January 19, 1903

Marconi Sends—and Receives—First Two-Way
Transatlantic Wireless Message

As you look for wireless hot-spots to connect to the Internet, thank Guglielmo Marconi. The Italian inventor championed wireless communication at the turn of the twentieth century—and demonstrated it on January 19, 1903, when he sent and received the first transatlantic wireless messages.

Marconi was inspired to investigate wireless communication by Heinrich Hertz’s studies of electrical and magnetic waves. He began experimenting in 1894, when he was twenty years old. His first successful signal traveled only 30 feet, but over time he built more and more powerful transmitters. By 1901, he could send a signal 200 miles.

Marconi dreamed of sending signals across the ocean. To transmit a signal, he built large antennas supported by four 210-foot high wooden towers. He built three of these transmission stations, one each in England, Nova Scotia, and Cape Cod. To send the long-wave radio signals he used, he needed powerful generators that produced 2,200-volts of electricity that a transformer increased to 25,000 volts. The noise of the generators could be heard 4 miles away.

After a successful test in December of 1902, Marconi demonstrated the equipment the next month. A telegraph operative tapped out a Morse Code message from President Theodore Roosevelt to British King Edward VII. “Taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity,” Roosevelt said, he sent greetings to the king and his people. Soon after, the king returned the president’s good wishes. The wireless age was born.

Wireless communication was quickly adopted by shipping companies. The importance of wireless messages was underscored less than a decade after Marconi’s demonstration. When the Titanic was sinking in 1912, its wireless distress calls reached the Carpathia, which steamed to the scene and rescued more than 700 people.

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December 6, 1877

Edison demonstrates the phonograph

While he cranked the handle on the device, inventor Thomas Edison watched the faces of the editors from the journal Scientific American. He was in the magazine’s offices to demonstrate one of his newest inventions. As he cranked, indentations made on a tinfoil cylinder sent signals to a diaphragm, and the editors heard the machine ask after their health. Astonished, they heard the device then say it was fine and bid them good night. “There can be no doubt,” editor Alfred Beach later wrote, “that the inflections are those of nothing else than the human voice.” The phonograph was born.

Edison had long been interested in recording information and playing it back later—his interest started back when he was working primarily on inventions related to telegraphy. By 1887, he had enjoyed enough success to create a laboratory dedicated to invention in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Edison had a large staff of scientists and technicians, one of whom—Swiss machinist John Kruesi—turned Edison’s sketches for the phonograph into a real device, reportedly in 30 hours. To test it, Edison had shouted a verse of the nursery rhyme “Mary had a little lamb” into the machine. As hoped, his recorded voice could be heard, as clearly as he had spoken.

Excited by the invention, Edison began to promote it vigorously, and the visit to Scientific American was part of his campaign. The journal published Beach’s glowing account of the demonstration on December 22. The inventor wrote an article for the North American Review speculating on the possible uses for the machine that was published the following spring, by which time he had already formed a company to manufacture phonographs. Whenever visitors came to the Menlo Park lab—and Edison encouraged them to come—he made sure to show them the phonograph, which he called his “baby.”

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I’m typing this blog entry on a desktop computer. It’s two years old, but I’m already looking at it and my laptop wondering how long they will be around in their current form. There are three fast-moving trends that may change computing over the next five years, affect the way that we use computers, and perhaps make desktop and laptop computers the computing equivalent of the now almost defunct record player.

The first trend is that the computer and the mobile phone are converging. If you use one of the new generation of smartphones—an iPhone for example— you are not only able to send and receive phone calls, but also carry out computer-related tasks such as reading email and browsing the web. This convergence has also embraced a new generation of computers known as tablet computers. These are light, thin, contain a relatively small amount of memory and, again, implement many of the facilities that are on my desktop and laptop computers.

The second trend is that the use of the computer is changing. New generations of users are accessing web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Digg. These social networking sites have become either a substitute or an add-on to normal interaction. Moreover recent figures indicate that there has been a major shift in the use of email facilities from the home computer to the smartphone and tablet computer.

The third trend is that data and software are moving from the computer on the desk or on the lap to the Internet. A commercial example is the company Salesforce.com. This is a successful company whose main business is customer relationship management: the process of keeping in touch with a customer; for example, tracking their orders and ensuring that they are happy with the service they are receiving. Salesforce.com keep much of their data and software on a number of Internet-based servers and their customers use the web to run their business. In the past customer relationship systems had to be bought as software, installed on a local computer, and then maintained by the buyer. This new model of doing business (something known as cloud computing) overturns this idea.

