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So at this reflective moment whilst I am in the process of accepting that computers and phones mean more to my happiness than I care to admit, and that their absence produce more isolation than even the most drastic culture shock. I’m still confused about whether a strategy to ‘sober’ up is in need. For example, if staying in touch with friends and family was that important to the degree that I couldn’t maintain my sanity without technology connected to the Internet, should I move to be in closer proximity? Or is it alright to embed these creatures deeper into our hearts and to explore how life will change as an afterthought?

I’m entertained by arguments that fall on either side. This little video seems to imply that nanobots will fundamentally change how technology infiltrates our lives to unimaginable extremes, thus we could experience an even greater dependence but this is of course portrayed as a positive.

NANOYOU – Narrated by Stephen Fry from Neon Otter on Vimeo.

Kunsler is skeptical:

What awaits us in a “time-out” from hyperbolic technological progress. Forget about Ray Kurzweil’s nanobot nirvana. That is not in the cards. Instead, wrap your mind around life in an economy organized around farming, with a much sparser distribution of big urban centers, and far fewer people overall. Don’t imagine for a moment that your grandchildren will be zinging across the landscape in electric cars sampling one theme park after another while “networking” with “friends” on cyborg social networks implanted in their brain jellies. Think of them grooming their mules in the summer twilight. Anyway, you get the picture: everything that the finance ministries and treasuries and central banks are affecting to do is mere shadow theater performed in support of wishful thinking.

The question, then, is what kind of hardship and disorder will attend our journey out of the industrial era into post-technological age we are entering. Will we just turn the world into a Michael Bay movie and blow everything up? Or will we make some graceful descent and retain what is really best about the human spirit?

And then there are ethical questions. What happens if we do allow technology to become embedded in our brain jellies? We like to think of technology as enhancers and dream up possibilities, but then we must always peddle backwards to fix the things that we didn’t consider, which is inevitable, by the way. At the DTMO conference there was an excellent presentation by Jan Silwa who discussed the possibilities of having sensors embedded within us in order to prevent medical emergencies and to keep track of medical histories so that doctors and emergency workers would have the most complete information possible. But what is often failed to be acknowledged is that this idea could also lead to murder through hacking, and also total surveillance!

I’m also guilty of dreaming of the possibilities more than treating the disastrous consequences, as much of my own research is jumping on the ‘infiltrate more’ bandwagon. If we track richer and more complete data, and make it open, then we will be able to connect more, know more, and act more relevantly. These are attractive assumptions, but their application plays out in way usually not along the lines of what I have in mind. Rather, it seems that the only way people will take an interest in open data is when there is a case for money-making (what’s new…). For example, the main purpose of the new Open Data Institute in the UK seems to be to explore how open data supports economic growth and innovation. The techies that first caught on to open data concepts used to speak about knowledge and collaboration, and freedom and rights. Now it’s just a big dialog about money again, but hey, who wants another tech bubble I guess.

I suppose the only reason why I haven’t given up on these research themes yet is because I believe I can’t let these dominant themes run my life! I’m looking forward to beginning 2012 in hopes of exploring the alternatives further.

In terms of our tech futures, I’m siding with Chrysippus, and just shutting up because things have become vague!

Related articles

• Where will open-data momentum take it in 2012? (vancouversun.com)
• How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Nanobots (pjmedia.com)

This Christmas was shockingly different from the last, as I spent last Christmas with Alex and her family in Germany, and so although I was a bit homesick at times, due to our different traditions and the fact that I couldn’t understand what people were saying, which is always isolating, the bottom line was that we had a blast. I loved every minute of my holiday with her.

This year, I planned for a quiet Christmas, getting through my methodology whilst everyone is away and having little to answer to. I had been sick for a long while this year without knowing what was wrong with me, and so the prospect of finally being healthy and happily having some quiet time to do some work was actually quite appealing.

Come Christmas Eve in England, everything begins to shut down. The trains stop running, and the stores close up for a few days. This wouldn’t have been a problem except for the fact that I mistakenly left my keys at a friend’s flat in London before returning home on the last train to Virginia Water without them. Not only did I forget my keys and have to walk late into the night to get the spare key to my bike lock to retrieve my bike, but I also left my computer and phone charger in my office… The office I no longer had keys for..

