IFTF's Future Now

Virtual gaming worlds overtake Namibia

No, it's not a coup. It's the title of a BBC News article on the latest version of Edward Castronova's study of the manufacture and trade of virtual goods in online games like Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies:

According to the analysis this gaming activity has a gross economic impact equivalent to the GDP of the Southern African nation of Namibia.

The data came out of a follow-up to a pioneering study that tried to find real world economic measures of all the activity in so-called massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs).

This places the online world's economy between Namibia and Jamaica. Lest you think this is an interesting yet trivial fact, Castronova points out that

"When you realise the immense cultural impact that a place like Jamaica has had... you also realize the potential impact that virtual worlds might have."

"The deeper point is that virtual worlds simply are not trivial phenomena.... Statistically, they matter, already, and it's only 2004."

Vintage Computing: IBM's SSEC

I just completed Kevin Maney's The Maverick and His Machine, a bio of IBM founder Thomas Watson Sr. It included lots of interesting bits about early commercial computing. Little known today, IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) was first placed in a NYC window in 1948. There pedestrians could watch as the machine was fed problems. It was also carefully designed to look interesting. The device was used as a model for the computer in the 1957 Hepburn/Tracy move Desk Set, a early example of computing in film. Many companies placed their 'electronic brains' in their lobbies, visible to all, at this time.

The computer was also well known for introducing the idea of having lots of blinking lights, to show it was actually doing something. To be sure the lights were not window-dressing, patterns could be read to determine various machine states, and logic could be stepped through by reading the lights. As late as the mid 70s, a CDC mainframe computer I worked on at the Pentagon still had arrays of lights on its panel. Here is more tech detail and pictures. Herbert Grosch's Reminiscenses. From IBM's archives:

...The IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) was dedicated in 1948 by Thomas J. Watson at IBM's headquarters at 590 Madison Avenue in New York City. The SSEC combined the speed of electronic circuits with a storage capacity of 400,000 digits and integrated for the first time electronic speed, vast memory capacity and highly flexible and convenient programming (or sequencing) facilities...

Sources of wisdom

With all of the discussion recently around James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, the question remains, "is the future going to revolve around talking heads or technorati?"

John Kay explains clearly the book's premise and how the idea of crowd expertise occurs in today's Financial Times, When to ask an expert.

Kay offers the best explanation I have seen of the book and its idea: "There is wisdom in crowds, but more often wisdom in the wise."

Hollywood vs. technology?

SF Gate has a long piece on entertainment industry's increasingly proactive efforts at Reining in tech:

When the original Napster program became an instant consumer hit five years ago, it blindsided the music business.

Today, the entire entertainment industry -- hoping to avoid being caught off guard again -- has stepped up efforts to nip potential problems with emerging technologies in the bud, before the public gets its hands on them.

For example, Hollywood movies studios and the National Football League recently teamed up to try to block a proposal from digital video recorder company TiVo Inc. to let subscribers view recorded TV programs over the Internet. The move surprised officials of the Silicon Valley firm, who weren't even ready to introduce that feature to the public.

Technology companies and public advocacy groups criticize these moves, saying the entertainment business is trying to stifle innovation to increase its own profits.... But entertainment industry officials say they are just trying to strike a fair balance between allowing innovation and stopping piracy.

Wagon Wheel Illusions

An NYRB article: In the River of Consciousness, by Oliver Sacks, brought together a number of issues regards perception that I have always been intrigued with. Oliver Sacks is a Neurologist and science writer, known for his engaging book The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, fictionalized in the film Awakenings. [Correction: A reader reminds me that it was actually based on his nonfiction book also called Awakenings]

Sacks discusses the work of Dale Purves of Duke University on the Wagon-Wheel Illusion. Its probably the best-known, yet incompletely understood visual illusion. You see it in movies when a cart with spoked wheels moves quickly, the wheels appear to rotate slowly backwards. The cause of this illusion is the synchronization of film speed with motion, essentially a flaw in the brain mechanism that allows us to see continuous motion in film. You can see the illusion in environments other than film, though, and this provides some insight into our visual systems.

