Tag Archives: new york times

Geezers get in on the Web action

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CC/Travis Church

Grandma: The computer will keep her at bay. Photo: CC/Travis Church

Thanks to my brother, Erik Baard, for passing along this piece, about grannies and grandpas making their holiday appearances via webcam:

“We would be strangers to them if we didn’t have the Web cam,” said Susan Pierce, 61, of Shreveport, La., who will be a virtual attendee at Thanksgiving dinner with her grandchildren in Jersey City this year.

Over the last year, Ms. Pierce and her husband watched Dylan, 17 months, learn to walk and talk over the Web cam, and witnessed his 4-year-old sister Kelsie’s drawings of people evolve from indeterminate blobs to figures with arms and fingers and toes.

But the powerful illusion of physical proximity also sharpens their ache for the real thing. “You just wish you could reach out and cuddle them,” said Ms. Pierce, a nursing professor. “Seeing them makes you miss them more.”

But many grandparents find that the Web cam eases the transition during in-person visits, when grandchildren may refuse to sit on their laps or may reject their hugs because they do not recognize them. As one Web cam evangelist wrote on her blog, www.nanascorner.com: “You’ll be able to pick up where you left off without those warming up to you, awkward moments.”

My emphases, in the excerpt, above. Two concerns: Visiting via webcam makes separation more painful, the article seems to suggests; I resist any technology celebrated for ameliorating natural human feelings, as noted by the Times, when it cites this incredibly fart-y website.

via Grandma’s on the Computer Screen – NYTimes.com

Google the flu? The feds will see you

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His Google searches may have given him away. Photo: CC/Daniel Horacio Agostini

Prepare to be reading a hell of a lot about “infoveillance” and “infodemiology,” and for the major news outlets to continue making nice to Google.

That’s because the biggest “infodemiology” experiment to-date is about to take place, now that we are at the end of flu shot season.

Thanks to a new Google product, Google Flu Trends federal watchers will track Americans’ illnesses this winter, based upon the search engine terms they use.

Any flu-stricken sap searching Google for a cure will find himself under the microscope.

Where people bang out searches for “sniffles” or “flu,” an outbreak might be seen by the feds as taking hold in that community.

Several searches from a single street for “hacking” and “high fever” might trigger a quarantine.

Google is making the usual assurances that the data will be aggregated, anonymized, etc…

But I know of no regulatory body authorized to march into Google’s offices, to insure the company scrubbing anyone’s personally identifiable information.

I can see why the CDC would covet such data: it will give epidemiologists specifics (in addition to hospital admissions data) on the course of an outbreak.

Such a project will also show the feds which communities haven’t gotten the “everyone must get a fllu shot” memo.

See the New York Times report.

Zealots haunt environmentalist religion

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Global warming now a core “belief” among environmentalists, says Freeman Dyson

(Love your mother.)

from Mark:

Environmentalism is a secular religion that we can all get behind, physicist Freeman Dyson writes in the Times.

There is just one problem: The movement, Dyson argues, is run largely by non-scientists, and many of those believe that “global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet.” (See excerpt, below.)

Now any global warming skeptic is being labeled in popular culture as “an enemy of the environment.”

One transhumanist (or H+, short for human-plus) complains that many of his fellows have already bought into the global warming “dogma.” Follow the link, below, to see the comments to this blog post, at Sentient Developments:

Sentient Developments: Freeman Dyson on the ‘religion of environmentalism’ There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.