Category Archives: Technology

Backwards into the future

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This morning’s Observer column.

It’s not often that a newspaper column can resolve a dispute that has troubled the finest minds of an abstruse academic discipline, but hey, what else is the New Review for? The field is cosmology, and the dispute concerns the issue of whether there exist parallel universes that together include “everything that physically exists: the entirety of space and time, all forms of matter, energy and momentum, and the physical laws and constants that govern them.”

Today we can reveal that at least one such parallel universe exists. It is usually found in Finland, but last week alighted on the ExCel Centre in London, where it was visited by several observers known to this columnist. It is called the Nokiaverse (though some call it Nokia World) and it is populated by people who believe that it is possible to go backwards into the future…

Internet Explorer pulls Lazarus stunt

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The Financial Times Techblog has a useful post pondering the significance of the Beta version of IE9. Its conclusion is that Microsoft has finally begun to innovate in the browser field again — which is good news for everyone (and will, in due course, lead to a re-evaluation of ‘the-Web-is-dead’ meme). Developments singled out by the FT include the new browser’s ability to tap into the graphics capabilities of contemporary PCs, smarter use of screen real-estate and the way it harnesses the capabilities of HTML5.

Now, all I need is a PC to try it on…

Computers and children’s brains: good news and bad news

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There’s an interesting article in the (open access) journal Neuron which summarises a lot of research on the cognitive and neurophysiological impact of computers on kids. The abstract is here. Christopher Mims has done a useful summary of the main points:

* Video game consoles are going to make your kids stupider in the following way: owning one will significantly reduce reading and writing skills — “more than one-half of a standard deviation in the case of writing,” says the paper. (source) This is not just a correlation: it has been established (in at least this one study) causatively.

* “Action” video games can produce better surgeons (source) and pilots (source). They also enhance top-down control of attention, allow players to choose among different options more rapidly (source), increase short-term visual memory (source) and increase flexibility in task-switching. NASA has even considered using them to treat attentional problems in children.

* Television is a model for what we can expect from games designed both for entertainment and education. Multiples studies have shown that Sesame Street increases language and numerical ability in children, while Teletubbies actually decreases language ability in very young children. Likewise, the “Baby Einstein” products were also shown to make children less capable. After controlling for other factors, amount of television exposure as a young child does not generally correlate (in either direction) with later abilities – unless it’s trading off with other critical activities (like opportunities to absorb language through normal socialization).

* Many educational games have no positive effect on learning when used in an education context, but a handful have been proven to work – especially in the area of mathematical education.

All predictions about the Net are wrong. (Except this one, of course)

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This morning’s Observer column.

If I’ve learned one thing from watching the internet over two decades, it’s this: prediction is futile. The reason is laughably simple: the network’s architecture and lack of central control effectively make it a global surprise-generation machine. And since its inception, it has enabled disruptive innovation at a blistering pace.

This doesn’t stop people making predictions, though. In fact, ever since the web went mainstream in 1993 there has been a constant stream of what computer scientist John Seely Brown calls “endism” – assertions that some new technology presages the termination of some revered practice, not to mention the end of civilisation as we know it. The prediction that online news means the death of newspapers, for example, is almost as old as the web. More recent examples include Wired’s announcement of the imminent death of the web at the hands of iPhone apps and Nicholas Carr’s assertion that ubiquitous networking heralds the end of contemplative reading.

The problem with endism is that it’s intrinsically simplistic…

Is the Net changing the way we think?

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To mark the publication of Nick Carr’s new book, the Observer decided to ask some UK experts about his thesis. I wrote the scene-setting piece for the feature — which you can find here.

It’s easy to dismiss Carr’s concern as just the latest episode of the moral panic that always accompanies the arrival of a new communications technology. People fretted about printing, photography, the telephone and television in analogous ways. It even bothered Plato, who argued that the technology of writing would destroy the art of remembering.

But just because fears recur doesn’t mean that they aren’t valid. There’s no doubt that communications technologies shape and reshape society – just look at the impact that printing and the broadcast media have had on our world. The question that we couldn’t answer before now was whether these technologies could also reshape us. Carr argues that modern neuroscience, which has revealed the ‘plasticity’ of the human brain, shows that our habitual practices can actually change our neuronal structures. The brains of illiterate people, for example, are structurally different from those of people who can read. So if the technology of printing – and its concomitant requirement to learn to read – could shape human brains, then surely it’s logical to assume that our addiction to networking technology will do something similar?

Why university websites suck

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Ever wondered why so many university websites are totally useless? Well this explains it neatly in one Venn diagram.

You’d have thought that universities would have figured out the Web by now. The reason they haven’t, of course, is that their official sites are usually the responsibility of the development (aka fundraising) or PR departments, and these people are exclusively focussed on the messages they wish to project, rather than thinking about what users and visitors might actually want.

Thanks to Laura James for the link.

Underwater news

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This must be one of the most innovative things ever to appear on the Foreign Office Website — an interactive map showing some of the possible impacts of a global temperature rise of 4 degrees Celsius. The yellow line shows where the new “shoreline” would be.

It’s done by using layers in Google Earth. Neat, eh?

Open data and the live tube map

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This morning’s Observer column.

For me, the most arresting image of the week was not the photograph of General Stanley McChrystal, looking drawn and ascetic in combat fatigues, en route to his dismissal by his commander-in-chief, but a map of central London showing the underground system. On each line can be seen little yellow blobs. Blink and you discover that each blob has moved a fraction. You can see it for yourself at traintimes.org.uk:81/map/tube/.

The yellow blobs are, of course, tube trains. The fact that they're moving across the map indicates that this is, as near as dammit, real-time information about their positions on the network. And it's public data: you can sit at your computer in San Francisco or Accra and know how the trains on the Central line are doing just now.

How you react to this provides a litmus test for determining where you are on the technology spectrum…