Technology adoption in Amish communities

Via Kottke, a fascinating article from Kevin Kelly about the adoption of modern technology by Amish and Mennonite communities:

At first pneumatics were devised for Amish workshops, but it was seen as so useful that air-power migrated to Amish households. In fact there is an entire cottage industry in retrofitting tools and appliances to Amish electricity. The retrofitters buy a heavy-duty blender, say, and yank out the electrical motor. They then substitute an air-powered motor of appropriate size, add pneumatic connectors, and bingo, your Amish mom now has a blender in her electrical-less kitchen. You can get a pneumatic sewing machine, and a pneumatic washer/dryer (with propane heat). In a display of pure steam-punk nerdiness, Amish hackers try to outdo each other in building pneumatic versions of electrified contraptions. Their mechanical skill is quite impressive, particularly since none went beyond the 8th grade. They love to show off this air-punk geekiness. And every tinkerer claimed that pneumatics were superior to electrical devices because air was more powerful and durable, outlasting motors which burned out after a few years hard labor. I don't know if this is true, or just justification, but it was a constant refrain.

[...]

The Amish are steadily, slowing adopting technology. They are slow geeks. As one Amish man told Howard Rheingold, "We don't want to stop progress, we just want to slow it down," But their manner of slow adoption is instructive.

1. They are selective. They know how to say "no" and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ban more than they adopt.
2. They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes.
3. They have criteria by which to select choices: technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world.
4. The choices are not individual, but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.

Amish Hackers (Kevin Kelly, 10 Feb 2009)

Whew, talk about crossing the chasm...

The cluetrain left the station some time ago

There are many ways to measure how screwed Republicans are after the last election.

You can look at the avalanche of swing states that broke big for Barack. You can look at the demographic shifts that left McCain-Palin with decisive wins only among voters over age 60 and towns with populations under 50,000. Or you can look at my emergency telegram from John McCain.

For the uninitiated—and that would be anyone under 60—telegrams were the instant-message of the horse and buggy era, the Internet boom of the 1850s.

Telegrams don’t exist any more. Western Union sent its last telegram without much fanfare in 2006, after modern technology (beginning with the telephone) left it nothing more than a sentimental novelty.

But nostalgia is apparently alive and well at the RNC. They’ve been sending these same fundraising letters since at least the 1970s, when a portion of the population could still equate “telegram” with “urgent.”

Technology Gap - John Avlon @ The Daily Beast

Pricelessly (and tellingly) a source interviewed for this article goes on to describe McCain's election strategy as "...trying to scare the Abe Simpson vote."

And: on Meetup.com, McCain was not only comprehensively outdone by Obama, but in sheer numbers, by Bob Barr!

Herding cats

I don't know who said it first, but it's a truism: managing IT projects is like herding cats.

EDS turned the concept into a very funny television ad:

To wake the deaf

Here's one I never thought much about: how do you reliably construct an alarm that will wake up a deaf person?

Alarm clocks for the deaf apparently work on the principle of vibration - you've got a clock hooked up to a disc or pad that slips under your mattress, and it literally shakes you awake when it's time to get up. (I think I'd opt for one of the vibrating wristwatches, myself.)

Japanese researchers have just come up with a possible alternative strategy: smell. In particular, the smell of wasabi.

A new type of fire alarm in Japan has been developed using the pungent smell of horseradish.

The device is drawing attention as a new way to warn people with hearing disabilities.

Medical equipment manufacturers have developed a technology to extract components of the strong odor of horseradish, seal them inside a can and spray them out.

Shiga University of Medical Science Hospital cooperated with the makers and carried out experiments to see if the horseradish smell can wake up people from a deep sleep.

Fourteen people, including those with hearing disabilities, took part in the experiments.

In the experiment, 13 out of the 14 subjects woke up in less than two minutes after the smell reached their noses.

The people with hearing disabilities were particularly quick to wake up, with one person emerging from sleep in just 10 seconds.

News Now Report: Horseradish fire alarm (WCTV Tallahassee, FL)

I wonder if the sleepers awoke craving sushi.

via BoingBoing

Nearing his Canadian breaking point

Several years ago, I had the chance to visit a tech-support call center for one of the big computer companies. The technician gave me a second pair of headphones so I could listen in on his conversations with the hapless users.

I learned so much that day. I learned that all computer companies outsource tech support to dedicated call-center companies. I learned that the Users can be outrageously rude to these hapless tech-support reps, taking out their built-up frustration on somebody who had nothing to do with causing the problem.

