Bridging the gap between email/IM and Web

/ Media Technology

I recently came across two programs for helping transfer large files via instant messenger or email. I see both these systems as gap-bridgers — they bridge between the spontaneity of email/IM and the robust and recipient-controlled download you get with Web browsers. Since the Internet abhors a gap, I’ve no doubt this difference in functionality will go away in the near future, especially as Web-based protocols are further integrated into the OS and file systems.

  • DropLoad (http://dropload.com/) is a donation-ware website where you can upload a file (using the web-browser upload) and indicate an email address you want the file “sent” to. That recipient then gets sent a random-hash URL to the uploaded file. Files are deleted after 48 hours or once they are downloaded, whichever comes first.
  • HFS (http://www.rejetto.com/hfs/guide/) is a webserver where you can drag & drop files onto the server and get a new URL for the file automatically put in your clipboard. You can also create “virtual folders” that are essentially directories on the webpage. I’ve not tried this one, but it feels like a more lightweight (and potentially temporary) approach to what WebDav or shared file systems do.

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Financial Engineering News on DARPA’s futures market

/ Politics

Nice analysis of DARPA’s geopolitical futures markets (discussed in previous posts here and here) in the Financial Engineering News. From the conclusion:

“Even if there were not any moral issues surrounding them, these futures are not a very smart thing to do. That is simply because there is a lot more information out there about what is going on geopolitical and terrorist-wise than what would ever come about from a market,” comments Gordon Woo, a risk modeler at RMS. Indeed, one betting shop manager in the U.S. already admitted that success in his business depends on knowing when a new book or report on terrorism or foreign affairs is coming out so he can close his book beforehand. The head of quantitative research at one large investment bank put it more bluntly: “I think the fact that officials in Washington considered this in the first place makes the U.S. government look totally bereft of common sense when it comes to the threat of terrorism.” He adds: “The point is that the market would allow any terrorist group to simply plan an attack and then have someone [or more] place a bet on it and make a pot of money. This is logical, but also immoral.”

References

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Number mobility: 26 days and still holding

/ Media Technology

I got a new cellphone back on December 5th, swapping out my T-Mobile Sidekick for an AT&T Treo 600 (both good phones, but AT&T has much better coverage in my area). I also signed up to transfer my T-mobile number over to my new phone.

Twenty-six days and about 8 hours on hold with technical support later and I’m still waiting for my number to be transferred. The problem is a classic multi-system gridlock. AT&T sent a request for number transfer to T-mobile through Telcordia, an intermediary that handles number portability communication between the various telcos. They then sent a follow-up with more information, but the follow-up arrived at T-mobile before the main request arrived. This wedged T-mobile’s system and caused both requests to be dropped. Now T-mobile is asking AT&T to cancel and resubmit the request, because they can’t get their side unwedged. Unfortunately, AT&T’s system can’t cancel requests that are awaiting a response. Gridlock.

There’s no one person to blame here. T-mobile’s system clearly shouldn’t have gotten wedged so easily, Telcordia shouldn’t have delivered messages out of order, and AT&T shouldn’t have sat on the request for three weeks when they thought the ball wasn’t in their court. Most importantly, both telcos need more staff to cut through the hour+ hold times.

At long last I’ve gotten the problem escalated at AT&T, thanks to a dedicated number mobility group member named Andrea who was willing to wait through T-mobile’s hold time and patch me into the call. They now say it’ll be another 48-72 hours, which will bring them just under the 30-day return policy on my new phone. Here’s hoping…

Update: And 29 days after purchase, my new phone finally takes calls! (And there was much rejoicing.) FYI, you can cut to the head of AT&T’s customer support queue by dialing 1-888-799-1305 and selecting 3G and English. This is the priority queue used by AT&T stores, though customers can also use it. (Thanks to Nelson and Vyruz Reaper for the number.)

Number mobility: 26 days and still holding Read More »

The Deceitful Krauthammer

/ Media

Last Friday, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote a rather snide piece on Howard Dean, drawing on his own previous career as a psychiatrist to diagnose what he calls “Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.” With obligatory sideswipe at Barbra Streisand, he paints Dean as a previously sane and intelligent man struck by this new disease, and uses two quotes from recent interviews to back up his tongue-in-cheek diagnosis.

