Forbes Wal-Mart Proves It Takes More Than Tech

""This was not expected. The technology that went into what Wal-Mart did was not brand-new and not especially at the technological frontiers, but when it was combined with the firm's managerial and organizational innovations, the impact was huge."

In other words, it wasn't the technology but the management that made Wal-Mart drive the last economic boom. And it wasn't the pace of technological innovation but sheer muscle that Wal-Mart used to force its suppliers to adopt common IT standards that led to the company's remarkable productivity advances."

MIT Technology Review Wal-Mart Trumps Moore's Law

"In terms of sheer economic impact, the single most important, dynamic, defining technological innovation in America hasn’t been the silicon cliché of Moore’s Law; it’s the relentless promotional promise of “everyday low prices.” Sure, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and Dell may be terrific companies, but the true corporate leader driving productivity improvement over the past decade has been Wal-Mart. When it comes to managing high-impact innovation, there is no contest—Sam Walton still matters more than Bill Gates."

redux [10.25.01]
MarketingProfs.Com Will and Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets

"Everybody thinks that it's the market pioneers who have the best name recognition, the highest market share, and the most enduring market leadership....Right?"

"Our discoveries may surprise the business community. After exposing the limitations of prior studies that extolled the success of pioneers, we find that pioneers mostly fail, have low market share, and are rarely enduring market leaders. In addition, we found that the current trend of staking everything on getting there first all-too-often leads companies to embrace a disastrous strategy of rushing to market with incomplete, inferior, and flawed products."

MSNBC Human chip implants stir up a debate

"A Florida technology company is poised to ask the government for permission to market a computer ID chip that could be embedded beneath a person’s skin. For airports, nuclear power plants and other high-security facilities, the immediate benefits would be a closer-to-foolproof security system. But privacy advocates warn that the chip could lead to encroachments on civil liberties.

THE IMPLANT TECHNOLOGY is another case of science fiction evolving into fact. Those who have long advanced the idea of implant chips say it could someday mean no more easy-to-counterfeit ID cards, no more reliance on dozing security guards."

redux [02.06.02]
Wired News They Want Their ID Chips Now

""Derek stood up and said, 'I want to be the first kid to be implanted with the chip,'" Leslie Jacobs said. "For the next few days all he did was talk about the VeriChip.""

"ADS chief technology officer Keith Bolton said he was a bit wary about the family's motives at first, but the Jacobses quickly convinced him they'd be perfect subjects. Since the VeriChip was announced in December, the company has been bombarded with queries from people interested in the device, Bolton said.

"Right now we have over 2,000 kids who have e-mailed, wanting to have the chip implanted," he said. "They think it's cool.""

redux [12.04.00]
News.Com Devices keep finger on wearer's pulse, place

"Applied Digital Solutions is launching a new line of products under the "Digital Angel" name that allow the monitoring of a person's whereabouts and vital statistics."

"Although the devices may evoke images of George Orwell's Big Brother, the company says the products could be used to keep track of pets, small children or adults with health concerns such as Alzheimer's disease."

redux [09.07.00]
Salon Put that silicon where the sun don't shine

"Worry no more, doting parents! Whether it's your little pumpkin's first day walking home from school by herself or the millionth time you've lost her at the mall, the BabysitterTM will track your sweetpea's location from a jelly bean-sized microchip implant, discretely tucked under her collarbone. You'll be able to chart her every move. What better way to give her independence, and put your mind at ease?"

Also available: The Constant CompanionTM lets you keep a watchful eye on grandma or grandpa, even when you can't be by their side; The Invisible BodyguardTM offers freedom from fear so you can enjoy the fauna and foliage when eco-tourism takes you to kidnapping hot spots around the globe. Coming soon: The INS Border PatrollerTM; the Maximum Security GuardTM; the Personal Private EyeTM; the Micro-ManagerTM."

redux [09.03.00]
SiliconValley.Com: Dan Gillmor Electronic leash would undermine our values

"WHAT can grease the slippery slope toward tyranny, and erode trust within families? Sometimes, it's as simple as parents' love for their children.

A colleague and friend says he'd gladly implant a location-tracking chip in his newborn daughter, to protect her from kidnapping and other threats. He says he wouldn't misuse such surveillance power. I'm sure he means it. I'm sure other parents would say, and believe, the same things.

This location-tracking product does not exist -- yet. Such is the race of technology, however, that it undoubtedly will exist soon enough. By then, I hope my colleague and others in his situation think hard about the consequences if they get what they want."

redux [07.17.00]
Wired Signing Up to Be Surveilled

"Forget the pager number and don't bother calling.

One company is making it easier for folks to "track" anyone, by allowing them to pull up a map of the person's location on a personal digital assistant (PDA) or computer.

