Digitivity » Digital Life

Should Laptops Be Banned from College Classes?

Digitivity — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:34:47 +0000

More and more professors are banning laptops from their classrooms. This is coming at a time when more and more colleges are also requiring students to buy laptop computers.

The problem is that students are checking their emails, Facebook, or other websites during class instead of listening to the lectures.

But beyond that, some professors don’t like the fact that laptop users are just producing word-for-word transcripts of lectures as opposed to listening, understanding, analyzing, and summarizing. Interesting, most students surveyed after a laptop ban agree that their participation in class increased.

In fact one chem professor went to the extent of freezing a laptop in liquid nitrogen and shattering it dropping it on the floor to demonstrate his no-laptop policy:

Some schools are are dealing with the problem by allowing professors to turn off wireless Internet access on a per-classroom basis. (Is the range of Wifi so low that it only extends to a single classroom?) Others, like Villanova, are turning off wireless Internet in classrooms from 8-5.

On the other hand, some students say that they’re the customers in the whole situation since they’re paying the tuition, and they should be able to do whatever they like.

On the subject of tuition, the Above the Law blog thinks people think that if a professor can’t be bothered to be more interesting than a blog or some random website, what’s the point of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition the students are paying?

What do you think?

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The Origins of Facebook, Hacked E-mails, and Privacy

Digitivity — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:52:30 +0000

Facebook is one of the largest sites on the Internet.

But most people don’t know the story of how it was founded.

BusinessInsider.com features a long investigative article about how Facebook started up. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, was a student at Harvard and a programmer. Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra (also at Harvard), wanted a programmer to develop a website which would later be called ConnectU.

But, the article says, instead of creatign ConnectU, Zuckerberg strung that site’s owners along, and developed his own site (then called thefacebook.com) instead.

But that’s not all, BusinessInsider.com also alleges that Zuckerberg used login information from Facebook to hack into Harvard Crimson writers’ e-mail accounts. Later, he also allegedly broke into ConnectU by guessing passwords and then disabled the accounts he broke into.

Obviously, there must have been somthing to the allegations, because Facebook paid ConnectU $65 million dollars to settle their dispute.

On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg went on to become the head of a web property used by 400 million people.

My comments

Knowing Facebook’s origins does certainly give a different perspective when you hear about the latest Facebook privacy problem. It’s certainly a different origins story as compared to Google.

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The Top 5 Mistakes People Make on Twitter

Digitivity — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:21:10 +0000

David Risley has a blog post on what he views as the top five mistakes people make on Twitter.

Read them here.

Most of his points have to do with spammy behavior, basically using a program to perform Twitter actions, like tweeting, following, and direct messaging.

I somewhat disagree with his point about following, though. Why is it considered bad to follow people? Is the goal to have 10,000 followers and only be following 20 or so?

Will that show that you’re a very important person? You are worth following for thousands of people, but there are only tens of people who are more interesting or worthwhile than you?

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Visualizing Federal Spending: The Federal Budget in One Poster

Digitivity — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:14:17 +0000

Remember The Visual Display of Quantitative Information? It was a book by Edward Tufte of Yale that showed innovative ways of showing a lot of numbers in intuitive and information-dense ways.

Now somebody’s come up with a poster that tries to make sense of the federal budget along the same lines.

Mint.com, the online personal budgeting website which helps you know where your money is going, posted a blog entry on a poster that helps you know where your tax money is going.

The “Death and Taxes” poster shows federal spending, with the larger circles being the more spendy departments (like the Department of Defense). Click through for a larger version:

You can buy the poster at wallstats.com for $24 from the artist who made it. Zoomorama features an interesting way to zoom in and out of the poster here.

The Young Americans for Liberty mentioned the death and taxes poster here.

Mint.com also has some great visualizations for what a trillion dolllars is.

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Google Fiber for Communities: 1Gbps Broadband Internet Service Coming

Digitivity — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:43:57 +0000

Google announced that they are going to be building high-speed networks 100x faster what most people have today.

They’re going to price their broadband service competitively to what other companies are charging.

I say it’s about time.

Google is launching the service to jumpstart new, high-speed Internet technologies. They’ll share what they learn in these trials with other companies to help increase Internet speeds generally.

It hasn’t decided where the service will be launched.

The networks will be open access, meaning the network infrastructure will be shared with other access providers.
They’ll provide service to anywhere from 50,000 to a half-million subscribers.
The trials will occur in one or more US municipalities which Google determines would be a good fit.

How fast is 1Gbps?

1 Gigabyte per second is:

134,217,728 bytes per second
131,072 MB per second
7.86 GB per minute

Obviously, this is fast enough to download a high-definition movie in minutes, or a standard-definition movie in seconds. There are a lot of videoconferencing, medical, gaming, educational, and other applications you could imagine being made possible with this speed.

Request for information

Google has a web page that describes what they are doing.

It’s requesting information from cities, counties, military bases, etc., which would be interested in participating in the program.

Even if your city doesn’t send an application in, you can nominate your locality as an individual.

My comments

Although it’s hard to believe that a corporation would be doing something like this out of the goodness of their own hearts, Google actually has an interest in high-speed Internet:

The faster the Internet experience is, the more compelling it is.
The more compelling the Internet is, the more time people spend online.
The more time people spend online, the more time they are likely to be on Google, or on a site that has Google ads.
Hence, the more money Google makes.

Textual vs. audiovisual Internet

A lower speed Internet lends itself to a textual world-wide web. When speeds increased, the use of images on the web increased. When we moved to DSL and broadband, in came videos. Even higher speeds (1 gigabit per second) would mean the possibility of an even more multimedia-based Internet.