Purves goes on to suggest that this effect demonstrates how our perception of time is carved into packets of interaction with our neural systems. Marketing implications?

Duke's Perception Lab has done considerable work in understanding the effect, and how is links to our perception of the world, here is their detailed paper. Purves has a new book out: Why We See What We Do, that covers some of the same territory.

The Cost of the Tag

For the RFID tag to near universally replace the optical UPC code on retail items, its price will have to drop radically. As recently as just a couple of years ago, I was using 5 cents in talks I gave, as an estimate of what the cost would be by 2004. At that time, some industry pundits suggested that 4 cent chips were available then, in sufficiently large quantity. At a presentation at a NYC retail meeting this year I shocked some people when I expressed doubt about making 5 cents by next year. Now ARC advisory group says we are unlikely to make 5 cents by 2008:

....ARC Advisory Group, a research firm based in Dedham, Mass. Instead of dipping to a nickel, as some industry observers predict, the average price of a passive UHF RFID tags will drop to only 16 cents, according to recently issued ARC report entitled "RFID Systems in the Manufacturing Supply Chain."

ARC found that in 2003, the average unit price of tag was 91 cents for a passive HF tag and 57 cents for a passive UHF tag. The firm expects that by 2008, the unit price will drop to an average of 16 cents for passive UHF tags ...

This does NOT mean we wont see tagging much sooner. High margin goods that need to be tracked closely will be tagged much sooner. Tagging will happen on the case and pallet. Pharma is an example area, prompted by the government in the US, where consumers will start to see widespread RFID soon. Recent hacking fears will lead to delays. But their use in pharma will lead to familiarization for the public and help remove many fears of the technology. This article is a good update:

RFID To Flourish In Pharmaceutical Industry
A Meta Group report says RFID use in pharmaceuticals will surpass that of consumer packaged goods within 18 months. By Rick Whiting, InformationWeek, Aug. 23, 2004
Use of radio-frequency identification by pharmaceutical companies will surpass that of consumer packaged-goods makers within 18 months, predicts a new Meta Group report to be issued Tuesday. But predictions that most pharmaceutical products will be tagged with electronic product code-compliant RFID tags at the pallet and case level within three years are "overly optimistic," the report says.

The "immaturity of EPC tag technology" is the limiting factor in the rate of RFID adoption, the report says. Current EPC specifications, for example, lack safeguards to prevent one chip's programming being copied onto another, a key requirement for guaranteed authentication. Such technology limitations, according to the report, reduce RFID's potential usefulness in the pharmaceutical industry to simple "track and trace" applications until EPC specifications are revised ...

Genevive Bell, "Getting to God: Technology, Religion and the New Enlightenment"

[Note: The Institute has a regular visitor series, the LOTT ("Lunch on the 'Tute"). Today we had Intel cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell talking about technology and religion. What follows are my notes of the talk. The usual caveats apply: as Jacques Derrida put it, every decoding is another encoding, and this isn't a transcript or approved summary.]

Introduction

Bell is doing a 3-year project "examining ways in which cultural practices in urban Asia are shaping people's attitudes to technology."

You can get paper versions of cell phones, computers, CDs to burn, thus equipping your ancestors for their afterlife. "These are a really nice index of what's important to the Chinese diaspora." Last year space shuttles were big, thanks to China's putting a person in space. Now, you burn cell phones and prepaid cards every year to keep your ancestors' accounts up to date.

Clearly, there are some interesting things happening at the intersection of communications technologies and religion.

Survey of ICT and religion

Lots of communications technologies are being used to serve religious practices, from Bibles in your PDA to GPS-enabled cell phones that show you the direction of Mecca (quiblah applications) to religious SMS messages, prayer reminders, etc..

Yet this is an analytical gap among anthropologists, STS people. What do we make of the absence of critical scholarship or research in this domain> and how can we use these repurposing as a critique of dominant visions of technology futures?

Technology and religion: What does it all mean?