Three days without computer and phone…

Remembering the isolation I felt in Germany was nothing compared to getting through Christmas without speaking to friends and family. Not only that, but I’ve spent many Christmases in far away places without access to phone or email really. Granted, spending Christmas buried in the sand with a gin & tonic strategically positioned next to my mouth makes life in general a little bit brighter..

Things are different now.

More and more, I find that I am having the same conversation about the fact that technology has infiltrated every aspect of human lives. Some people that I speak with view this fact as a bad thing, arguing that people need to restrict and control the infiltration. On the other hand, others think that the beast has been unleashed, and so there is nothing to do but embrace that fact, thus might as well take full advantage.

This is a conversation I have generally not taken a side on, as I personally have strong feelings about both views, which doesn’t seem rational. Mostly because my own personal relationships with technology are like a drug addiction, and are destructive if I let them get out of hand (like sleeping with my computer next to me in my bed!! — and yes, this is a regular occurrence sadly). At the same time, I acknowledge the benefits that I have gained from being ‘so close’ to my electronic friends. In any case, I find it interesting that the conversation topic is so divisive. People are really passionate about it.

So, while I am left to struggle with my own addictions, I thought it might be a good new theme for my blog.

Today, I am posting about two radio shows that I heard, both from a few weeks ago, but both heard on the exact same day, not even hours apart.

The first was an episode of DNTO about numbers, and what people keep track of:

• How do numbers shape your life?

In particular, one guy compiles all of his personal information into statistics in order to produce an annual report. There was also an example of a mood tracking website (http://www.moodscope.com/) that enables you to log your mood every day and share this information with your friends.

I got to thinking about a conversation I had on Sunday about writing. Tim was mentioning how much he loves to write, to be able to craft words into powerful and/or creative ideas. I don’t have the same relationship with words, but I do have somewhat similarly passionate feelings about programming or diagramming sometimes. I really love how hypertext lets me express various strands of thoughts in diverse and never linear ways. Being able to craft websites let’s me bring together many ideas to shape my own and to express them in an aesthetically pleasing manner à la Tufte. Anyhow, the point is that technology has allowed us to track so much more, and to use more than words to convey meaning and expression. What I am not so thrilled about, as demonstrated by the podcast (although the show was specifically about numbers, yes), the pressure to represent data in quantifiable ways is growing. The pressure is growing because of the potential to analyze and make relationships between data if its quantified or categorized. If I think about all of the wonderful ways that I have used technology to express myself, I have always used words in addition, or as a guide so to speak. A low mood score, or a huge peak in a financial report is always more interesting and meaningful if there is a story to go along. So to me, the issue is not that we track everything or whether technology is to blame for meaning-loss. It’s about how we choose to express ourselves that counts.

The second radio example was on BBC radio. I thought I had noted the name of the show, but I can’t find it now, and I can’t even recall the details of the documentary I wanted to mention. It was a documentary about a man who attempted to eliminate all digital traces of himself in the world. There were these ‘hunters’ that were going to try to find him and he was trying not to get caught. He went to great lengths, calling telephone and utility companies trying to get them to remove all traces of him in their records. One customer service representative said that nobody had ever asked that, and it wasn’t even possible for her to remove the database record.

The point is, that on the one hand, using technology to record more and more details of our lives is celebrated in the DNTO podcast, and even demonstrates the emotional well-being that it has brought some people. On the BBC show, listeners are scolded for not being aware of the online records that are kept of themselves, and of how limited the companies we trust are in actually managing our information flexibly and securely. I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this, but maybe I will one day.

Related articles

• Moodscope- 100% happy (poppyposts-blog.net)

Well, it’s possible that I’m just not a person that is that committed to organizing my literature and subsequent thoughts on it with too much time or effort. It’s quite tedious creating a link and then a page for every article or book I read — not to mention going back and organizing. I thought it would be a good learning process, forcing me to review and reflect on what I’ve read. I think the tediousness outweighs the benefits of learning. The literature I read is not heavily structured and my understanding is changing so much that I can’t realistically create a stable classification scheme or any scheme in general.

I think I am more preoccupied with my writing process, and I require more assistance organizing my writing and connecting the literature I read into my writing.

