A true scientist at work

Sometimes satire says a thousand times more than explanatory criticism every could. Martin Robbins lays out a scathing satire of most scientific journalism that, quite frankly, is spot on.

Scientific reporting in mainstream media is abysmal. While major news outlets are not generally known for their ‘fair and balanced’ reporting in general, they surpass themselves in failure when it comes to reporting on science. Science articles generally are shallow, tell very little about the actual research involved, and often entirely misrepresent the results and significance of the research.

Partly this is a result of poor journalistic practices, but more importantly, I think this is the result of a terrible misunderstanding of science as a part of our society. Science is not done by lone researchers in their dark mountaintop lairs who shout ‘Eureka’ when they make a discovery. It is a group enterprise with progress coming not out of individual discoveries, but through the creation of theories, repeated and differentiated tests of those theories, and most importantly, consensus among those who have spent time actually contemplating the deep problems in the relevant fields. This makes scientific reporting rather incompatible with traditional journalistic models. Scientific findings don’t generally ‘break’ and even when they do, much further research and study is necessary to even understand that they were in fact breakthroughs. Furthermore, the drive towards consensus is difficult for a news environment that seems to think ‘balanced’ means throwing two things on a scale, regardless of whether their weight actually balances.

All of this is deeply depressing for such a time as now where so much great scientific research is happening.

Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 – Teaser from Thiago Costa on Vimeo.

Computers and physics go together like Jimi Hendrix and a guitar. One was practically made for the other.  Computational physics was one of the very first applications of computers and, indeed, along with decrypting military codes, virtual physics was one of the very uses that lead to the development of the modern computer.

However, while certain physical problems are easily solvable with sufficient computational power, many of the more common ‘real-world’ physics that surround us are much more difficult to simulate.  While dropping your clothes in a pile on the floor might be easier than washing them, simulating the behavior of such an action would be extremely difficult.  Non-rigid physics of objects like cloth, water, putty,etc is very difficult to do.

Still, the folks over at Lagao Technologies (there’s not much there, but the owner says more is coming soon) have come up with an absolutely amazing and super powerful physics engine for representing exactly this sort of interaction! How long these take to render at video-game or movie quality is anyone’s guess, but as processing power increases there is a lot of potential here.

Lagao Technologies

Via CrunchGear.

FourSquare rewards users with various badges depending on their activity.

When I first heard about Twitter in 2007, my initial reaction was something along the lines of “That is the silliest idea I have ever heard of.”  Time has proven me wrong and I was determined not to make the same mistake with the newest hot trend in the social web: GeoLocation based social networks like FourSquare, BrightKite and Gowalla.  Like Twitter, these networks took off at the uber-hip SXSW conference in Austin Texas and like Twitter, the tech world can hardly stop talking about them.   I was leery, but determined to see if all the hype is worth it.  For the last few weeks I have been dutifully living the GeoLocation lifestyle and am ready to report on my initial findings.

The first question, as with Twitter, is, “Why would you ever want to do this?” Well, to a certain extent we already do.  We share on Twitter, Facebook and via text where we are.  We invite friends and look for them. These services are a great way to meet up with people, particularly at large events like SXSW (where they first really began to take off).  So why not use the ubiquitous GPS and map applications on our smart-phones to add some clarity and structure to this type of interaction. It is fun to declare loyalty to your spots, and advertise businesses you care about! That local coffee shop? No longer let it languish in the shadow of the nearby Starbuck’s – shout it out!

There are also non-social applications to these services. They provide a way for you internally to keep track of where you have been.  This seems rather minor, but at the end of the month when going over your credit card bills how often do you wonder where a particular bill you don’t recognize came from? Check Foursquare and you’ll find out where you were on that day and rather easily narrow it down.  Secondly, Foursquare is experimenting with a sort of location based wiki at each venue.  You can leave tips for other Foursquare users who go there (try the Pad Thai and avoid the tofu) as well as notes to yourself (make an appointment to get a tune up next time I’m at the gas station).

Most of the utility and business-models of these services are relatively untapped, but they are simply fun ways to connect with friends and places in real life.  I will say one of the real advantages for nerds like myself is that they are definitely an encouragement to get out of the house and explore new places.  It is fun to check into a new place and find out what others have thought about it.  Also, you may find places you did not know that existed right in your area.  It is a very quickly growing field and it will be very interesting to see where we end up (both literally and figuratively).

