Archive for the 'Science and technology' Category

Time to mourn cyberporn?

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on November 11, 2008
in Science and technology
. 2 Comments
Virtual worlds: not as fun as a friendly chat

Virtual worlds: not as fun as a nice chat

A brief note for those temperamentally inclined to believe that every other click on the worldwide web is a quest for sex—in the latest Alexa rankings of the globe’s 500 most-visited sites, only two of the top 100 actually supply such gratification (these being, for purely academic interest, youporn dot com and RedTube—which proudly dubs itself a “Portal gigante de vídeos de sexo”—at ranks 48 and 52 respectively). Indeed, sex online, both in terms of percentage of web visits and of search terms entered, has been in fairly steady decline for the last decade.

So, what’s hot? Most of this year’s top 100 are, variously, search engines (yahoo and google in its various incarnations are at the top); social networking sites (Facebook comes in at 5, MySpace at 7); media hosting and sharing sites (YouTube at 3, RapidShare at 12); news sites (the BBC is top among these at 47, then CNN at 50, then the New York Times at 89); information sites (Wikipedia and imdb, at 8 and 46); selling and trading sites (Amazon and eBay, at 37 and 64); and corporate sites (Microsoft lead in 13th, 64 places above Apple’s 77th). And then there’s blogging in all its forms, beginning with blogger.com at number 9.

Of course, plenty of titillating things can be found within or via the non-porn 98. But it’s still a disappointing result for those who thought that the amount of viagra cluttering their spam filters was a fair representation of the world’s central preoccupation. It’s a statistic that has been being knocking around for several years—99 per cent of what we do online appears not, at least directly, to be dirty.

Then again, maybe we should be worrying in the other direction. With a study last year suggesting that Americans are happier to go without sex than without the internet, is technology pushing us beyond our traditional Freudian triggers? Are we replacing the innocent pleasures of lust with altogether more intractable addictions, such as conversation, reading, collaboration and self-expression? Ironically enough, it seems that the greatest appeal of a wired world is its ability to provide us not with virtual titillations and indulgences, but with the real thing—each other.

Fireworks displays and the future of television

Published
by
Rory Sutherland
on October 27, 2008
in Business, Inside Prospect and Science and technology
. 0 Comments

Peter Bazalgette’s article in the most recent edition of Prospect argues for a fundamentally new model of funding media, through different sorts of adverts run by digital tracking technology companies. Why so? Like broadcast television or fireworks displays, the web is very much what economists call a public good—something which is difficult to charge for directly but which can be made economically viable when it is charged for either obliquely or through some kind of compulsory levy such as a TV license fee. And while you can get round this problem with a fireworks display, it can be rather more difficult for television….. Continue reading ‘Fireworks displays and the future of television’

How Merck made a killing

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on October 23, 2008
in Business, Inside Prospect, Science and technology and United States
. 0 Comments

In order to survive in the increasingly lucrative and competitive phramaceutical business, big drug companies need to have several billion dollar “blockbuster” drugs on the market at any one time. This has forced many to market their products ever more aggressively—and to pay less attention to their potential risks. In the case of Merck’s painkiller, Vioxx, this had disastrous and lethal results. Critics estimate that 140,000 Americans suffered heart attacks and strokes as a result of taking the drug during the seven years it was on the market.

There have been numerous scandals involving drug companies in recent years, but what makes this case unique is that Merck, instead of settling compensation claims out of court to avoid negative publicity, decided to fight every case—and so we have over 20m legal documents, telling the warts-and-all story of Vioxx: what Merck’s staff were telling eachother, but not necessarily anyone else. Jim Giles reports.

Flaming for Obama

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on September 24, 2008
in Elections, Media, Science and technology and United States
. 15 Comments

America’s political battles are no longer just fought on the hustings and in the television studios; some of the fiercest take place in the blogosphere. Peter Jukes, a seasoned veteran of the Democratic primary wars, recalls the highs and lows of that internecine struggle, and looks to the battle ahead.

Happy birthday, Google!

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 5, 2008
in Science and technology
. 3 Comments

As the BBC and, doubtless, almost everybody else in the online information game is pointing out, google turns ten years old this weekend, a milestone marked among other things by the release of its new internet browser, Chrome (well, that was yesterday, but it’s close enough).