Image via Wikipedia

I’m going to try Scrivener, although I’m a bit reluctant seeing as it’s a lot less easy to share with others than a page on my wiki. It’s also not integrated with Endnote, and it was designed for creative writers, not academics initially. But, I’m getting fed up with my note-taking and how it over takes my actual writing  as I always tend to write notes under each section so that I don’t forget about what I want to include, this often gets me way off topic though… It will be nice to separate my notes from my writing, and to manage to look at both things at once. I also have 18 versions of one section and I forget where I put a note that I cut out in version 2 for example, and then want to include again. So Scrivener’s Snapshot feature should help me out a great deal.

Scrivener won’t integrate with the revision procedure I have going with my supervisor though, I will still have to review comments in Word before importing the document back into Scrivener. I’m also not likely to stop using Papers or Endnote. Gah, I will probably have to add in citations in Word after I’ve finished writing, I hate that…

What I’m still waiting for is an Atlas type writing tool that lets me not only look at PDFs but tag sections of PDFs, and then compile all the bits of text on one page according to the tag, like Diigo, but for PDFs. That’s really all I wanted from my Semantic Mediawiki… I’ve been using Preview’s annotation tools, but really, I’m still an underlining and circling concepts by hand junkie, the only way I will stop printing off papers is if the benefit of combining sources coherently is faster than me doing it in my head.

Anyhow, I may reflect again on this never ending frustration with the inadequate tools that we have as researchers writing a dissertation, but I think I should now focus on what I’m writing about (i.e. my topic) than the tools I will use to write about it

This is my Ph D, the time in my life when everything is supposed to be stimulating and challenging and thought-provoking and boundary breaking.

So why is it that everything I read seems to make me fall asleep?

You might tell me to read something more interesting… Some of it is interesting, and the rest seems to be precursors to get to the good stuff. One of the glorious benefits of switching disciplines not once but twice now. I get to start all over again Luckily development studies also draws on a number of other disciplines that I know very little to nothing about, sociology, economics, philosophy.. So I am for the most part a wandering scatterbrained novice.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I just need some superpowers. To increase my focus and concentration (and hence persistence) I’ve tried diet and exercise, vitamins and fish oils, coffee.. But still, 10 pages in and my eyes begin to droop.

I need some practical solutions.

So I am asking you, mom, Richard, Alison, Faith, can you please let me in on some of your speed-reading secrets?

Do you verbalize the text in your head as you are reading along? Sometimes, do you read a paragraph and realize that you were actually planning out in your head what you were going to wear tomorrow? How do you stop that? If you skim, how do you convince yourself that you haven’t missed out on the best part?

Tim says that we should be able to read a 300 page book in a day. Under what conditions is this even possible? Maybe a novel, I guess, but I remember the most stimulating reading in my learning theories class took me a week to read and understand a 4 page article. I guess it’s more about learning how to sift through the crap to get to the good stuff rather than actually reading all the crap.

Please help…

So I have finally arrived in the UK, and I have begun reading and taking notes. So far, I’ve learned that I’m not supposed to call it a literature review, but a conceptual framework . In any case, as a quick reminder, the goal of this blog series is to chronicle my successes and failures of using Semantic Mediawiki (SMW) as my personal notebook/research diary.

At the start of your Ph D, you can go off in many directions while you are reading as much as you can, and so what I wanted from the SMW was some help in organizing my search and retrieval of new and exciting things to read, not knowing exactly how it all fits together and where it all goes. My initial instinct was to use Properties as tags, and to have the tags be sort of process guides for me (i.e. To Find, To Read), ideally, once I had found and read the articles that I wanted to find and read, I could cross them off the list. What I’ve discovered is that Properties in SMW seem to be more static than fluid creatures, and so, it’s completely unrealistic for me to use SMW in this way. At least I haven’t figured out how to rid certain pages of certain properties in bulk as of yet. If someone knows how to do this, please let me in on the secret!

Back to square one. In my next attempt, although I fully admit to not knowing what I’m reading is ‘all’ about quite so far, nor do I know how it fits together, my next impulse is to simply categorize books and articles into basic categories, and as I go along, I can add properties after that.

