Letters Remain

Category: technology

  • The Future of the Calendar

    The calendar has the possibility to become “the biggest software revolution of the future”, says Scott Adams in an article looking at how crucial time and proximity are in making information (more) relevant. I also found myself agreeing with Adams’ thoughts on news: When I read the news, I’m generally most interested in how stories…

  • Taming White House Trolls

    When the Obama administration embraced blogging, sans commenting, on the White House website there were a number of detractors saying that Obama had retreated from his campaign promise of providing a site enabling public discussions. The reasons why are fairly obvious, but Clive Thompson looks at how the WhiteHouse.gov blog could enable commenting and successfully/safely control trolls (the…

  • History of the 160 Character Text Message

    I’ve never given much thought to this, and maybe that’s a sign of how well it was designed and implemented: the history and (high-level) technical development of  text messaging. Would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, [the research commitee] based their initial assumptions on…

  • Using Spammers to Solve AI Problems

    With spammers having already written software to match humans at solving some CAPTCHAs, many are predicting the end of the CAPTCHA. Not so, says Luis von Ahn (developer of the reCAPTCHA system) in a New Scientist article that asks why not set the spammers further AI tasks that they can solve inadvertently. Software that can solve any…

  • Open Source Software as Self Service

    “Open source software development is the ultimate self-service industry”, says Jeff Atwood in an article looking at possible reasons for the OpenOffice.org project’s dwindling development community. However, it’s Atwood’s thoughts on self service supermarket checkouts that I found most interesting: What fascinates me about self-service checkout devices is that the store is making you do work they…

  • Unintuitive Interfaces

    Expanding on Jared Spool’s thoughts on learning cycles and so-called ‘intuitive’ interfaces, Vicky Teinaki discusses the ‘knowledge matrix’ and makes this interesting point that I feel almost embarrassed to have not thought about previously: Digital devices can never be inherently ‘intuitive’, as the fact that they deal in abstraction automatically means that actions must be arbitrary.…

  • Causes of Poverty and Prosperity

    Matt Ridley—author of The Red Queen, among others—discusses the causes of poverty and prosperity, offering new (to me) insights on innovation, technology and markets. It’s very clear from history that markets bring forth innovation. If you’ve got free and fair exchange with decent property rights and a sufficiently dense population, then you get innovation. […] The…

  • The Decay of Social Networks

    Unaccountability and anonymity on the Internet has brought about “the end of empathy”, says Jason Calacanis, as he discusses the ‘condition’ of Internet Asperger’s Syndrome: This disease affects people when their communication moves to digital, and the emotional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expression and the so called “blush response”–are lost. […] In this syndrome,…

  • The Dunbar Number and the Limits of Social Networking

    The Economist looks at whether Dunbar’s number, the supposed limit of stable social relationships, holds true on social networking sites. That […] online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. […]…

  • Design Patterns for Errorproofing

    Persuasive technologies are those which are designed to change the attitudes or behaviours of users. Errorproofing, on the otherhand, is concerned not with behavioural change, but in ensuring certain behaviours are met. Errorproof technologies, then, are those which “[make] it easier for users to work without making errors, or [that make] errors impossible in the…