Every few years I become a sports fan – it’s Soccer World Cup time again and if I were a betting man, I’d say it’s South Korea for the win! I don’t think the US will do nearly as bad as expected, making it to the final eight. And of course Germany will make it to the final four. 
I got a little smarter recently when I read an article by the economist. The point was that it has very often been popular to “grumble about” new technology – in this case, the culprit was Obama as he said in a speech at Hampton University, “With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment”.
That was surprising to hear from Obama, but it was more striking to find that this kind of complaining about new technology dates all the way back to Socrates. He expressed concern about the passing on of knowledge via the written word making people forgetful of the things they know and instead dependent on the letters “external to them”. For this author, that explains why professionals and professors always take pictures with lots of books behind them – we have come to associate having read books (or even just being able to read a book on, say, bioinformatics) with intelligence. These are simply written references, however, and it is the knowledge internal to us that seems to matter more in defining a person’s intellectual capital.
What’s the bottom line? Well, people are grumblers, I guess, and technology, even the pen-and-paper kind, usually triumphs.
Visualization from gadling.
I like language. Writing is something I’ve always enjoyed, and I wouldn’t put writing a book past me someday (it being worth publishing is another matter entirely ). Recently I’ve been proofreading dissertations and research papers written by non-native English speakers which has given me the chance to see what young scientists are being taught about writing and publishing. A recent post on The Language Log sums up the issue quite well – teachers and profs have been known to provide a lot of advice concerning style and grammer without understanding the language constructs themselves. The perhaps biggest, longest-standing misconception is the use of passive voice (see here). Most advice will tell you that active voice makes a text more emphatic, but will fail to mention that passive can, at times, simply be the best and most natural way to say something. In fact, it could be argued that if passive voice were inappropriate for expressing ideas, it wouldn’t exist. At least it wouldn’t be as popular and prevalent in language as it is. Too much scientific literature suffers from dry, uninviting style – let’s not make it worse by restricting good grammar!
Steve Jobs presents some very convincing arguments for why Apple shouldn’t support Flash on it’s devices. I can’t help but agree with him…and to throw in my two cents, Flash is the only thing I know of that has yet caused my iMac to crash…
Well, Maya Zankoul summed up my opinion on Google’s new facebook-like service pretty well: it’s yet another distraction, but one that is always in my inbox and which I can’t make go away. Even considering switching to evolution…but not very seriously. Buzz buzz buzz.
Edit: The buzz label in gmail can be hidden. Just drag and drop it to the “X more” underneath the displayed labels to hide it!
Billy Boyd has submitted a great script and promo video for the your big break film-making contest. He’s currently the most viewed/most popular entry, and has a very good shot at winning financial support to produce his own commercial and to meet Peter Jackson (that’s right, the director of Lord of the Rings). Go here to watch his promo-video, read the script that he might get to produce and direct professionally in New Zealand, and vote for him! (The registration is quick and painless – just email, name and password – and you have the option to get emails about trips and tourism in New Zealand…not exactly the worst spam out there ^^ ).
Billy has also done other film work, including his almost finished feature-length film Steampunk.
The Economist wrote a very insightful article about foreigners, and what it means to be one on a number of levels. In a lot of ways, some which I admitt I’m not trilled about, their analysis applies very much to me. What surprises me most though, is that hardly any mention was made of communication with family and friends back home. More to the point, this article feels a little like a research note in psychology (an extremely readable one, I guess) from the 1960’s. The internet, along with twitter, facebook and blogging are all ignored. Speaking from experience, I can say that the internet has had a profound effect on my experiences overseas. Free video calls alone have changed what it means to have a visa in Plato’s utopian Magnesia.
For me, one of the Obama administration’s most impressive feats so far has been its effective use of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Not only is the White House website now as familiar and inviting as my own wordpress blog, the government has also published a huge amount of data from all departments, from the Dept. of Energy to the National Park Service and the DOD online, for all to use. Including geological data, there are currently well over 10,000 datasets available for the public to download, review and study. Not only is this incredibly relevant for economists and statistians, it should make the government more efficient by outsourcing the review and analysis of all this data to those citizens (or even international researchers) who are interested in and can make good use of it.
The same initiative has also produced the Federal IT Dashboard, an interactive database which lays bare, in nicely colored detail, the entire administration’s IT investment portfolio. In my opinion, it’s an incredible amount of information, displayed in a way that empowers individuals to assess for themselves the government’s management of tax dollars and information technology.
The white house released this rather long video which explains everything.
All in all, I think it’s a great thing.