"Cell-Loc isn't the only company to come out with location-sensitive devices. After all, the industry is expected to bring in a whopping $3.9 billion by 2004, according to the Strategis Group.

The same Strategis study showed that people didn't mind being tracked down for emergency situations like roadside assistance."

redux [05.25.00]
USA Today Denver may track workers by satellite

"It could be getting harder to hide from the boss.

After allegations that some city employees are loafing on the job, Denver officials said Monday they want to spend $1.5 million to track city vehicles with the military's Global Positioning System satellites."

"One labor expert said it might be counterproductive for an employer to try to scrutinize its workers so closely."

redux [04.11.00]
Salon Japanese firm developing tool to track stray grannies

"Johnny: "Mom! Grandma's missing again!"

Mom: "Don't worry, dear, the satellite will find her.""

"According to Reuters, a Japanese company has come up with a new way to track down grandmas, grandpas and anyone else who forgets where he or she is supposed to be, by using a satellite-based global positioning system and cellular technology."

NPR: Morning Edition The Video Surveillance Debate

"It hangs over Times Square, looking more like a street lamp than what it really is: a police video surveillance camera that can swivel 360 degrees and zoom in close enough to read a Broadway ticket in a scalper's hand 50 feet away.

As Jad Abumrad reports for Morning Edition, the camera and thousands of others like it in New York City and millions across the country are at the center of an escalating debate: is the use of such devices to combat crime and terrorism worth the loss of privacy and other guaranteed constitutional freedoms?"

redux [02.15.02]
The New York Review of Books The Threat to Patriotism

"What has al-Qaeda done to our Constitution, and to our national standards of fairness and decency? Since September 11, the government has enacted legislation, adopted policies, and threatened procedures that are not consistent with our established laws and values and would have been unthinkable before."

"The Justice Department has now detained several hundred aliens, some of them in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day. None of them has been convicted of anything at all, and many of them have been charged with only minor immigration offenses that would not by themselves remotely justify detention. It has refused repeated efforts on the part of journalists, the ACLU, and other groups even to identify these detainees. So our country now jails large numbers of people, secretly, not for what they have done, nor even with case-by-case evidence that it would be dangerous to leave them at liberty, but only because they fall within a vaguely defined class, of which some members might pose danger."

Reason Are You Camera-Ready?

"The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Washington Metropolitan Police Department plans to monitor people through hundreds of cameras on streets, in subway stations, and possibly in shopping malls and other businesses. "In the context of September 11," said Stephen Gaffigan, the official in charge of the surveillance network, "we have no choice but to accept greater use of this technology."

Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that we do have a choice. Fighting terrorism may have replaced protecting children as an all-purpose excuse for expanded government, but there is still something undeniably creepy about ubiquitous, centralized surveillance of public spaces.

Admittedly, this vague uneasiness, even if it's backed up with references to 1984 and Enemy of the State, is not enough to trump fears of terrorism. So what, exactly, is the problem with using cameras to enhance the police presence in our nation's capital (and soon, perhaps, in your town)?"

redux [11.14.01]
MSNBC Warming to Big Brother

"Khalid al-Midhar was on an INS “watch list” — and being hunted by the FBI — when he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11. A simple computer link between federal agencies could have stopped al-Midhar’s suicide mission cold. Frustrated investigators and a nervous American public are wondering why such an intelligent network of police data isn’t already in place. But a project to create that kind of gigantic database is now being built — it’s called Golden Shield, and it’s been designed by the Chinese Communist Party’s police agency to control Chinese citizens."

"Two months ago, even the thought of such a project in the U.S. would likely have elicited immediate outrage. Even today, as just described, Golden Shield might not sound very palatable."

But piece by piece, a skittish American public seems willing to go along with many of Golden Shield’s tactics."

redux [11.10.01]
Business 2.0 America's Secret Weapon

""That's the kind of thing this war needs," says Claudia Kennedy, the four-star Army general who was deputy chief of staff for intelligence until her retirement early this year. Analyzing networks requires maximum information -- phone and bank records, police, FBI, and other intelligence files -- on suspected terrorists and their associates. "You have to get everyone to agree to put in their data," Kennedy says. And if anyone balks, well, "you don't always have to ask for permission," she says.

Through such work, the topology of al Qaeda is slowly coming into focus -- and it's not a pretty picture for the United States."

NPR: Morning Edition Terror Networks

"NPR's Joe Palca examines the academic discipline known as "social network analysis," which has potential for tracking terrorist networks that are known to exist and uncovering others that were previously unknown. Law enforcement agencies already use the techniques, but broad implementation could raise personal privacy issues. (7:07)"

redux [10.04.01]
First Monday Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future

"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."

redux [10.12.01]
Fortune Above the Crowd: From Wired to Wiretapped

"In the weeks following the World Trade Center tragedy, many government officials were actively lobbying for increased Internet surveillance as a method of restricting terrorist activity."

