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Produced and hosted by Jon Gordon, Future Tense brings you the latest technology topics in daily five-minute capsules. From electronic privacy and digital democracy to spam and computer worms, Future Tense keeps you up to date on the rapidly changing world of technology.
Future Tense is heard in the United States during broadcasts of the CBC's As It Happens.
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A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds that the Internet and mobile phones do not lead to social isolation, as some previous research suggested. In fact, there's plenty of evidence that people who spend a lot of time online have fuller social lives.
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The Open Source Digital Voting Foundation is spearheading a project to build new voting machines to replace proprietary systems currently in place. The group is in the second year of a an eight-year plan to produce a publicly-owned, open source election system. OSDV has turned loose its first batch of software code for technical review.
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Part two of our interview with Wired's Robert Capps
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We love MP3s even though they sound inferior to CDs. We can't get by without our mobile phones even though they've tended to sound worse than land lines. We're watching more TV shows and movies on our little computer screens, even as our big TVs sit idle in the next room. It's the Good Enough Revolution.
Guest: Robert Capps, Wired
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In Wired magazine, Nicholas Thompson writes about system known as Dead Hand. It was designed by Soviet scientists in the mid 1980s to automatically retaliate against a nuclear strike from the U.S.
Thompson's new book on the cold war is The Hawk and the Dove.
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Libraries are taking a recession-induced hit even as they become more important for people seeking their way out of economic hard times, according to a new report from the American Library Association.
Guest: John Bertot, professor and director of the Center for Library and Information Innovation at the University of Maryland College Park
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Yesterday we heard from Fordham University Law associate professor Zephyr Teachout, who predicted that the Internet would cause the next generation to turn away from college campuses in favor of online education.
Today we have a rebuttal from John Sener, an online learning consultant and director of special initiatives for the Sloan Consortium, a group that promotes online education.
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Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by the Internet, according to Zephyr Teachout, associate professor of law at Fordham University.
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A survey by the nonprofit Conference Board shows that nearly a quarter of households in the U.S. now watch television programs on the Internet.
The average sentence length of a Twitter message is 1.40 sentences. Gerunds are more popular on Twitter than off. The second most popular word on Twitter is "I."
These are a few of the things the Oxford English Dictionary has learned by studying millions of Twitter messages.
Guest: Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the OED
This segment originally aired June 8, 2009
Exponential advances in technology will result in the merging of humans and machines in this century, according to renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.
This theoretical point in time when computers gain a kind of super intelligence, and we humans incorporate remarkable computing power into our own bodies, is known as the "technological singularity."
Guest: Patrick Tucker, The Futurist
Iconic Internet company Craigslist is a strange beast: The founder of the simple, text-based online classified site spends a great deal of his time as a customer service rep reading ad submissions and responding to complaints; the company refuses to adopt new features that most users expect from other sites; and Craigslist intentionally limits its profitability by charging for only a few kinds of classified ads.
Guest: Gary Wolf, Wired
New data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds young people aged 12 to 17 have adopted cell phones at nearly the same rate as adults. The small gap that exists now was much larger five years ago, according to Pew's Amanda Lenhart.
A recognized genius in mathematics, cryptography, and computer science, Alan Turing cracked German naval code in World War II, and is thought to be the father of modern computer science. Despite his achievements he was treated poorly in his home country of Great Britain, which prosecuted him for homosexual acts, which were illegal at the time. That treatment likely led to his suicide in 1954 at the age of 41.
John Graham-Cumming, a British computer programmer, believes Turing is owed an apology.
Fueled by the Internet, the verb "fail" is being transformed into a noun, an interjection, and even an adjective.
Guest: Ben Zimmer, Visual Thesaurus
In the final part of our series on mobile phone choice, we hear from a woman who gave up her iPhone, and a man who says he loves iPhones but would never actually buy one.
Today we feature part 2 of out interview with Lawrence R. Samuel, author of Future: A Recent History. We discuss Al Gore, Ray Kurzweil, and Steve Martin.
Futurism has seen better times than the last 15 years, according to Lawrence R. Samuel, author of Future: A Recent History.
In part 1 of our interview, Samuel talks about how caution and timidity have infected futurists.
Today, part two of our conversation with Ronald Arkin, author of Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots
Unmanned aerial vehicles and other robots are taking on an ever-larger role in how the U.S. wages war. Fully autonomous battle robots seem inevitable. One researcher is committed to the notion that battle robots should be imbued with ethical decision-making technology.
