MITPressLog

Rich Gold, your companion

Rich Gold's The Plenitude is a whimsical yet serious meditation on the ecology of stuff within which we live and create. It's also a relatively short book - less than 150 pages. For anyone who's craved more wisdom from this lighthearted polymath, you can now check out "The Plenitude: A Companion." It consists of autobiographical reflections from Gold, in the same literary and visual style as the book.

Check it out.

Behind Our High Technology Corridor

Just a few decades ago, Tysons Corner was dominated by dairy farms and gravel pits. Today, it's where businesses govern the world's Internet traffic, assist the American government in military planning, carry out security analysis, and more. Yesterday, WAMU radio's Kojo Nnamdi talked with our own Paul Ceruzzi (Internet Alley) about the region - everything from the local politics of land use to the impact of the postwar movement on central cities affected the development of Tysons Corner and its Internet Alley.

In case you  missed it, you can listen here.  Ceruzzi also wrote a post for us a few weeks back on the recent Dulles Rail revival news in the area. 

Dulles Rail Revival

The Washington Post reports that The Dulles Rail project, one of the largest transit infrastructure plans in the nation, that has been "on hold" until yesterday when the Federal Transit Administration approved the final design stage.  This decision will expand the Metrorail through Tysons Corner to Dulles International Airport and beyond. 

This is exciting news for everyone in the area.  Paul Ceruzzi, author of Internet Alley: High Technology in Tyson's Corner, 1945-2005, commented on the project and it's decade-long history.

I talk about the Dulles rail link as part of a general discussion in the  final chapter of Internet Alley. I also mentioned it in the chapter on Dulles Airport history. There was a plan for a rail (monorail?) as early as
1962(!) but it never got built. Now everyone realizes that it is needed - Dulles is very hard to get to without driving.

Fortunately the land was reserved along the median of the Access Road, so at least that cost is avoided. Nevertheless, in spite of not having to condemn and buy land, the project is very expensive. That is what
caused the Federal government to balk (see below).

Where it gets interesting is that an ideal link to Dulles would go straight there, with only a few stops along the way. The Tysons Corner developers, however, want a lot of stops in Tysons, both to bring people to their buildings; also to get the county give them increased zoning that comes with being close to mass transit ("transit oriented development"). However, these two goals are incompatible: Dulles passengers don't want to ride a "Broadway local" that makes lots of stops: they want to go straight to their plane. Real estate developers don't want to spend money on a rail link that sends all those affluent
people past their buildings without stopping.

The local planners thought they had all this solved, with a set of 4 stops in Tysons and an (eventual) fast link to the airport, but last January, the Federal Transit Agency vetoed it - to everyone's surprise. Without Federal money it cannot be built. Now the Feds have apparently changed their minds.

I my book I tried to get to the basics of this issue, not knowing of course all the drama that would unfold. But I am not al all surprised about this, as I did research the underlying issue, which the local news media have not always done.

Want more?  Listen to the podcast interview with Professor Ceruzzi here. 

A Robot that Loves You Back

As part of the Cambridge Science Festival,  Cynthia Breazeal and our own Sherry Turkle (whose latest book, Falling for Science, just hit the bookstore shelves) will give a talk tonight called "Sociable Robots." These women are experts on intimacy and technology and will discuss how robots can be made to communicate like humans. Basically, these women are the key to what you've all been waiting for - a robot that loves you back.

6 p.m.
Free.
MIT Museum
265 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge
617-253-5927
More information about this event and all of the Cambridge Science Festival activities can be found here. 

Information Overload

UCLA Today asked Christine Borgman (Professor and Presidential Chair of Information Studies at UCLA) 10 questions about the new role of digital data for scholars, which is also the subject of her recent book, Scholarship in the Digital Age:  Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. 

Here are three of the questions:

Using digital tools, researchers can collaborate more easily and access data more quickly. But what are some trade-offs?
Collaboration has considerable overhead. Tools and services for conducting online meetings are not yet robust or easy to use. Similarly, data are not always easy to find or to interpret.

Can you protect your rights, but still post your papers on a Web site or e-repository?
You can. I recommend assessing a journal's copyright policy before submitting an article, modifying agreements where appropriate and using Creative Commons licenses whenever possible. The Creative Commons is a some-rights-reserved legal model. You can learn more about these methods through the UCLA Library.

Is preservation of data a problem?
A massive problem, especially as the "data deluge" accelerates. Information scientists are partnering with other scholars to build up data preservation expertise in specific disciplines.

The entire Q&A can be found here.  For more on Borgman's work and the book, listen to the podcast. 

Internet Censorship in Turkey

John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is in Turkey discussing that country's struggle with the prospect of internet censorship. Palfrey is the author of our recent book Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, which is the topic that's brought him to Turkey. In a blog post, John writes that "the state is on the knife’s edge, between one world and another, just as Istanbul sits, on the Bosporus, at the juncture between 'East and West.'"

