Tech has changed our lives in so many ways. Two areas that interest me are our thoughts about knowledge itself, and our experience of solitude.
I used to like the game show Jeopardy and even tried out for it. I flew to Los Angeles for the day and passed the test when my daughter was five months old, proving to myself that my brain hadn't totally gone to mush. I didn't get called to be on the show, but the tryout was still a good experience.
But now, with Google and smart phones, we have all that information at our fingertips, so who cares whether we can memorize facts any more? The LA Times had a funny article about this, "The risk for Apple iPhone users: They know too much." Being a know-it-all quickly becomes annoying, especially when you cut into a good-natured bull session about what year a Springsteen album was released by looking it up on Wikipedia.
What about the experience of solitude? Mobile phones connect us like never before. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it made me realize that we are losing the experience of truly being on our own. The second story that got me thinking about these issues this week was The Wall Street Journal article, "Mom called and said, 'Slow down!'" I remember getting my driver's license and feeling the rush of freedom that I was on my own, alone. Now there are detailed monitoring systems that parents can install, including GPS, systems that will send parents text messages when their teen drivers speed, and multiple camera options for car interior and windshield view.
This potentially transforms the experience of being a new driver. I don't know yet how I feel about these systems. As much as I relished my independence as a teen, I was a bad driver initially and I am lucky that I didn't have a serous accident. Teen drivers definitely need to develop skill and earn trust. We want them to develop experience, while avoiding life-threatening situations. The WSJ article profiled a 16-year-old girl whose parents had nagged her to wear her seat belt, based on the DriveCam system's video evidence that she was not buckling up. Two weeks later, the girl rolled the car, totaling it, but she was only slightly injured because she was wearing her seat belt.
Teens need to earn trust, parents need to give responsibility. I believe that the teens should at least know they are being monitored. Such a system might be an angel on the shoulder, or a Big Brother nightmare, but either way, teens are not on their own they way they used to be.
Photo: Apple.com
Photo: Blackberry.com
I've been living a dual mobile life with both an iPhone and a Blackberry Pearl for almost six months now, and I thought that before we before we get overwhelmed with new gadgets rolled out at CES and Macworld, I would check back in on my developing relationship with the iPhone. I appreciate its charms much more after working with it for a while, and I have found an important new use for it, but it is significant that I have not come close to setting aside my Blackberry yet.
After the jump, you'll find my side-by-side comparison, written from a busy working Mom's perspective:... Read more
Looking to get more exercise into your life? New research from Stanford Medical School reports that people who use pedometers walk about 2,000 steps more every day than those who don't. That translates to an extra mile of progress each day.
So that's one little gadget that can help. Walking has been on my mind lately because one strategy that has really worked for me is to listen to public radio shows on my iPhone iPod while I walk the dog. I know that if I walk my way through an entire 40-minute podcast each day, broken up into two or three segments, I have met my exercise goal.
But even better than that, I often walk farther than I had planned because I get caught up in a compelling show--turning public radio "driveway moments" into "walkway moments."
... Read moreThere's always potential for massive dorkiness when parents venture into a new pop culture arena like customized ringtones. I had stayed away from this trend, due to a general state of information overload as well as concerns about deceptive ringtone services that promise a free ringtone and then surreptitiously subscribe you to ongoing charges.
But this week I have been getting to know my iPhone better and the new version of iTunes has a ringtone function, so I decided to check it out.
The new iTunes feature is easy to use. You buy a ringtone-designated song from iTunes for 99 cents, select the snippet you want to use, and then pay another 99 cents to make it into a ringtone that you can upload to iPhone. Now there is theoretically a workaround that you can use to create free ringtone, but I can't vouch for it. For me, I wasn't going to sweat the $1.98, for which you do get the actual song added to your iTunes library.
Okay, getting the ringtone is easy, but who is there to solve the existential angst of deciding which song to use to announce the incoming call of that special someone? My husband Michael is a musician, so I didn't want any old piece of pop dreck to signal his calls. Given my taste, it was at least going to be a very special piece of pop dreck.