Now I have no problem with snide columnists, though sometimes I wish there weren’t quite so many of them. However, I do have problems with columnists who deliberate edit quotes to make readers think something was said that wasn’t. Here’s one of Krauthammer’s quotes — play along at home and see if you can spot where he tries to pull the wool over your eyes:

That’s what has researchers so alarmed about Dean. He had none of the usual risk factors: Dean has never opined for a living and has no detectable sense of humor. Even worse is the fact that he is now exhibiting symptoms of a related illness, Murdoch Derangement Syndrome (MDS), in which otherwise normal people believe that their minds are being controlled by a single, very clever Australian.

Chris Matthews: “Would you break up Fox?”

Howard Dean: “On ideological grounds, absolutely yes, but . . . I don’t want to answer whether I would break up Fox or not. . . . What I’m going to do is appoint people to the FCC that believe democracy depends on getting information from all portions of the political spectrum, not just one.”

Some clinicians consider this delusion — that Americans can get their news from only one part of the political spectrum — the gravest of all. They report that no matter how many times sufferers in padded cells are presented with flash cards with the symbols ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, Time, Newsweek, New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times — they remain unresponsive, some in a terrifying near-catatonic torpor.

If you answered that the trick is with “those suspicious ellipses which broke up Krauthammer’s pleasing text” then you’ve been reading the same Daily Howler articles I have. As the Howler points out, the official transcript for the Hardball interview gives a whole different context than you get from Krauthammer (missing text in bold):

       MATTHEWS: …Ted Kennedy was part of that deregulation, the deregulation of radio. There are so many things that have been deregulated. Is that wrong trend and would you reverse it?
       DEAN: I would reverse in some areas.
       First of all, 11 companies in this country control 90 percent of what ordinary people are able to read and watch on their television. That’s wrong. We need to have a wide variety of opinions in every community. We don’t have that because of Michael Powell and what George Bush has tried to do to the FCC.
       MATTHEWS: Would you break up Fox?
       (LAUGHTER)
       MATTHEWS: I’m serious.
       DEAN: I’m keeping a…
       MATTHEWS: Would you break it up? Rupert Murdoch has “The Weekly Standard.” It has got a lot of other interests. It has got “The New York Post.” Would you break it up?
       DEAN: On ideological grounds, absolutely yes, but…
       (LAUGHTER)
       MATTHEWS: No, seriously. As a public policy, would you bring industrial policy to bear and break up these conglomerations of power?
       DEAN: I don’t want to answer whether I would break up Fox or not,
       because, obviously
       (CROSSTALK)
       MATTHEWS: Well, how about large media enterprises?
       DEAN: Let me-yes, let me get…
       (LAUGHTER)
       DEAN: The answer to that is yes.
       I would say that there is too much penetration by single corporations in media markets all over this country. We need locally-owned radio stations. There are only two or three radio stations left in the state of Vermont where you can get local news anymore. The rest of it is read and ripped from the AP.
       MATTHEWS: So what are you going to do about it? You’re going to be president of the United States, what are you going to do?
       DEAN: What I’m going to do is appoint people to the FCC that believe democracy depends on getting information from all portions of the political spectrum, not just one.

When you see the whole context it’s clear that “no detectable sense of humor” Dean was joking when he said he would break up Fox — obvious when you leave in the audience laughter and Matthews’ comments of “no, seriously.” More importantly, Dean wasn’t answering the question “would you break up Fox” but the more general question “would you break up large media companies,” a question that conveniently fell between Krauthammer’s ellipses. What Krauthammer paints as a liberal conspiracy-theory answer is actually a plainly-stated position on the media consolidation limits currently being debated in Congress. Krauthammer could have honestly argued with Dean’s position, as did Chris Matthews, but instead he chose to pretend Dean was answering a different question and then make fun of him.

Krauthammer leads the column with his other quote:

Diane Rehm: “Why do you think he [Bush] is suppressing that [Sept. 11] report?”

Howard Dean: “I don’t know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I’ve heard so far — which is nothing more than a theory, it can’t be proved — is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis. Now who knows what the real situation is?”

— “The Diane Rehm Show,” NPR, Dec. 1

He then builds from the quote to his core accusation:

…When he avers, however, that “the most interesting” theory as to why the president is “suppressing” the Sept. 11 report is that Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance, it’s time to check on thorazine supplies. When Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) first broached this idea before the 2002 primary election, it was considered so nutty it helped make her former representative McKinney. Today the Democratic presidential front-runner professes agnosticism as to whether the president of the United States was tipped off about 9/11 by the Saudis, and it goes unnoticed. The virus is spreading.