Still, there are a number of hurdles that these networks will need to overcome if they are going to really take off.  As long as Foursquare is a game without any real consequences, there is no real motivation (other than obsession) to game the system.  However, as Foursquare monetizes and business start to offer real life rewards for being the mayor, people trying to game the system will become much more of a problem. How to define what constitutes a ‘check in’ and how long before you can check-in again?  Also, as the network grows, they will need to find better ways to fix broken/duplicate venues, spam-tips and other such pests of large networks.

For right now, it is fun to vie for dominance at your local venues.  Hopefully the creativity that pushed these networks will continue to increase their utility as well as their fun.

Image via Mariss007

When the first computers were being developed, every functional aspect of the computer had to be programmed into every program.  Want your program to use a keyboard? You would have to program your punch-cards to handle this.  Want to output to a printer? You have to do that too.  Eventually, machines became powerful enough and the computer science sophisticated enough that the handling of these basic aspects of the computer were handled by the operating system.  It managed the system so that users and programmers could focus on the higher-level operations that they wanted to be doing.

Right now the social web is in very much the same position as those early computers.  Ways to share information, links, comments, pictures, videos and more are unending.  What are you thinking? Post it to Twitter.  Want to share pictures of that crazy party you had last weekend? Post them to Facebook. Email them to your friends. Want to share pictures of your cousin’s first child? Go on Facebook.  It is getting almost too overwhelming to figure out how to share it all. Want to tell your friends where you are? Check into Foursquare.

Part of the complexity is that different social networks are built around different types of sharing, but the deeper complexity is that human networks are not like relational databases.  We don’t share our weekend experiences with our boss and neither do we share our work details with our family.  Some of this is because of actual privacy concerns, but more often it is simply about which people in our lives care about which aspects of our life.  My technical musings on Python are just noise to my family.

What is needed is an operating system for our social interactions that can actually help smooth over these various different systems.

Right now the internet functions as this system.  It enables the sharing and, via its various technical protocols allows us to share data between our friends.  However, getting the system to work in a human way rather than a technical way is the next large challenge.  In a sense we have the operating part of the system, but not the GUI.  The GUI smoothes over all the technical aspect’s of the computer and allow its power to be harnessed in a very human way.

Very little progress I think is being made in this direction.  The more successful projects like Facebook’s Facebook Connect, Twitter’s OAuth and OpenID seek simply to unify your identity around the internet.  More ambitious projects like Disqus aim to unify types of behaviors (in this case, commenting) across different services.  There are hints of real high-level SocialOS apps with projects like Diaspora, Pip.io, Facebook’s Connect and OpenGraph, as well as services like Google Buzz, but none of them really make interacting with people in cyberspace feel as natural as physical space.  They feel more like social interactions that are squeezed into the mold formed by relational databases and API requests.

Part of the problem is that it is really uncertain just exactly what a system like this would look like.  We are not always sure ourselves where we want and so encoding the nebulous nature of interactions into literal code is an extremely complex enterprise that requires people who understand, not just computers, but people.

[We talked extensively about Facebook and privacy this week on the show.  Stay tuned for our upcoming episode.]

The uncanny valley is an effect in computer graphics where as depictions of humans become more and more realistic, they become more off-putting.  Yosemite Sam looks nothing like a human and is not nearly as creepy as Tom Hanks in the Polar Express.  As Facebook makes its transition from private college network to open-network a similar uncanny valley of privacy emerges.  We are comfortable sharing privately online via chat and email and many of us are comfortable being totally open online via Twitter, FourSquare and Blippy, but the kind of open, kind of closed nature of Facebook’s network is extremely un-nerving.

Facebook’s F8 developer conference kicked off a little over two weeks ago, wherein Facebook announced a number of major changes and updates to their platform, api and privacy settings. At the time, most of the reactions were somewhat muted. Developers, journalists and users waited to see what the updates would really mean going forward.

The past few weeks however have seen going backlash against the service. Several major vulnerabilities were uncovered, while simultaneously, a growing number of technology personalities and early adapters like Leo Laporte, Peter Rojas and Matt Cullen have deleted or deactivated their accounts from the service.  The EU has written a letter to Facebook, complaining of the change.  Even some of Facebook’s biggest supporters are writing open letter’s to Mark Zuckerberg on how to fix some of the problems.

It is nevertheless somewhat ironic that so many high profile figures are leaving. Leo Laporte is a particularly good example. Leo seems to live most of his life in front of a camera. He streams his location to Twitter via Foursquare, and generally seems unopposed to living his life in public. The same goes for a number of my friends who have left. They are podcasters and Twittering and bloggers, not people who wish to live in a hermitage of offline seclusion.