The third trend, cloud computing, is also infiltrating the home use of computing. Google Inc. has implemented a series of office products such as a word processor, a calendar program and a spread-sheet program that can only be accessed over the Internet, with documents stored remotely—not on the computer that accesses the documents.

So, the future looks to be configured around users employing smart-phones and tablets to access the Internet for all their needs, with desktop and laptop computers being confined to specialist areas such as systems development, film editing, games programming and financial number crunching. Technically there are few obstacles in the way of this: the cost of computer circuits drops every year; and the inexorable increase in broadband speeds and advances in silicon technology mean that more and more electronics can be packed into smaller and smaller spaces.

There is, however, a major issue that has been explored by three writers: Nicholas Carr, Tim Wu and Jonathan Zittrain. Carr, in his book The Big Switch, uses a series of elegant analogies to show that computing is heading towards becoming a utility. The book first provides a history of the electrical generation industry where, in the early days, companies had their own generator; however, eventually due to the efforts of Thomas Edison and Samuel Insull, power become centralised with utility companies delivering electricity to consumers over a grid. The book then describes how this is happening with the Internet. It describes the birth of cloud computing, where all software and data is stored on the Internet and where the computer could be downgraded to a simple consumer device with little if any storage and only the ability to access the World Wide Web.

Zittrain, in his book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, goes further in that he describes a potential future that is based on tethered devices. These are devices such as tablet computers and smart phones where the manufacturer regulates the software development that is used to create new applications and where new applications, written by third-party developers, have to be approved by the manufacturer of the device. One possible future vision that Zittrain’s book puts forward is of an Internet accessed only by tethered devices and where restrictions on access are made for commercial or political reasons.

Tim Wu in his book, The Master Switch, takes a historical stance. He describes how various forms of media have initially floated on a wave of idealism and optimism only to succumb to forms of commercial, closed centralisation. He warns about this happening with the Internet.

So what does the future hold? In terms of the dystopias described by Wu and Zittrain I will pass: what happens to the Internet will depend on commercial and political factors which would be foolish to predict; put me down as an agnostic on these visions. However, in terms of technology I think the future is much clearer: that the desktop and laptop will become rarer and rarer and only used for specialised tasks, and that the home and away ‘computer’ will be a thin tablet such as the iPad or a smartphone.

Darrel Ince is Professor of Computing at the Open University. He is the author of 22 books and over 100 academic papers. He has also written for major British newspapers. His latest book The Computer: A Very Short Introduction is published by Oxford University Press. Click here for the book’s companion website.

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October 23, 2001

Apple announces iPod

After weeks of speculation about what, exactly, Apple had up its sleeve, Steve Jobs made an appearance on October 23, 2001, that ended the mystery. Jobs announced Apple’s newest product, a portable digital music player that would, he said, put “1,000 songs in your pocket.” The iPod was born.

When Jobs made the announcement, some industry analysts wondered how well the product would do. While many admired the iPod’s handy size and battery life, they were skeptical due to the hefty $399 price tag and Apple’s lack of experience in consumer electronics. Steve Jobs was convinced he had a winner, however, telling one industry reporter “iPod will be a landmark product.”

Jobs proved prescient. The iPod quickly took off. By the middle of 2002, Apple had sold 600,000 units, and the following year total iPod sales surged past two million units. Sales skyrocketed: by 2005, they exceeded 40 million, and they passed the 100 million mark two years later. The popularity of the device was aided by Apple’s introduction of iTune software earlier in 2001—and by the opening of the iTunes Music Store early in 2003. By the end of that first year, users had already downloaded 25 million songs from the online store. No one doubted Apple’s ability to compete with consumer electronics any longer.

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I have no qualms in admitting that this Linked Up post is entirely inspired by the clip I found this week of Bill Gates, circa 1994, demonstrating his circus skills. How can I get this on OUPblog, I wondered to myself? I know; let’s have a TECHNOLOGY LINKED UP SPECIAL.     -Nicola

So here’s the vintage footage of Bill Gates, proving that he CAN jump over a chair…

Click here to view the embedded video.

