There is a stupid but recurring joke that we should give fake bluetooth headsets to the homeless. That way, when they talk to themselves they won’t seem crazy. The Washington Post covered this important issue, back in 2006. “[It’s not] always easy to tell which is which,” says staff writer Darragh Johnson, “in the game of Crazy? Or cellphone?” photo credit: Mr. Adrian Camera What’s so interesting about this joke is the story that it tells about discomfort and avoidance. It’s an instance of the same forces that drove shoppers into the arcades and then city-dwellers into the…
Cyborgs
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He's not Houseless. He's Technomadic.
Quiet Babylon - Cyborgs & Architects13 Mar 2012 | 12:02 am
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Quiet Babylon - Cyborgs & Architects
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He's not Houseless. He's Technomadic.
13 Mar 2012 | 12:02 amThere is a stupid but recurring joke that we should give fake bluetooth headsets to the homeless. That way, when they talk to themselves they won’t seem crazy. The Washington Post covered this important issue, back in 2006. “[It’s not] always easy to tell which is which,” says staff writer Darragh Johnson, “in the game of Crazy? Or cellphone?” photo credit: Mr. Adrian Camera What’s so interesting about this joke is the story that it tells about discomfort and avoidance. It’s an instance of the same forces that drove shoppers into the arcades and then city-dwellers into the… -
The Freelance Panoptiswarm
26 Dec 2011 | 7:07 amHere’s a glimpse of the future: Ubiquitous cheap sensors. Perpetual freelance surveillance. Relentless sunlight, directed by shoals of shadowy interest groups. It has been a bounteous season for panoptiswarm-related news (previously: 1, 2, 3). Sea Shepherd has drones now. They are using them to track the Japanese whaling fleet. Occupy has a drone. It is called the occucopter. There is a thing called the Drone Journalism Lab. They just unboxed their first drone. photo credit: elbflorenz As they document their first experiments with flying the thing and with hacking around the controls and… -
The Perils of Personality
8 Dec 2011 | 6:58 amThis is another installment in an ongoing meditation on Matt Jones’ admonition that robots should BASAAP. photo credit: Andreas Kristensson It was my term for a bunch of things that encompass some 3rd rail issues for UI designers like proactive personalisation and interaction, examined in the work of Byron and Nass, exemplified by (and forever-after-vilified-as) Microsoft’s Bob and Clippy (RIP). A bunch of things about bots and daemons, conversational interface. And lately, a bunch of things about machine learning – and for want of a better term, consumer-grade artificial intelligence. -
The Complicated Ethics of the Unborn
5 Dec 2011 | 7:31 am1. The first thing I think about when I think about the rights of the unborn is the odious fight against a woman’s right to choose. To whit, Mississippi’s recently failed Initiative 26 which tried to grant full rights to a fertilized egg. Let’s call that the sledgehammer approach. Then there is the scalpel approach, such as Canada’s proposed Unborn Victims of Crime Act or the US’s (enacted) Unborn Victims of Violence Act. These and other acts that try to restrict access to abortion pick at grey areas and blurry lines. The Unborn Victims acts in particular attempt to codify the… -
The State of the Occupied Panoptiswarm
23 Nov 2011 | 6:50 am1. Friend of Quiet Babylon, Quinn Norton was in New York when the police evicted Occupy Wall Street from from Zuccotti park. In an effort to give her some protection from the baton and pepper spray happy NYPD, Wired tried to get her press credentials. It didn’t go well. Wired has been trying to get NYPD press credentials for freelancer Quinn Norton, who is on special assignment to cover the Occupy movement. Even before this week’s arrests, the NYPD made it clear they would not issue her credentials, as she first had to comply with Kafka-esque rules, such as proving she’d already covered…
