Encyclopedia?

I don't even remember when I first heard of Wikipedia, but in the last year it's become a part of every net-user's daily life. When you wonder about something, you go to Wikipedia. I've even got a shortcut to it on my phone's home page.

Why? Because it's reliable. Contrary to a certain spoof video (funny even though I disagree with it) the facts are almost always straight. For every user posting random information there is a hundred users correcting it and providing citations to support it. Wikipedia is famous because it's accurate, and it's accurate because it's famous. I've seen pages updated within literally minutes of something happening. Where else would you get this kind of information?

That's exactly my point. Without Wikipedia, where would we get our information? From a hard-copy encyclopedia that's incorrect the moment the editors are done with it? With the coming of the "Data Age", as I like to call it, internet access (and by extension access to information) is available almost anywhere. Are we leaving behind the encyclopedia? Is the process of validating information for print too slow for our needs?

Many blogs operate on the First Post principle. As soon as they catch wind of a rumour, they publish it on their blog. It's the internet. You can always go back and update it when you have more information, but the prestige of being the first publication to announce something makes it a risk worth taking. In a way Wikipedia is the same. As soon as something happens, a user thinks "I probably need to put that on the page" and off they go. If it's incorrect, another user (or the same user) will go and correct it. Because of this, you can go check how many people watched the last episode Lost, literally hours after broadcast.

So is Wikipedia the ultimate and only? No. Why is it the sole source of information on the internet, even maybe the world (because even newspapers now cite it as reference)? Because it provided the right service at exactly the right time. The problem with the internet was, yes there's all the information you will ever need, but are you going to sift through pages of search results pointing to news articles and rumour blogs to find what you're looking for? Wikipedia gives a single point of contact for information, which is then presented with definitions and basic information first, filtering into detail as you read.

As with everything, there is competition, other companies doing the same thing. Google launched Knol. It's essentially Wikipedia, but articles are based on topics and theses rather than defining a concept, and are supposed to be written by an expert in the field. There are some good articles, but when I want to know what films Stanley Kubrick(yes it's linked to the Wikipedia page) made, I'm not going to find it on Knol.

About now I usually make my closing argument. This time it's easy. To write this article, I opened Wikipedia 12 times to check references. That's all you need to know.

Also, if you're the type of person that gets involved in high science arguments over a few drink(happens every weekend), Wikipedia and a cell phone that can access it is an essential part of winning an argument.

Words:

Picture this time...

TV and Plugs

I first noticed it with Mythbusters. "We didn't only perform these tests. To see what else we got up to, go to your website on..."

It's a plug, like so many others. It's been there for ages. But ever since the internet can handle video, they've been hinting at further content. During season 4 of Battlestar Galactica the same thing happened, but they hinted that there are further scenes. Time Warp says that they performed more experiments than they can put in the disappointingly short show, which is quite believable.

However: At what point do they start depriving from the television episodes to bring traffic to their website? It's all fine if they put deleted scenes on the website, but did they purposefully cut those scenes from the episode to generate traffic to their website? Are they important? Are you still getting the full impact of the show if you don't go watch that part online?

It makes sense to drive people to your website. After all, when you have them there, you can sell stupid merchandise to them such as actual Cylon toasters.

What about webisodes? Battlestar Galactica had several seasons of between-television-season episodes. In my opinion the shows didn't greatly impact the way you interpret the next season, but are they a part of the story? Or simply fan fiction with publicity? All they really did was show a little more depth of the situation leading into the next season, to whet the apetite of a prospective audience. 

I think it's fine to have extra footage on the website, as long as it sticks by one of two conditions: The footage is not an integral part of the show, or is included on the box set upon release. When you buy the set, you want everything. In five years' time when you feel nostalgic, you won't be able to find those webisodes again.

We must be wary of this trend. I fear the day I watch Survivor and at the end of the show they say "To see who gets voted off, go to our website". It would mean the end of television as we know it...