And I learned that when they say, “Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes,” that’s only partly true. They also record your calls so they can pass around recordings of the funniest ones.

[...]

A Canadian customer was calling to find out if there was a faster way to trigger menu commands than mousing up to the menus.

Agent: Certainly, sir. There are keyboard shortcuts for many of those commands. For example, suppose you want to trigger the Select All command…

Caller: Yes, I use that one all the time! How do I do it?

Agent: Well, you just press Control-A.

Caller (after a pause): Well, that’s not working for me.

Agent: Do you have a text document open in front of you?

Caller: Yes, I sure do.

Agent: OK, now press Control-A.

Caller: I am, but nothing happens.

Agent: The text isn’t highlighted?

Caller: No, there’s no change at all.

Agent: That’s odd. If you press Control-A, the whole document should be highlighted. Try it again. Press Control-A. Tell me exactly what’s happening.

Caller (nearing his Canadian breaking point): Listen. I’m pressing Control, eh? And nothing’s happening, eh?

David Pogue: Tech Support Gets a Reprieve While Users Take a Hit (6 March 2008)

Hat tip: Greg

If God had meant for us to do molecular engineering, He'd have given us brains

If you don’t have a super-fast, super-small computer in a few years, blame the moral majority. It turns out that most Americans find nanotechnology, the scientific field most likely to produce such a breakthrough, morally unacceptable.

That’s according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin who are studying people’s attitudes towards nanotechnology, an emerging scientific field that involves manipulating molecules and atoms. They found that just 29.5% of the 1,000-plus Americans surveyed said they thought nanotechnology research was morally acceptable.

In other news, at least 70.5% of Americans don't have the first freaking clue what "nanotechnology" is...

Nanotechnology Is Morally Unacceptable (Wall Street Journal Business Technology Blog)

OLPC hits a snag or two

The One Laptop Per Child initiative is foundering on the rocky shoals of politics... and tech-company hardball:

In an interview with the BBC, Nigeria's education minister questioned the need for laptops in poorly equipped schools.

Dr Igwe Aja-Nwachuku said: "What is the essence of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don't have seats to sit down and learn; when they don't have uniforms to go to school in, where they don't have facilities?"

"We are more interested in laying a very solid foundation for quality education which will be efficient, effective, accessible and affordable."

The previous government of Nigeria had committed to buying one million laptops.

Dr Aja-Nwachuku said he was now assessing OLPC alongside other schemes from Microsoft and Intel.

[...]

Professor Bender said there was still an "aggressive" effort to undermine the charity.

"There is still a concerted misinformation campaign out there," he said.

Mr Bender said he would not speculate on who was behind the alleged campaign.

"Wherever it is coming from, it exists," he told BBC News.

Politics stifling $100 laptop (BBC News)

Technology companies, which at the end of the day are driven almost completely by ideas, are FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) generating machines.

When they perceive a threatening idea, they attack it publicly by spreading FUD (like a squid sprays ink), while privately angling to cut the best deal for themselves.

OLPC supporters see the project as almost pure altruism; Microsoft and Intel see it as having just created a massive new market... and one they desperately want a piece of.

As a practical matter, the laptop design that finally makes it to the masses is likely to be running some version of Windows and have "Intel inside."

Party like it's 1999

mr bubble
Originally uploaded by Carol Esther.

Silicon Valley’s math is getting fuzzy again.

Internet companies with funny names, little revenue and few customers are commanding high prices. And investors, having seemingly forgotten the pain of the first dot-com bust, are displaying symptoms of the disorder known as irrational exuberance.

Consider Facebook, the popular but financially unproven social network, which is reportedly being valued by investors at up to $15 billion. That is nearly half the value of Yahoo, a company with 38 times the number of employees and, based on estimates of Facebook’s income, 32 times the revenue.

Google, which recently surged past $600 a share, is now worth more than I.B.M., a company with eight times the revenue.

More broadly, Internet start-ups are drawing investment based on their ability to build an audience, not bring in revenue — the very alchemy that many say led to the inflation and bursting of the dot-com bubble.

There's a lovely symmetry in the choice of Yahoo as the benchmark for 2007 dotcom value vs. Facebook.

Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again (The New York Times)

Meet the Geek Marketers

In my Advertising Age column this week I wrote about a new career path I see emerging. It exists both in PR/advertising agencies and on the client side as well - The Geek Marketer.