But how can this be good for Google, which has traditionally leveraged its parsing of web page text in order to be able to serve ads?

I think the answer is in some key audio-to-text technologies which Google has recently rolled out:

Automatic subtitles for YouTube
Textual voicemail for Google Nexus and Android cell phones

Since Google now has the ability to parse spoken words, it’s not afraid of audiovisual elements in the web for serving relevant advertisements. In fact a really cool thing that they could do is show different ads as a speaker changes subjects.

Network neutrality

There’s also the factor that Google’s been fighting ISPs who are content producers (Time/AOL) or are otherwise jerks (AT&T) which are limiting the already pathetic speeds that they deign to give to American Internet consumers. AT&T’s head actually said he’d like Google to pay for the access that he gives Google to consumers.

This represents a sort of end-run around those ISPs. Google will make its own Internet.

Here’s a case where Google’s interests align with common man’s. Hooray for Google in this instance.

Resources

Google Fiber for Communities

Ars Technica article

Slashdot discussion

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Google Adds Sex Free Safety Mode for YouTube

Digitivity — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:22:55 +0000

Google introduced what they’re calling Safety Mode for YouTube. YouTube’s community guidelines are already pretty strict, but Safety Mode takes it a step further.

Videos that will be filtered in the new Safety Mode include:

Videos with a sexual theme meant for mature viewers
News videos featuring violence

Turning on Safety Mode

There’s a link to turn on Safety Mode at the bottom of every YouTube page.

You can lock Safety Mode on by logging in, and then turning Safety Mode on (which, again, is at the bottom of every page).

The setting is browser-specific, and also profile-specific. So if you (or other users) use multiple browsers, you have to set Safety Mode to “on” in every browser. It doesn’t matter if the person using the browser is logged in or not; Safety Mode will stay on until you log in with your password and turn it off.

Using Safety Mode

If you have Safety Mode on,

Search results won’t feature objectionable content, though the fact that results were filtered will be noted.
Comments aren’t shown by default.
If you show comments, objectionable words are replaced with asterisks.
You won’t be able to see filtered videos a friend sends you until Safety Mode is turned off.

My comments

Google’s recently been increasing the amount of advertising on YouTube. It looks like Google is creating a safe for work atmosphere which is also a safe for advertising environment.

Resources

Google announcement of Safety Mode
Google Help on YouTube Safety Mode
http://digital.venturebeat.com/
http://financegeek.com/
http://techcrunch.com/
http://googland.blogspot.com/

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Digital Subscriptions Cost $1000 per Month?

Digitivity — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:36:52 +0000

The Gizmodo blog did some arithmetic, and it figures that all the digital subscriptions you need to keep all of the devices some people view as necessary these days can cost near a thousand dollars.

Here’s the list of subscriptions:

Smartphone plan
Netbook plan
Slate plan
Home internet
Cable TV
Landline phone
Mobile Internet
Wi-Fi hotspots
Netflix
TiVo
Xbox Live Gold membership
Hulu
Flickr Pro
Navigation (GPS)

The total dollar cost ranges from $208 to $738.

Granted, some of these may be double counted. And there are ways you could cut costs. For example, you could choose to have either a landline phone, or a mobile phone. Yet, some people don’t have the option to choose, because the phone company wants you to have a landline in order to get DSL. And the cable company wants you to have cable TV to have cable Internet.

But even if you skimp on some subscriptions, others will multiply simply because you have multiple members of the same household, and they need their own separate plans for each of their phones. If you can live with having Internet access on your phone only at home, the office, and major urban centers, you could make do with only Wi-Fi Internet on your cell phone.

Still, no matter what, all these digital subscriptions do add up to a lot, and can be expensive when you add them all up.

Via Hard|OCP

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Will Conan O’Brien Move to the Web After Getting Dumped by NBC?

Digitivity — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:26:56 +0000

So who needs a time slot?

After being pushed out by NBC to make room for Jay Leno, what will Conan O’Brian do next?

How about a radical move of going web-only?

That’s what the New York Times Bits Blog surmises.

With the $40 million dollar settlement, I think it’s certainly a possibility. (OK, much of that money is for his show’s staff, but he still has enough so that he doesn’t have to work.) He has enough money to pursue ventures that may or may not immediately pay off. And YouTube offers revenue sharing.

And for those who say people don’t want to watch TV on a small screen. Ahem. That’s mostly old people who say that. Anybody born after the IBM PC seems to be just fine with watching YouTube clips on a 320×480 cellphone screen.

If Conan does go to a web-only format, I think that could do a lot to change the way entertainment is sent to viewers anymore.

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Jorge Colombo Draws New Yorker Cover Using an iPhone with the Brushes App

Digitivity — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:27:19 +0000

This month’s New Yorker cover was drawn by artist Jorge Colombo while standing outside the wax museum in Times Square. He used an iPhone application called Brushes.

There’s a video on the New Yorker site which shows how he did it. The video is created by another Brushes application called Brushes Viewer, which converts the saved steps of a painting into a movie.

I have to say, this is pretty neat. The iPhone is really coming into its own as a mobile computing platform. Will we all be doing all of our work, drawing, writing, editing, and programming on the iPhone shortly?

The story is being discussed on Slashdot here.

Blogs covering the iPhone story include Gizmodo, Charles Apple, and the Unofficial Apple Weblog.

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Hello, World!

Digitivity — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:40:23 +0000

Digitivity.org is about digital productivity.

Most of us spend much of our working and personal lives using computers. I’ve noticed that almost everything that you do with a computer requires a lot of research, experimentation, and often frustration.

Digitivity is a weblog mostly of my experiences in trying to increase my digital productivity. I hope you find it useful.