Words:
This will be my first post without a relevant quote at the bottom. However, I read this during the week and found it funny:
"Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died"
-Stephen Wright

Boredom

When I think back to my childhood (when I was about 13), the first thing I think of is the stupid stuff we got up to during summer holiday. Spending hours outside, walking from friend's house to friend's house, getting into trouble as often as humanly possible... Good times were had.

But why did we do this? Why did we mess around for days on end? Because we were bored. We had nothing to do.

A decade later, I have no time to do the things I want to. I realise that this is partly because I now have a job, but if I look purely at the list of things I want to get to, there's ten times more stuff on my list. When I was a kid, we entertained ourselves. We made stuff up. We pretended. These days, you don't have to imagine. If you want a fantasy story, you play a game with a fantasy story in it. If you want to pretend to race around, you go to the carts track and race.

In my day, we built soap box racers. I think I'm one of the last generations to actually do this. You didn't just get in and press the win button with your foot. You actually designed the thing, planned it out, built it, tested it. And when you ended up in a ditch you learnt from the experience and did it better next time.

Kids these days can buy their "soap box racer" at the store. It's plastic. It's made in a factory. And it comes with seatbelts and airbags, because heaven forbid you actually hit something and got hurt. And if somehow you did manage to get hurt, your parents sue the living daylights out of the manufacturor.

How sad is that? That you can't even get hurt anymore. It's an integral part of childhood!

Here's what scares me: Writers use their imagination to create worlds for their readers. Their imaginations are vivid because they played in the garden when they were a kid. They made stuff up. When the children of this generation grow up... where will their inspiration come from? Will they simply derive their stories from the stories they've read before? Will they base it on the inherintly crappy stories in games?

Are we the cause of imagination's extinction?

You don't have to imagine you're a jedi, running around with a broomstick going "woooooom! wooom!". You just play the Star Wars game. Don't get me wrong, the games are great. But at some point kids need to put down the game and actually use their brain.

Be creative. Try to solve problems. Get it wrong. Get hurt. This is how you learn. This is how you discover what it's like to lose. This is what shapes your future. Live it.

Words:
"1000 times I have accepted the drudge work and delivery jobs and assassination requests and diplomatic missions and more for every random person I've met in the game. And yet, I get resentful every time my wife asks me to take out the trash. Something is not right here. And while I'd love to ponder it more, I really do have to get back to the game now. Oh wait, no---I'm at work! Shit!"
-Jeff Green

Organic Computing

Anyone who's seen sunlight in the last 20 years knows that computers work in binary. Ones and zero's. On or off. There's no inbetween. It's structured, organised and predictable. It allows people like me to control a user's experience, anticipate their behaviour, and provide them with what they need. But why is this? Humans have a natural urge to organise. To put concepts into categories. To decide what is relevant and what can be ignored. But why is this? Because when we were barbarians (no offence to barbarians, they did a lot for our species) knowing what to pay attention to meant the difference between life and death.

Personally I don't make decisions until I know something about all the options presented to me. When there are only 2 options, the decision is easy. You can then begin assigning theoretical meanings to each value. "When this link changes colour, it means I've been to this page." The information that is given to you is simple, but you're willing to be more loosely coupled about the concept when it's in your mind, because then you're in control. As long as it's in the computer, the values of on or off means that electricity is flowing or it is not flowing, like a complex network of electric extention leads all plugged into each other, back and forth. Depending which lights you want on, you walk around flipping different switches. After a while you get bored and you start doing strange things such as synchronising Christmas lights to music.

This is the core of all electronics: Flipping switches really fast to make it do what you want.

The truth is, nothing is coldly logical. A computer may present itself in ones and zero's, but when you drill all the way down, those digits are stored somewhere on a disc. On that disc there's some physical medium being forced into a positive or negative state. The medium may well be able to store more values, such as half-on or almost off. But if it did, it would be much more complicated to control.

