When I was a classroom teacher taking professional development (PD) classes, I remember feeling trapped in a room with my coworkers, listening to yet another lecture on how to teach better using a strategy that didn’t always apply to my classroom (the result of one-size-fits-all PD). While some sessions were helpful and engaging, many weren’t. […]
We have recently become a society in which it is normal to walk into a restaurant, sit down, and ask for the wifi password. For some people, it is just as normal to walk into someone’s home and ask the same question. In restaurants, the servers are normally quick to give up the password. A […]
Proper localization, which is the process of adapting your product to the local marketplace, will impact not only your web traffic, but sales, advertising conversion, mobile downloads and more. As access to the internet spreads, localization of your mobile and online presence and products, whether they be physical, digital, or informational, becomes more and more […]
Last week another shift in the balance of web freedom versus responsibility occurred. The world wide web is not that old, and it is going through growing pains. One of the greatest things about this medium has been its ability to let people reach out and find others like themselves, across the world. Another is […]
Colombia, like most countries, struggles with meeting the needs of the disabled community. There are 2.9 million Colombians with some type of disability. Only 15.5% of disable population are currently in the work force, the ministry of new technologies believes this data indicates that this is a problem which needs to be addressed. Technology, especially […]
Newspapers therefore become more necessary in proportion as men become more equal and individualism more to be feared. To suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance: they maintain civilization. I shall not deny that in democratic countries newspapers frequently lead the citizens to launch together into very ill-digested […]
Start-up culture has captured the word “innovation.” It sits on the mantle with words like “disruption” and “fail forward.” But innovation happens in a lot of other places, and seeing start up culture as the be-all and end all of innovation is stifling. The start up entrepreneur model is that a person, or small group, […]
Big Data has won. For years we’ve been hearing about all the things Big Data would do to make our lives better. Then, around two years ago, people started predicting that Small Data would be the next Big Thing. But now, in 2015, we see the President of the United States appointing a US Chief […]
Meaningful family involvement in schools can make a huge difference for a child’s learning and for driving improvement in the school system as a whole. Extensive research has shown that students with involved parents have higher attendance, social skills, grades, test scores, and graduation rates. We learned a lot more about this topic when […]
The Mobility Labs retreat in Medellin, Colombia continued with a trip into the hills around Medellin for some paragliding. We arrived there early in the day and got a chance to watch other people floating gently in the sky. It was a bit of a hike up to the launch point, but it was worth […]
The Pew Report Recently we did an eight part series on the boundaries between the human and digital world. The first segment was on the new reality of robots. This is a field that keeps moving, however, and recently the debate about whether robots will end up taking our jobs was fueled anew by Pew […]
This is the last part in our eight-part series on the boundary between the digital world and our own, human existence. Our goal was to show that this boundary is thin and shifting all the time. The idea that there is a “real life” that exists independently of our online digital existence is at […]
The 2014 World Cup opened with a paraplegic kicking the first ball. The moment was almost, but not quite captured in this video. To make the kick, the man wore a cap full of sensors that read his brainwaves. These signals controlled his exoskeleton, allowing him to kick a ball. The last article in […]
We normally gather information through our senses. We see, we touch, we feel. Though tradition describes us as having five senses, we actually have closer to 20, depending on how you define sense. We are gathering information about the world around us as well as the world inside us on an ongoing basis. Much of […]
If you can’t upload yourself into a computer, how about wrapping yourself up in one? Ever since Dick Tracy put on his two-way radio wristwatch, the public imagination has been waiting for us to wear our electronics. Fictional versions of wearable computing have evolved from the two-way communicator on a wrist to Iron Man’s JARVIS. […]
In 1990 I got a chance to interview the lawyer for Thomas Donaldson, Ph.d, the neuroscientist who at the time was suing for the right to have himself killed and frozen. At the time Donaldson was fairly young, but had been diagnosed with brain cancer. He was a proponent of cryonic suspension, but feared that […]
We expect computers to know the answers to questions. In fact, many of us grow frustrated when a computer doesn’t seem to understand what we’re asking. We Google phrases and we get results that are pretty astounding, really. Those of us who grew up watching Star Trek are familiar with the computer’s supporting role. You […]
Many of humanity’s creations turn out to be deadly, either intentionally or unintentionally. From fire to railroads, to cigarettes and fast food, people die from the things we make. We should also include cars, guns, and swimming pools. Now we are giving greater autonomy to at least two types of moving devices that we already […]
We are taking a break from our ongoing discussion of education and technology to talk about the interpenetration of the digital world and the real one. Since before the Web actually began, we have had a concept of a virtual space in which one could do things you can’t in reality. This virtual space was […]
Last year we did a series exploring the overlapping issues of privacy, identity, and anonymity. Of course the scope of these issues is huge, far more than we could cover in a few blog posts. Also, the world keeps evolving and testing any norms we have around these issues in new and more challenging ways. […]
Recently the National Science Foundation released a long document reporting the results of a survey of American attitudes towards and knowledge of science. The whole report is called SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING INDICATORS 2014. It includes 600 pages of text and over 900 additional pages of graphs and tables and such. The whole report received some […]
