Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.

I study people, technology, and the worlds they make

Month: June 2011 (page 1 of 2)

New toy

June 30, 2011 / / Comments Off on New toy

This afternoon I finally gave in and bought an iPad 2. Perhaps "gave in" is not quite the right term for my feelings about the purchase, but still…. It's my gift to myself for winning a contract for the contemplative computing book, so I partly justify it on the grounds that I'll be able to write with it.

I have high hopes that I can leave my laptop at home more often, and take this and a Bluetooth keyboard when I go travelling, to the library, etc.. That won't always be the case; in fact, I suspect that the relationship between my MacBook and the iPad will be like the relationship between my car and bike. I need the car for certain kinds of tasks, but I can substitute the bike for shorter trips and if I think out my day completely enough; a large technology is really a hedge against having to think too much.

Anyway, the Bluetooth keyboard works like a charm, and I have high hopes that I'll be able to make this relationship work.

Another book giveaway

June 29, 2011 / / 2 Comments

In the course of reorganizing my home office (I’m starting serious work on my next book, on contemplative computing), I’ve made another cull of my book collection. Like last year, I’ve got several large boxes of books that are duplicates, books I read long ago, or books I’m honestly never going to read. Some are in pristine condition (alas), while others are annotated. I’m looking to give away to someone who can use them- preferably a grad student in history of science / STS or some related field, but that’s highly negotiable.

Many of them are really outstanding, but the trajectory of my professional work is such that they’re no longer really relevant for me, and I’ve got more books coming in the door every day. Here’s a picture of many, but not quite all, the books I’m giving away.


Go to flickr for a full size version

The terms of the giveaway are:

  1. The books are free; all you pay is postage (about $25-30 per box).
  2. You take the whole set, which consists largely of books in history of science; contemporary science, science policy, or science and business; and a few in history of art and architecture. I don’t really have time to publish a catalog of all the books, and mail them out individually; plus as a collection it has some measure of integrity or structure that I think is of some small value, and worth preserving.

If you’re interested, contact me at askpang at gmail dot com.

The rise of self-publishing

June 24, 2011 / / Comments Off on The rise of self-publishing

I’ve spent the last few weeks working on a book proposal around contemplative computing. It’s been a great, absorbing experience, so naturally an article on the growing respectability of self-publishing would catch my eye.

With Bowker reporting an “explosive growth” of 169% last month in “non-traditional” publishing, it’s not just vanity projects that are taking the self-publishing route these days. Amazon announced last week that John Locke had sold 1,010,370 Kindle books using Kindle Direct Publishing, making him the first self-published author to join the “Kindle Million Club”, alongside the likes of Stieg Larsson and James Patterson. Meanwhile, self-published authors Louise Voss and Mark Edwards currently top Amazon.co.uk’s Kindle bestseller list, and say they’re selling up to 1,900 copies a day of their jointly-written thriller, Catch Your Death. Faulkner award-winning author John Edgar Wideman last year chose to publish his new collection of short stories through Lulu.com; the site, offering authors an 80/20 revenue split, has published over 1.1 million authors to date, adding 20,000 titles to its catalogue a month. Writers around the world are getting their books to readers – and getting paid for it – without a publisher standing in between. Self-publishing, it seems, is becoming respectable.

Many of the authors who this Guardian article talks about are established authors with fan bases: their name recognition means that they’re going to be sought out by readers, and don’t have to compete as hard as first-time authors.

So what’s changed recently? According to one author who’s selling a lot online,

“Two major developments have had a hugely beneficial impact on self-publishing. Firstly, changes in technology, in particular the adoption of ebooks by the mainstream thanks to Amazon’s Kindle, the iPad, etc… If you’re a self-publishing author today, you have a vast audience waiting, and a decent number of professional channels through which you can easily make your work available. I personally know authors who are doing this to great effect – some are making over $10,000 every month! Secondly, the advent of social networking has had an incredible effect.”

Word of mouth matters a lot for both printed and electronic books. And as another author makes clear, for professional writers, this isn’t just about disintermediation, or being free of the shackles of the editorial process: to be a success in the self-publishing market, you need to

“Write the best book you can, hire a real editor to make it better. Have it professionally copy-edited to remove typos. Get a real cover artist – if you’re not a professional artist, don’t do your own cover. Get that book into ebook form. Start promoting, and start on your next book. Repeat, repeat, repeat.”

So essentially self-publishing is “create your own virtual publishing house.”

Quote of the day: Cars 2

June 23, 2011 / / Comments Off on Quote of the day: Cars 2

From Slate:

A little girl near me kept asking her dad, “Which cars are the bad guys? What are they doing?” Her father shushed her politely, but he would have done his fellow audience members a bigger favor by loudly and accurately answering her questions, since we were just as stumped.

Uh oh.

Quote of the day: On sleeping in the same room as the kids

June 21, 2011 / / Comments Off on Quote of the day: On sleeping in the same room as the kids

From Gizmodo:

[G]oing on vacation is MUCH more stressful and emotionally draining than working. This is largely because I have to spend a full week sleeping in the same room as my children. You should only have to sleep in same room as your kids if aliens have invaded the fucking Earth and are trying to mow you down with their giant alien laserbeams. Otherwise, it should never be necessary.

