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Tuesday
2/26/2008 7:11:54 PM
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Michael Wells
People have always adapted language to the communications medium. There are slight differences between how language is used when spoken personally v. when it's spoken over the radio v. when it's written, and so on.
In some languages, where audio fidelity and visual cues are important to differentiating words, the words themselves can change. Japanese speakers tend to use "yon" (the number four) and "nana" (the number seven) over the phone rather than "shi" and "shichi" which are exactly equivalent.
But nothing seems to affect language use as much as the recent communications technologies of email, instant messaging, and phone texting.
Texting by itself is interesting in that you see impacts on spelling and usage of the English language immediately. The first drivers are speed of typing, and message length limitions--both push abbreviation into overdrive--and vowels just evaporate.
Then you have "coolness" which is a main driver for l33t, or "leet". There numerics replace alphabetics simply for the style of it.
But another interesting thing I've noticed is accidental language transformation. Take T9 for example. T9, also known as predictive typing, lets you simply press the numbers on the keypad and then using a dictionary, it picks the most likely candidate for the word you want. But short words are harder for it to guess, simply because there are more candidates, so often times you see someone type something like "go out" and instead it T9-translates to "in out".
What's interesting about this is that it happens commonly enough that people seem to have added the phrase "in out" to their vocabulary as acceptable slang for "to eat out". Even in speech.
Curious about this I spent a few minutes on Google and found that this odd cyclical adaption from speech -> writing -> abbreviated writing -> speech isn't new.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b1cyNigny8
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Sunday
12/2/2007 7:28:19 PM
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Michael Wells
Friend PhotoSaver is a very cool app... have your photo albums from your friends display directly on your PC in screensaver mode.
It would be really cool if this kind of app supported out-to-TV, and USB photo frame. I imagine people would actually pay quite a sum to have a decent digital photo frame on their wall, which automatically loaded with interesting content from their family and friends.
Although... I imagine it would have to be square in order to decently handle both portrait and landscape display modes...
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Tuesday
5/31/2005 11:24:13 AM
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Michael Wells
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Friday
3/25/2005 4:03:08 PM
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Michael Wells
As a sci-fi fan (hey, I'm an idea junkie, even the far-fetched ones), I picked up a Tracy Hickman book yesterday. Darksword. The story is... well, it has an interesting context and plot superstructure. I'm not far enough in yet to tell whether I like it. But an interesting revelation came to me very quickly.
The story has a good skeleton. You can see the basic elements early in the story; the framework for things to come. "Superstructure" is the best name I've come up with so far. But the actual story content is layered a bit too thinly. That is, the superstructure is too visible; and because it's too visible, it seems unlikely that there will be any surprises. Since you understand the basic rules and dynamics of the story so early in the novel, it will be difficult to turn away from them later.
The visual that came to mind was of come great beast, maybe a mammoth, but quite emaciated. What's inside is just too visible and therefore the whole thing seems weak. The superstructure is impressive, but the book reveals too much too soon. Almost as if the authors spent a lot of time on the superstructure, and had little time left to write the stories themselves.
The lesson is, definately spend the time on the superstructure, but make certain you don't leave the skeleton bare. Send it to the gym; pack on some meat, some muscle; finish the critter and give it some strength. Then, it's a bit harder for the reader to guess what's going on inside and predict the outcomes; the reader has to work a bit to figure out where the author's going, and that is the fun part.
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Friday
3/26/2004 8:27:14 AM
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Michael Wells
Wired quote of May 2002...
Weblogs are to words
What Napster was to music
Good, but I think it should be adjusted...
Weblogs are to ideas
What Napster was to music
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Thursday
3/25/2004 10:04:54 AM
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Michael Wells
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Monday
3/22/2004 1:57:16 PM
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Michael Wells
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Thursday
1/8/2004 5:51:15 AM
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Michael Wells
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Tuesday
12/30/2003 7:22:11 AM
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Michael Wells
Anti-Spam laws have passed! And though it's unlikely that this will have a real impact in the stuff at the bottom of the barrel [which was the stuff most of us objected to anyway], it's at least an interesting effort.
Read up on the legal mullabaloo, and then read the English version here.
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Thursday
12/18/2003 2:39:23 PM
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Michael Wells
An interesting discussion has recently popped on one of my favorite magazine discussion forums, regarding recent "phishing expiditions", where scam artists attempt to dupe the public into giving them private information... like PayPal account logins.
The discussion was very interesting and is still ongoing... but one thing that immediately became apparent is the incredible sophistication of these scams and the misconceptions and vulnerability the general public has regarding them.
