John Miedema

I’ve been looking at houses in the Ottawa area. The prices have been rising dramatically over the past year, so I was interested in an article by the CBC a couple days ago with the headline, “Housing bubble may soon burst”. The article cited a report by The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, warning that Canada may be facing a U.S. style housing bubble. I read this article around noon. That evening I looked at the article again. By that time, the headline and story had changed. The headline now …

Clay Shirky has a new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. In this book he makes an argument with which I agree. Much of the cognitive surplus we squandered on watching television has been put to better use on the web. I also agree that the potential is enormous. As Shirky observes, Wikipedia was built out of one percent of the hours spent watching television in a year. However, before the web, we also spent more time reading long-form books, shaping the capacity for complex cognition, …

Feed readers are old news for many active web users. Using a feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader, a reader enjoys having the latest information from preferred sites all show up in one tool. I noticed that any site that did not have an RSS feed quickly fell off my radar. I asked, Does a site without RSS exist? Although many people still read the web the old-fashioned way of visiting bookmarked sites, I wondered if the new trend would cause non-RSS sites to fall off the map into …

OpenBook 3 is not far from completion: a few more small features to add, loose ends to tie up, and testing. Most recently I updated OpenBook to use Open Library’s server-side implementation of their Books API. This may sound dull but it will make a big difference for OpenBook in two ways.
Loads triple fast. Previously, OpenBook had to make two to three API calls to get all the book information it needed. The deprecated APIs needed separate calls for book and author information. If you supplied an ISBN, OpenBook …

A conservative defines a liberal as someone who sees a drowning man and throws him a rope only half as long as needed, calling out, “I’ve done my part, now you do yours.” Compromise. Mushy oatmeal. That is how people with polarized ideas, from either end of any spectrum, portray the people who prefer a middle ground. Sitting on the fence, they call it. Ever run into a fence? It is cataclysmic, a sudden dramatic disruption in pattern. No oatmeal.
Many middle zones are cataclysmic, marking a dramatic change that …

Surfing the web, pages loading, files downloading or uploading, even offline using resource hungry programs, how much time do you spend watching your computer’s hourglass spin, waiting? Unlike a book that everyone can read at once, the Internet is a stateless resource, requiring time and energy each time a request is made. If everyone requested a single page at once, the server would crash. So requests are queued, and we wait.
Sure, we have to wait with print resources too. If I am writing and need to look something up, …

Organized information is better than disorganized information, so it goes. Fast, relevant, digital, centralized. Google’s express mission is to “to organize the world’s information”. Information has been defined as the reduction of uncertainty. Certain, consistent, simple. All good things, I suppose. I am certain, though, that the reverse qualities of information are important too. Information that is …
Slow. It runs deeper.
Late, even, rather than timely and false.
Local, subjective, personalized, something my neighbour wrote, never found on a top-ten list.
Irrelevant, because it is selfless. This is the opposite of local, but …

How much thought do you put into selecting a setting for reading? Recently I have been thinking about the extended mind thesis. It states that our minds do not end with our brains but extend into the environment. A thought is partly a product of the setting. It makes sense then that where we reading makes a big difference in a reading experience.
Maybe you already do this. Many people read cookbooks in the kitchen, magazines in the bathroom, computer books while programming, or a bible or psalter in a …

You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s just the way it is. The statement may sound too obvious, but it plays out in so many ways. You’ve heard the old joke about the drunk looking for his keys by a lamp post, not because he lost them there, but because that’s where the light is. Psychologists try to interpret the unconscious. Critical theorists try to reveal subtext. Physicists have uncertainty principles and mathematicians have incompleteness theorems. They are all limits to knowledge.
Economists have their own horizon, externalities. Given …

Just watched a video featuring Jaron Lanier, author of You are Not a Gadget. He pitches against Web 2.0 freebie culture, envisioning instead humans creatively reinventing themselves rather than remixing the products of others. He also rejects AI singularity zealots who predict a merger of human and machine intelligence, preferring to see humans as supernatural, distinct from computers and nature. Hmmm. I agree that I am not a gadget, but I see things a little differently. I think Web 2.0 hype got carried away (thank goodness that’s over) but creativity …

The digital world has substance in its own right, but we invented digital technology to enhance our physical world. It’s funny how we forget that sometimes.
Take ereaders. Ereaders like the Kindle, Nook, and Kobo are popular right now. They are nifty. You can download books, you can click from one page to the next using buttons instead of fingers. They are lightweight if you’re the sort to carry a library with you. But is that it? I found the Kindle’s note-taking functions disappointing, especially when I wanted to transfer …

You’ve played Tetris. It’s that fun video game in which players rotate falling shapes to fit a neat fit in slots at the bottom of the screen. Clark and Chalmers (1998) wrote a paper, The Extended Mind, in which they used Tetris to make a fascinating point about the nature of mind. The article begins with a question, “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Enter Tetris. When we play the game, we rotate the shapes before deciding the best fit in the slots. Part …

Last week I experienced my first earthquake. It was 5.0 at its origin in Quebec, and managed to shake up downtown Ottawa quite nicely too. I was plunking down code at my computer when it happened. I looked up, wondering for a moment if the walls were going to collapse. No damage happened and no one was hurt, but it was a reminder that digital technology, powerful though it seems, is fragile.
Where is digital technology going next? Web 2.0 is over. What a rush. Web participation went mainstream with blogs, …

You’ve heard Nicholas Carr’s question, Is Google making us stupid? Why stop with Google and the Internet? Media mogul Moses Znaimer claimed that print created illiteracy. If you think Znaimer lacks credibility on this subject, how about Socrates? In the Phaedrus, Socrates shares the view that written accounts cause forgetfulness, giving only the semblance of knowledge, making us shallower thinkers. Socrates preferred the oral tradition, and is only known to us today through the writings of Plato.
Perhaps all technologies take something away from us. Or not. Our brains have evolved …

I’m one of those people who is concerned about how the Internet is changing our brains. Nicholas Carr addresses this theme in his new book, The Shallows. I will review it soon. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Internet. And it’s true that everything changes the brain. This has become increasingly apparent with new research on brain plasticity. But the Internet is an intellectual technology, extending our brains and changing the way we process information. It changes the way we perceive the world. That’s not necessarily bad. Past intellectual …