I think I should be able to use the SMW Concepts -

It is possible to store queries in Semantic MediaWiki on dedicated pages, called concepts. These pages can be viewed as «dynamic categories», i.e. as collections of pages that are not created manually, but that are computed by SMW from the description given by a query. (SMW – http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Concepts)

To then gather pages containing certain properties together as I would like them to be displayed, so that I don’t have to actually organize and keep things organized.

I am also making an immediate point of contacting my own personal semantic wiki guru, Gretchen Lowerison, as I’m sure she’ll have some fabulous advise, because she always does.

Although I am still currently in Canada, I am supposed to be starting my Ph D at Royal Holloway University of London with the ICT4D Collective in the Department of Geography. My first order of business is to immerse myself in the literature before I concretize the research methodology for my project.

My topic loosely deals with how semantic technologies, like linked data, could be used to improve monitoring and evaluation activities within development programmes in Africa. I’m sure I will have many opportunities to write blog posts about my project in the future, so getting back to what I actually wanted to write about: what better way to learn about semantic technologies than to use them myself?

I’m trying out Semantic Wiki to keep notes on all the literature I’m reading, to organise it, to keep track of my ideas and questions, and to reflect on what I’m reading.

Right now, I’m at the very beginning of my doctoral adventures, so my literature review thus far is quite pitiful. I have maybe two pages for two books that I’m reading (thanks mom for the suggestions, lol). So the only real advantages to using the Semantic Wiki for the time being is that I can add properties to literature and quotations that I would like to go back and read in the future, without getting myself off track.

For example, I just add [[To Find::Doe (2010)]] to the inline text, and save the page. ‘To Find’ is called a Property, almost like a tag, or a category, and you can have many properties for one item (i.e. [[To Find::To Read::Knowledge Management::Hoarding::Doe (2010)]] you get my point). In the menu bar on the wiki, you just click the ‘Browse Properties’ link to see all the properties for the page. From there I can click on To Find and see all of the items I need to find on one page, practically in a list I can print out and take with me to the library.

Later when I build up my literature base, I can go back through the pages again adding properties to parts of text within my notes, almost like a qualitative analysis tool. It should also help me develop my understanding of things, as I will have to actively classify and order things. I’m sure there will also be advantages in terms of finding and re-finding things too, but I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

What I’m curious about is that I currently do not have a plan, or even an understanding of the breadth of literature that will be ‘stored’ on my wiki. Without a plan, or an understanding of what’s to come, I wonder how much of a pain this is going to be if I need to go back and add or change properties in the future. I’m also a little scared about hitting the save button and encountering a server timeout. To avoid this, I’m just copying the page before hitting save.

So, this blog series is meant to chronicle my success or extreme failures using this tool to organise my literature

Related articles

• Exploring Semantic Media Wiki (dorai.wordpress.com)
• Help:Introduction to Semantic MediaWiki – semantic-mediawiki.org (semantic-mediawiki.org)
• Semantic Web – Knowledge Wiki – Base22 (wiki.base22.com)

AfriGadget » Blog Archive » A Homemade Robot in Togo.

Video about a robot made in Togo out of old TV parts.

More curious about how this video came to fruition.

My experience with Internet in Togo was always challenging. There were two ISPs that we dealt with in Togo: Hélim (Togo Telecom) and CAFE Internet. CAFE Internet costs about triple what Hélim charges, but was more reliable. Still it costs 70 000 F CFA for a 128K/64K connection in Togo (about 125 CAD) per month. Due to the unreliability of the connection it would have taken them forever to upload this vid, they must have done it elsewhere.

It’s also a shame there’s no French version of this vid.

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HBR blogger Umar Haque recently wrote about how businesses are getting the purpose of social media tools wrong. He points out that instead of using social media to simply sell more product faster, businesses should exploit the potential of social tools to improve the way we do things:

Today, the meaning is the message. The “message” of the Internet’s social revolution is more meaningful work, economics, politics, society, and organization. It promises radically more meaning: to make stuff matter, once again, in human terms, not just financial ones.

While I would definitely not classify not-for-profit organisations as antisocial like Haque describes businesses in his post, I would agree that he is bang on in terms of how easy it is for organisations to jump on band wagons leading down popular paths that sometimes are missing the point of the purpose of new media.

(more…)

Does this mean they are going to ban Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in the UK? => Check #41.
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