But now we've become used to the basic functionality of computers. (I use the term "basic" loosely) Now we want a computer that can think and deduce like a person. We want a computer in our fridge that will order milk over the internet when you're running low. We want a door that unlocks when you ask it to. We want computer-controlled players in games that can play against us as if we're playing against a friend, making mistakes like a human player would. So we programmers end up trying to get ones and zero's to seem like they're thinking. To appear to have several options such as half-on or almost off. We end up taking the analogous medium, forcing it into a controllable digital medium, only to create a pretend analogous experience.

In my opinion, the only way we can create machines that can think, is to leave the electronic and robotic environment behind and work with something pure, something natural. Something that works like a brain. As long as we're stuck behind coldly logical situations, we have to think of every possible scenario and prepare for it. We can never just leave the thing to learn. A computer, no matter how advanced, can never truly be spontaneous. The problem is, creatures have spent millions or years making mistakes, only the lucky few surviving, to develop the natural ability to learn. Even a child of a few weeks old can learn from their own experience (with a little help).

As far as I know the closest we've ever come to a human-created thing teaching itself is Lucy the Android (pictured).

There isn't really a point to this. I'm just putting out there something that was mulling around in my head the last few days... It's all very interesting once you start reading up on it a bit. Comments welcome, especially if it's philosophical...

Words:
"Anyway what went wrong with A. I.? Well its all this guy’s fault and I presume most of you recognise Alan Turing. He was probably the one person qualified to expect that by now nobody would be making me stand up here and talk about how we were going to achieve human like intelligence because we would have done it. Because 52 years ago, he made this prediction 'By the end of the century one would be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted'. Well the end of the century came and went a couple of years ago and coincidentally the time ran out for Turing's prediction the exact second when computers were destined to tell us how stupid they were on account of the fact that they couldn't add up the date properly. So it all went horribly wrong and around the turn of the century I started thinking about why it went wrong. I considered it carefully and came up with the following considered opinion "its because we A. I. researchers are all narrow minded, domineering, chess playing computer nerds'."
-Transcript of Steve's keynote speech, "Machines Like Us," given at the Applied Knowledge Research Institute's 2002 Biennial Seminar

You're Overqualified

Many of us have heard this phrase. It's the excuse they use to get rid of you when there's someone with lower qualifications but greater potential. And by potential I mean influence, or a family member in the company (good read).

But what it really means, and how it became an excuse in the first place, is what I'm discussing here.

When you finally get out of high school and start studying, it's the greatest thing since your driver's licence. You're finally studying for your passion, not just subjects that "will help you later in life". If you're going away from home to study it also brings independence. You can do what you want, when you want. To some degree you can even own what you want because many bursaries and student loans include living expenses. The problem arises a few years later, when you receive your bachelor's. Now you have a decision: Go work, or study further. There are a few arguments to table:

1. "What if I'm unqualified? Is a bachelor's degree enough?" Many companies and/or lines of work require further study. The more technical it becomes, usually the more specialised your studies need to become. Maybe an honour's degree? Or how about a doctorate?
2. "I don't have to pay my loan until I start working." Especially if you're from a less privileged household your parents are unwilling to or incapable of paying your loan for you. In many cases the massive debt hanging over your head is a good enough reason to avoid the real world of the middle-class low-income young adult.
3. "But there's so much more to learn!" Many students get stuck in the academic, working their way up from undergrad to grad to doctor to professor. They then make their living from writing papers on ridiculously focussed and specific subject matters that have no real-world implications other than to advance science in an obscure direction. Many students become apprentices to a professor at their university and later replace the professor.

These are all valid arguments, but are they feasible in a modern world?

I'm a programmer so my knowledge of the work environment is limited to the IT sector, but I think my logic extends to other fields. The most important thing in work isn't theory, it's experience. You can study for years and think you've seen everything, but I guarantee the first day on the job something will happen that you never saw coming. The only way to learn the tricks of the trade is to actually be part of the trade. If your dream job requires more study, I suggest finishing your first qualification and then getting a part-time job in the specific sector to start gaining experience. You can then continue your studies in whatever direction you need.

Often you study something thinking it's your dream career, but as soon as you start working you find out that it's not as glamorous as you thought. If you start working early enough, you won't waste so much time and money studying something you're not really into.