Our real products were the experts, not the papers

June 21, 2011 / / Comments Off on Our real products were the experts, not the papers

A very interesting article by Gregory Treverton (who I know from his distinction between puzzles and mysteries in forecasting) asks "What should we expect of our spies?" It's available to subscribers, so you may or may not be able to read the whole thing, but a couple points jumped out at me.

The main question he takes on is,

"What should people expect of their intelligence agencies?" Not "what would they like?"; for policymakers would like perfect prescience, if not omniscience. They know that they can have neither.

The first is his distinction between different types of tasks that intelligence analysts are called upon to undertake, and the danger of confusing one with the other. There are demands for both actionable intelligence or answers to specific questions- i.e., the answers to puzzles- and a broader awareness of large trends or potential disruptions- in other words, mysteries- and the pursuit of the two don't sit together well.

When the Soviet Union would collapse was a mystery, not a puzzle. No one could know the answer: it depended. It was contingent. Puzzles are a very different kind of intelligence problem. They have an answer, but we may not know it. Many of the intelligence successes of the cold war were puzzle-solving about a very secretive foe: were there Soviet missiles in Cuba? How many warheads did the Soviet SS-18 missile carry?

The second interesting point is that at the National Intelligence Council,

I came to think that, for all the technology, strategic analysis was best done in person. I came to think that our real products weren't those papers, the NIEs. Rather they were the NIOs, the National Intelligence Officers-the experts, not papers. We all think we can absorb information more efficiently by reading, but my advice to my policy colleagues was to give intelligence officers some face time. If policymakers ask for a paper, what they get will inevitably be 60 degrees off the target. In 20 minutes, though, the intelligence officers can sharpen the question, and the policy official can calibrate the expertise of the analyst.

This is a nice reminder how just how much our thinking about the future is a product of our current concerns- that intelligence "is about creating and adjusting stories," as Treverton puts it, and thus "stories not imagined by policy are not likely to be answered or developed by intelligence"- and how much knowledge about the future is irreducibly craft and tacit knowledge, not formal knowledge. Sure, you can produce a report, this line of argument goes, but that product will by its nature be misleading.

Contemplative art

June 20, 2011 / / Comments Off on Contemplative art

I was in Washington DC last week, and managed to take in the Nam June Paik exhibit at the National Gallery. It was an unexpected lesson in technology and contemplation.

Nam June Paik, One Candle, Standing Buddha
via flickr

Qantified self

June 13, 2011 / / Comments Off on Qantified self

Just wanted to note brief post about self-tracking and the quantified self movement on my Future 2 blog.

Quantified self and self-tracking

June 13, 2011 / / Comments Off on Quantified self and self-tracking

Slate reprints a Financial Times piece on self-tracking, using the recent Quantified Self conference as a jumping-off point to look at the movement more generally. For anyone who's not familiar with it, the article offers a good introduction to the phenomenon, and the spirit behind it:

Moving in the technology circles of New York and Silicon Valley, engineers and entrepreneurs have begun applying a tenet of the computer business to their personal health: "One cannot change or control that which one cannot measure."

Much as an engineer will analyze data and tweak specifications in order to optimize a software program, people are ­collecting and correlating data on the "inputs and outputs" of their bodies to optimize physical and mental performance.

"We like to hack hardware and software, why not hack our bodies?" says Tim Chang, a self-quantifier and Silicon Valley investor who is backing the development of several self-tracking gadgets.

Indeed, why not give yourself an "upgrade," says Dave Asprey, a "bio-hacker" who takes self-quantification to the extreme of self-experimentation. He claims to have shaved 20 years off his biochemistry and increased his IQ by as much as 40 points through "smart pills", diet and biology-enhancing gadgets.

"I've rewired my brain," he says.

I like this quote because it's highlights the somewhat geeky quality of the movement, and the tendency to think of the body as a piece of hardware. (Asprey's assumption that we can "rewire" the brain in directed ways that don't mainly involve things like learning new languages- in other words, the indirect old-fashioned way, through activities, but the new-fangled way, through drugs and so forth- is particularly revealing. Though we often use the term brain when we mean mind, but in this case I suspect the choice is perfectly accurate.)

I'm as big a believer in the virtues of self-tracking as anyone (it was critical for my weight loss, and self-experimentation is one foundation of my contemplative computing work). But as the author notes toward the end of the piece, "Nobody has yet measured the full impact of so fully measuring their lives." More generally, though, thinking about the human body as a piece of hardware leads you to make the kinds of mistakes that Jaron Lanier warns us about in You Are Not a Gadget: the accidental degredation of human abilities through comparison to computers. For it to go mainstream, and to do more good than harm, we need a more human, or humane, version of self-tracking and self-experimentation.

Ecto is dying, long live… what, exactly?

June 11, 2011 / / Comments Off on Ecto is dying, long live… what, exactly?

For years I’ve used Ecto, and loved it. However, for the last few months I’ve had problems with it: it’s crashing or hanging up constantly, and that’s getting in my way.

So what should I switch to? I tried Mars Edit a long time ago, and have the vague memory that it was all right. I’ve installed the ScribeFire extension, and will play with that a bit (though I’n not seeing an ability to set categories, which may be a deal-breaker). But I liked having a stand-alone blog editor for offline writing, and would like to find another one.

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