Part of the reason is that freedom and control and openness are core values of many of the early pioneers in the internet world. It is clear that Facebook shares none of these value. By making their privacy settings extremely difficult to understand, rolling out major updates to the site with disregard for the userbase’s interests or desires, and even by the way they treat some of their biggest partners (like their developing spat with Zynga), they have shown a desire to control and direct just about every facet of how the internet works. Certainly they are entitled to do what is in the best interest of their business, but they seem to be going in a direction that many people are increasingly uncomfortable with.

I would like to stop here and preemptively respond to some of the common defenses of Facebook and privacy.  First, although it is technically possible for savvy users to maintain a fairly private profile, it is entirely too difficult for the vast majority of Facebook’s users.  Certainly people should be more savvy, but, having worked for 6 years in technical support, I realized that designing a system for what users should do rather than what they actually do is destined to fail.  Secondly, although it is true that everything on the web is potentially leak-able to the general public, there is a big difference between one of my friends sharing that information, and the service provider doing so.  As more and more of our communication and socializing happens online, there is still just as much  as much a need for a place of relative privacy amongst friends as there always has been offline.  Certainly friends can back-stab or leak information about you online as much as offline, but that is a far cry from the service provider forcing that openness.  Thomas Baekdal has a spectacular blog article on this principle, which is well worth a read.

Facebook is marching towards openness, which is unfortunate because we could really all use a place of intimacy on the web.

(Image via Ελεγεία και σάτιρες)

[Updated to add additional relevant links]

To any of us who use more than one window at at time, this is a nearly constant problem that is embedded into just about any OS we could be using today.  What we really want is a system of switching interfaces that learns what we want to switch back and forth between, rather than simply sending us back to the last place we were.

Aza Raskin has a very lucid discussion on this problem that I wish more OS designers would read (or at least hackers with the skill to write a mod for alt-tab behavior.)

Source: Aza on Design.

What is the point of designing the super-AI for your all-powerful robotic army if your drones can barely pick up their battle orders? One of the ongoing issues in robotics is that creating ways for robots to interact with the world in meaningful ways is surprisingly difficult.  Researchers at Festo have unveiled an impressively dextrous robotic arm which was inspired from the ways that elephants use their trunks.  If the thought of elephant-robots doesn’t terrify you, then you probably have better world-domination potential than I.

From Festo

via Engadget

Gizmodo bought an iPhone last week.  Rumor has it they paid between $5000 to $10,000 for this iPhone, which is a bit much, even by Apple’s pricey standards, but evidently the reason for this outrageous price was that this device is a pre-release version of Apple’s new fourth-generation iPhone that is to be released this June.

The internet went wild.

Gizmodo's shots of the device

Sitemeter reports that Gizmodo tucked in a nice 10 million page views on April 19th when this story broke plus an additional 13 million views the following day as more articles on the story were released.  Since then there have been enumerable discussions and articles on the legality and ethics of Gizmodo’s actions as well as factual critiques of whether the story was even true. Gizmodo, in true tabloid-journalastic fashion has drawn out it into an insufferably long list of posts detailing every aspect of their story.

One post stands out in particular in a way that characterizes the entire fiasco most appropriately.  Go ahead and read that link.  I’ll wait (and don’t worry about encouraging them with more page views – they already have millions and yours will hardly make a difference).

Done?

Without hyperbole, I think I can say that this is the most hilarious, pitiful and maddening article that I have read on the internet. After clinching what should be the story to end all stories, Gizmodo realizes that in fact there is hardly any story here at all, and then proceeds to wax eloquently about this existential realization.

It’s always just been Apple. And now that we’ve garnered a peek inside, the once secret society of magicians, assassins and melancholy artists looks like any another tech company.

Apple will continue to do business—great business—following the leak of their most prized commodity, the next iPhone. But as Steve Jobs prepares for his next magic show, we’ll never forget seeing the strings. An unparalleled era of surprises has come to an end.

We’ve just lost one of our few self-indulgences of wonder. Christmas morning will never, ever be the same.

Really?!

Are you admitting that you really have fully taken Apple’s bait, hook, line and sinker? Many of us have suspected this all along.