Do you like to wait? I don’t mean the kind of waiting where you go off and do something else, knowing that sooner or later some promised event will come to pass. I mean the kind of waiting where that is what you’re doing. Sitting there, thinking about the passage of time. Waiting. Probably not. […]
In an earlier post, we talked about the concept of dark patterns. A dark pattern is a navigation or action path that leads a user to a choice that doesn’t really benefit him or her, but seems to benefit the site or app owner. Another recent example really illustrates this process. Recently EA released a […]
Today is Facebook’s 10th Birthday. To celebrate, we are covering some of the more interesting aspects of the now-ubiquitous social network. Teens have NOT abandoned Facebook Some media reports have been reporting that teens are abandoning Facebook “in droves.” There are some studies that suggest this, and the teens give for their waning interest in […]
The Federal government interaction with citizens online has taken a couple big hits recently. One was the NSA scandal, which has hopefully led to a discussion of privacy versus Government surveillance. The other was the problematic launch of Healthcare.gov. Addressing the second problem, the Atlantic published an article on Estonia’s more tech-savvy government. According to […]
If you frequent the technology blogs and websites you probably saw a report, recently, telling us that an army of smart refrigerators had been taken over and were now working in the service of evil. A closer read might tell you that the actual story is just about a bot-net, this time one which included […]
2013 was a big year for Mobility Labs. We grew significantly and took on much bigger and more challenging projects. There were also several major technology stories last year; some of them have permanently changed the technology landscape, others merely predict major changes to come. Here are our picks for the top four Mobility Labs […]
It’s not secret that some technology people are not treated very well. Clients often expect top quality work at rock-bottom prices, and many companies try to push their teams through crisis after crisis, destroying work/life and providing little reward. Small companies that call themselves “start-ups” often justify this behavior by claiming the workers are building […]
It seems that one of the key decisions most web developers, designers, and other web professionals face when moving from one position to the next is whether to freelance or become a fixture in an organization. Web professions seem to have a natural affinity to the “1099 economy.” For several reasons: Skill sets can be […]
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, is known for being a loose cannon when he talks. One of his more noted statements was: “In America, there’s a sense of fairness that’s culturally true for all of us,” Schmidt said. “The lack of a delete button on the Internet is a significant issue. There is a […]
No, “Don’t be evil” is not Google’s mission statement. A lot of popular media gets that mixed up, but the actual mission statement is: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google Helpouts is the latest big thing from Google. While searching and filtering is a big […]
Aside from the horrifying depths of 4chan, one of the most toxic places online is actually pretty mainstream: the comments on YouTube. Many social media strategists, who generally advocate open engagement with an audience, will suggest turning comments off when YouTube is discussed. One of the odd consequences is that nobody reads YouTube comments. So […]
You can date the birth of the Internet to a number of different milestones, going back to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly. A common milestone used is the standardization of the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) in 1982. But that’s not really what we think of as the Internet. Now, the word Internet is […]
One of the goals of Mobility Labs is to cast off the ropes and chains that hold individuals and businesses to certain locations when they work. But are there limits to this trend? Many workplaces have seen better productivity and innovation when letting employees work remotely. Activities such as education and healthcare have been moving […]
In this series we’ve looked at privacy, identity, and anonymity from several angles. In Part I, we looked at the sense of creepiness that comes from big entities tracking our actions—even if they are giving us value in return. Part II separates anonymity from privacy, and explains more about what anonymity is and how it […]
One consequence of the government shutdown is that some popular federal agency websites have disappeared. Others are still available, though every one we tried at least had some kind of notice about the shutdown in place. The shutdown of many of the websites was predicted online. This Washington Post article is a good summary. Taking a […]
Often discussions about online privacy assume that we should all maximize our privacy settings and never give up any information, but for some reason we don’t. If you look up a bunch of articles on the topic, many will have a list of tips that you can use to supposedly keep people from tracking you. […]
Working out of Affinity Lab has many advantages, one of which is the chance to meet interesting people who drop in periodically. Yesterday, mayoral candidate and city councilperson Tommy Wells dropped by. Here he is meeting Sean Perkins, Mobility Labs owner, and Dan Jeffers.
When I went away to the Navy, I took the opportunity most of us take when we leave home; I changed myself. We all did. In boot camp, the first thing they did was really clamp down on fighting. You would think that might temper everything, but without the threat of real violence, we all […]
Privacy is somewhat distinct from anonymity in that it refers to our ability to control who sees information about us. The sense we have about privacy is fairly modern. In many cultures it was normal for your family, village, or tribe to know everything about you—in fact, to have a right to such knowledge. Marriage […]
Anonymity is Not Privacy Anonymity and privacy are not the same thing. There is overlap. While the ability to be anonymous is related to privacy, they are different. Failure to recognize this difference has confused many discussions about online privacy. Privacy is often passive. We have data out there, some of it public, some of […]
Part I: The Creepy Signal Going online initiates information exchanges. We go to a website, open an email, or check on someone’s status update—we receive information. Usually, we also give up some. The website tracks our activity on the site, and may leave something called a “cookie” in our browser that allows it to track […]