Reflections on Technology and Society

So 2011 represents my second year of Kindle use, and it's been quite an eventful year. In 2011 I adopted a policy of not buying dead-tree books any more. And, while I had intended to sustain my use of the Nook, it didn't really work out and I'm not even sure where my Nook is any more. I still like the Nook's business model better than the Kindle's, but my momentum is with the Kindle. I bought 60 books for the Kindle in 2011 and, as before, read some but not all. I have been reading my Kindle library on a wide range of devices: on my Kindle, of course, as well as on Kindle software for our iPad, our two Android tablets, my Android cellphone, my wife's iPhone, on all of our Macs, and on the Chrome browser. This really makes it much more attractive for me to continue to acquire books for the Kindle than for any other medium because my library is available to essentially any device I end up using. Title Author Read Fight Club: A Novel Palahniuk, Chuck Yes Loyal Char...

The day was perfect for riding. Not too hot, not too cold. Not too humid. I rendezvoused with my teammates Jane and Tamara at the corner of 70th Street and Columbus Avenue at 6:20 AM. After pumping up our tires and adjusting our bicycles, we headed downtown five miles to the starting line. Because we were riding for them, Noelle Ito of BronxWorks arranged for us to start near the head of the pack, enabling us to get moving soon after the starting gun (it wasn't really a gun, but rather big jets of flame emitted from the starting gate). The first few miles, north on Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas, for tourists) were slow, but we began to move more smoothly once we entered Central Park. We rode north along the eastern side of the Park Drive, exiting at 110th street and continuing north through Harlem to 138th Street, where we cut over to the Madison Avenue bridge and the Bronx. We didn't spend long in the Bronx, returning to Manhattan by the Third Avenue Bridge ...

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...