For a company to move within a decade from zero to a quarterly turnover of $5.7bn (£3.2bn), with net quarterly profit of $1.25bn, is a thoroughly modern experience—a phenomenon enabled by the almost unlimited proliferation of products and services that people are willing to buy, sell and, crucially, advertise online. Even the previous generation of tech miracles didn’t happen like this. In 1985, ten years after it was founded, Microsoft was on the cusp of releasing its Windows operating system and had enjoyed huge success in the (still relatively small) world of computing with its DOS operating system. But it was still a year away from going public, and its turnover was less than $163m. Its founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, were barely millionaires. According to Forbes’s latest list of the world’s billionaires, google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are now worth $18.7bn and $18.6bn respectively. Admittedly, adding them together still leaves you quite a few billion shy of Bill Gates’s current $58bn. But he’s had 23 more years and one internet revolution to consolidate.

Delve back still further into the mists of time, and you’ll see exactly why such growth is unprecedented. Henry Ford founded his automobile company in 1903, and by 1913 its production of the Model T—the world’s first mass-produced car—was running at over 200,000 units a year. It was an unprecedented industrial success, and allowed Ford to sell cars that year at the astonishingly low price of $550. Assuming every car he made that year was sold at full price, Ford’s 1913 revenue can thus be approximated to $11m, which adjusting for inflation would have been worth around $245m today. Ford was working at the peak of technology, on a scale that had never been seen before. Yet today, that peak is a mere footnote to a foothill—and Google is grossing more than $319m a week (according to last year’s accounts).

So companies are bigger now, and can grow faster, than ever? Well, yes. Yet a glance at one of the world’s first incorporated companies is somewhat sobering. Born in 1600, the Honorable East India Company of Great Britain began as a trading venture for British merchants wishing to exploit the riches of Southeast Asia. Pause a century or so, and it had become an entity which—as Nick Robins concisely puts it over at OpenDemocracy—”ruled over a fifth of the world’s people, generated a revenue greater than the whole of Britain and commanded a private army a quarter of a million strong.” If google’s disconcertingly cheery blog and “don’t be evil” ethos are a front for this kind of empire-building, they’re doing an awfully good job of keeping it quiet…

Bizarre measures against terrorism

Published
by
Will Daunt
on July 9, 2008
in Science and technology
. 1 Comment

Since 9/11, terrorism has, of course, been an all-pervasive issue. But an interesting aside to the traditional narrative of fear, hatred and polemic with which terrorism goes hand in hand is capitalism’s capacity to incorporate such horror into traditional market structures. Much has been made of the branded nature of al Qaeda, and the carefully timed video clips of al Qaeda representatives spouting extremist rubbish has all of the finesse of a well planned viral advertising campaign. Indeed, for an organisation which has no concrete identity (no offices, no official staff, no payroll) it has been incredibly “successful,” if such a term can be applied.

So, it was with little surprise that we found this, a list of the top ten strangest anti-terrorism patents. All are genuine, and all display a keen nose for profit come the expansion of the war on terrorism. Perhaps the most apocalyptic is the Biohazard Suit with Built-In Toilet, an invention that suggests a world where un-gassed public conveniences are few and far between.

Prospect’s new issue - mind games

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on May 27, 2008
in Inside Prospect and Science and technology
. 28 Comments

June cover imageThe March publication of the Byron Review, the government’s first official investigation into the effects of electronic media on children, offered an opportunity to examine what is potentially being gained and lost in the increasing ubiquity of electronic, interactive entertainments. Instead - dazzled by the quite astonishing sales figures and controversial content of recent games releases like the notorious Grand Theft Auto IV - most mainstream accounts of video games since have tended to be either a dazzling stream of featurettes hailing their ascendancy, or bitter dismantlings of any and all of their claims as culture. 

In this month’s cover story, I look at some of the complexities of the culture of modern video games, and the astonishing divide it has carved out between those generations born either side of the computer era. I remember reading newspaper articles about video games while I was just starting at secondary school, fifteen years ago. It was, usually, bewildering. Here were writers publishing serious pieces in the national press who simply didn’t seem to know what they were talking about. They had clearly never played any of the games they were writing about. And their concerns were bizarrely unconnected to everything I thought I knew about the sociable, intensely absorbing activity of playing games on computers and consoles. How, my friends and I wondered, could anyone take such absurd objections seriously?