"But putting aside any debate on civil liberties, a stronger case against the government's Internet surveillance attempts is that there may well be huge problems in both implementation and effectiveness. One predicament is just how much of the genie is already out of the bottle."

The New York Times Magazine A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
[requires 'free' registration]

"Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American future."

redux [09.27.01]
MSNBC Is FBI asking for data overload?

"The Bush administration is pressing Congress to approve the most sweeping expansion of federal law-enforcement authority since the Cold War. But would U.S. officials even know what to do with the deluge of information their new power could make available?"

"Yet even if the president gets his way, it could give rise to one of the classic problems of the information age: The capacity to produce oceans of data often isn?t matched by sufficient tools to sort and interpret it."

Database Nation Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""

Reason Overextended

"If intellectual "property" were morally indistinguishable from tangible property--as copyright holders suggest when they equate infringement with theft--there would be nothing wrong with a perpetual copyright. We take it for granted that ownership of a house or a diamond ring does not simply expire after a set number of years and that such assets can be passed on to descendants indefinitely.

A song, a movie, or a book is not quite the same, as the very existence of the Copyright Clause suggests. The Framers did not give Congress the power to grant people rights to their homes, farms, or personal possessions because such rights already existed."

"Copyrights, by contrast, were understood to be a legal invention, and the justification for them was utilitarian: to promote progress and enrich the culture by giving authors an additional incentive to create. But the Framers recognized that copyrights could also impede progress and impoverish the culture by preventing people from building on the work of others."

Time The Pirates of Prime Time

"Michelle Chaplin can't get enough Sex and the City. She has seen virtually all 66 episodes of the series--some of them, like the one in which Samantha tries to seduce a priest, repeatedly. But unlike most people, who pay an extra $13 a month on their cable bills to get HBO, which carries the show (and is owned by TIME's parent company AOL Time Warner), Chaplin gets her Sex and the City free. Using a program called Morpheus, she goes online and downloads any episode she wants in as little as 10 minutes. Then she watches her haul on the computer. "I know it's not legal," the college sophomore says, "but it's easier for me to download than it is to get HBO or cable.""

redux [10.15.01]
MIT Technology Review Owning the Future: Content Discontent

""Content": in the modern lexicon, the term denotes everything from the information delivered daily to our doors on newsprint to the multimedia clips streamed over the Internet; from the music carried on the airwaves to the interactive software on CD-ROMs. This so-called content is produced by an increasingly broad and diverse segment of the economy, including not just writers and artists, but also software programmers and other high-tech researchers who create new intellectual property.

And here's the most interesting part. Time and again, the distributors - such as publishers, broadcasters and record labels - recoil in the face of technological advances that could diminish their role."

redux [08.03.01]
Ars Technica Intellectual Property and the Good Society

"Many of the voices in online debates around IP fall into one of two camps. I won't take the time to do more than very briefly summarize these two positions, because we're all familiar with them by now. The first is the "information wants to be free" camp, which advocates the free and communal sharing of information and rejects any notion that products of the intellect can or should be understood, legally or philosophically, as property. At the other extreme is a camp that is comfortable drawing direct, strong analogies between concepts of ownership of physical property and concepts of ownership of intellectual property. Furthermore, this camp is intent on letting the "free" market determine a value for information, much as it determines a value for more traditional types of property. This second camp usually feels that the anti-IP rhetoric coming from the first camp is merely a rationale for piracy, while the first camp feels that members of the second are mindless shills for the corporate machine.

Somewhere in between these two extremes lies a large majority who find both extremes attractive for different reasons, but who can't in good conscience commit to one stance or the other."

redux [07.13.00]
Business 2.0 Semantics of the New Economy

"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the "90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May."

""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers - not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."

Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They're yours - they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And "intellectual property" is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."

"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."

redux [02.05.00]
Reason Copy Catfight

"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."

redux [09.04.01]
First Monday Copyright in a Frictionless World: Toward a Rhetoric of Responsibility