Guest: Ronald Arkin, author of Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots
For seven months the New York Times managed to bury news of the kidnapping of one of its reporters by the Taliban. It also worked with Wikipedia to quash any mention of the kidnapping, and in doing so raised some questions about the very nature of the online encyclopedia.
Guest: Wikipedia researcher Joseph M. Reagle, adjunct professor at NYU
More coverage of this story:
Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia (New York Times)
Why Wikipedia was right to stop the revelation of David Rohde's kidnapping (TimesOnline)
The Troubles of Crowdsourcing: How Do You Keep a Secret? (Mashable)
Wales quashes kidnapping on Wikipedia (TECH.BLORGE)
Future Tense commentator Dwight Silverman checks in on the thorny issue of using iPhones, BlackBerries and other smart phones during business meetings (and to Tweet that you're eating lunch with a friend you're ignoring in order to send that Tweet).
Researchers at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University analyzed about 35,000 active Arabic language Weblogs in 18 different countries. One of the more interesting findings, according to Harvard's Bruce Etling, is bloggers tend to write mostly about their own towns and countries rather than wider, regional issues.
Today, part two of our conversation with Bill Wasik, author of And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture
Culture in the digital age is being created from the ground up, and just about anyone with a computer or smartphone can become a content-producing superstar, according to Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper's magazine and author of the new book And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture.
Charity is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, blogs and other social media. Mashable.com, which covers the world of social media, is hoping to change that. Mashable's Summer of Social Good project - which runs through August - is attempting to light a fire under social media users by encouraging them to donate money to four charities: The Humane Society, Oxfam America, Livestrong and the World Wildlife Federation.
The average sentence length of a Twitter message is 1.40 sentences. Gerunds are more popular on Twitter than off. The second most popular word on Twitter is "I."
These are a few of the things the Oxford English Dictionary has learned by studying millions of Twitter messages.
Guest: Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the OED
Online classified ad site Craigslist is dropping its controversial "erotic services" category -- but adding a new one called "adult services" in which all ad submissions will be screened before they're posted.
Guest: Greg Sandoval, CNET News.com
A team of scientists at Yahoo Research studied the time of day that 125,000 students at U.S. and European universities sent e-mail. Yahoo research scientist Duncan Watts says people fall into one of two groups -- "day laborers" and "emailholics."
Also mentioned today:
Baiting Nigerian Scammers For Fun (Ars Technica)
10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media (Mashable)
California prison authorities confiscated 2800 cell phones from inmates last year - double the number the year before. And now a proposal being debated in California would make it a crime for the state's approximately 170,00 inmates to possess cell phones and for people to sneak them into prisons. Right now cell phones are banned from California prisons but not illegal.
Yahoo announced last week it would shut down its GeoCities personal website service later this year. Yahoo paid about $3 billion for the company in 1999.
Geocities allowed users to design personal websites. but the pioneering service has long since been eclipsed by blogs and social networks.
What will become of the million-plus GeoCities home pages out there? Yahoo is saying only that it will provide details later this summer on how customers can save their own data.
Jason Scott believes GeoCities deserves saving. Scott runs textfiles.com, a site devoted to computer history. He's lead organizer for a new group called the Archive Team, which is working to rescue a growing body of endangered Internet content, including GeoCities.
In a new report the Pew Internet and American Life Project places American adults into ten different technology user categories -- from the persistently offline to the constantly connected.
In her new book The Trouble with Boys, former Newsweek education reporter Peg Tyre argues schools and parents do boys a disservice when they rein in boys' natural play that involves fantasy violence -- like a little game of cops and robbers. "There is a palpable sense," she writes, "that the ways in which boys play need to be suppressed or rigidly controlled." Such control, she argues, inhibits boys' ability to learn and understand the world. Violent video games, she says, could be beneficial as an outlet for naturally violent tendencies.
As federal agencies decide how to spend $7 billion dollars allocated for high speed Internet deployment from the recently-passed stimulus package, a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture attempts to quantify the extent of the digital divide between urban and rural America. The USDA says 72.6 percent of urban dwellers use the Internet somewhere, compared to 63.3 percent of rural residents. Internet penetration is lowest in the rural south.
The city-country gap is much bigger when it comes to broadband deployment.