BlackBerry blackout: some of the funniest tweets so far. [Mashable]

One in 10 leave internet passwords in their will. [Sky News]

Could Thomas Crapper ever have predicted ‘Toilet 2.0’? [Humans Invent]

When we asked for a lean font, we meant italics, not back bacon. [Trendhunter]

Whatever happened to ChatRoulette? Four interesting uses of the webcam site. [ShinyShiny]

Chop Idol: retro video-game-style chopping boards… [Domestic Sluttery]

University of Oxford develops the ultimate Knightrider – minus the Hoff. [Daily Mail]

Need a Hallow’een costume and got $4000 spare? This ought to do the trick. [TechCrunch]

INFOGRAPHIC in memoriam: The life and times of Steve Jobs [Infographic World]

Director of Institutional Accounts

The title of the classic Philip K. Dick story asks whether androids dream of electric sheep. I don’t know the answer to that particular question, but I do know that we’re all–at this very moment, asleep or awake–dreaming of a digital monograph platform that is financially viable, intuitive, sustainable from the perspective of a rapidly shifting market environment, and adaptable enough to be able to meet both the short and long-term needs of scholarly research at all levels as well as the development of new business and acquisition models.

Our shared mission dictates that we disseminate scholarly content as widely as possible. But how best to fulfill this mission and meet the ongoing needs of academic research all while satisfying the above criteria? Simply publishing our content in electronic format is no longer enough.

Oxford Scholarship Online, launched nearly a decade ago and conceived of when ebooks were in what was then a virtually embryonic phase of development, has blazed a trail that is only now being followed in the marketplace. The use of XML and the precise nature of the text tagging it provided was an early and fundamental decision and has been instrumental to OSO’s success.

XML provides us the ability to do more than give users what is essentially a static “picture” of a book, offering instead a rich, robust text that meets the needs of scholarly research today and for the foreseeable future. In spite of all the rapid technological developments and the ensuing seismic shifts in the market, one thing has remained constant:  the nature and methodology of scholarly research. This is often lost in the clamor of our current discussion so it’s worth reminding ourselves from time to time that this is at the very heart of what we do and why we do it.

As OSO now evolves into University Press Scholarship Online and we begin the process of including other university press content on our platform, — see our partner presses list — we’re more focused than ever on the viability of the monograph as a key medium of scholarly communication. The ability to conduct precisely targeted searches across multiple presses within the same platform is an exciting development and one that promises to do much in the way of advancing scholarly research.

XML is what makes that long-held dream a fully-functioning reality. Rather than merely replicating the confining linearity of the print book usage experience, XML instead offers accurate search-and-discoverability tools that greatly enhance research. Even in its latest incarnation, PDF cannot replicate the advantages provided by XML tagging, which identifies each piece of data and allows it to be found in the context of the search being made. By contrast, PDF searches are analogous to those made on the open web. Improvements made recently to PDF are all ‘bolt-on’ pieces of functionality applied to something which is intrinsically static. XML, in contrast, is designed from the ground up as a dynamic, repurposeable method of managing sophisticated data.

Students, researchers, and scholars are becoming ever more sophisticated consumers of electronic content. We need only look to the latest generation of discoverability services for evidence of the absolute importance of feature-rich metadata. In the newly dawning era of demand-driven acquisition (aka Patron Driven Acquisition) the discoverability of content has become of paramount importance. If the new formula for library acquisitions can be posited as “access = purchase,” no academic publisher can afford to exert less than a herculean effort at ensuring their content discoverability. The higher the quality of the XML tagging, the easier it becomes to discover the content users are looking for amid the ocean of online information, much of which is lacking in the authority guaranteed by the peer-review process.

OSO, UPSO, and all other Oxford online products have been built under the umbrella of a digital strategy that is in many ways dependent on the XML format. We continue to believe that will hold true going forward and that XML provides enormous benefits to researchers and consumers of scholarly content–our own and that of the presses with whom we partner on the UPSO platform.

A version of this article previously appeared on The Digital Digest.

October 6, 1938

Carlson receives patent for Xerography

Chester Carlson had everything he needed to invent a xerography machine, or photocopier. He had been interested in printing and chemistry since childhood. He perceived a need—in his job, he found that he always needed more copies of documents than he could obtain cheaply. He reasoned that other businesses would also love to have a way of copying documents inexpensively. He had incentive to invent—he had just gotten married and did not think his job offered much chance for getting ahead. Finally, he had an inspiration. Rather than trying to design a copier based on photography, he wanted to explore the field of photoconductivity, in which shining light on a photoconductive surface boosts the electrical conductivity of the surface.