"In this paper, the author reviews the history and application of copyright and concludes that, although promoted as being in the interests of authors, it is designed in such a way as to be primarily a right which benefits distributors and publishers. The author identifies a number of difficulties faced by distributors and publishers in enforcing their rights in an age where the various sources of "friction" which once limited infringement are being constantly reduced. In particular, in the emerging frictionless world the typical targets of the holder of a copyright monopoly (distributors pirating for profit) are being overtaken by a new breed of target (individuals with a cost reduction motive) and it is uneconomical for a holder of a copyright monopoly to pursue this new breed. The author argues that recent extensions to copyright monopolies add little to the illegality of the infringing acts nor any stigma to the performance of those acts. Instead, they exacerbate one of the main causes of infringement - consumer cynicism as to the benefits to society of the copyright monopoly. The author argues further that, rather than driving further cynicism through more expansive rhetoric relating to rights, holders of a copyright monopoly should instead seek to mollify consumer sentiment and encourage compliance by emphasizing a rhetoric of responsibility in the exercise of those rights. The author proposes three possible principles of responsibility that copyright monopoly holders might evaluate and endorse."

redux [06.08.01]
ZDNet Technology and the corruption of copyright

"Interestingly, with the onslaught of technology and promises of greater opportunity to share and communicate, copyright is now a hindrance to these ideals, serving only the moneyed interests of owners."

"Historically, copyright protections were afforded to promote expressive discourse fundamental to a democratic society. Today, the very notion of intellectual property serves to commoditize expressive ideas, rather than fostering their dissemination. Whereas initially the provision of an economic benefit was secondary to the promotion of original works, modern copyright inverts this ideal in a continuing effort to establish a marketplace for ideas."

redux [01.23.01]
Cryptome What's Wrong With Content Protection

"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."

redux [12.17.00]
Bad Subjects Beyond Copyright Consciousness

"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."

Business 2.0 Is the Information Revolution Dead?

"At the peak of the Internet frenzy two years ago, when the Nasdaq was over 5,000 and dotcom millionaires were buying spreads in the hills above Palo Alto, it seemed that the information revolution would go on forever. Little tech companies were popping up everywhere, and small investors were reaping returns that made them feel like geniuses. Then the bubble burst. It burst, management guru Peter Drucker tells us, because "the information industry as a business wasn't going anywhere." The information revolution had been hyped, exaggerated. Neither computers nor the Internet, Drucker says, had added much to the economy.

Is the information economy going nowhere? Is its revolution over? In Silicon Valley, certainly, the prospects look bleak. But history suggests that such pessimism is misplaced -- that the information revolution's best days might actually lie ahead."

redux [12.27.01]
The Christian Science Monitor After the dot.com crash

"On the surface, it was a bad year for the Internet.

The dot.com bust left hundreds of companies out of business, thousands of people out of work, and millions of investors out-of-pocket.

But as investors and the economy tried to avoid being sucked down in the whirlpool created when dot.com companies and their stocks capsized, the actual, everyday world of cyberspace continued to transform the ways we live, work, study, play, and just, well, waste time.

redux [10.08.01]
Business 2.0 Peter Drucker Interview

"But it is reasonable to expect that we have not yet really discovered what the Internet is best suited for. Mind you, the steamship was not a great improvement over the first sailing ships. Up until the end of the 19th century, most of the world's ocean freight was still carried by sail. What eliminated the sailing ship was that it takes several years to learn to be a sailor, while it takes 10 minutes to learn to shovel coal into the steamship boiler. The sailing ships died because they couldn't get crews and the steamship crews are unskilled. You need only a very few skilled people on a steamship. To furl and unfurl sails is highly skilled? But the railroad immediately created mobility, on the land, which had never existed.

Today, the Internet eliminates distance for communication."

The New York Times The New Meaning of New Economy
[requires 'free' registration]

"Remember the new economy? What does it mean - if anything - anymore?"

"Impressive as the wonders of the Internet may be, historians point out that all of the technological advances of the post-World War II era probably cannot match the burst of invention that came from the 1850's to 1903: the Bessemer steel-making process, the telegraph, the light bulb, the phonograph, the telephone, the radio, the automobile, rapid transit (subways and elevated trains), the diesel engine, mechanical refrigeration and the airplane."

MSNBC Networked dream home still a dream

"You’re on your way to work when you realize you forgot to switch on the washing machine you loaded earlier that morning. No problem. You use your cellphone to send a text message to your personal computer. It transmits the order to your washer, which whirrs into life. Later that day you get stuck at the office. You’re in danger of missing the big soccer match on TV so you e-mail your PC and tell it to switch on your video recorder at kick-off time. Match saved. It’s a glimpse of a sleek technology-driven world which has been promised for a while but, according to industry experts, is still some way off.

“THE INTEGRATED HOME is at least five years out from here,” says Ian Keene, chief analyst of the European Telecommunications Group at research company Gartner Dataquest."

redux [02.05.02]
BusinessWeek Technology without a Cause

"My mom had a couple of questions after being presented with this glimpse of the digital future, and because I cover technology, she thought I might be able to answer them. She knows why AOL Time Warner wants to keep pushing itself into her life -- and pocketbook. But why would she buy everything the media giant wants to sell her?"