The iPhone has been refreshed every June since it came out four years ago.  Each time there were some design changes and some hardware upgrades.  We have learned basically nothing about this device that could not be easily inferred from reading the Wikipedia article on the iPhone.  The far bigger story would have been if Apple were not going to refresh the iPhone this year.

iPods over the Years

The real story here, I think is what this news cycle reveals about  tech journalism, Apple, and particularly Gizmodo.  There is something about Apple that causes tech journalists to lose all credible grips on their sanity as they wildly speculate about how this Steve Jobs’s next gadget could ‘revolutionize life as we know it’ and talk about every new Apple product as though it is in fact a revolution.  Without a doubt Apple does occaisionally make revolutionary products.  The original Mac was revolutionary, the iPod was revolutionary (although at its inception, that was by no means clear) and the iPhone was as well.  The iPad looks to follow in this tradition.  However, Apple works incrementally.  Every refresh is slightly better, slightly shinier and slightly more refined. Indeed one of the genius aspects of Apple’s PR is that they leave out obvious features in their devices (camera, multitasking, etc) and then get even more hype when they finally get around to delivering those features.

Yet the tech world acts as if every step Jobs takes is a step of genius and magic.  Certainly this is what Apple wants them to think and yet why is it that otherwise hardened journalists who can so easily see through PR stunts and marketing-speak, completely lose their heads when the topic of Apple comes up?

Gizmodo is particularly guilty of this and in this article I think they are finally beginning to realize that Apple is just Apple and that there are usually better things to talk about.  One thing that particularly irks me about Apple coverage is how any bit of Apple news (no matter how mundane) completely blocks out anything else going on at the same time.  For a perfect example, look no further than Verizon’s Monday announcement  of the HTC Droid Incredible, which is unquestionably the best Android phone available on the market and a compelling iPhone competitor.  It got its news story, but was completely drowned out by this leak because Apple takes priority in the tech news cycle.

I hope (though my cynicism says not to) that this is a wake up call to Gizmodo and other tech journalists that the echo chamber needs to be broken.  Are we really excited about technology? Or are we simply pawns manipulated by Apple’s PR and marketing teams?

Windows Phone 7 Screenshot

Well, this is a small but welcome update: Microsoft’s new phone OS iss is here-to-forth to be referred to as ‘Windows Phone 7′, which is a welcome relief to those of us who have spent the last 2 months since it’s announcement trying to say ‘Windows Phone Seven Series’ over and over.

Seriously, I am amazed that Microsoft manages to stay alive given the idiocy of its marketing department.  The last few years we have seen a great improvement in Microsoft in terms of engineering, standards support, visual attractiveness and overall usability.  Concurrently, we have seen Bill Gates butt-wiggling and ‘Churros’ with washed up comedians and absolutely inane product names (seriously, just look at that URL).

via Engadget.

Nuclear power puts on a happier face?

We discussed a few weeks ago on the run-down a new type of nuclear reactor that utilized depleted uranium and that theoretically be built on a much smaller and safer scale than traditional reactors.  Well it appears that we were not the only ones who noticed this technology as Bill Gates and Toshiba have thrown his prestige (and presumably some of his billions of dollars) behind Terrapower, which is working on this technology.

via Engadget.

[Note: We had some responses from our listeners concerning a recent episode in which we were fairly harsh on Facebook.  This post grew out of those conversations.]

Why do we hate on Facebook so much?  I will admit that I think sometimes we get a bit carried away with it.  Its cool to hate the big guys and we fall into that too sometimes.  However, with Facebook there is something more than just the David and Goliath effect.

Facebook is a great one-stop way to keep up with friends (especially more distant ones), share what is going on in your life and so on.  Insofar as Facebook curates those interactions, I think it is a wonderful service – and one which Twitter really will never be able to replace (though Buzz might have some potential there, especially with its ability to unify various social network streams).

Twitter is a fundamentally different animal.  For me Twitter is less like a website and more like a TV. I am mostly interested in what is happening *now* rather than what happened an hour ago.  So for people/sites/feeds that are interesting to me, but sort of an overwhelming stream of information, its a good way to get interesting things without having to wade through their hundred daily posts in Google Reader.

My distaste for Facebook is not as much what it *is* but how its run.  Facebook has a good core idea, but other than that, the company seems to have hardly any interest in the actual community of people who use it, what they want, or how they want to interact with the service.  Most other social networks (Digg, Reddit, Twitter, even Craigslist) are very sensitive to the community.  They know that if they annoy the community it will go away, but more importantly, the founders of most of these companies actually feel like the community is a community of people who want to use the community in a particular way.