Mobile phones for Muslims are a great example of a new technology designed to support traditional religious practices. You see this in the quiblah software, but also in phone envelopes designed to echo minarets. In the Christian West, the Papal SMS service, Lent SMS messages, religious ringtones (hymns), the Bible in SMS format ("4 God so luvd da world").

There are also anxieties about the use of these technologies within religious institutions, and by those institutions: Phillipine bishops banned confession and absolution could be conducted over SMS, e-mail, or fax; Islamic countries are split over whether you can divorce your wife via SMS, and whether lotteries via SMS constitutes gambling; Korean churches have cellphone dampers.

There's also discussion around practices to naturalize phones through religious practices: blessing mobile phones (one company sells pre-blessed phones), augmenting cell phones with religious iconography.

There are online versions of religious institutions (virtual parishes), sacred spaces that extend into physical spaces (the notion of the Internet enabling a cyber-ummah) and new sacred spaces that exist completely online (Isidore of Seville as patron saint of the Internet, online ancestor memorials, online fortunetelling and soothsaying).

There are some entirely new online religious practices... and they're largely American. There's also Satanic worship. Interestingly, there's less revival of ancient, pre-Christian religious practices (e.g. European animist, Norse religions) than you might think. Native communities in the U.S. were early adopters of fax machines, and quickly moved to the Web, despite problems with connectivity. In Australia, aboriginal communities became local TV content producers, and developed their own samizdat of aboriginal television; but there are infrastructure problems as big as in the U.S.

Ubicomp and religion

The rhetoric of ubicomp is profoundly secular, which may be a problem, given how religion helps shape many daily practices.

The use of computing technologies for religious purposes challenges some basic assumptions of the kinds of work that technology does (both literally and culturally). Attending to religion also informs other larger contexts for technology consumption: i.e., privacy, security, etc..

Sewing meets computers

There's a famous story that the computer punch card evolved out of cards used to record patterns for the Jacquard Loom. This The New York Times article shows that the causal chain is moving in the opposite direction: computers are coming to single-user sewing machines.

Conventional machines have given way to souped-up stitching monsters that combine data-processing muscle with "design for dummies" versatility. Loaded with large memory caches and floppy disk drives (U.S.B. ports are soon to come), machines like Husqvarna Viking's Designer I function as ancillary computers for hobbyists, many of whom augment their sewing workstations with laptops so they can continually update software and stitch patterns. In essence, sewing machines are now computers with needles and thread attached.

It's another example of DIY Design.

Convergence of real-world sports and electronic games

THe New York Times has an article on sports equipent that uses sensors, processors, and wireless to blur the lines between games played in the real world-- on the golf course, the baseball diamond-- and in the digital world, and to create games between players who are in different places.

I want to emphasize the fact that I'm quoted at length in the piece does not influence my thinking about it. The overlap between electronic games and exercise equipment, as I've noted previously. is long overdue

Adaptive Decision Making in the Global Economy

Now that we have the ability to put sensors in many kinds of systems, how do we get benefit from that expense? In a very general sense, this should allow us to adapt to situations faster and more accurately than ever before. A key aspect to this is the fact that adapting needs to be continual, so optimizing on say readings of sensors some time ago may not be optimal now. This contrasts with classical operations research approaches, which gather aggregated data, optimize, and then seek to apply the results to a changed and changing system. So, OK, we can place sensors everywhere, but how do we use that data? How do we address decision making under this new wealth of data?

Here is an innovative paper that addresses that issue by collaborator Tom Gibbs, Worldwide Director of Industry Strategy, Intel and Shoumen Datta, MIT Forum for Supply Chain Innovation:

Adaptive Decision Making in the Evolving Global Economy

.... rapid developments in the field of automatic identification technologies (AIT) such as radio frequency identification (RFID) promise an unprecedented new management resource, wrapped in an equally unprecedented operational challenge�how to structure and support real-time analysis and response concurrently at local, regional and central decision points.

This paper will examine some of the tools and technologies that are emerging for decentralized real-time decision making, particularly as they impact traditional supply chain systems and their related business processes. We believe these technologies, along with innovative business practices, can be used to meet the challenges and harvest the opportunities presented by the new global economy ....