"All too often, technology isn't applied to a real problem. It's just thrown at a supposed need. And not just any mundane need, but one that's affecting a mind-bogglingly large market. The urge to foist new technology (or new uses of existing technology) on people becomes more intense when adoption rates for a technology plateau."

Business 2.0 Apple vs. Sony: An Entertainment Smackdown

" In most debates about the future of home entertainment, the real question is not whether homes will become digitized, but how, and who'll profit from it. Like the Betamax/VHS battle, there's a split developing right now between the two main companies vying to rule the digital entertainment roost: Apple (AAPL) and Sony (SNE ). The two have different strategies and different technologies, but truly reinventing the consumer electronics market may require a combination of their approaches."

redux [01.25.02]
BBC News Smart homes on trial

""Houses are already moving to online meter-reading, appliances have microprocessors in them," said Mr Devlin.

"It is inevitable that every home will be a smart home."

The Internet Home Alliance brings together a group of diverse companies, such as General Motors, Invensys, Panasonic, Hewlett-Packard and ADT Security Services."

redux [10.10.01]
The McKinsey Quarterly Home is where the network is

"Ever since the Internet entered the popular culture, futurists and technophiles have been telling the world that the new medium would transform homes into information-rich hubs of activity. Refrigerators, they predicted, would someday monitor the expiration dates on milk cartons. The family room would double as a videoconferencing theater. The toaster and the microwave would engage in endless Socratic debate.

Three or four years on, none of this has happened, and some of it may never happen, since consumers are likely to see many gee-whiz applications as more trouble than they are worth. Yet home networking is far from dead: in the past three years, the underlying technology has undergone its own quiet revolution. Big interests are at stake, and companies such as Intel, Microsoft, and 3Com have been diligently working out the bugs; others, including Cisco, Ericsson, and Pace, have been testing the new technology in homes to see how consumers react."

redux [07.28.01]
USAToday IBM's fridge doesn't just hum, it knows the words

"Imagine being paged with word that the milk in the refrigerator has spoiled. Imagine turning off the porch light at home while vacationing at the beach. In the future, when the words "home computer" take on new meaning, it might be possible. That future is on display now at an IBM lab, where researchers are testing new technology in a fully furnished living room, kitchen and garage. In the kitchen, a screen on the refrigerator tells what's inside - without opening the door. Digital stoves and microwaves cook automatically, following recipes downloaded from the Internet."

redux [01.03.01]
Feed No Place Like the Future

"IF THE JETSONS expressed post-war America's subconscious desire to live in an effortless, gadget-filled future, the Microsoft house is today's Internet economy version. Filled with PCs, wireless gizmos, and digital music players (all networked together) the Microsoft Home sets the stage "for families to begin adopting technologies into their homes that simplify daily tasks, enhance their entertainment experiences, and increase communication at home and away." At least that's what the press release says."

"This bit of publicist theater feels like nothing so much as a weirdly flawed version of those kitschy fifties industrial films that heralded the "House of Tomorrow" -- magical, futuristic places where hausfraus in pastel dresses prance around praising the inherent liberation of the robotic kitchen. But where the older films perfectly captured the mix of consumer desire and social anxiety that characterized the newly modern home, Redmond's vision of the future gives the viewer a bad case of cognitive dissonance."

redux [12.18.00]
Context Magazine Smart Homes? A Stupid Idea

"A blind enthusiasm for technological advances is a very costly habit to indulge. It ignores the real nature of peoples? busy lives, the scarcity of their attention, and the rising irritation we all have with devices that clutter our homes and confuse us. Yet, periodically, companies manage to convince one another that some big new trend is simply unstoppable. The last time this happened was in the postwar period when the hot theme was convenience. So, firms rushed to sell us electric knives and can openers, mixers, ice cream makers, electric knife sharpeners, and popcorn poppers. Did this deliver on the promise of convenience? No way.

"Smart homes" aren't inevitable. Homes will continue to get smarter, of course. But they will do so by being more responsive to our activities - directly, respectfully, gently, in ways that amuse and beguile. Above all else, in ways that are gracefully accommodating. If you want to build a really hot product, start there."

The Standard Home on the Web

"Home networking is nothing new. Homes are already thoroughly wired for lighting, security, phones and more. The Internet home will connect all of the in-home networks, then connect each with any number of outside networks. For the fridge to talk to the computer, at least two networks ? the home electrical network into which the fridge is plugged, and the telephone, firewire or wireless network into which the computer is connected ? need some way of interfacing. And if the fridge needs to send you e-mail at work, it needs some way to communicate outside the home network.

But the obvious question is, do consumers want all this interconnectivity? Will we ever really need our fridge to e-mail us that our milk is past its prime?"