Unlike Hardball, The Diane Rehm Show doesn’t have an online transcript, but it does have a streaming audio link. The quote in question is between 42:00 and 43:30 (or just listen to the whole interview, it’s interesting). Again, here’s the full context:

Diane Rehm: “Why do you think he [Bush] is suppressing that [Sept. 11] report?”

Howard Dean: “I don’t know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I’ve heard so far — which is nothing more than a theory, it can’t be proved — is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis. Now who knows what the real situation is, but the trouble is by suppressing that kind of information you lead to those kinds of theories, whether they have any truth to them or not. And eventually they get repeated as fact. So I think the president is taking a great risk by suppressing the key information that needs to go to the Kean Commission.“

Now it may be that three years in California’s liberal environment has addled my brain, but to me it looks like Dean isn’t defending the Saudi tip-off theory at all, but is rather saying that even outlandish theories like this one are getting bandied about because Bush hasn’t been forthcoming with the evidence of what really did happen.

One might wonder why a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist would use these at best negligent and at worst deliberately deceitful quotes, but donning my own psychologist’s lab coat I think I have the answer. If you carefully re-reading Krauthammer’s column, it’s clear that he has he has subconsciously embedded the true cause of these journalistic lapses:

It has been 25 years since I… was considered so nutty… the very sight of… Thanksgiving turkey… caused dozens of cases of apoplexy. What is worrying… is… the… neurologically hazardous punditry… of… Murdoch… in which otherwise normal people… can get their news from only one part of the political spectrum.

Clearly this column was the product of a disturbed mind, with the psychotic episode triggered by a combination of holiday feasting and too much Fox News.

Actually, scratch my last quote and comment — it was childish and cruel of me to distort Krauthammer’s words that way. If I were a professional columnist and not just a blogger, I hope I would be ashamed of myself.

References

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Music fake-books as a pre-history of sampling

/ Intellectual Property

Just read an interesting paper: Pop Song Piracy, Fake Books, and a Pre-history of Sampling by Barry Kernfeld, presented at the Copyright and the Networked Computer: A Stakeholder’s Congress conference. Kernfeld gives a brief history of bootleg fake books (books of lyrics and chord progressions that musicians use to get the gist of a song) and draws comparison to the music industry’s current jihad against file-sharing. From the intro:

I’d like to give a quick soup-to-nuts tour through the second half of a book in progress entitled Pop Song Piracy: Bootleg Song Sheets, Fake Books, and America’s First Criminal Copyright Trials. The first half of my book might be called “Napster in the 1930s.” It resurrects the forgotten story of bootleg song sheets (initially, newspaper-sized sheets of pop-song lyrics, and then, from the mid-1930s, song-lyric magazines). The bootleg sheets, which emerged in 1929, elicited a hysterical response from the music industry, which fought vigorously against these products for roughly a decade, using every legal ploy available, before discovering, extremely reluctantly and somewhat inadvertently, that assimilation was a much more successful policy than prohibition. The simple and obvious historical lesson to be drawn from this story, is that the essential nature of the American music industry is to defend deeply entrenched interests, without regard for change, and in its current-day reactions to Napster and Kazaa, the industry is re-living an expected and already well-established mode of behavior.

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Why we should care if Krugman is partisan

/ Politics

A couple weeks ago The Economist had an article discussing how economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is becoming increasingly partisan in his writings. The article relies primarily on analysis done by Ken Waight over at Lying In Ponds, a site dedicated to rating columnists and other pundits on partisanship. I like the site’s philosophy, particularly because it ignores the whole question of “bias” and goes straight to the more important issue of partisanship: blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance to one of the two main political parties.

I don’t read Krugman often and don’t have a personal opinion on his partisanship, though I do find Waight’s arguments compelling. What’s gotten me thinking is the follow-up question: should we care?

As Waight is quick to point out, there is nothing wrong with an editorial columnist having and expressing a bias — that’s what we pay them for. He also points out that some biases will naturally align with the biases of one political party or another. Waight’s beef is when a pundit crosses over from bias for similar ideals to bias for a political party itself. When this happens, Waight argues, “The views of pundits who are excessively partisan cannot be taken seriously (like advertising), because their ulterior motives or uncontrolled biases are certain to frequently contaminate their judgments.”

