The distractions of social media, 1673 style « tomstandage.com. Update June 2013: I wrote an Op-Ed on this topic for the New York Times, which draws modern lessons from the 17th-century concerns about the distractions of coffeehouses. Here’s an extract from my forthcoming book (to be published in October 2013) on the prehistory of social media, from the Roman period to the present day. (A previous extract, about Martin Luther and social media, is here.) You know how you can easily lose track of time while checking Twitter and Facebook? And how people worry that social media is distracting people from doing real work (aka “social notworking”)?
The same thing happened in the 17th century with coffeehouses, a new social-media platform where people went to read and discuss the news: With the promise of a constant and unpredictable stream of news, messages and gossip, coffeehouses offered an exciting and novel platform for sharing information. Thence to the Coffee-house, whither comes Sir W. Like this: Like Loading... The cost of selling Galaxies. In the post “Google vs. Samsung” I compared the profits of Google and Samsung Electronics’ mobile (aka Telecoms) division. It showed how Samsung has grown its mobile business to such a degree that, if sustained, could conceivably influence the way Android is controlled. However, we should not analyze Samsung’s mobile group in isolation of the entire company. Samsung relies on internal transfer of technology and capacities of production which are quite unique for device vendors today. In other words, Samsung is a relatively integrated enterprise. The following graph shows the sales and operating profit for Samsung Electronics as a composite of its divisions since early 2008.
As one would expect, the mobile group (Telecom) is the source of both top and bottom line growth. The margins averaged 11% during 2007 and 17% during the trailing four quarters. One could argue however that a 17% operating margin from a group that is now leading in volume and price is still a bit weak. Notes:
My NPR adventure: Watching YouTube's WIGS and Yahoo!'s Suit Up! push boundaries of web series | TV shows, TV news, media issues: The Feed. Not long ago, the words "web video series" brought a particular vision to mind: Low production values. A D.I.Y. look that seemed shot with a camcorder or webcam, even when it wasn't. And an eccentric, almost anti-TV focus aimed at creating a new kind of programming online. But there's a change under way. Developed by a few of the biggest names in television and film, some online series have a production level matching anything on cable or broadcast TV. Next year, major series such as Netflix's revival of Arrested Development and its Kevin Spacey show House of Cards will debut solely on streaming video, extending the trend.
Before those big titles drop, here's a sample of couple of great web only shows hat I talked about this week on NPR. It's only going to get better from here. Ruth and Erica; YouTube's WIGS channel. WIGS' best work offers details about characters doled out slowly, in tiny touches. Suit Up! Cybergeddon; Yahoo! Isaac Asimov on Creativity in Education & The Future of Science. MaKey MaKey: An Invention Kit for Everyone by Jay Silver. Augmented Reality: LEAP Motion | Beyond The Beyond. *Oh lordy. Realtime motion-tracking to one hundredth of a millimeter? For seventy bucks? Whaah? “Say goodbye to your mouse and keyboard. “Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. “This isn’t a game system that roughly maps your hand movements.
“This is like day one of the mouse. *Reality-check time… Hmmm, LEAP would appear to be actual, if as-yet-unreleased, product: “This week, Leap Motion, a San Francisco-based startup, unveils its Leap 3D motion control system. “Leap, which was founded in 2010, has had investors excited for at least a little while–the company announced $12.75 million in Series A funding a few weeks ago–but it’s only now that they’re letting the rest of us in on the fun.
“It might seem as though with a technology with such transformative potential, a hardware breakthrough must have made it fundamentally possible. Via @industwetrust. The Benjamin Franklin Effect. The Misconception: You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate. The Truth: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm. Benjamin Franklin knew how to deal with haters. Born in 1706 as the eighth of 17 children to a Massachusetts soap and candlestick maker, the chances Benjamin would go on to become a gentleman, scholar, scientist, statesman, musician, author, publisher and all-around general bad-ass were astronomically low, yet he did just that and more because he was a master of the game of personal politics. Like many people full of drive and intelligence born into a low station, Franklin developed strong people skills and social powers.
All else denied, the analytical mind will pick apart behavior, and Franklin became adroit at human relations. From an early age, he was a talker and a schemer – a man capable of guile, cunning and persuasive charm. Franklin’s prospects were dim. What exactly happened here? Futurity.org. Military Soldier Cockpit. Digital Deconstruction Episode 2 - Mixed Reality Lab, Adrian David Cheok. Huggy Pajama- Mixed Reality Lab,Adrian David Cheok. Girls out loud-Mixed Reality Lab,Adrian David Cheok. AnywhereSomewhereEverywhere. Highly integratable large-scale displays for public spaces：Ubicomp 2010 Video/Poster. Ivan Poupyrev Blog. Ivan Poupyrev, Tactile. Early prototypes of TouchEngine tactile actuators. Research: Tactile User Interfaces Why tactile interfaces?
TouchEngine™ tactile platform.Tactile interfaces for small touch screens.Tactile feedback for pen computing.Publications. Why tactile interfaces? A sense of touch is a combination of sensations evoked by stimulating the skin and it is crucial for our interactions with the world around us. In several projects listed below I investigate how we can use sense of touch as an additional channel of communication between human and digital devices, in particular handheld mobile devices that has become so prevalent nowadays. TouchEngine™ tactile platform. TouchEngine is a new haptic actuator that we created for designing and implementing a wide range of tactile user interfaces. The TouchEngine actuator is constructed as a sandwich of 0.28 micrometer piezoceramic film layers with adhesive electrodes in between, resulting in a 0.5mm beam. Piezoelectric bending motor actuator. GUI interaction. Ivan Poupyrev, Projects. Projects. I am interested in creating interfaces and technologies that seamlessly merge digital and physical in everyday objects, tools and environments.
