Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in jdonald's LiveJournal:

Sunday, September 24th, 2006
9:22 am	!Link updated! Google's current and future place in the media industy "...there's practically no money left to be made in computers, not in hardware or software. The money, instead, is all in Web applications, a trend Schmidt had been predicting since his days as chief technology officer at Sun a decade ago. Users won't always be traveling to the Web on the PC, which is why he scribbles lines for cellphones, cable set-top boxes, Treos, BlackBerrys, and so on. Schmidt's most compelling point -- and the most visible glimmer of a method to Google's madness -- is the power behind the not-so-secret data centers Google is building, particularly a 30-acre facility in Oregon whose existence he references without provocation. "That massive investment should translate into the ability to build applications that are impossible for our competitors to offer, just because we can handle the scale," says Schmidt. (Microsoft, Yahoo, and IBM, each of which is spending heavily on similar big iron, would beg to differ.) He's talking about processing-power-sucking Google applications like Gmail and Google Earth -- and unannounced products on the drawing board." from: Chaos by design The inside story of disorder, disarray, and uncertainty at Google. And why it's all part of the plan. (They hope.) Adam Lashinsky , Fortune senior writer Even more interesting is Google's investment in print and radio--suggesting that the web is taking its place alongside other media, rather than displacing them.
Friday, September 22nd, 2006
12:41 pm	Intuitive interfaces & the flat world This video gets real interesting when he talks about the digital light box, and then at about 6:00 when he demonstrates the touch-screen with the digital globe. Given that some sort of hardware-less interface will be standard issue on the personal devices of the future, will this mean that all those interface skills--typing, knowledge of toolbars, navigation, even searching--will go away? Or will they just be different--yet still complex--skills, like those in the film Minority Report? I really like what he says about data display towards the end. He's right--there is an enormous amount of data available to anyone. The problem is that people lack the skills to make meaning with it. Lack of tools is fast being eliminated as a barrier to numeric fluency. Jeremy
Monday, September 11th, 2006
9:23 am	Artistic images of future space colonies from the 1970's, courtesy of NASA Who doesn't love artistic renderings of space? These images from NASA ( http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/SpaceSettlement/70sArt/art.html ) make me so happy. I don't know, I guess it's all the Yellowstone-like vistas framed by the clearly artificial ceiling and sides of the structures. I love the the people pictured in them, too. CLearly happy. My favorite, the one I remember from the quasi-science books my parents plied me with in hopes that I would develop some quantitative skills, is this one: Current Mood: quixotic Current Music: none
Sunday, September 3rd, 2006
11:21 am	3344 intro & reading response I'm Jeremy Donald, Coates Library reference librarian and liaison to COMM. I'm really excited to be part of these discussions, and will most certainly be learning a great deal about users and online communication, and the world of Sealab 2021. To quickly sketch my background--idyllic hippie childhood in VT, marred by divorce, followed by strong identification with jazz guitar in high school. Found a spiritual home in liberal arts education after wandering the country in search of a Clinton-era social utopia (no luck) and now consider myself an academic voyeur with a service ethic and a compulsion to tell people what to read. I found the Kurzweil and Joy pieces more interesting as character studies than anything else, though they are clearly the contemporary equivalent of the greater discussion of which the Einstein letters are a part. While tinged with latent megalomania, they do very well to raise the question of short- versus long-term thinking on the part of scientists, policy-makers, and the public. Kurzweil briefly mentions ethical implications and a proscription for "narrow reliquishment" of threatening, self-replicating technology, and Joy's ethical imperative seems to be to engage in and promote informed discussion about our collective technological priorities, though he appears to recommend a "loss of privacy and freedom of action." It strikes me that Einstein at the time of those letters seemed to have had a clear idea about the priority of nuclear weapons: we must race to be the first to have this technology, for we can't trust any one else to be responsible with it. Joy chalks this up to the purely military role of that technology at the time, and sees the vastly expanded role of science R&D in the commercial realm as a threat to ethical clarity. Librarians are trained to think in the long term (e.g.--"How can I organize this collection so that someone two hundred years from now can find what they need?"), and to be skeptical of the pursuit of short term goals (e.g.--"Let's cancel our institutional subscription to the NYT to protest their printing of sensitive information about government surveillance.") We also believe that books on bomb-making are no different that books on decoy-carving: anybody with a library card can check them out, and we don't interfere or act on suspicions (in theory). Preserving the individual's privacy, and freedom to read anything is a long-term goal--it assumes that wisdom will triumph over impluse in the long run. To assume it won't in the short term, and to make broadly-reaching policy decisions based on short-term fears, is the pattern of contemporary thought, and no doubt the key factor in the saving of countless lives. Tough stuff, to be sure...but how can all of this inform our del.ici.ous tagging habits...?