Episode 0014, 09/08/2007
Title: People Searching, Brain Game Control, and
Cloud Computing
Welcome to Course Technology's CourseCast of the week, Episode 14, recorded September 8th, 2007.
This is Ken Baldauf bringing you this week's technology news and information targeted at college students.
This CourseCast is brought to you by Course Technology. Check out www.course.com for innovative textbooks and creative electronic learning solutions for higher education.
Story 1 - People Searching
It's difficult to find a person in a crowd, but finding a person in a crowd of 1.2 billion Internet users is a challenge indeed. Spock.com is a personal search engine that helps users find and discover people and information about people. The engineers behind Spock.com intend to profile every person in the world. They are taking advantage of the information provided by individuals about themselves on social networking sites such as MySpace and LinkedIn. They make use of artificial Intelligence software called the "Spock Robot" that scours the Web collecting every bit of information about every person that can be found, and combines that information into personal profiles. Once an individual's profile is created, Spock.com members can add and vote on descriptive tags for each individual which will provide the fuel for the search engine to generate accurate search results. A member can also "Claim" his or her own profile and add information to it, although users are not allowed to remove their profile, or alter what others have contributed to it.
Clearly such a service has considerable value: you could use it to find individuals with similar interests and tastes, find old friends and classmates, find individuals in your neighborhood to put together a softball team, businesses could use it to find new employees. There are also serious issues of privacy to be considered. Identity thieves and scam artists would most certainly use such a service to scout out victims. Advertisers and marketing agencies would target potential customers, and law enforcement would use it to search for criminals and criminal behavior.
This week social networking site Facebook announced that it will be exposing its 39 million members to outside search engines which of course will include the Spock Robot. Some Facebook members have expressed concerns over the decision. To ease concerns Facebook representatives stated that only the members name, photo, and list of friends will be accessible along with the ability to send the member a message. By default, all members will be exposed to outside search unless they change their privacy settings so that the search option is not set to include "everyone". However, having an "opt out" policy rather than an "opt in" policy makes it likely that Facebook will be offering up a majority of its users to the Spock bot.
It’s clear that Facebook will profit from the additional exposure it is providing to search engines, but many wonder at what cost to the Facebook community.
You can read more about this topic in articles published this week at Reuters, MIT's Technology Review, and NewsFactor Network.
Sources: Searching for Humans (Technology Review), Facebook lets users choose to publicize themselves (Reuters), Is Facebook Exposing Users to Identity Theft? (Newsfactor)
Story 2 - Brain Game Controllers - Which Is Being Controlled?
A brain-computer interface or BCI is a device that attaches to your head to allow you to control computer software through your thoughts alone. Companies like Emotiv Systems and NeuroSky are currently manufacturing BCIs mostly for use by disabled persons. It is expected that these devices will migrate to the consumer gaming market in 2008. Soon you may be "thinking" your game character around the landscape of the game's virtual world.
Users of BCI's say that it takes some training to be able to effectively use the device. The brain is trained through sensory feedback to become more adept at controlling action in the virtual world. Sensors attached to the scalp detect brain-wave patterns, and amplify and digitize the signals so the computer can process the information. As the brain experiences positive results in the software it learns how to generate more useful signals. Scientists fear that recreational use of the technology may result in negative effects on user's brains. For example, users are sometimes forced to slow down their brain waves to control on-screen objects. Afterward, some users have reported having difficulty focusing their attention. This begs the question, are we controlling the computer, or is the computer controlling us?
Read more about this topic in an article published in this week's Wired.
Source: Direct Brain-to-Game Interface Worries Scientists (wired)
Story 3 - Cloud Computing
I've spoken previously on this program about the probability of software and digital services migrating from individual PCs to Web-delivered services. This week, Microsoft took a big step in that direction with a product it calls Windows Live. Windows Live uses a delivery approach that techies call cloud computing, to deliver a growing number of free software services over the Internet. Windows Live is a dramatic departure from Microsoft's traditional packaged software approach and intended to compete with Web-delivered software from Google and Salesforce.com Software provided through Windows Live includes an updated e-mail program, a photo sharing application, and a writing tool for bloggers.
Cloud computing is a rapidly growing approach to software deployment that provides access to software "on-demand" through a Web browser. Data files created with the software are stored on the Web server in the users account. This arrangement allows users to access the tools and data from any Internet-connected device. An added benefit is that the data can be easily shared with other users of the service. It's perfect for group projects.
Read more about this topic in the New York Times at nytimes.com.
Source: Software via the Internet: Microsoft in ‘Cloud’ Computing (NYTimes)
New Briefs
That's it for this week's CourseCast. Links to this week's stories and many more news and information resources are provided at the Coursecast Web site at coursecasts.course.com. Until next time have a great week, and be sure to take advantage of the Power -- of Technology!