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Owning your data

With all of the talk lately about Google consolidating its privacy policies, I've recalled an idea that I had a while ago. Typically we rely on companies outside of our control to collect, store, and use our data to make our use of their services more pleasurable (allegedly). But couldn't we, given the tools and knowledge, collect, store, and use our own data in the manner that we see fit, without the requirement that other entities be trusted with our data? Of course, what our online services do wasn't unheard of before they started doing it. We have often entrusted the administration of tasks too laborious or trivial for us to carry out on our own to specialized professionals. Few people bake their own bread these days except as a novelty, cars are typically serviced by trained technicians (at great expense), and teaching is left to teachers. However, there are features of personal data management, such as the potency of personally identifying data for manipulating users, that suggest benefits in personally managing ones own information.

Presently, I don't know of any tools that would allow a person to completely remove themselves from the many web services they use while keeping the most beneficial parts, but there is value in considering what those parts are to begin with. I don't think what draws people to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and all of the web forums and mailing lists is something bound up in the interfaces themselves. Rather, the social benefits conferred by users upon other users is what makes and breaks these microcosms of society. Because they merely act as conduits of social transaction, the value of the transactions is what should be in question. Our most meaningful and rewarding connections are the ones we have with individuals. Social networking sites rarely contribute to those kinds of connections.

Why students should memorize dates

This post isn't in in line stated subject of this blog, but I'm not about to make another blog just to post this, so there.

Knowledge of dates is, primarily a tool for the organization of facts. While dates are arbitrary in themselves---for a given event might have fallen the day before or after on chance---when assigned to a collection of events they provide the basis for chronology which then allows for notions of logical progression and from there a story – the most persistent structure for human memory storage. Nassim Taleb’s denunciations of the human fixation on story-making aside, if we want students to learn history, they need, as in all other areas of learning, a meaningful framework on which they can seat new ideas. Stories provide such a framework, and dates are instrumental to their formation when the parts of those stories, given piecemeal in books and lectures, must be put back together.

Dynamo Bit 313-A

Really cool film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb6AqhT9quA&feature=player_embedded

Web bugs

Ever wonder why your email client typically blocks images from loading?
Here's a good reason: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_bug

I'M MOVIN' TA CANADA

People who claim they're "moving to Canada" in the face of legislation they oppose (or believe they would oppose if they actually read and understood it) really disgust me. When did the value of your personal freedoms become so cheap that you aren't willing to defend them? That you aren't willing to even face the reality of an ailing nation that you, and others like you, helped to create by consistently blaming others for making mistakes where you might have done worse and in any case wouldn't bother trying?

If you want to forfeit what greater men have fought for all I can do work is harder in your stead. Even so, I implore you, don't shout your cowardice in every forum of your precious Internet -- your time would be better spent packing.

Every time I think of some cool futuristic machine application, I'm reminded of how pointless it would be if we can't link up our consciousness and biology to the machines. So troublesome.