06 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Paradigm Shift: Everyone Will have a Timeline
In 10 years, every human connected to the Internet will have a timeline. It will contain everything we’ve done since we started recording, and it will be the primary tool with which we administer our lives. This will fundamentally change how we live, love, work, and play. And we’ll look back at the time before our feed started — before Year Zero — as a huge, unknowable black hole.
This timeline — beginning for newborns at Year Zero — will be so intrinsic to life that it will quic...
1 The ubiquitous tracking of so much data on everyone means we are entering a new age.
10 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
How Science Enriches our Lives
The most obvious is the exhilarating achievement of scientific knowledge itself. We can say much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental life. Better still, this understanding consists not in a mere listing of facts, but in deep and elegant principles, like the insight that life depends on a molecule that carries information, directs metabolism, and replicates i...The creation of knowledge and improving our quality of life.
07 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Privacy is Impossible on the Internet
The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him;105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.
[...]
Sure, we can take measures to pr...Folksonomies: privacy sousveillance
Folksonomies: privacy sousveillance
1 
notes
notesThere are too many companies gathering too much data in too many ways.
23 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Be Careful What You Worship
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my de...Folksonomies: mindfulness cognizance
Folksonomies: mindfulness cognizance
1 notes
notesBe mindful, don't accept the default settings that society constructs for us.
10 FEB 2011 by ideonexus
Latinos Less Likely to Be Online Than Whites
While about two-thirds of Latino (65%) and black (66%) adults went online in 2010, more than three-fourths (77%) of white adults did so. In terms of broadband use at home, there is a large gap between Latinos (45%) and whites (65%), and the rate among blacks (52%) is somewhat higher than that of Latinos. Fully 85% of whites owned a cell phone in 2010, compared with 76% of Latinos and 79% of blacks.
Hispanics, on average, have lower levels of education and earn less than whites. Controlling f...
1 Hispanics are less likely to use the Internet, but if you control for socioeconomic disparities, this difference becomes much less.
26 DEC 2010 by ideonexus
Look at a Four Way Stop Intersection to See Why Civilizat...
First, if you want to see clues about our future, step away from your computer screen. Go outside and stand near a four-way intersection that’s regulated only by stop signs.
Watch for a while as drivers take turns, not-quite-stopping while they gauge each others’ intentions, negotiating rapid deals with nods and flashes of eye-contact. You’ll spot some rudeness, certainly. But exceptions seldom rattle this silent dance of brief courtesies and tacit bargains — a strange...Folksonomies: centrism
Folksonomies: centrism
Civilization works because we work together, taking turns, and negotiating deals. The fact that it is in our nature to do so is apparent when you watch civilization in action at the microcosm of a four-way stop intersection.
