The Calladus Blog

Now my day is all messed up!

My phone rang

"This is Mark in Engineering, how can I help you?"

A really sexy sounding voice with a French accent responded.

"Hallo? I need you badly. Ze, ah... ah.. thing is... Hallo? Hallo?"

"Hello, I'm here."

"Yes, ah... zat THING has ah... ah... ah...zat thing... you know?" She emphasized "thing" with a sort of horrid fascination, like she'd found a particularly fascinating and disgusting mouse. The weird part was that even incoherent, the sex appeal in her voice was hitting me at a very visceral level. It annoyed me.

"Hallo? Hallo? Are you zere?"

"Yes I'm here." I let my annoyance leak into my voice just a bit. "What can Engineering help you with?"

"Engineering?" Even confused, she still managed to make the word sound exotic, fascinating, and full of soft susurrations. "Engineering? I zon't need Engineering. I need Finance!"

"Well this is Mark in Engineering."

"Ah! Zo, can you ah... ah... throw... ah... you know? To Finance?"

"You mean transfer your call?"

"Yes! Zat is it! Please transfer me," she said in a pleading tone. She pronounced "transfer" with a long 'a' and soft 'z' and 'v' sounds. It was the sexiest word I've heard in years.

"I'll see what I can do." I hit the 'XFER' button on my phone, brusquely cutting off her thanks. I looked up Finance in the online directory and sent the call on.

Why am I writing about it now? Because that darned sexy voice is going to be rattling in my head all morning and ruining my concentration.

Changing the game with Technology

So I read Cory Doctorow's book, "The Makers". There were some points where I think it could have benefited with some editing, but overall I think it was a good book.

Makers is a story about the effect of disruptive, game changing technology. In the case of Makers the primary example is the three dimensional printer that is able to download a pattern and print it out. Want a new bicycle? Print out the parts and assemble it. Need a new fender for your car? Print it out.

3D printers are not fantasy - they do exist. The RepRap 3D printer is a device that can almost print a copy of itself. That's the goal. No one would purchase one of these printers, they would just have a friend run one off for them. RepRap is working on making a printer that could even print electronic circuits.

My friend Madhu linked to a TechCrunch article from his Facebook page about the beginnings of another disruptive technology. I think this technology is not getting the attention it deserves.

This Techcrunch article by Paul Carr is about the Fort Hood massacre, and it talks about how Army soldier Tearah Moore was inside the hospital where soldiers were being taken for treatment. Mr. Carr rips into Moore for being a "citizen journalist" for her reporting of events via the Twitter social network. He points out that she got much of her information wrong, and then calls her a problem for being part of the "look at me" society.

Mr. Carr seems to be lamenting the loss of professional journalism, and berates those amateurs behind the camera who won't get out of the way, or put down the camera and help. I think that is a discussion worth having, but is not the intent of my post.

I mentioned in response to Madhu that the difference between citizen journalists and professional journalists is the difference between data and information. A person on the spot with a camera and a twitter feed is providing data. This data, like all data, should be considered to be suspect until confirmed. A good news person would know this. A quick twit of "multiple shooters" would be turned into a cautious announcement of, "We have an unconfirmed report that there may be more than one shooter."

There aren't many good news reporters left.

But data is going to increase. The game changing technology is the convergence of micro digital video recorders, cell phones and live Internet streams. These cameras are shrinking to the point where a police officer can confiscate your 35mm camera while completely overlooking your personal digital video recorder. What good is it to force a photographer to delete his photos when they are already online the moment he or she takes them?

CCTV is already pervasive, there are few public urban places where people can go without being recorded by some sort of camera system. These systems are usually owned by businesses or by local governments, and they rarely link together. CCTV is sold to businesses and the public as a means of "security". As one executive in the security industry told me, "We don't build 'alarms' because they don't alarm the bad guys. We build 'security systems' because they make our customers feel more secure".

How much more secure would it make an average person feel than to wear a real-time video transmitter all the time?

At some point the technology is going to be so pervasive, and so discreet, that it will be unthinkable to prevent citizens from using it in public areas. It will become difficult, if not impossible to prevent the use of this technology even in a secure area. Places that don't allow cell phones often allow personal music players. What if your discreet iPod had a camera built into it? What if your camera system was smaller, and designed to blend in?

