Sunday, July 19, 2009

Social Networking (Facebook) Insights

While I am technologist, I had purposefully stayed away from social networking sites such as Facebook for a variety of reasons. In an effort to continue communication with several people from my doctoral cohort I started a Facebook account. I am now among the masses.

An interesting thing happened upon creating this account... within 48 hours I had 56 friends, of which 25 are past students of mine spanning over 16 years. This is an interesting example in networking/graph theory. This will be used in my Discrete Mathematics course this fall for discussion.

This phenomena evokes several questions, predominately ... "What is so compelling about this technology?" Its appeal is generationally independent; case in point, my grandfather of 92 has his own Facebook page. (Yes, a 92 year old had a page before his grandson, a computer science professor) Watching the posts over the last two days is quite amazing. The cumulative amount of time and effort expended for all these posts is quite significant. Is their an ingrained need for people to "expose" details (at times highly personal) to various layers of their social circle to the sacrifice of their personal privacy? Does this need to share overpower ones need to guard privacy?

Defenders would say "All the information is already out there... so what's the big deal [dad]?" While this may be true, it is all in one place for easy access. This makes data mining a trivial task. How much is your identity worth? Every person needs to ask themselves this question. It is not a single piece of information that is harmful, it is the collection of individual data that creates a digital profile over time that quite possibly provides a leverage to those whom you might not otherwise grant power over you. Remember... information is power and this information will most likely persist indefinitely.


Saturday, July 18, 2009

The Sixth Sense - Future Technology


Pattie Maes from MIT's Media Lab demonstrates a prototype of wearable computing in her video on TED (http://www.ted.com) She calls it the "Sixth Sense" The concept of this device allows for real-time manipulation of information with natural movement. The device keys off of four color caps worn on four fingers. A camera tracks the movements of your hands while a projector allows for manipulation upon any surface. The device acts similar to that of Microsoft's Surface (http://www.microsoft.com/surface/) however it is not limited to a specific surface.

Need to know the time? Draw a watch on your arm with your finger and a watch appears with the time. Shopping for a book in a bookstore, pick up a book and the Amazon rating is displayed on the cover. These and other examples are shown in Dr. Maes' video.

A very interesting watch... enjoy.