Advocacy group Free Press, which campaigns for universal broadband, has just released a report called Five Days On the Digital Dirt Road which attempts to put a human face on the digital divide.
Ever notice how fast kids kids seem to learn intricate video games? There's a school of thought that says there's something about the nature of games that help kids learn effectively -- perhaps more so than in traditional school-based learning. There's a new public school opening soon in New York City that aims to use game design principles to create immersive, game-like learning experiences for students. Quest to Learn is a grade six through 12 school that will open its doors in the fall.
Researchers from Coventry University in the U.K. studied 88 children between the ages of 10 and 12 to help understand the impact of text messaging on their language skills. They found that the use text messaging shortcuts could be helping children read better.
The study is published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.
On the new site Academic Earth you can watch lectures on physics from M.I.T., or catch a Yale history course on the origins of World War I, or see a U.C. Berkeley professor cradle a brain while she talks about human anatomy.
Backed by angel funding, Academic Earth aims to bring videotaped university courses and lectures to a wide audience.
Other stories mentioned:
What the Web Knows About You (Computerworld)
Google and the Future of Books (NY Review of Books)
In a new scholarly journal article, Texas A&M psychology professor Christopher Ferguson argues there is no significant relationship between violent video games school shootings like those at Virginia Tech and Columbine High School. A sense of "moral panic" rather then good science is driving many people to conclude that violent games lead to violent acts, said Ferguson.
Ferguson's article appears in the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling.
A task force charged with assessing technologies for protecting children from unwanted contact online has concluded that fears of Internet sexual predators are overblown.
The Internet Safety Technical Task Force, led by Harvard University, grew out of an agreement reached between MySpace and 49 state attorneys general a year ago.
(Some audio excerpted from podcast by Berkman Center for Internet and Society)
Thirty-five percent of adults who go online have accounts on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networks, according to new survey data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Just eight percent were on social networking sites four years ago.
New research finds that more than half who adolescents who use the social networking MySpace have posted information about sex, substance abuse or violence. The research, published in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, also shows adult attention can help kids be savvier about what they disclose online.
CNN's Rick Sanchez is not high on crack as his recent Twitter update stated. Sanchez had his account hacked, as did dozens of other users of the microblogging service.
Other recent victims include the President-elect, Britney Spears, and Fox News.
And over the last few days Twitter users received a series of messages promising free iPhones and debt relief. The messages directed them to a site that asked for their user names and passwords.
Guest: Dan Tynan
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded about $7 million in grants for faster Internet connections at public libraries in seven states. The grants are seed money to help libraries attract long-term financial support for high-speed access.
A few years ago doctors removed Rob Spence's right eye. He damaged it more than 20 years ago while shooting his grandfather's gun on a trip to Ireland.
Now the 36 year-old Canadian documentary film maker is working with a team of scientists to implant a camera in his prosthetic eye. Spence plans to use the eye-cam to shoot scenes for a new film, which will examine the perils of surveillance by camera.
Here is a longer version of my interview with Spence:
Adam Jackson left Florida 6 months ago on a whim - to chase the dream of working in San Francisco's tech industry. He hurriedly rented the first apartment he saw, unaware the 6th floor unit sits at the edge of the city's sketchy Tenderloin neighborhood -- known in part for its high crime rate, massage parlors and abundant liquor stores.
Wanting to show folks back home what life was like at the intersection of Ellis and Taylor streets, he decided to point a 24-hour Web cam at the corner.
Clips from Jackson's camera can be found on YouTube. Here's one:
The annual Video Game Report Card came out this week. It's the thirteenth year for the influential report from the National Institute on Media and the Family, which has consistently criticized the violent nature of some games. This year the Institute gives good grades, saying game makers and retailers are taking effective measure to limit kids' exposure to violent and inappropriate content.
The report comes on the heels of recent studies suggesting that video games have positive effects on learning, social development, technology literacy, and civic participation.