"After IBM ran a series of ads in which a dishwasher repairman shows up at a home because the dishwasher contacted him for service, Parks Associates held focus groups to gauge reaction to the commercial. "Consumers absolutely hated that," says Scherf. "People want more control of their lives, not less; they want to be the one to make the call, not the dishwasher."

redux [06.27.00]
O'Reilly.Com Dialog with an Internet Toaster

""Why haven't you given me any new scripts to run for the past two months?" whined my toaster.

I was so surprised I almost dropped my Wheaties on the floor. It didn't bother me that the toaster spoke out of turn; I had installed the adaptive interface as a lark when I got the thing six months ago. What threw me was simply how many months had passed since I became bored with writing scripts to rotate English muffins or adjust the top-brown feature to the thickness of the cheese.

"Hardware problems," I said to gain time. Jeez, what was the world coming to--how could I let my own toaster make me feel guilty?"

The New York Review of Books The Threat to Patriotism

"What has al-Qaeda done to our Constitution, and to our national standards of fairness and decency? Since September 11, the government has enacted legislation, adopted policies, and threatened procedures that are not consistent with our established laws and values and would have been unthinkable before."

"The Justice Department has now detained several hundred aliens, some of them in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day. None of them has been convicted of anything at all, and many of them have been charged with only minor immigration offenses that would not by themselves remotely justify detention. It has refused repeated efforts on the part of journalists, the ACLU, and other groups even to identify these detainees. So our country now jails large numbers of people, secretly, not for what they have done, nor even with case-by-case evidence that it would be dangerous to leave them at liberty, but only because they fall within a vaguely defined class, of which some members might pose danger."

Reason Are You Camera-Ready?

"The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Washington Metropolitan Police Department plans to monitor people through hundreds of cameras on streets, in subway stations, and possibly in shopping malls and other businesses. "In the context of September 11," said Stephen Gaffigan, the official in charge of the surveillance network, "we have no choice but to accept greater use of this technology."

Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that we do have a choice. Fighting terrorism may have replaced protecting children as an all-purpose excuse for expanded government, but there is still something undeniably creepy about ubiquitous, centralized surveillance of public spaces.

Admittedly, this vague uneasiness, even if it's backed up with references to 1984 and Enemy of the State, is not enough to trump fears of terrorism. So what, exactly, is the problem with using cameras to enhance the police presence in our nation's capital (and soon, perhaps, in your town)?"

redux [11.14.01]
MSNBC Warming to Big Brother

"Khalid al-Midhar was on an INS “watch list” — and being hunted by the FBI — when he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11. A simple computer link between federal agencies could have stopped al-Midhar’s suicide mission cold. Frustrated investigators and a nervous American public are wondering why such an intelligent network of police data isn’t already in place. But a project to create that kind of gigantic database is now being built — it’s called Golden Shield, and it’s been designed by the Chinese Communist Party’s police agency to control Chinese citizens."

"Two months ago, even the thought of such a project in the U.S. would likely have elicited immediate outrage. Even today, as just described, Golden Shield might not sound very palatable."

But piece by piece, a skittish American public seems willing to go along with many of Golden Shield’s tactics."

redux [11.10.01]
Business 2.0 America's Secret Weapon

""That's the kind of thing this war needs," says Claudia Kennedy, the four-star Army general who was deputy chief of staff for intelligence until her retirement early this year. Analyzing networks requires maximum information -- phone and bank records, police, FBI, and other intelligence files -- on suspected terrorists and their associates. "You have to get everyone to agree to put in their data," Kennedy says. And if anyone balks, well, "you don't always have to ask for permission," she says.

Through such work, the topology of al Qaeda is slowly coming into focus -- and it's not a pretty picture for the United States."

NPR: Morning Edition Terror Networks

"NPR's Joe Palca examines the academic discipline known as "social network analysis," which has potential for tracking terrorist networks that are known to exist and uncovering others that were previously unknown. Law enforcement agencies already use the techniques, but broad implementation could raise personal privacy issues. (7:07)"

redux [10.04.01]
First Monday Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future

"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."

redux [10.12.01]
Fortune Above the Crowd: From Wired to Wiretapped

"In the weeks following the World Trade Center tragedy, many government officials were actively lobbying for increased Internet surveillance as a method of restricting terrorist activity."

"But putting aside any debate on civil liberties, a stronger case against the government's Internet surveillance attempts is that there may well be huge problems in both implementation and effectiveness. One predicament is just how much of the genie is already out of the bottle."

The New York Times Magazine A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
[requires 'free' registration]

"Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American future."

redux [09.27.01]
MSNBC Is FBI asking for data overload?

"The Bush administration is pressing Congress to approve the most sweeping expansion of federal law-enforcement authority since the Cold War. But would U.S. officials even know what to do with the deluge of information their new power could make available?"