The projects archived below describe some of the modest steps that I took in this direction. They cover work that I did at Disney Research, Sony Computer Science Labs in Tokyo, Advanced Telecommunicaiton Research Institute in Kyoto, University of Washington in Seattle and Hiroshima University. Ishin-Den-Shin: Transmitting Sound via Touch. Can we use the human body as medium for analogue sound transmission and playback? Ishin-Den-Shin project allows to transmit and playback recorded audio messages through the act of touching real world artifacts, which could be artificial objects or even a human ear [more details ...]. AIREAL: Tactile Feedback in Free Air. How can we create a physical, tactile feeling for virtual objects floating in air? Printed Optics. How will the interactive objects of tomorrow be manufactured? Capacitive Fingerprinting.
Teslatouch - Disney Research. Disney Research, Pittsburgh Loaded: 0% Progress: 0% We present Electrostatic Vibration (formerly “TeslaTouch”), a new technology for enhancing touch interfaces with tactile sensations. Electrostatic Vibration is based on the electrovibration phenomenon and does not use any moving parts. Our technology provides a wide range of tactile sensations to fingers sliding across surfaces of any shape and size, from small mobile displays to curved or wall-sized screens. Electrostatic Vibration can be easily combined with a wide range of touch sensing technologies, including capacitive, optical and resistive touch screens.
Research Paper TeslaTouch: Electrovibration for Touch Surfaces Olivier Bau, Ivan Poupyrev, Ali Israr, and Chris Harrison. 2010. Awards Best Demo Award at World Haptics 2011. Team and Credits The Electrostatic Vibration project is being developed at Disney Research Pittsburgh by the Haptics Team, in collaboration with Chris Harrison from Carnegie Mellon University.
Contact Gallery. SideBySide. Disney Research, Pittsburgh SideBySide is a novel interactive system that allows multiple people to play and work together using handheld projectors at anytime and anyplace. The system is immediate and simple: users simply project onto a surface and their projection becomes aware and responsive to other projections nearby. Interaction can range from projector-based games, such as boxing with projected characters, to everyday tasks such as exchanging contact information by ‘dragging and dropping’ onto another user’s projection. Importantly, SideBySide does not require any fixed sensing in the environment and can be used anywhere: at home, at the office, or even inside the car during long road trips. The system consists of a hybrid mobile projector that outputs both visible and invisible projections at the same time.
Research Paper SideBySide: Ad-hoc Multi-user Interaction with Handheld Projectors Willis, K. Awards Best Paper Award at UIST 2011 Best Demo Award at UIST 2011 Team and Credits. Adding Smart Gestures to Everyday Objects and the Human Body. From D.C. To Beijing In 2 Hours – Evacuated Tube Transport Could Revolutionize How We Travel. Evacuated Tube Transport capsules will be lightweight and able to hold up to six passengers or 800 lbs of payload, then zip away at 4,000 mph. Daryl Oster wants to change the world by making it smaller. He wants you to “Imagine living in warm sunny Los Angeles and commuting daily to New York City with only a forty-five minute commute.”
Or to “Imagine ordering Chinese food – from China.” And he doesn’t need a spaceship to do it because, in a way, he’s bringing space travel to Earth. What it is is Evacuated Tube Transport, or ETT. ETT does the maglevs one better by sending its levitated capsules down guider tubes out of which the air has been sucked, creating a vacuum. And the motion we’re talking about is seriously fast. I’ll take the Szechuan beef, extra spicy. And give me your finest bottle of rice wine.
Here’s a video summary of how the ETT would work. Each capsule fits in the 1.5 meter-diameter tube and seats six passengers. Of course, that’s not actually going to happen. Die-Welt-in-100-Jahren_final_en.pdf (application/pdf Object) KNBC live-tweeting the LA riots for 20th anniversary. Paul Otlet, visioning a web in 1934. TOP 10 IMPOSSIBLE INVENTIONS THAT WORK « Revolutionizing Awareness. Searl Effects Generator by Jeane Manning When Leonardo da Vinci sketched out an impossible invention, fifteenth-century scholars probably put him down.
Forget it, Leon. If machines could fly, we’d know about it. Throughout history, experts tell innovators that their inventions are impossible. Perhaps in the 21st century the following inventions will be standard science, and a history student may wonder why 20th-century pundits disregarded them. This class of inventions could wipe out oil crises and help solve environmental problems. Forget the Rube Goldberg mechanical perpetual motion contraptions; they had to stop eventually. Inventors give various names to their space-energy converters. A spiritual commune in Switzerland had a tabletop free energy device running in greenhouses for years, but members feared that outsiders would turn the technology into weaponry. It may have been done before Tesla’s time. The garage inventors come from many backgrounds. 8.
Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence. 0WandsKing_Tesla. S5_CISCO.pdf (application/pdf Object) LabCAST - The MIT Media Lab Video Podcast » Archive » #53 Qooqle. How to Predict the Future of Content. In Retrospect - Part I.
In Retrospect - Part III. Future in reverse. GeoCity Impressions. Brain Painting.