WFTB – S5E12 – Dead is Dead

Namaste

Looking at my Google Analytics blogging stats. Some observations:

• I get more traffic blog-baiting DocJensen than starting a LOST Disney petition.
• Hardly any of the blogs/articles about the petition, have driven traffic to this blog.
• Twitter is a good way to bring people in to read your blog, but not necessarily to comment.
• It’s probably because my followers just tweet me back. which I LOVE.
• it does look like the ‘lost disney petition’ might finally overwhelm such favorite google searches as:
  • compare time warner cable to verizon fios
  • navy drill commands

And finally, it appears that the person that most reads my blog, is … probably me *facepalm*

Here is the transcript from last night’s WFTB (Watch From The Beginning) tweetup. Click more to see all the tweets. Enjoyed getting this final season underway. h/t to @batchout for collecting all the tweets.
Read more…

Did a little past episode snooping last night, and lo and behold, Ilana’s henchman, Bram (thanks IMDB) tried to persuade Miles to switch sides after he was recruited by Naomi.  Who are the SotS people?  They’re not Widmore’s people, they’re not Ben’s people…

Ilana and Bram confront Frank Lapidus

Bram confronts Miles in the back of the van

or contra, studies with bad methodologies will make headlines!

I know, I know what else is new.

As Stacy noticed yesterday, facebook addicts face a hard row in college, and can’t compete with the non-addicts academically.  Seems she’s now found that workers with addictions end up being less productive than their peers.  Truly this is cats and dogs living together time.

We can now rest assured that western civilization is on the highway to hell, thanks to this headline

Twitter can make you immoral, claim scientists

(its big cuz its a headline)

Here is the lede:

Social networks such as Twitter may blunt people’s sense of morality, claim brain scientists.

New evidence shows the digital torrent of information from networking sites could have long-term damaging effects on the emotional development of young people’s brains.

A study suggests rapid-fire news updates and instant social interaction are too fast for the ‘moral compass’ of the brain to process.

The danger is that heavy Twitters and Facebook users could become ‘indifferent to human suffering’ because they never get time to reflect and fully experience emotions about other people’s feelings.

US scientists from the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California (USC) say the brain can respond in fractions of seconds to signs of physical pain in others.

Yep, that’s what happened to Hitler, too much twittering.  So now all you time-travelers, go back and steal Adolph’s iPhone.

Oh wait, here is the buried lede:

But a new study led by Antonio Damasio, director of the USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, suggests that digital media may be better suited to some mental processes than others.

The study used compelling, real-life stories to induce admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain, in 13 volunteers.

The emotions felt were verified by researchers in a series of interviews before and after, conducted using a careful protocol.

Brain imaging showed the volunteers needed six to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of virtue or social pain.

However, once awakened, the responses lasted far longer than the volunteers’ reactions to stories focused on physical pain.

Yep, statistics geek, that is an N of 13 that supports the headline.  Now all this neat stuff about how long the brain takes to fully register an emotional story is neat, but hardly directly attributible to ‘Twitter’.  What about MTV, CNN, Headline News, etc…  Nah, the headline gets noticed because of TWITTER.

I WANT MY GRANT MONEY

(alternate title: how Apple is borrowing from Xerox PARC again)

Back in the heady days before the first Macintosh, when PC was in infancy there were a group of Apple researchers that took a visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and took a look at a Xerox research product called the Alto that had a graphical screen, and this weird thing called a mouse to collect user input.  The Apple guys came back home and brought out the Lisa (not huge commercial success) and then a few years later the Macintosh was born.  This is history.

When I was in grad school, we got to take a tour of Xerox’s PARC and had an hour long lecture by Mark Weiser about Ubiquitous Computing ( look here and here ) which was fascinating.  The year was 1996/97ish, and you have to recall the technology of the time.  Weiser was excited about a few things, some haven’t really fleshed out (really cheap computers ~$5 per device — but look at flash drive prices; and the influence of IrDa – infrared as a local networking stack) but I think the one thing he’s come close to identifying is the three form factors of a pad, a tab and a board.

This was at the very beginning of Palm’s device, and that was considered a ‘tab’ something extremely portable, personal and identifible.  In Apple speak this has grown into the iPhone/iPod Touch size devices.

The next form factor was the ‘tab’, this is roughly paper sized and very portable, Weiser saw this as impersonal, like sheets of paper but that could compute, you could push your presence to the device through your pad.  Apple currently doesn’t have a device that fits this description, the closest could be the iBook line, but Weiser identified this as NOT a notebook computer.  Could the rumors flying around Cupertino about a new tablet big boy iPhone be this missing link.

The third form factor was the ‘board’, Weiser saw this as a large wall sized computer monitor where or a group white board type of device where again people could connect to a ‘presence’ via the internet or some other networked type infrastructure.  Apple ‘kinna’ has this form factor in their iMac and/or AppleTV/MAc Mini displaying through a large HDTV.  I say kinda, because again this doesn’t fit Weiser vision as a computing device.

Switch paradigms a bit.  Apple is a first class hardware software company, but they’re making lots of money in a different market, media.  Since the first iPod, Apple has increasingly become less a computer manufacturer (ala Dell) and more a media marketer.  iTunes has become the center of their universe.

It seems to me, that Apple is hitting those form factors and tying them to iTunes for the distribution of content and ‘presence’ to your devices (iPhone, iTablet, AppleTV).

So while all the rumors fly of what the next announcement out of Cupertino will be this afternoon, my thoughts think history will repeat themselves a bit, and Apple will announce a tablet form factor (not a netbook, not a notebook, but something more ‘apple-ish’) as well as more changes to support an iTunes centric media-verse for their collection of devices.

someone had to write that headline.  ESPN missed the opportunity with:

Beavers Trap Trojans

It was a good game, and the Beavs had the mo the whole way, constant running game, stiff defense, and then resolve in the final minutes.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Oregon State Fight Fight Fight.