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My iPhone and I got off to a rough start. I rushed in to buying one and initially felt that the actual device did not live up to the hype. It's clear that only a miracle could have met everyone's expectations after all the buildup, but part of my lukewarm response was due to the fact that the other gadgets I relied on, my Blackberry Pearl and first generation iPod Nano worked just fine. It took a lot to convince me that merging these devices was worth the hassle of carrying around the iPhone, which neither fits snugly in a small pocket nor hangs from a neck lanyard.
But there is good news. Now that I have used it for four months, I may finally be ready to swap my Blackberry Pearl for the iPhone, at least some of the time. I appreciate the fact that I can do just about everything but blog on the iPhone. Emails, messaging work well. The calendar application on the iPhone motivated me to finally get into using synchronized iCal on my Mac in addition to a paper calendar. The visual appeal of iPhone's interface finally got through to me. While my Blackberry can do email, messaging, internet browsing, and calendars, it all looks better on the iPhone.
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While the rest of the blogosphere is looking forward at the new iPods launched Wednesday, I want to take a look back and say goodbye to the now-outmoded version of the iPod Nano.
... Read more"Summer lovin' had me a blast. Summer lovin' happened so fast..."
When iPhone came out, I fell hard. I was all ready to sign up as an early adopter. After all, the iPod tops my list as the gadget that has improved my life the most over the the past five years (with TiVO in a close second place). Apple convinced me that the iPhone was the next quantum leap in the digital lifestyle.
Well, now that iPhone and I have been together for a couple of months, I wish I could kick it to the curb like a summer fling. Unfortunately, we're bonded together by a two-year contract. Why hasn't iPhone been the end-all, be-all device I was hoping for?
... Read moreEarlier this month, New York enacted an Air Passenger Bill of Rights. Among other things, it requires that airlines make minimal provisions for passengers stranded on the tarmac for more than three hours. If you've done any traveling with kids, you probably know how difficult it is to both pack light (a key strategy for successful travel generally) and to pack enough stuff so that if there's a delay, you can keep the little ones occupied. The New York law bounds the problem a little bit: if your longest leg is 6 hours, you can be relatively assured that your outbound leg from a New York airport won't add more than 3 hours to that. But as the US Customs and Border Patrol SNAFU at LAX confirms, airport authorities don't seem to get particularly concerned about tarmac waits of 6, 8, or 10 hours, be they outbound or inbound. I think that when traveling with children, that's a bit much. What's a parent to do?
... Read moreWow! I come back home after attending some 4th of July parties in Chapel Hill, and I find there are more flames on my recent blog posting than in any fireworks show I've seen. How did this happen? And what does it mean? And what am I going to do about it?
How did this happen?
The answer is pretty simple. I wrote a long and convoluted blog posting about identity theft, its epidemic proportions, and the challenges of raising children in such a hostile environment. I then explained how the unthinking act of supplying one's Social Security number (SSN) to any agency not directly connected with Social Security is a violation of the original design of the SSN, a violation of instructions printed on the card (until 1972), a violation of consumer protection and privacy laws passed as recently as 1974, a violation of expert testimony presented to Congress in 1992, 2000, and as recently as last month. Based on these facts, I argued that the reason identity theft is epidemic in this country is precisely because people have either ignored these facts or have been simply unaware of them. I then finished with a twist, noting that the iPhone activation procedure asks customers to do precisely what the security experts agree you should never do, which is to supply a Social Security number as personal identification information. And if you have been following the blog, you know that my wife Amy is going to be getting an iPhone, so I was using the blog to share with her (and all the other parents reading along) some friendly family advice informed from my 20+ years as a computer scientist.
Well, when she picked her jaw back up, she said "You buried the lead!" I turned my article upside down, putting the most important stuff up front; CNET then (re)published the blog in their big news section, and the fireworks began!
That is how it happened.
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