It is here that I break ranks with Waight. Clearly partisanship can blind pundits, but there are levels of blindness that might occur. The worst partisans deliberately lie and dissemble to argue their case — these pundits should certainly not be taken seriously. However, less egregious partisans give factual, rational arguments, but either omit arguments that would support their opponents or only choose to talk about topics that put their side in the best light. These partisans can still provide a valuable service so long as (a) they make their partisanship clear and (b) they are only one part of a diverse and balanced opinion diet. I’d say most politicians of either party fall into this second, less egregious level of partisanship. While I certainly won’t trust a politician without question, I will still take their arguments seriously. I would say the same for anyone with a strong prejudice, whether that prejudice is towards a particular party, methodology, world-view or value judgment.

All that said, I do believe that a prejudice towards a political party is qualitatively different than, say, a prejudice for well-run scientific studies or small government or Christian values. The difference is not that allegiance to a party produces worse decisions than allegiance to a world-view, method or value system, but rather that adherence to a party line is one of a few easy shortcuts that we non-pundits already use. As a good citizen I would love to become an expert on every political issue that comes up, but I just don’t have the time. Instead, I learn about a few issues that are important to me and for the rest I rely on the opinion of the politicians and political parties that I elect to represent me. As Dr. Robert Cialdini puts it in Influence: Science and Practice:

It’s instructive that even though we often don’t take a complex approach to personally important topics, we wish our advisors — our physicians, accountants, lawyers, and brokers — to do precisely that for us (Kahn & Baron, 1995). When feeling overwhelmed by a complicated and consequential choice, we still want a fully considered, point-by-point analysis of it — an analysis we may not be able to achieve except, ironically enough, through a shortcut: reliance on an expert.

The problem with professional pundits who are partisan is that they use party positions as a shortcut for deciding what is right and wrong — just like we non-professionals do. That means we can’t use their arguments as a shortcut validation of of the opinions we get using our own partisanship shortcut. Independent validation, I would argue, is the primary purpose of an opinion columnist.

Eugene Volokh once opined that we shouldn’t hold non-professional pundits (like most bloggers) to the high standard of even-handedness. However, it is perfectly reasonable to hold professional columnists to this standard. When I read Krugman (or any other professional pundit) I don’t expect him to disagree with the Democrats often, but I want to know that he could. Otherwise I haven’t checked my initial shortcut at all, I just got two copies of the same shortcut. As Waight put it, “When two people agree on everything, it’s pretty certain that only one is doing the thinking.” First and foremost, we should expect our professional pundits to think.

References

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Microsoft looking into just-in-time information retrieval

/ Media Technology

Last night I finally got around to watching Microsoft’s Comdex presentation, specifically the section where Susan Dumais shows off her new search technology “Stuff I’ve Seen.” (Search for “switch gears” at the bottom of the transcript or go to 1:07:50 on the video.)

Most of Stuff I’ve Seen is concentrating on the problem of quickly indexing and searching your entire hard drive, regardless of media format. (I sometimes jokingly refer to projects like this as YAPIM, or Yet Another Project Invoking Memex, my own thesis work fitting that description as well.) However, the part that interests me most is what they’re calling implicit query. As CNET describes the Comdex demo:

In demonstrating Implicit Query, Dumais began to type an e-mail asking a colleague about a set of slides for an upcoming conference. Before the message was complete, the program — which appears in a window on the side of the screen — pulled up e-mails, slide decks and Word documents containing the name of the conference and the future recipient. Each hit came with a brief summary of the internal content, date, the type of software the file was written in, and its potential relevance, among other information.

This is the same functionality that in my PhD I call Just-In-Time Information Retrieval, and is the main focus of the Remembrance Agent software I developed. It can be incredibly powerful (I use it regularly to suggest email discussions related to my blog entries, for example) and I hope Dumais pursues it. It looks like she’s still in early stages with the concept though, and and more importantly the current interface is still designed for explicit query — far too intrusive for something that runs all the time in the background. By contrast, Autonomy has had an actual product in this area for over three years, though I’d say the interface is still the real trickiness for this kind of application. Still, as is often the case one of the more interesting aspects of Microsoft doing something is that it’s Microsoft doing it. If implicit query makes it into a future version of the OS (and if MS doesn’t screw it up they way they did with that annoying paperclip) that’ll be quite interesting.

References

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I got the horse right here, reloaded

/ Media Technology

Back in July there was a big scandal over DARPA’s funding of a futures market where people bet on things like whether Arafat will be assassinated or when the US will pull out of Iraq. The project was canceled, and also became the straw that forced John Poindexter’s resignation. Now the Guardian reports that San Diego-based Net Exchange, the company that was implementing the project, is going ahead and launching it without government support or involvement. Given the previous uproar, Net Exchange is being understandably quiet about the whole thing.