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Wednesday
9/24/2003 1:55:04 PM
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Michael Wells
The U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City said the Federal Trade Commission overstepped its authority when it set up the popular anti-telemarketing measure, according to a court decision filed late Tuesday.
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=10171
Interestingly, the FTC's donotcall.gov website hasn't been updated as of this writing...
However, Illinois and many other states intend to fight the good fight, and appeal the ruling... there is confidence that the ruling will be overturned by the 10th Circuit.
But my real beef is this... telemarketers initiated the suit in January, arguing freedom of speech. Since when does anyone's freedom of speech extend into my home, and overrule my freedom to NOT LISTEN?
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Monday
9/22/2003 3:27:22 PM
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Michael Wells
Sweet revenge. For all the times you've been annoyed by telemarketers, Tom Mabe has the cure; a CD of his witty and appropriate response to telemarketers. Recently, Tom attended a convention of telemarketers and dialed attendees in their hotel rooms...
"Hello?"
"Hi, this is Tom Mabe calling from IG&A long-distance services. How are you doing this evening, sir?"
"I'm sleeping."
"Sir, do you ever find yourself awake at night worrying about your long-distance phone bill?"
"Dude, it's after three o'clock in the morning."
"Sir, I'm sorry, I would never call you this late. We must be in a different time zone. It's only, like, 2:15 here. Let me make it up to you. What if I told you I could save you up to $5 a year on your phone bill?"
[Click.]
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Tuesday
8/26/2003 12:49:51 PM
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Michael Wells
The human mind is a fickle thing, but one thing that my mind responds to is funniness. The higher something rates on my funniness scale, the more attention it steals away from other things, and the more stress goes with it. I like that.
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Wednesday
8/13/2003 7:09:42 PM
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Michael Wells
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Thursday
7/31/2003 9:24:03 AM
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Michael Wells
An interesting move for IT network admins... centralized information sharing! And why not? Crackers have certainly learned the advantages...
Internet Storm Center - Shows which vulnerabilities are being attacked most heavily.
Dartmouth News - Discusses security and technology issues.
Perhaps various news services will combine their efforts in the future, and offer a paging alert service to network administrators (and Chief Security Officer's / CSO's). Could save a lot of headaches and minimize damage.
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Friday
7/25/2003 6:42:38 PM
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Michael Wells
CDDB is the central database of compact disc (CD) music, which enables your CD player or computer to identify the songs on any CD you insert.
Though not truly a "communications" tool, CDDB is worth of discussion in this category because it does a great job at information processing through communication.
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Thursday
6/5/2003 10:55:49 AM
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Michael Wells
The pending releases of Exchange and Outlook have added some useful spam-fighting capabilities--both at the organization level and at the desktop level.
Some of the spam-identification technology is being carried over from Microsoft's MSN 8 service--which could be considered a very positive development. Like AOL, MSN has been faced with the mounting costs of dealing with millions of spam messages a day (and the angry consumers that result). By using the considerable traffic in the MSN mail system as a research and development environment, it's likely that the spam-recognition algorithms have been well-tuned.
http://www.ftponline.com/reports/tech-ed/2003/06_04_03/spam/
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Tuesday
6/3/2003 3:29:03 PM
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Michael Wells
There is continued activity regarding the FTC's nationwide do-not-call lists, but the gaps are starting to show...
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Saturday
5/31/2003 6:31:16 PM
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Michael Wells
As Americans, we've grown accustomed to existance in an incessant bazaar of marketing, and learned to tune out most of the messages we're not interested in.
Unfortunately, our desire to be social beings, and our affinity for communication technology like email and telephones has made it possible for marketers to follow us home.
There is a way to stop this...
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Saturday
5/31/2003 12:05:57 PM
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Michael Wells
I'm newly frustrated with my to-do list. Between my Outlook, two giant whiteboards, and my iPAQ Pocket PC, I still feel unable to effectivly track and prioritize tasks. There are a number of limitations...
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Friday
5/30/2003 9:08:11 AM
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Michael Wells
Though not strictly a communications technology, Wearable Computing experiments have made interesting headway in the communications arena.
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Thursday
5/29/2003 10:03:28 PM
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Michael Wells
One area in which information-transfer can be enhanced is through the use of direct visuals. In the case of purely audio-visual information such as the recording of a live event, information can be efficiently recorded and played back through video streams over the Internet.
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Thursday
5/29/2003 9:39:09 PM
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Michael Wells
Clearly we would be in the social stone ages if writing (and publishing) had never been developed. As a form of communication, nothing has changed human society more than writing.
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