sardonick

Slashdot had a story commemorating sixty years Vannevar Bush’s As We May Thunk. The signal-to-noise of comments on slashdot stories is usually too low to be good reading (even browsing at +5), but commentary on this story was surprisingly good. Notably, there was the link to this story on Bush by Wired.

I find it amazing that, 60 years ago, a man from a pre-PC world could form theories on managing information overload. And it is amazing how similar the solutions of today are, compared to those he penned. Yes, there are notable, fundamental differences–Bush imagined more large-structured information management (extracting big-picture structure through the tracking of entire paths of browsing history), while current solutions to manging information thrive on small, local structure (google exploiting only first-degree links from page-to-page, del.icio.us’ ontology built from simple non-hierarchical tags, wikipedia’s dictionary-based-lookup, and of course the naive surface-string-search used by nearly every search engine in existence). I wonder if the future will find us moving towards his ideas of information management, or if ours will prove better.

Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, Vanderwal’s Personal Info Cloud, Microsoft’s My Life Bits, MIT’s Haystack. The information age has seen a tastes (or, perhaps, distant faint smells) of the fruits of paradise that Bush dreamed. What will the next 60 years of harvest bring?

Welcome back to America, Nick:

• Monday: come down with cold
• Tuesday: Car broken into (while it’s parked in front of my apartment), CD player stolen
• Wednesday: Find out I’m being relocated at work, from 9th story window office to 4th story interior office

As a “welcome back to work” gift this morning, I find that all our elevators at ISI have been equipped with TV screens courtesy the “Captivate Network“. Ugh.

“Captivate”, oh so aptly and ironically named. They’re basically small TV screens that deliver, via wireless update, “quality programming” (news, weather, stock quotes, advertisements) to riders of the elevator.

I’m annoyed by it, but I’m not entirely sure which part of the situation makes me the most annoyed. Is it that I don’t want to be advertised to? I think it’s something deeper. Captivate intrudes upon one of the last bastions of silence in my information-overloaded world: that minute-long hiatus that is an elevator ride. I have enough damned data in my life. Let me have a moment or two of peace and quiet! Only a moment or two!

The Captivate Network is, needless to say, not-easily-opt-outable. No off switch, always on, 24 hours a day. I can turn my back to the screen, but it’s still there (and, data is saccarine and tempting–even though I know I don’t want it, it’s hard not to watch).

The installation has spurred a flurry of emails on the ISI listserv, and many, many complaints to Trizec (the landlord company for our building). Trizec replied that the network rollout was a nation-wide choice–and that, strangely, our building is the first instance where they have recieved any negative feedback (I can’t believe that we were the only ones to complain. They must have expected the techie crowd here at ISI to love access to Yet Another Data Feed. Paradoxically, this has not been the case… perhaps we, as information scientists, are more sensitive to information pollution). And, bad news… given the fact that it’s a nation-wide rollout, they can do nothing to remove or disable the screens.

If I was more than a lowly PhD student researcher, I would do more to protest this. As it is, I have no voice. A few unknown co-workers have been taping over the screens with paper, but the covering is removed soon enough, and is being replaced more and more infrequently… It’s only a matter of time, I guess, before these screens become an everyday part of life. And I rue that day.

Returned from the other side of the world late last week; Was a groomsman at my sister’s wedding in the little town of Yakima, Washington over the weekend.

Now, making a feeble attempt to transition back into everyday life.

Busy, busy, busy.

Turned on my desktop this afternoon, for the first time in a month. Faced a daunting ocean of unread rss feeds (when, oh when will a decent rss reader be ready for everyday use? [1] [2]), and what looks like about 3 days of compile-time for program upgrades (it’s a gentoo box, and there’s new versions of gaim, openoffice, gnome, eclipse, evolution, and a thousand other minor apps).

Overwhelming, all, but the apartment feels a bit more like home again.