My thesis is this: it's very difficult for anyone in marketing to keep up with all the twists the digital space because technology changes so darn fast. It's like chasing a cheetah. Most marketers - be they clients or agency side - are heads-down running their business. Therefore, companies are creating a new role. They're hiring people who act as translators between the ultra geeks and the marketers, if you will, and shepherd the development of pilot programs...

...These cross-trained specialists are fluent in both worlds and bridge them. They are marketers by trade, yet they also have a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology. As curious individuals, they are constantly studying how digital advances are changing our culture and media. Armed with these insights, they regularly apply them in a marketing context by working closely with brand teams to codify new best practices.

(Micro Persuasion: The Geek Marketer, September 4, 2007)

I think blogger Steve Rubel is on to something here, and not solely because he's just neatly summarized important aspects of my job description. :-)

There has always been money in being the resident geek-to-suit translator, especially in the IT business. I concur that it's the *pace* of change that is now driving this to the fore.

I'm going to have sanction you for "word processing while clueless"

The FTC spills the beans on Whole Foods' acquisition strategy, including a plan to contain Wal-Mart as they move into the organic grocery space... via a very elementary editing error while using Microsoft Word (and, presumably, Acrobat or something like it to create distributable PDFs.)

The Associated Press loves it:

Many of the details in the documents, which FTC lawyers filed electronically, were not meant to be released publicly, but words intended to be redacted were actually just electronically shaded black. The words could be searched, copied, pasted and read in versions downloaded from court computer servers.

Court officials realized the mistake and replaced the filing with a version using scanned pages of the redacted documents. Like covering up parts of a page with black paper before photocopying, there is no way to remove the blacked-out portions from the final copy.

The Associated Press downloaded the document from the public server before it was replaced by a properly redacted version.

In a statement late Tuesday, Whole Foods said it was investigating the "apparent improper release by the Federal Trade Commission of confidential proprietary business information."

"All information shared with the FTC was done so with the reasonable understanding that it would be handled appropriately," the statement said.

FTC spokesman Mitchell Katz declined to comment on the matter.

FTC's Whole Foods Case Revealed (AP, via Yahoo News)

I'll bet.

One ring to rule them all

In his weekly technology column, the New York Times' David Pogue describes the incredibly innovative web-based telephone management service, GrandCentral:

Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht — and with great complexity comes great hassle. You have to check multiple answering machines. You miss calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). You send around e-mail messages at work that say, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.”

And when you switch your job, cellphone carrier or home city, you have to notify everyone you know that you have new phone numbers.

A new service called GrandCentral, now in its final weeks of public beta testing, solves all of these problems. It’s a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.

Its motto, “One number for life,” pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of “The Lawnmower Man.”

GrandCentral

The online malware market

Microsoft says its new operating system, Windows Vista, is the most secure in the company’s history. Now the bounty hunters will test just how secure it is.

When its predecessor, Windows XP, was released five years ago, software bugs were typically hunted by hackers for fame and glory, not financial reward. But now software vulnerabilities — as with stolen credit-card numbers and spammable e-mail addresses — carry real financial value. They are commonly bought, sold and traded online, both by legitimate security companies, which say they are providing a service, and by nefarious hackers and thieves.

A Lively Market, Legal and Not, for Software Bugs (New York Times, 30 Jan 2007)

Liberation technology: mobile phones and third-world politics

Until recently, killers in Burundi found it easy to cover their traces; they just tossed the bodies into a river where crocodiles would eat them up. But in August residents of Muyinga province acted fast when they saw fresh corpses drifting downstream; they used their mobile phones to contact NGOs, who in turn tipped off the United Nations, whose soldiers got to the scene fast enough to recover some forensic evidence.

The use of mobiles as a tool of “empowerment”, even in the poorest and worst-governed parts of the world, is not always so grisly. The cruder kinds of electoral fraud, relying on poor communications between the capital and the boondocks, are now much harder. Even with minimal resources, monitors can count the voters and conduct exit polls—and then phone their findings to a radio station before the authorities stuff the ballot boxes. Such methods have helped make elections a bit cleaner in places like Ghana and Kenya. Meanwhile, in Europe's darkest corner, Belarus, text messages call youngsters to surreal acts of resistance, such as (to take a recent example) gathering to eat ice cream.

Mobiles, protests and pundits (The Economist, October 26, 2006)