Then there's the counter argument: If experience is so much better than theory, why study at all? Because without any theory you're the temp secretary in the high-tech laboratory. You have no idea what's going on around you. Besides, no-one will take you seriously unless you have something behind your name. If no-one will take you, you will never get your golden "two years experience" that so many of the big players require.

So, to summarise: You need to study something relevant before you start working, but once you have a qualification that can get you a proper job, start working even if it's only part-time. Continue studies if you're interested, but keep tabs on what's needed in your sector and what the big companies are looking for. It doesn't help studying something that you love if it's only going to get you unemployed.




Words:
"I don't trust Apple, I just like them. Very much like dating a supermodel."
-ZA Tech Show: Episode 20

Survival of the Smartest

If you spend a little time observing a pack of wolves, you quickly notice a hierarchy. There's an alpha male, considered the leader, and his followers. The followers all want to be the alpha, but unless they can challenge and defeat the alpha, they're forced to follow him. The females in the group would want to be with the alpha because he is the strongest or fastest of the males, and thus holds genes that would guarantee their offspring's future.

Humans were very much the same for a long time. The jock was the guy with the girls. He was the popular guy until someone appeared to be better than him, at which point he was replaced. Later this was shifted towards money. The richest guy was considered the popular one. He could make things happen. But recently, this balance of Survival of the fittest has shifted.

I read somewhere once that woman find Dilbert(pictured) attractive. Why is this? By all standards he's the lesser man. He's unhealthy and ugly. It's because he's a geek.

On a subconscious level, people realise that with the advent of the internet as a business and social tool, and a massive part of everyday life, the people who are involved in this sector are the ones with the reliable income in the foreseeable future. On the other side of the spectrum is the current sports star. Though they make millions in a very small time frame, their earning ability is directly linked to their health. And in this world of fast food and couch entertainment it becomes increasingly difficult to stay at the top of your game. It's no longer the survival of the fittest, it's survival of the smartest.

But don't think it's easy to stay at the top in the IT sector. The problem with a web-driven life is that it becomes susceptible to trend. Today people will love your product. Tomorrow they could be enthralled in someone else's product. Or worse, you could get sued for some repercussion that your product has in the real world, like what happened to Napster.

To stay on top in this environment, you need to stay up to date. And by date, I mean literally to the day. You need to know what's hot on the net, and what's the next big thing. This creates the problem that you might fall for a trend that lasts only a week. You could become a cloner...

Definition of word I just made up:

Cloner (noun)

A product or company that copies a successful idea almost to the letter, differing only enough to be distinct, but not enough to discredit the popularity.

On the other hand, cloners can often hit on an idea that makes their idea better than the original. You don't always get it right the first time. Take for instance MySpace. It allowed you to tell other people about you (and later about your band, company or whatever). You had a list of friends, but that's basically as far as you could take it. Then Facebook came along. In essence it was the same concept, but it was focussed on your real identity and your real friends. Not just that, but it shows you your mutual friends to help you figure out how you know someone. Later it also started showing you who you might know on Facebook that you didn't realise was on Facebook, by tracking who's friends are also your friends.

This simple link between the internet and everyday life made Facebook much more popular than MySpace. Not to mention more sophisticated. When you go to someone's MySpace page, you're bombarded by animations, video's, music, flashing banners, games... basically anything that you feel like putting on there. It's messy and noisy. Facebook has a rule: No active content on your profile unless the viewer activates it. It's much cleaner. They're also working on separating your profile into different areas, your critical information being the first thing you see. The rest of your content will be shifted to another page, so a viewer only has to see it if they're interested in it. (do I get my commission now?)

The internet and its relating technologies is where the sustainable income of the future will be. And if you're careful, you might be one of the lucky few to end up on top.

Words:
"First, I sit up. Writing is serious business for which your spine must be straight. I also lean my head slightly downward, looking up at my words as I write. Occasionally I mumble what I'm typing… no clue why."
-Rands in Repose