Reflections on Technology and Society

Four years ago, just before I joined Google, I wrote "The Art Ecosystem and the Digital Museum" on this blog. At Google I worked to promote the digital museum concept and found a number of similarly motivated folks. A team in Europe had worked with the Prado to put a number of the masterpieces from that museum online in a dramatic way with tremendously high resolution images. Others turned up from around Google and joined in. [By the way, you can look at the fourteen Prado pictures in amazingly high resolution using Google Earth. Just turn on 3D buildings in Earth and then navigate to the Prado and you'll get a popup for the images.] Today Google launched the Google Art Project ( http://www.googleartproject.com/) with participation from seventeen major museums around the world. The site is very cool.

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about the new Kindle that a dear friend had given me and the affect that it had had on me. I wrote that item only a few days after receiving it, so it is interesting now to look back at the Kindle after a full year. Let's look at some of the significant events of the last year involving the Kindle and the entire electronic book space. Not long after I had received the Kindle I chatted with a colleague, Teddy Kowalski, who had been involved with the Nook development at Barnes & Noble. Soon I ran over to a nearby Barnes & Noble shop, one destined to close in a few days, as it happens, and acquired a Nook. Now I had two different ebook readers. I found the Nook to be quite comparable to the Kindle. The basic reading UI (forward and back buttons, primarily) is superior on the Nook, but the Kindle is a bit better on the less common functions like zooming around from chapter to chapter or searching. The Kindle has a clever annotation facility th...

How Many AI People Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb [the original was posted in the early 1980s by Jeff Schrager, then a PhD student at CMU] Q: How many Artificial Intelligence (AI) people does it take to change a lightbulb? A: At least 55: The problem space group (5): [ One to define the goal state, One to define the operators, One to describe the universal problem solver, One to hack the production system, One to indicate about how it is a model of human lightbulb changing behavior ], The logical formalism group (16): [ One to figure out how to describe lightbulb changing in first order logic, One to figure out how to describe lightbulb changing in second order logic, One to show the adequacy of FOL, One to show the inadequacy of FOL, One to show that lightbulb logic is non-monotonic, One to show that it isn't non-monotonic, One to show how non-monotonic logic is incorporated in FOL, One to determine the bindings for the variables, One to show the co...

[This editorial was published originally in " Security & Privacy " Volume 2 Number 4 July/August 2004 ] Archaeologists wonder why the city of Naachtun, capital of the Mayan kingdom of Masuul, was abandoned suddenly, with no evidence of natural or manmade disaster. No volcanic eruption. No invading hordes. Why, after more than 250 years of growth and economic vigor was this city abruptly evacuated? Did the leading people in the city fail to react to some important change? What happened? Two recent Internet worms, Slammer and Witty, have sounded an alarm to the entire computer security industry. To date, however, we have failed to respond to the alarm with the vigor warranted. Could we be dooming the Internet itself to the fate of Naachtun? When Slammer hit in January 2003, it shocked the security community by growing with unprecedented rapidity‚ -- doubling every eight seconds or so. The bulk of the machines destined to be infected were hit within 10 minutes, although the ...

[This editorial was published originally in " Security & Privacy " Volume 2 Number 3 May/June 2004 ] A few years ago I had lunch with Ray Cornbill, a friend of mine who is a distinguished professor, though not a physician, at a major medical school. Ray's unique sideline is as an international rugby coach. We chatted about our work and compared notes on current events. As we finished our lunch and prepared to depart, he made a remarkable statement: "I'm going over to the radiology practice to pick up my old x-rays." What did he mean by that? It turns out that the radiology lab that had taken his x-rays for the past couple of decades decided that it could no longer afford to keep the old ones around. Because he was a well-known professor at an affiliated medical school, a staff member had given him the heads up about the imminent disposal. Why did he care? Well, before becoming a rugby coach, he was an active rugby player for many years. Rugby is, shall w...

[This editorial was published originally in " Security & Privacy " Volume 1 Number 3 May/June 2003 ] There comes a point in the life of any new discipline when it realizes that it must begin to grow up. That time has come to the security field, as this magazine's founding indicates. Many things come with adulthood — some desirable and some less so. If we're to establish a place in the engineering community for ourselves as practitioners with expertise in security and privacy issues, we must be clear about what it is that we do and what we don't do; what can be expected of us and the boundaries of our capabilities. Today, far too much security terminology is vaguely defined. We find ourselves confused when we communicate with our colleagues and, worse yet, we confuse the people we're trying to serve. Back in the bad old days, it seemed clearer. The Orange Book (see the related sidebar) was new and seemed relevant, and the industry agreed on the nature of th...

So, Santa, was I naughty or nice? The Kindle you gave me for Christmas is quite delightful, which makes me think that you must have noticed some of the good things I did in 2009. On the other hand, my relationship with books is somehow self-abusive - I buy far more of them than I have the time to actually read. All it takes is a well-written book review or an enthusiastic recommendation from a friend or even an acquaintance and my Amazon.com history quickly gets ever longer. Back when I was courting my wife I remember telling her about one night when I woke up disoriented in my (then solitary) bed completely covered with books. It seems that my towering reading list, piled high on the night table, had become unstable and collapsed on me. I thought the story was funny, she thought it was cautionary. She was right. So now I have yet another way to consume the written word. My wife will be pleased, since the Kindle will hold in its capacious storage a quantity of books far beyond t...