We asked David Walsh, director of the Institute, to provide us with the research he finds most persuasive in showing that violent games are harmful to children. Here is what he wrote:
The book that I mentioned which gives a good overview of the research is Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents: Research, Theory and Public Policy by Craig Anderson, Douglas Gentile and Katherine Buckley (Oxford University Press, 2007). A recent longitudinal and cross cultural study is "Longitudinal effects of violent video games on aggression in Japan and the United States" Pediatrics, (2008) 122, e1067-1072. A meta-analysis that examines the statistical power of the body of video game research is found in Anderson, C.A. (2004). An update on the effects of playing violent video games. Journal of Adolescence, 27, 113-122. An example of the brain based research I mentioned is summarized as follows: Teenagers' brains are fired up by violent video games, while at the same time areas of the brain associated with self control become subdued, say researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine.Dr. Vincent Mathews, head researcher, explained that this study shows, for the first time, that violent video games affect the physiology of the brain and the way it functions. He said the teenagers had increased activity in the amygdala, an area of the brain involved in emotional arousal. "At the same time, they had decreases in activity in parts of the brain which are involved in self-control," he said.
Video games are big business - in the USA alone sales hit over $10 billion in 2005.
44 teenagers were randomly asked to either play a violent video game or a non-violent one, for half-an-hour, after which they underwent an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). An fMRI measures changes that take place in the active brain in real time. The teenagers of either group did not differ in age, IQ or gender.
They found that those who had played the violent games had more activity going on in the amygdala, as opposed to the teenagers who played the non-violent games (who did not have more activity there). Those playing the violent games also had lower activity in prefrontal areas of the brain - these areas are associated with self control, inhibition and focus (concentration), compared to the non-violent game players (who did not have lower activity there).
Dr. Mathews presented the findings at the Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
"Short-term Effects of Violent Video Game Playing: An fMRI Study"
Vincent Mathews, M.D., Yang Wang, M.D., Andrew J. Kalnin, M.D., Kristine M. Mosier, D.M.D., Ph.D., David W. Dunn, M.D., and William G. Kronenberger, Ph.D
Many Americans mistakenly conclude they have a rare illness after attempting self-diagnosis on the Internet, according to a new study by researchers from Microsoft.
The company conducted the study to improve its own search engine.
Microsoft studied health-related Web searches on popular search engines and surveyed 500 of its employees about their health-related searching.
Web search engines can increase our health-related anxieties and lead us to believe worst-case scenarios, said Microsoft's Eric Horvitz, an artificial intelligence expert and medical school graduate.
A new study by the MacArthur Foundation finds teenagers learn important social and technology literacy skills when they spend time on MySpace, send instant messages, and generally hang out with their friends online.
Fifteen percent of people who had some piece of technology break down in the previous year were never able to get it repaired, according to a new survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. That figure is even higher for cell phones - as one in four people report an unresolved problem.
Popular online classified ad site craigslist has introduced new rules aimed at reducing ads placed by prostitutes and pimps. The San Francisco company is now charging a small fee and requiring credit card verification for postings in the "erotic services" section of the site. Advertisers must also supply a working phone number. Craigslist promises to donate revenue generated from ads to charity.
Guest: Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica
This Sunday's 60 Minutes exposes what looks like a ghastly e-waste dismantling facility in Guiyu, China. Thugs overseeing the dump jumped Scott Pelley and his crew, but the newsies managed to get out with their cameras.
The Chinese attackers were trying to protect a lucrative business of mining the e-waste-junked computers, televisions and other old electronic products-for valuable components, including gold. "They're afraid of being found out. This is smuggling. This is illegal," says Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, a group working to stop the dumping of toxic materials in poor countries that certifies ethical e-waste recyclers in the United States. "A lot of people are turning a blind eye here. And if somebody makes enough noise, they're afraid this is all going to dry up."
Here's John McCain talking tech at the All Things D conference in 2007.
There's little doubt that computers, cell phones and the Internet have stirred up our culture and economy -- but a prominent neuroscientist argues they're physically altering our brains as well.
In his new book, "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," UCLA's Gary Small posits that technology has great influence over our emotions, intelligence, language processing and social interactions.
Update: Here's part two of our conversation:
It was cold where Glen Martin lived in New Zealand and one of the few places to stay warm was the library. There he read what he needed to become a biochemist but to take a break he read the Wright Brothers diaries and studied what it would take to build a jetpack.
It paid off at the world's biggest public airshow at Oshkosh Wisconsin in July. He unveiled the Martin Jetpack, a two-engine, gasoline powered backpack that can lift a 280-pound person and transport that person through the air.
Martin's Jetpack, for which people -- mostly in the United States -- have plunked down a $10,000 deposit, is now undergoing flight testing. It uses gasoline, can fly for a half hour, and, theoretically, can fly to 8,000 feet.