Facebook on the other hand, has a long history of utterly changing what its about (usually in the direction of making information that was once private, or at least semi-private to be public.  The original news feed was one example of this. Of course anyone could go on and see if your relationship status had changed before the news feed, but then Facebook decided you would want to broadcast that out to everyone. Most recently the change to make your friends public was a similar breach in the implicit social contract Facebook has with its users.

Facebook feels to me like they see the direction the market is going (feeds, status updates, and now it looks like they’re going to add geolocation too) and just forces it on the community because its good business, but not in a way that is ammenable to the community, or even really very beneficial to them.  I generally look forward to updates of most services/apps I use because it adds new functionality to me.  But everytime I hear that Facebook is changing something I groan inwardly because I know that I’m not going to like it and it probably will not add much to my use of Facebook.  Also, as the local tech guru to most of my friends, it is going to mean many repetitive conversations on the new changes, and how to deal with them.

What can Facebook do to turn this around?  Facebook needs to choose what it does and focus on doing that well.  I feel like Facebook is simply chasing the moment and trying to do a bit of everything.  It ends up doing a lot of things, but doing them poorly.  You can share photos, but not as well as on Flickr. You can share status updates, but not as easily as on Twitter.  You can comment on other posts, but your comments get lost in the stream.  Stop changing around the interface/core idea of what Facebook is every 18 months.

If it ever comes out, this could be the antiPad for those of us tired of Apple’s shenanigans.

via Engadget. (Image also via Engadget)

A preview of one the new default themes in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 relase (via Ars Technica)

The first big event this year is Canonical’s graphical overhaul of Ubuntu.  Ditching the brown color-scheme that has dominated the distribution since its inception, Ubuntu will be moving to a purple and orange theme that, while by no means perfect, certainly moves the distribution much further in the direction of not-ugly.

One of the mockups for Gnome 3 (from Ars Technica)

The other development, which is much further down the road before it hits mainstream is the planning for the upcoming release of Gnome v3.0.  Gnome is the most graphical shell environment for Linux, partly due to its stability and that it shies away from making large changes in the user experience.  However, the consequence is that the environment feels old and looks pale in comparison with modern for-sale operating systems like OSX and Windows 7.  Several mock-ups have been released from a recent Gnome 3 development conference that are quite promising.

Why does design in Linux matter?  After all, regardless of what the default environment looks like, users can go onto Gnome-look.org or other customization site and download any of a massive library of themes, skins, mods and utilities for their desktop environment.  Linux is absolutely the most customizable operating system out there.  However, most users – even power users like me – don’t want to have to spend forever tweaking a new install (especially since Linux users tend to re-install pretty regularly).  The ugliness turns off new users too.  Linux users need to stop pretending that looks don’t matter in an OS.  Linux is a powerful and elegant OS that should reflect that in its design.

I am constantly fascinated by the ingenuity and cleverness of  designers and inventors like Fabian Hemmert.  His idea is simple — that technology should mimic organic life, but his execution is surprisingly ingenious and clever.

via Engadget.

Editors at Engadget today decided to shut down commenting on the site for a while after the flame wars and trolling on the site got out of hand. (Whether or not this had anything to do with a certain rectangular, flat, device announced last week shall remain up to the reader to decide.)  This seems like a rather draconian move on the normally libertarian Internet.  However, we all know how bad the internet can be and perhaps it benefits a community (especially a blog community as opposed to a self-moderated community like Digg or Reddit) to try to keep things under control.

Link to Engadget.

Link to CollegeHumor.

Silicon Valley Insider via TechMeme

Electronista via  Boy Genius Report and Engadget

This needs to happen more often.  Google announced today in their enterprise blog that they are going to drop support for Internet Explorer 6 in for their Google Docs and Google Sites web applications.  Frankly, this needs to happen more often.  As we were all reminded of two weeks ago  (if you can remember that far back before the iPad party moved in), Internet Explorer 6 is riddled with security holes.  Furthermore, it is a browser written for the web of 9 years ago. I understand that there are many enterprise applications that simply will not work with anything else and for those applications, well, go ahead and keep using Internet Explorer 6, but the gap between IE6 and the rest of the internet keeps growing and at some point the cord has to be cut. It is not exactly as if it is impossible to run a second, more modern browser alongside IE6.  The whole web will be a much better place for it.

Google Enterprise via Techcrunch

NewsObserver via Planetizen

Duke DiVE