers.

So, will we have telephones? Of any kind?

As far as I know, the Croquet developers didn’t set out to replace the telephone. If I had, my wife would have threatened divorce for such a hair-brained idea. And I’m not predicting that Croquet will displace the telephone. But it is interesting that progress in solving an abstract and general problem
mightlead to the merging of computers and telephones.

Tales of The Sausage Factory: PA HB 30 Now Law *sigh*

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Gov. Rendell signed HB 30 into law an hour before the deadline last night (11/30). In a last minute deal, VRZN agreed to waive its right of first refusal against the proposed Philly municpal wifi system. Rendell promises to work with other municipalities to the extent their systems are “viable” to “ensure that they succeed.”

I’ll have more analysis later, including what I think is the likely aftermath in both PA and for other states. Short version: we did surprisingly well for organizing from ground zero the week before Thanksgiving. We have also put a spotlight on the issue of municpal broadband systems (and wireless in particular) that will take this out of the back rooms and turn it into a real issue for public debate.

A copy of Rendell’s statement on the ban and a link to the full text of the statement below.

Stay tuned . .

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Inventing the Future: shared persistence

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The real-time collaboration in Croquet is cool. It provides a very different way of structuring applications that will allow things that nothing else can. The croquet team is working hard on this aspect. But we’re just begining to consider the implications of shared persistence. I think this is just as radical in itself, and will inspire truly extroadinary software when combined with Croquet’s other aspects.

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TotSF: Industry Mobilizes to Stop Philly WiFi

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Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! As recorded in this article about last night’s community meeting in Philly, Verizon has mobilized to squash municipal wifi in Pennsylvania. This little gem, called House Bill 30, is a classic: it provides huge new public subsidies for Verizon while squeezing out competitors. My analysis below.

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Total Government Awareness going the way of John Ashcroft?

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A long time ago, I think I mentioned in a comment to something that there was a project at the MIT Media Lab to keep a database of uncorroborated information about government officials, analogous to Ashcroft and Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness” monstrosity.

The project had been written up in several places, including Wired and slashdot, but now it seems to have shut down.

Why? Lack of interest (we get the government we deserve), or were they shut down? I have no idea.

The TIA project (ephemistically renamed “Terorist Information Awareness”) seems to have disappeared from the DARPA site, too. Does that mean it has been abandoned, or just gone silent.