He figured a few rich people would buy one, but that most people wouldn't be interested in the concept, until 10,000 people showed up to see it in Wisconsin in July. That, he says, has changed who he thinks might buy a jetpack.
The Experimental Aircraft Association produced the following video following the demonstration in July.
If you'd like to hear more from Glenn Martin, here's the unedited (for broadcast) interview.
The Internet and cell phones are bringing family members together rather than creating isolation, according to a new study.
Based on a recent survey of 2,252 adults, the traditional nuclear family has the highest rate of technology usage among all household types, according to University of Toronto sociologist Barry Wellman and researchers from the Pew Internet and American Life project.
inside those families, parents and children are using cell phones, texting and e-mail to forge a new kind of connectedness, said Wellman.
Megan Wiseman feels like she probably should buy a video game console or two, plus a handful of games -- she works as a technical writer for a video game company and needs to stay on top of the industry.
But with the stock market plunging, job losses increasing, and the threat of greater inflation, she's resisting. The Raleigh, North Carolina resident dumped her cell phone plan in favor of a cheaper pay-as-you-go phone.
"I kind of miss having a gadgety phone and I've been kind of trying to think of how I can work that back into my budget but it just hasn't really been possible," she said.
It's not just the cell phone. Wiseman's also saving money on television.
"I used to have digital cable, you know having a DVR and nifty technology where you can record and fast forward and back up," she said. "And I just couldn't afford that so I just have plain old basic cable."
Wiseman and other members of American Public Media's Public Insight Network recently responded to a questionnaire about how the economy is forcing them to change their technology spending habits.
Derek Hansell, who staffs a technology help desk at a biotech firm in Clinton, New Jersey, said his tech spending has fallen by the wayside. If it weren't for the bleak economic outlook, Hansell said he might now be the proud owner of a 3G iPhone and a new computer graphics card.
"Splurging on technology was something I did readily even just a few years ago," he said. "Those kinds of things just aren't happening anymore."
Hansell is even cutting back on small purchases like 99 cent songs from iTunes.
Ellen Crain, a home-schooling mother from Hudson, Wisconsin, feels she needs to save money to soften the blow of a deep recession, so she's nixing any new cell phones, and found a creative solution to the recent demise of her DirecTV receiver.
"I ended up calling my parents who had had the same satellite service and had switched over to cable and they shipped me their old box that had been sitting in the basement," she said. "So we've upgraded to my parents hand-me-downs."
Scary economic news actually prompted one person to make a big purchase. Software writer Lisa Twede of Burbank, California bought a computer so she could work more hours outside the office as a way to boost her standing in the eye of her company.
"I had to buy a laptop so I could work from wherever and it's turned out to be quite a blessing because I can kind of like take even more vacations now because I can just take the laptop with me," she said. "I just went to Canada and I just worked there for a week."
An urgency to spend money before it's gone prompted Anna B. Scott, an assistant professor of dance history and theory, to requisition a much-needed external hard drive from her school, the University of California Riverside. She's afraid her budget is about to dry up.
"So I just went ahead and found an external drive that came in under $250 and I'm going to use some of my research funds to get that," she said.
Not everyone is cutting back on technology of course. Some people told us they're vetoing other household budget items to protect their need for tech.
Sign up for American Public Media's Public Insight Network
David Ewing Duncan writes in the latest issue of Portfolio magazine, "While we're spending hundreds of billions to bail out financial institutions, why not also bail in the future by investing more in science and technology?"
The government should pour money into things like green technology and basic infrastructure, said Duncan, who's written for the Atlantic, National Geographic, and the New York Times.
On today's show, Lem Fugitt of Robots Dreams reviews Rovio, a new domestic robot designed for remotely-controlled Web chats and friendly surveillance.
Here are some videos of Rovio in action:
Three-fourths of American teenagers say they've been bullied online, but only one in ten tells their parents, according to a new survey by UCLA.
With data from social networks and search engines, cultural tipping points, as described by Malcolm Gladwell, can be spotted online, according to Bill Tancer of Hitwise.
We already know that people tend to be nastier in e-mail than pen and paper. Now some university researchers say workers are significantly more likely to lie in e-mail messages than hand-written notes.
Guest: Terri Kurtzberg, Rutgers University
Today we feature part two of our conversation with Business Week reporter Steve Baker, author of The Numerati.