Fifteen years later, I’m still playing video games and I’m still bemused by the way they’re discussed. But I no longer think that the objections many people raise against them are absurd: under even the most hysterical rhetorics are, usually, reasonable concerns about social change and continuity, the loss of certain kinds of experience and learning, and the moral and aesthetic limitations of “on-screen” culture. What amazes me, rather, is the lack of a serious, mutually well-informed debate about a phenomenon that is likely to be a dominant cultural force in the 21st century: an industry that’s already bigger business than cinema or physical music sales, and that is likely soon enough to overtake videos, DVDs and even books.

There’s never been a more important time to attempt to comprehend the future before it simply becomes an ill-understood, exploitative present. I hope you’ll join in the discussion on this blog.

The genetic reality of race

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on May 27, 2008
in Inside Prospect and Science and technology
. 29 Comments

In this month’s lead review, Mark Pagel, professor of evolutionary biology at Reading University, reads two new books about race, genetics and social structures—Strange Fruit by Kenan Malik, and Trust by Marek Kohn.

Pagel argues that our understanding of the evolution of our species must begin with an acceptance of the genetic reality of race, but must also recognise our unique ability to transcend this through co-operation of a kind no other species has remotely achieved.

The relationship between our “humanity” and our biological natures is always a troubling topic for scientists and sociologists. Yet, Pagel suggests, there is no inherent contradiction in our understandings of the societies we are able to build and those natures with which we are born, so long as we are able to talk of our unique social features with sufficient precision. Let us know your own thoughts below.

Dispatches from the maths war

Published
by
Ian Benson
on April 29, 2008
in British politics, Science and technology and United States
. 0 Comments

In a piece for Prospect last year, I reported on developments on the US front of the “maths wars” (an ongoing conflict over how maths should be taught in schools) and suggested that these may have implications for the 40 per cent of children who leave British primary schools without adequate maths or English.

My report was based on the work of schools and children in the Stanford Tizard project. My fellow researchers and I are re-evaluating a math curriculum developed by the math educator Caleb Gattegno, the founder of the UK Association of Mathematics Teachers. For a time it seemed that Labour’s new regime would take the opportunity to replace our outmoded model of maths learning. In this article we look at what has gone wrong, why, and what we might yet do about it.

Continue reading ‘Dispatches from the maths war’

How to ruin your children

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on April 28, 2008
in Science and technology
. 3 Comments

A timely piece in the Times this weekend saw John Cornwell meeting with brain scientist Susan Greenfield to explore the thesis of her forthcoming book, The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century—namely, that electronic gaming and online culture are “creating a hedonistic, mindless generation.”

It’s timely because tomorrow sees the release of what’s almost certain to be the best-selling video game of the year, and also its most controversial: Grand Theft Auto IV, an 18-rated entertainment in which your avatar’s central task is to win cash and reputation in a parallel NYC by jacking cars, beating pimps, extorting money, etc.

My copy is on order, and I eagerly expect to be revelling in this world within 24 hours, as I have with all the previous GTAs (as notable and loved for their slick soundtracks and atmospheric visuals as for their nail-biting gameplay). But am I being turned into a dopamine-addicted zombie as I blast away? Am I going to get violent at work? Or, more pertinently, are young and impressionable others going to succumb even while my mature sensibility is merely titillated?

I think the answer to all these questions is a resounding no; partly because they’re rather silly questions to ask, at least in the form that many po-faced media commentators are posing them. The interactive worlds presented by electronic games are a profound and transforming experience, and something unprecendented in many ways. They have their dangers, which should not be underplayed; but we understand these dangers poorly, and often fail sufficiently to distinguish them from the better-known tribulations that television, cinema and print have bred (or, for that matter, from the rather more pressing social pathologies associated with poverty, lack of education and suchlike).

One important analogy does stand. Like these other media, electronic games have a complex, creative and highly sociable culture of their own; and, as ever, most analyses conducted from the outside are destined to be both simplistic and (more importantly) simply to look ridiculous to those on the inside whose intellects most need to be mobilized. I look forward to reading Greenfield’s book, and to engaging with the furore that’s sure to roll out along with GTA IV. But I suspect I’ll find myself looking elsewhere afterwards—probably into the online communities and forums devoted to games themselves—for discussions that get to grips with what the future has started to look like, and with what we should really be afraid of.