Personally I’d be happy to see them try this out. As I said before, the U.S. Government shouldn’t be involved in something as shady as gallows gambling, but as a private experiment the whole thing intrigues me and I don’t have a problem with seeing where it goes. My guess is it will wind up being an interesting past-time for armchair analysts, but like most markets will fluctuate far too much to provide any real security data. The only real danger I see is if the stakes get high (unlikely) and attract corruption — unlike sports gambling or its Wall-Street counterpart, Middle-East politics has neither conflict-of-interest nor insider-trading laws. The more likely danger is simple lack of interest, the risk all seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time Internet projects face.

References

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Trusted Computing

/ Big Brother

I’ve finally gotten around to reading up on Trusted Computing (a process that, ironically enough, was interrupted by my being rootkitted a couple of weeks ago). I’d heard some pretty unsettling things about trusted computing, but now that I’ve done some digging… well it’s still pretty disturbing.

Trusted Computing (TC) is one of several names for a set of changes to server, PC, PDA and mobile phone operating systems, software and hardware that will make these computers “more trustworthy.” Microsoft has one version, known as Palladium or Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), and an alliance of Intel, Microsoft, IBM, HP and AMD known as the Trusted Computing Group has a slightly different one called either trusted computing, trustworthy computing, or “safer computing.” Some parts of Trusted Computing are already in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and the in the hardware for the IBM Thinkpad, and many more will be in Microsoft’s new Longhorn version of Windows scheduled for 2006.

The EFF has a nice introduction to trusted computing systems, written by Seth Schoen, and Ross Anderson has a more detailed and critical analysis. A brief summary of the summary is that a trusted computer includes tamper-resistant hardware that can cryptographically verify the identity and integrity of the programs you run, verify that identity to online “policy servers,” encrypt keyboard and screen communications, and keep an unauthorized program from reading another program’s memory or saved data. The center of this is the so-called “Fritz” chip, named after Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, who tried to make digital rights management a mandatory part of all consumer electronics. (He failed and is retiring in 2004, but I’ve no doubt there will be attempts to pass similar laws in the future.)

When most people think about computer security they think about virus detectors, firewalls and encrypted network traffic — the computer analogs to burglar alarms, padlocks and opaque envelopes. The Fritz chip is a different kind of security, more like the “political officer” that the Soviet Union would put on every submarine to make sure the captain stayed loyal. The whole purpose of the Fritz chip is to make sure that you, the computer user, can’t do anything that goes against the policies set by the people who wrote your software and/or provide you with web services.

There are many people who would like such a feature. Content providers such as Disney could verify that your version of Windows Media Player hasn’t had digital rights management disabled before sending you a decryption key for a movie. Your employer could prevent email from being printed or read on non-company machines, and could automatically delete it from your inbox after six months. Governments could prevent leaks by doing the same with sensitive documents. Microsoft and AOL could prevent third-party instant-message software from working with the MSN or AIM networks, or lock-in customers by making it difficult to switch to other products without losing access to years worth of saved documents. Game designers could keep you from cheating in networked games. Distributed computing and mobile agents programs could be sure their code isn’t being subverted or leaked when running on third-party systems. Software designers could verify that a program is registered and only running on a single computer (as Windows XP does already), and could even prevent all legitimate trusted computers from reading files encrypted by pirated software. Trusted computing is all about their trust, and the person they don’t trust is you.

End users do get a little bit of “trust” out of trusted computing, but not as much as you might think. TC won’t stop hackers from gaining access to a system, but it could be used to detect rootkits that have been installed. TC also won’t prevent viruses, worms or Trojans, but it can prevent them from accessing data or keys owned by other applications. That means a program you download from the Internet won’t be able to email itself to everyone in your (encrypted) address book. However, TC won’t stop worms that exploit security holes in MS Outlook’s scripting language from accessing your address book, because Outlook already has that permission. In spite of what the Trusted Computing Group’s backgrounder and Microsoft’s Palladium overview imply, TC won’t help with identity theft or computer thieves physically accessing your data any more than current public key cryptography and encrypted file systems do.