"Yet even if the president gets his way, it could give rise to one of the classic problems of the information age: The capacity to produce oceans of data often isn?t matched by sufficient tools to sort and interpret it."

Database Nation Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""

Media Life 20-somethings fleeing papers for the web

"Among internet users in their twenties, the ritual of sitting down with the morning paper is gradually being displaced by a new routine: logging on for news.

People in the 20 to 29 age bracket are bypassing print newspapers for their online editions, according to a recent study from Forrester Research.

"There’s a new wave of consumers that are coming up the pike, and these consumers have been introduced to the web at a much younger age," says Christopher M. Kelley, the analyst behind the report."

redux [01.30.02]
HBS Working Knowledge Read All About It! Newspapers Lose Web War

"This paradox can be summarized: absent a sense of threat, response to disruptive opportunities is inadequate; but with threat, the fully funded response is too rigid.

We also found that a de-coupling mechanism could allow firms to capture the benefits of being motivated by the threat to their core business, without being bound by its rigidity-producing effects. By separating those who were running the business from the core organization, newspaper sites became much more innovative and received much higher market penetration. In our large sample study, sites that separate their online organizations from the newspaper were more than twice as innovative than sites that remained integrated into the newspaper. More importantly, these sites gained 60 percent higher market penetration! Thus, all else equal (similar market sites, launch date, and number of employees) separated sites were much more likely to innovate and gain traction in the market."

redux [10.19.01]
The Christian Science Monitor Is the Internet now our most serious communications medium?

"As the days and the weeks pass after the attacks of Sept. 11, an interesting development is taking place: American media is being beaten, and beaten solidly, by foreign competitors in the hunt for the stories of the new war against terrorism. This is particularly true of electronic media, whose shortcomings -- especially in terms of international coverage -- are on view for all to see. While American media seems fixated on the anthrax threat, the rest of the world is receiving better information about the larger, more complex issues."

"The limitations of other media -- time, space and depth, in particular, in various quantities -- mean that the Internet is becoming the one medium where Americans who are interested in getting the 'real facts' of the story can go to find them. Even most American media also recognize this -- witness the regular exhortations to audiences and readers to 'go to the Web to get more on this story.'"

ABCNews.Com Internet Grows as News Source

"A new ABCNEWS poll finds that nearly half of Americans now get news over the Internet, up by 11 points - perhaps 22 million individuals - since mid-1999. And just over a third of Internet news consumers say they've been going online for news more often since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."

redux [06.13.00]
Freedom Forum Web news scores above print, broadcast on credibility

"The most-credible Internet news sources are Web sites run by network or cable TV outlets or national newspapers, according to a new survey. Such well-known Internet names as America Online, Netscape and Yahoo! ranked higher on credibility than lesser-known sites."

"Among news media, continuing a trend, the Pew poll found key segments of the nation's news audience, particularly younger and better-educated Americans and those seeking financial information, are turning increasingly to the Internet."

""Increasingly, news organizations that are going to be successful have to offer news on a 24-hour basis..."

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press Investors Now Go Online for Quotes, Advice

"Traditional news outlets are feeling the impact of two distinct and powerful trends. Internet news has not only arrived, it is attracting key segments of the national audience. At the same time, growing numbers of Americans are losing the news habit. Fewer people say they enjoy following the news, and fully half pay attention to national news only when something important is happening. And more Americans than ever say they watch the news with a remote control in hand, ready to dispatch uninteresting stories. To some extent, these trends are affecting all traditional media, but broadcast news outlets -- both national and local -- have been the most adversely affected."

redux [04.20.00]
The Round Table Group M.I.T. Course Materials Free Over Web

"Young adults say the Internet, not newspapers or television, is their number one source of information, a Round Table Group survey has found.

Fifty-nine percent of Internet users in the 18- to 24-year-old age group say that their household gets more "useful information" from the Net than from newspapers; 53 percent say they receive more information from the Internet than from TV.

Fully 84 percent say that their household is more likely to use the Internet to find useful information than to go to the public library. For specific questions, 68 percent are more inclined to consult the Internet than turn to a newspaper and 67 percent are more likely to go to the Net than rely on television."

The Oregonian School in heart of tech country teaches without PCs

"Several of Swallowtail's high-tech parents say they didn't pick the school solely for its no-tech stance but support the philosophy behind it. The parents say they know computer skills are easy to learn because they work with technology all day.

"It's not rocket science to use a computer," says O'Mahony, a former Intel electrical engineer whose husband, Barry, is a senior engineer for the company.