He elaborates:

As Turkey looks ahead toward the day when they join the European Union once and for all, one of the many policy questions on the national agenda is whether and how to filter the Internet. There is sensitivity around content of various sorts: criticism of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; gambling; and obscenity top the list. The parliament passed a law earlier in 2007 that gives a government authority a broad mandate to filter content of this sort from the Internet. To date, I’m told, about 10 orders have been issued by this authority, and an additional 40 orders by a court to filter content. The process is only a few months old; much remains to be learned about how this law, known as “5651,” will be implemented over time.

Read the whole of John's fascinating post here.

Fat Tuesday

Take the challenge: Fit or fat? Live or die? You decide with FATWORLD! ITVS Interactive (Independent Television Service) and PBS’ Emmy® Award-winning weekly series, Independent Lens, has just published FATWORLD, an online videogame created by Atlanta-based independent game studio Persuasive Games (spearheaded by our own Ian Bogost) about the politics of nutrition. FATWORLD explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition and socioeconomics in the United States and is free to play.  Do you think it's a coincidence that FATWORLD is being released the same week that the chief executive of McDonalds UK is blaming videogames for childhood obesity?     

After you've played the game, read the book!  In Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost looks at how games, like Fatworld, can mount arguments, make expressive statements about the world around us, and persuade us to  think about things in a different way. 

BotTV

Maja Mataric, author of The Robotics Primer, got a visit from the Cyberguy - aka Kurt Knutsson of KTLA, a Los Angeles TV station. As you can see from this clip, it was love at first sight -- between Cyberguy and the robots, that is. Hey, the idea that a robot can save you the trouble of cleaning your gutters - if that isn't grounds for love, it ain't far off.

Video of Cyberguy's visit to Maja's lab is here.

Could the Writer’s Strike Shift the Media Landscape?

As the Writer's Strike continues, for almost a month now,  Tarleton Gillespie, author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture, looks at whether it could really shift the media landscape. 

The writer’s guild has complained for years that they’ve been unfairly shut out of profits from digital versions of the TV shows and movies they helped create; as networks and studios continue to expand the web presence of their programs, providing “webisodes” and character blogs and background stories for their on-screen content, they have further enlisted writers to produce material they’re not being adequately compensated for. Perhaps the current strike will help rectify this inequity.

But are screenwriters inadvertently helping to shift the new media landscape – just as they get their extra slice for their “webisodes,” are they digging out the ground beneath their entire venture? In 1988, the last writer’s strike, grinding the prime time television season to a halt was a powerful move: we were still in a world of four channels and “must-see TV”. The absence of new programming was disruptive enough to audiences and advertisers that the networks and production companies felt compelled to enter negotiations. Today, the scope of that media universe has changed. What are viewers doing without their new episodes of "House" or "The Office"? They may be catching up on series they hadn’t gotten to, finally exploring "Friday Night Lights" or "Mad Men" or "Weeds", either through on-demand services, iTunes, the network websites, Netflix, or even illicit peer-to-peer networks. The networks may actually cash in on the opportunity, if they’re smart: “never got around to Aliens in America? Want to see what critics are talking about? We’ll start at season one, let you come in from the beginning, starting Monday!” An array of other options loom: video games, social networking sites, blogs.

And what if viewers (and advertisers with them) find themselves gravitating to that massive “channel” of content produced by non-unionized writers, i.e. the rest of us: YouTube? Will some ascerbic amateur writer, especially as we head into the heart of the presidential season, become the YouTube stand-in for the political humor of "The Daily Show", "The Colbert Report", and "SNL"? Will dramatic shorts or amateur sitcoms, produced by aspiring writers or just those bored college kids, finally become a viable entertainment form, filling the current vacuum on TV? It would be ironic indeed, though not unprecedented in the history of media, for this squabble over one version of the digital media future to end up giving a boost to a different digital media platform, a tectonic shift in viewer preferences and cultural legitimacy that would be difficult to undo.

Deborah Halbert also reviewed Wired Shut on Law and Politics Book Review today.  Be sure to check that out too. 

The Simplicity Shoe

Move over Air Jordans, world renowned graphic designer John Maeda has created Reebok's John Maeda custom shoe.  Finding inspiration in the third law (Time) from his book, The Laws of Simplicity, Maeda  collaborated with Reebok to bring us the Timetanium, marking one of the first times Maeda’s graphics have become 3-Dimensional.  Designed through a computer process using Maeda's mathematical alogrithms, the grapic adorns the outside of the shoe, while the original handwritten code is hidden on the shoe's lining.  Though it begins complex at the heel, the graphic evolves into a focused expression of simplicity at the toe creating an attractive visual design. 

The Reebok Timetanium is available now exclusively at the Reebok custom website for $150. But you better hurry, this release is limited to only 100 pairs. VIP samples have already been spotted on the feet of celebreties including Adrian Grenier, Dane Cook, and Zach Braff.

There's also an interesting video on YouTube about the project.