As long as you agree with the goals of the people who write your software and provide your web services, TC isn’t a bad deal. After all, most people don’t want people to cheat at online games and can see the value of company email deletion policies. The same can be said of the political officer on Soviet submarines — they were great as long as you believed in what the Communist Party stood for. And unlike Soviet submarine commanders, you won’t get shot for refusing to use TC on your computer. Your programs will still run as always, you just won’t be able to read encrypted email from your customers, watch downloaded movies, or purchase items through your TC-enabled cellphone. Some have claimed that this is how it should be, and that the market will try out all sorts of agreements and those that are acceptable to both consumers and service providers will survive. That sounds nice in theory, but doesn’t work when the market is dominated by a few players (e.g. Microsoft for software, wireless providers for mobile services, and the content cartel for music and movies) or when there are network externalities that make it easy to lock in a customer base (e.g. email, web, web services and electronic commerce). What choice will you have in wordprocessors if the only way you can read memos from your boss is by using MS Word? What choice will you have in stereo systems when the five big record companies announce that new recordings will only be released in a secure-media format?

Of course, even monopolies respond to strong enough consumer push-back, but as Ross Anderson points out there are subtle tricks software and service providers can pull to lock in unwary consumers. For example, a law firm might discover that migrating years of encrypted documents from Microsoft to OpenOffice requires sign-off for the change by every client that has ever sent an encrypted email attachment. That’s a nasty barrel to be over, and the firm would probably grudgingly pay Microsoft large continuing license fees to avoid that pain. These kinds of barriers to change can be subtle, and you can bet they won’t be a part of the original sales pitch from Microsoft. But then what do you expect when you invite a political officer into your computer?

References

Trusted Computing Read More »

Wearable Computing Conference Highlights

/ Mind and Brain

Just got back from the 7th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers. As always, the subjects spanned several fields including augmented reality, machine perception, biosensors, fashion design and ergonomics, human-computer interaction, textiles, and systems. I’ll post a link to a full trip report in a few days, but here are a few highlights:

  • Implantables (keynote): it’s always nice when a keynote can do a conference one better, and that was certainly the case this year. Dr. Michael Okun, co-director of the University of Florida Movement Disorders Center, discussed and showed videos from his work on surgical treatment of Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders using deep brain stimulator therapy (DBS). Okun and his colleague probe deep inside a fully awake patient’s brain with a micrometer lead and start “listening” to individual neuron firings to tell what part of the brain they’re probing. The target is the part of the brain that controls motion for the body part experiencing tremors — a spot about the size of a small pea. Then they insert a deep-brain lead attached to an embedded pacemaker-like device that sits in the chest. The device emits electrical pulses that change the pattern with which the neurons fire, and within seconds the patient’s tremor stops. The videos he showed were almost like magic; you can literally turn on and off a person’s tremor using a remote control.

    Even more thought-provoking is that when you move the deep-brain lead you can affect not just other motor functions but also cognition and emotions. Some of the videos he showed were of patients with slightly misplaced electrodes (placed by other labs). Depending on where the electrode has been placed, activation can induce face twitches, contralateral (one-sided) smiling, giggling and laughter, crying attacks, manic attacks, euphoria, severe depression, fear or anxiety. Some patients would cry while experiencing a sudden overwhelming feeling of sadness, while others would go into a fit of uncontrollable sobbing but have no feeling of sadness at all. To see all these effects induced with what looks like a normal TV remote is rather amazing, as is the thought that Okun thinks such techniques might one day be used to treat affective disorders, severe depression, or possibly even conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  • Memory Glasses: Last year Rich DeVaul presented a poster on some preliminary work showing that he could successfully cue people’s memory by displaying subliminals on a head-up display. The idea is that such a system might be used as a “zero attention memory aid,” designed to help a person remember names, facts or conversations without the additional cognitive load usually required. This year he presented a more complete study that bears out his hypothesis: subjects did about 1.5 times better on a match-names-to-faces recall test when they had subliminal cuing with names than when they didn’t have cuing. Even more intriguing, when subjects were given an incorrect subliminal cue (a name that matches a different face), they still did slightly better at remembering the correct name, presumably because the subliminal primed the memorization process as a whole even if it didn’t prime the specific name. This secondary effect was not quite statistically significant (p = 0.06) but if real it might mean that the subliminal only needs to be related to an event to have a positive effect. For example, you might better remember a conversation with your boss just by having a subliminal flashback of an image of what he was wearing at the time.

  • Sociometer: The real structure of a business isn’t the official organization chart but the informal network of who communicates with whom. In the late 1980s Olivetti and Xerox PARC used their active badge technology to explore some aspects of these networks, but Tanzeem Choudhury is taking it several steps further with active badges that can not only map out who talks to whom (using infrared beacons) but also the style of turn-taking that is used in a conversation (using microphones). Through this she’s able to, for example, determine who has more social prestige in a group by who modifies his or her speech patterns to match the other person in a conversation.

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