The couple's children learn about computers at home from their parents, but, says O'Mahony, "We certainly can't teach them to paint.""

redux [11.06.01]
First Monday Computer-Mediated School Education and the Web

"The addition of the Web to the range of technologies which humans have used to mediate between themselves and the world has contributed to problems as well as advantages in the area of school education. Historical antecedents in areas such as writing, printing and industrialisation provide a context in which mediated experiences can be examined. In the 21st century, the availability of online education increases the possibility that virtual experience will be substituted for reality. There are also concerns that there will be a blurring of appearance and reality, and that cultural imperialism will continue to spread by use of the Web. Together with the observation that computer-mediation via the Web tends to reframe the central role of the teacher in the educational process, these factors are considered in terms of the need to establish future guidelines to reduce the adverse impact of the Web on school education."

redux [10.02.01]
MIT Technology Review Brave New World for Higher Education

"Sperling is the very model of an entrepreneur who has firsthand experience with the "inefficiencies" in the educational marketplace and knows how to exploit them. Sperling knows that quality education is often a secondary - or even a tertiary - concern of universities. After all, a university is not just a marketplace of ideas; it's a marketplace.

Will that marketplace be driven more by for-profit or not-for-profit sensibilities? (Or as Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman likes to put it, "tax-paying" versus "tax-exempt" sensibilities.) It's one thing for an MIT or a Stanford to benchmark itself against a Chicago or a Berkeley; but what does it mean to benchmark itself against a Phoenix or a DeVry? Or is that too ridiculous to even contemplate? Sperling has no (apparent) illusions about direct competition with the elite schools, because the fundamental missions are so different. But when it comes to opportunities in continuing education, distance learning and the Internet, he has no doubts about which kind of school is in the best position to profitably innovate."

redux [04.04.01]
The New York Times M.I.T. Course Materials Free Over Web
[requires 'free' registration]

"At a time when online knowledge can be a valuable commodity, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to offer nearly all its course materials on the Internet for free."

"The plan counters a trend toward the "privatization of knowledge," where ideas are owned by companies or institutions, said professor Steven Lerman, chairman of the MIT faculty.

The school is still considering ways to use the Internet to generate revenue, such as selling research updates to alumni, said MIT President Charles Vest. But this venture is essentially altruistic, he said."

NPR: All Things Considered MIT Classes on the Web

"Linda Wertheimer talks with Charles Vest, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about the school's offer to create a Web site for most of its classes and to post materials from each course. (4:30)"

redux [02.16.01]
The Economist Lessons of a virtual timetable

"Belief in e-learning, as it is often called, has so far weathered the downturn in the wider dotcom world. John Chambers, the influential CEO of Cisco, which supplies much of the Internet's hardware, asserts that the scale of network traffic generated by e-learning will make today?s exchange of e-mail messages look like a rounding error. But his firm's business depends on an ever-rising flood of electronic data passing over the connections which it makes for electronic networks. More disinterested voices caution against confusing the obvious need to learn computer-literacy skills with the less obvious need to learn everything else via a computer."

redux [12.04.00]
NPR: Morning Edition Higher Computer Education

"NPR's Ina Jaffe reports that more and more students are turning to computers rather than campuses to earn their college degree. This may make a college education possible for a wider range of students, but some in academia are concerned that internet degree programs only in it for the money will influence course curriculum for everyone. (7:30)"

Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks Higher Education in an Era of Digital Competition: Emerging Organizational Models

"Growing demand among learners for improved accessibility and convenience, lower costs, and direct application of content to work settings is radically changing the environment for higher education in the United States and globally. In this rapidly changing environment, which is increasingly based within the context of a global, knowledge-based economy, traditional universities are attempting to adapt purposes, structures, and programs, and new organizations are emerging in response. Organizational changes and new developments are being fueled by accelerating advances in digital communications and learning technologies that are sweeping the world. Growing demand for learning combined with these technical advances is in fact a critical pressure point for challenging the dominant assumptions and characteristics of existing traditionally organized universities in the 21st century. This combination of demand, costs, application of content and new technologies is opening the door to emerging competitors and new organizations that will compete directly with traditional universities and with each other for students and learners.

redux [05.09.00]
Netfuture Who's Killing Higher Education? (or is it suicide?)

"A growing consensus holds that new information technologies foretell the end of higher education as we have known it. I suspect this is true. Its truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end -- the final perfection and dead-end extreme -- of the old regime's shortcomings."

"All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the corporation's "crushing solicitude". (The phrase is William F. Buckley's which he applied many years ago to the ministrations of centralized government.) I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and procedures, then business -- already attuned to such computationally rigorous training -- will far outperform the university.

In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training grounds for business -- which is what the information-transfer model of education implies -- universities are now finding that business is better situated to train its own employees than schools are. At best the universities will simply hire themselves out to corporations.

redux [07.06.00]