{ Monthly Archives }
As some of you know, I recently joined Israeli television company Keshet (channel 2) as the digital editor at their upcoming new website, called mako. Site’s not up yet (we launch in April), but we’re feeding some news items to the old Keshet website. Here’s the first news item, about Google’s Hebrew website’s going black in honor of Earth Hour (which is two days early in Israel, Sabbath and all).
I gave a once-over to my mangy number two on Calcalist in the Google. Jesus was that thing written like — well, I don’t want to say like what. I hope it wasn’t them that wrote that thing. I kept the basic gist, added a little bit of clarification and some extra info, corrected not a few misspells, and, oh yeah, ended that stupid line about Calcalist being an “affectionado of economics”. Sounds like a damn cigar magazine.
Meanwhile, Calcalist’s website rose from fifth to fourth place in Google (it’s first on Live.com, but nowhere on the first page in Yahoo), while my dingy, two-days old, no-design-yet blog that’s not about them rose from second to first. That’s strange, and also a shame, because Calcalist has a bitchin’ Internet team, and once they unleash them they might have a very powerful presence. I sound bitching but I’m not. I do hope Calcalist will do well. There’s good people there, and while I’m not a fan of this business news rush Israel’s having, but there’s no denying that given stiff competition, these journals can turn out some really good material that mainstream media just ignores.
(16.3: Fixed!)
You see, that’s why competition is good. For over a year we’re told the second reason HD players don’t sell is the high prices. So the competition dies, and the very next thing that happens is that the prices go up.
Reason number one for not buying n HD player was that everybody was afraid they’d look like a fool when the dust settles and they’d be holding the losing brand. I say, don’t worry: even if you buy Blu-Ray you’d still look like a fool. A couple of years from now bandwidth being what it is, everybody will be downloading their HD movies through Netflix and Blockbuster and Apple TV, and video stores will all be Starbucks.
I’ve watched the first few episodes of Deadwood before reading my RSS feed today, and let me tell you this: in the olden times, back in the west, conflicts of interests were met with a strong stand and a Colt .45. Now we have the Twitter.
Wordpress is the friend of professional bloggers and SixApart, who developed TypePad and also held Livejournal for a while, cater more to the personal bloggers, the ones who might be more prone to drama. So let me be on the record saying that it seems like Wordpress started it.
An upcoming article in Brain Research Magazine will prove the incredible — in the sense that it’s incredible that anyone has took the time to prove it. It seems that (a) you don’t drive as well when you’re talking on your cell phone; and, more incredibly*, (b) humans can’t multitask. Popular Science, which runs an article series called Science Confirms the Obvious, say that the Carnegie Mellon University study, conducted by fMRIing people while they were playing a driving simulator, shows listening reduces the ability to concentrate on driving by 37 percent. The lead investigator, Marcel Just, said that no matter how different two tasks are, “there’s only so much the brain can do at once”.
And yet, in defiance of this dazzling science, personal transportation has become more and more distracting as it advances. There’s only so much you could do on horse back. Maybe hum and play with the hilt of your sword. But radios, cellphone, GPSs and drive-throus, and more benign-looking, but as dangerous contraptions, such as rear-view makeup mirrors and seats for passengers, almost insure the road never gets those 37 percent of concentration. And that’s a shame: somewhere in those 37 lie the two or three percent you need to avoid running over a ten-year-old. And that’s just what distracts you on the inside of your car: more and more we learn how jamming the highways with huge, distracting billboards can rob us of our much-needed brain processing power.
I recently talked to Mario Gerla, a UCLA professor who works on a car-to-car computer network called CarTorrent. (Interview coming soon). If Gerla succeeds, we can add a file-sharing, video-playing computer to that list of distracting things we have in our cars. We were talking about the practical applications of CarTorrent and Gerla insisted he’d build his system so the driver can’t see the computer screens, or access the computers through special goggles which won’t require taking your eyes off the road. But even then you’d have more drivers searching for driving instructions or downloading movies for their kids, and who could blame them? Driving is boring. And if there’s one thing our weak mind can’t handle, that’s boredom.
I’m sure that CarTorrent is the future for cars: a robust network that can be used for everything from file sharing to navigation. I asked Gerla if it’s a bleak future for pedestrian ten-year-olds everywhere, or whether the tide would be stemmed and in the future we will see less and less interactive elements in our cars. The opposite, he said: “the future to me is in the driver not being the driver anymore, maybe a supervisor”. Using multi-point info gathering, systems such as CarTorrent would be able to drive our cars for us, and do it better than we ever would. That’s Gerla’s big dream: using accurate data from the net and lacking male egos, automatic cars would be tenfold more efficient at getting from point a to point b, and being computers, they would be absolutely better at preventing last-minute collisions.
This solves the too many distractions problem very neatly: “With the driving gone,” says Gerla, “we’d see more ways for you to entertain yourself on the way”. The big roadblock here is the car companies, who Gerla says are dead scared of liability suites. Solve this and there’s no reason for humans to drive anymore.
What’s interesting, and more than a little insulting, is how there’s no question we’d be so inferior to these driving computers. It’s not just that we’re easily distracted: these systems would react faster and more accurately to danger than even the most composed driver. They would do it just as elegantly while they’d be playing a movie for our kids, surfing the web for us and beating us at chess: computers can multitask fine. In the meanwhile, we’d be resigned to sit there and stare at the babes on the billboards.
I guess most of you know by now I left Calcalist, an ambitious new business journal backed by Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Ahronot. I thought about sharing the reasons with you — using a point-by-point illustration with before-and-after versions of an article, but I’m too polite for that.
But I will say that a last week this aspiring new publication printed an interview I made with Mark Frauenfelder. Mark is not only the founder of Boing Boing; he’s also the executive editor for the very cool MAKE Magazine, the epicenter of a subculture bent on making their own imprint on technology.
But alas: the printed version of the article was so severely mauled by its editors, so effectively watered down and cheapened as to appeal to none but the least interested – that it led me to a couple of conclusions. The first is that I’m ever more glad to have left. The second is that I do need a journalism blog, if only to post the original, the tame and untouched versions of those mutilated babies of mine, which they’ll continue to run in Calcalist in months to come. So (trumpets!) here it is, after the cut.
We’ll start with the original version of the Frauenfelder interview. I’ll have it – and all future articles, for copyright’s sake – translated soon, but I’m so offended by what’s published, and it bears so little relation to the original, that I’m taking this liberty once.
Among the many mistakes the editors made with this article, they forget to mention Eviatar Tron, who helped prepare this article. Thanks, Eviatar.
(If you want to be as offended like I am, drop a note and I’ll show the molested version).