What will we do when all this video becomes available through live feeds on the Internet? The problem will cease to be shoddy citizen journalism. The problem will be in sifting through all this data and turning it into information. Those people and companies that learn how to do this well will become our news media. Those people who can turn mountains of raw video and audio into brief, informative text and video reports will become the "Walter Cronkites" of this next age of information.

And this pervasive technology will definitely change the game. Police got the message from Rodney King and routinely harass those people who video or photograph their actions. How will they act if they are unable to tell if someone is recording them? Most stores, like Walmart, don't bother to stuff cameras behind each camera bubble in the ceiling because the bubble itself is a deterrent. In the same vein, every bystander will become a deterrent to poor police procedure because it will be impossible to know if someone is carrying one of these cameras without performing a thorough search.

The new technology of video analytics is a way of analyzing video to determine behavior or attitude. If we applied this to a personal video stream, it could be possible for the system to sound an alarm when something goes wrong. Being held up at gunpoint, having an airbag deploy, or even varying your routine in a drastic manner may make your own personal "OnStar" system perk up and ask you if everything is okay. If you've ever been mugged before, this could be a very attractive technology. It would certainly change the game for criminals.

What does this all mean? What will come of it? I dunno. No one did a good job of predicting the consequences of personal computers or of the Internet. Some industries and governments have tried, and failed to predict the consequences of technology, with often humorous results. (For example, the Movie and Music industry successfully lobbied to cripple Digital Audio Tape recorders in America, and completely missed the importance of CD-ROM. They've been trying to catch up since then.)

Cory Doctorow's other book, "Little Brother" talks about pervasive information gathering of government and private businesses, and how the citizen can fight back using technology. It's a good book, but I don't think he took it far enough. When web-connected personal video cameras become ubiquitous the change will be massive.

If the Boy Scouts law was completely upfront...

I had a reminder of the Boy Scouts again today. It made me wonder what the Oath, the Scout Law, and what their Vision Statement would look like if they stated the practices of their private club more explicitly...

Something like this?

The War on America

In the book, "James Dobson's War on America" Dobson associate Gil Alexander-Moegerle wrote about how Dobson discovered that direct mailings requesting donations to Focus on the Family worked better when they warned about some sort of ominous threat to Christianity.

Apparently apathy can be overcome when people feel threatened.

But Dobson also discovered that there were diminishing returns. In other words, if a warning is successful in getting a donation then a second warning was less successful. The returns for any given warning diminish as people realized that the grim foreboding hasn't come true. In order to prevent the requested donations from drying up Dobson had to discover - or make up - another threat to warn people about. Like Heroin, people developed a tolerance to the warnings. To get the same effect you have to up the dosage over time.

I believe that scaring people with warnings about danger is somewhat like a cross between "Crying Wolf" and drug dependency.

The AP has an article today about how politicians and their supporters lie, and how their lies are supported by the Internet. The Internet has allowed the public to become more involved in politics than ever before, but it has also allowed people to be extremely uncivil.

Birthers, Tea-baggers, Freepers, Rush Limbaugh and writers at World Net Daily (I'm looking at YOU Chuck Norris!) are an excellent example of the soaring tirade against the current administration. These people don't just rail against the things that Obama is doing, but also against things that aren't true. Obama is supposedly a secret Muslim Socialist who is in America illegally to kill off old people through health care reform.

If you were reading this for the first time, you'd think I'm making this up.

These people are addicted to hate, and have such a high tolerance that they've had to up their dosage of fear and loathing to ludicrous levels. Whole news networks have become dealers in this crack, and sit on the corner of Fox and Talk Radio offering passers-by a 'free taste'. And when a well-mannered, civil person appears on their show and speaks sense they get yelled at.

This. Is. Insane.

Look, I don't have a problem with calling someone out when they are in the wrong, but when you make stuff up to be upset over then you're hurting real people who you convince to believe you. You're welcome to believe in Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, you're welcome to believe that Obama should be deported as an illegal alien, you're welcome to believe that Bush destroyed the World Trade Center. You are allowed your own beliefs.

But you're not allowed your own so-called "facts".

