This week: Gartner’s latest hype cycle addresses the relationship between humans and machines, moral panics about our attention and time resurface, UPS optimizes drop offs around the happiness of drivers, Bitcoin’s regulatory environment gets messy, and data brokers take steps towards improved consumer transparency. As always, if you want to keep up with what we’re reading/thinking about on a weekly basis, the best way is to subscribe to the “else” feed, either as an email newsletter or through RSS.
Gartner’s 2013 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps Out Evolving Relationship Between Humans and Machines – Gartner
Gartner’s latest hype cycle on emerging technologies focuses on the relationship between humans and machines. Any one of these technologies stand as examples of how data is shaping our world, and how our world is becoming data.
Google Glass and a Futuristic Vision of Fashion – Vogue
Wearable tech gets the haute couture treatment in the September issue of Vogue. The spread mixes retrofuturist aesthetic with modernist architecture. This isn’t the first time Google Glass has gone high-fashion.
We’ve seen a streak of moral panics about how technology is changing how we relate to others around us; that we are getting out of touch with being present. Rebecca Solnit walks through the evolution, and does a poetic job of noting how we’re letting technology break up our time, and how we might reconnect with the physical world. Mike Rugnetta cuts through the language that gives agency to our devices, when we should be taking ownership over our decisions about how we use technology. Charlene deGuzman’s painful but true I Forgot My Phone gets the NYT treatment, and Clive Thompson suggests that Glass will only be most useful to interrupt or augment our attention when it matters.
The Giant Hurdle For The Internet Of Things – Popsci
What will the protocol to connect and integrate the the Internet of Things look like? There’s lots of work to be done here. Larger, cheaper wireless networks like Flutter could help connect sensor devices.
Unhappy Truckers and Other Algorithmic Problems – Nautilus
Tom Vanderbilt (author of Traffic, which we’ve also been reading), writes about the challenges of modeling the human aspects of the traveling salesman problem in UPS delivery optimization. “But modeling the real world, with constraints like melting ice cream and idiosyncratic human behavior, is often where the real challenge lies.”
Bitcoin’s complex and changing regulatory environment – Pandodaily
As cryptographic currencies like Bitcoin gain policy makers’ and regulators‘ attention, things are getting complicated.
A Data Broker Offers a Peek Behind the Curtain – NYTimes
Acxiom will launch a consumer-facing data management interface at AbouttheData.com to give us the opportunity to update and correct the demographic data they have on us. This is an important step towards improved communication and transparency between data brokers and consumers. (Caveat: John is on the Board of Acxiom.)
Health apps run into privacy snags – FT
Research reveals how free health tracking apps like MapMyRun are sharing their data (with as many as 70 third parties). Another reminder that free services are never really free.
Thoughts on privacy – Doc Searls
Doc Searls walks us through a brief history of privacy and the internet. He talks about the human instinct to talk about privacy as a bodily sense of ownership; our physical world norms aren’t matching up with digital realities. Our take: we still haven’t caught up with those evolving norms, but what if we are moving towards a hybrid reality where physical and digital norms are merging?