This vicious cycle of ever-increasing warnings has by necessity gone from warnings about truth to warnings about things that are made up because the people addicted need more despite to feel the same level of outrage.

Unless we get some perspective on this, things won't end well.

High-falutin' Internet stalker!

Some guys get kooky stalkers on the Internet. I am a cut above the regular style stalker - mine is a ~~PhD~~ J.D. and a (community) college (part time) professor! He's also a Tampa Bay Florida public defender.

My! Impressive huh?

Anyway, ~~Dr.~~ Mr. Ellis Rexwood Curry IV (FBN: 475327) is a radical Libertarian who took a dislike to me over my blog posting for the Pledge of Allegiance. My initial research on him turned up very little, but that seems to be because the servers for his community college and the Florida Bar were down. I later confirmed that he was who he says - which makes him even weirder than I originally thought. I mentioned him a second time, and then forgot about him.

He just wasn't that interesting or important for me to spend any time on.

Anyway, he's on Usenet / Google Groups now, and for some reason he's boasting about besting me on the Internets. In the third person.

I've been reading about ~~Dr.~~ Mr. Curry - I originally thought he might be a tenured professor, but according to his community college he's merely an adjunct instructor. His fellow teachers get ratings from "Rate My Professor", but no student has bothered to rate him. ~~Maybe he's forgettable, or maybe he merely has a titular position.~~ Because he teaches via "Distance Learning" - in other words, online. His classes are "Courtroom presentation / Scientific evidence" (in other words, how to look, dress, and act in a courtroom and how to present your evidence.) He also teaches an overview class on civil rights & liability.

Rex has been banned from Wikipedia, laughed at by the Tampa Tribune, writes in the third person, and is a founding member of the Republican Liberty Caucus, an interesting group who (among other things) wants to do away with the Department of Education and close public schools in favor of private schools.

Wait, he attended Hillsborough Community College and the University of South Florida, got his ~~doctorate~~ J.D. at Florida State, and he works at Hillsborough Community College? And all of these are public schools? Well, I guess he's pragmatic enough to set aside his principles to reach his goals.

Anyway, as the old joke goes, just because someone is crazy doesn't mean that they are wrong. So he's finally got my interest, and I think I'll take some time to read how he supposedly exposed the terrible socialist conspiracy that is demonstrated by our quasi-Nazi salute of the flag. I actually kind of dread this because his website looks like it was designed by the Time Cube guy. But who knows? Maybe he'll convince me.

By the way, ~~Dr.~~ Mr. Curry, when you write something as stupidly, provably false as, "A public apology has been posted from the Calludus kook to the historian Dr. Rex Curry", this is known as libel. It's a legal term. You might want to look it up.

I've been finding this very amusing. I thought you'd be amused too.

---------------------------
Update 7 Oct 09

heh. I got a whole page dedicated to me on Mr. Curry's website!

Dude, don't you proofread your own material? Don't you edit? Pick up a copy of, "The Elements of Style" and use it! You're a teacher, act like one!

BTW, saying that you've "written volumes on the topic" is meaningless if what you've written is merely a cut and paste of yourself, scattered over the Internet like the droppings of an incontinent pigeon. You want to be taken seriously? Publish.

The Villiage Idiots - move past them.

Some Christians I really agree with. This Christian gentleman had me saying, "AMEN!"

Creationism capsulated in a comic

ill Holbrook is a prolific artist of online and print comics. He draws three different strips that I know of. "Safe Havens", "On the Fastrack", and the one shown here, "Kevin & Kell".

In the Kevin & Kell comic universe, every animal, plant, and bug is sentient and self-aware. And yet, there is still a food chain. This can be problematic if you are the sentient being at the bottom of the food chain.

Every now and then, Holbrook comments, through his comics, about things happening in the real world. The comic shown was a dig at talk radio - but it works just as well for those who deny reality.

As Philip K. Dick once said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

If you like webcomics, you might enjoy Kevin & Kell. You can see the full cartoon shown here by clicking on this link.

Now my day is all messed up!

Changing the game with Technology

If the Boy Scouts law was completely upfront...

The War on America

High-falutin' Internet stalker!

The Villiage Idiots - move past them.

Creationism capsulated in a comic

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