Carlson used his small savings to set up a lab and hire an assistant. They struggled until they developed a working process that involved several steps. Carlson carefully patented his work to protect his interest in it. His efforts to interest companies in his process met with five years of rejection, however. Finally, a nonprofit research firm agreed to develop the process further, taking a share of any resulting royalties. Three years later, in 1947, a company signed a deal to make the first photocopiers. Those machines did not appear until 1959, but they quickly caught on, and the manufacturer—Xerox—enjoyed great success. Carlson himself earned millions from royalties on sales of these machines, huge amounts of which he gave to charity.

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A visibly deep pleasure is embraced by cell phone talkers. For tens of millions of Americans, there is almost nothing that can compare to the ringing ecstasy of a message. It also seems that nothing can bring down a deeper sense of despair than the palpable suffering of cellular silence.

Perhaps half of the American adult population is literally addicted to cell phones. For them, a cell, now also offering access to an expanding host of related social networks, offers much more than suitable business contact, personal safety, or even a merely prudent ability to “stay in touch.” For these anxious legions, conversing or messaging on a cell phone grants easily accessible personal therapy. It permits both the caller and the called to feel more important, more valuable, less anonymous, and (above all else) less alone. With “rugged individualism” now reduced to a convenient national myth, cellular communication in its many forms promises to provide almost everyone who is “linked in” a direct line to stature, inclusion and happiness.

“We are the hollow men,” announced T.S. Eliot, long before the advent of cell phones. Today, still, most of our “whispers” remain “quiet and meaningless.” Aside from  rare emergencies and  common daily chores, cell phone conversations or messages usually transmit only innocuous prattle, mind-numbing blather, or monosyllabic grunts. This is especially plain on university campuses, where anxiously-connecting students defensively compress their entire universe of personal meanings into the distinctly limited lexicon of “cool,” “awesome,” or the ever-popular “incredible.”

The known universe is probably many billions of light years “across.”  Yet, here, in America, and elsewhere as well, most humans are still desperately afraid to become individuals. “Why bother?” they reason. Why take the risk?

“Look at me, please,” is the unspoken but desperate cry of the public talker, or “texter,” or “Twitterer.” I am here. I am important. I have human connections. I count for something. I am not (heaven forbid) unpopular. I am not alone.”

The cell phone has not caused people to display pathos and freeze in terror. This tiny machine itself is not “the problem.” It is, after all, just a tangible instrument, a tool that identifies and magnifies what would otherwise lie dormant in our adrenalized and breathlessly-frenetic society.

Each ring promises to reveal more than just an incoming message. It also serves to confirm that we have become a very lonely crowd, an excruciatingly “hollow” society driven openly by imitation, conformance, fear, and trembling.

There exists a universal human wish to remain unaware of oneself. But this subversive hope always leads individuals to stray dangerously from their true personhood, and toward the deceptively available  security of the “herd.”  Sometimes, when a terror gang and a sports team effectively become competitors for group loyalty, any herd will do. Obscuring what might otherwise express an incapacity to belong, an inability to become a good “member,” the apprehensive American learns very quickly that authenticity generally goes unrewarded, and that courage is typically punished.

We humans sometimes fear exclusion more than anything, sometimes even more than death. Oddly, perhaps more than anyone knows, this is a vitally important personal calculus, one that may be largely responsible for war, terrorism and genocide.  The human need to belong can become so overwhelming that many will literally kill others – any others – rather than face personal isolation or ostracism.

“I’m trying to get as far away from myself as I can,” sings Bob Dylan (“Things Have Changed”). Unexpectedly, this single insightful verse  may unwittingly explain a great deal about the root causes of violence in world politics.

Although never widely recognized, the inner fear of loneliness expressed by cell phone addiction gives rise to another huge problem. Nothing important, in science or industry or art or music or literature or medicine or philosophy, can ever take place without some loneliness. To be able to exist apart from the mass – to be tolerably separated from what Freud called the “primal horde,” or what Nietzsche termed the “herd,” or Kierkegaard the “crowd” – is actually indispensable to exceptional intellectual development, and determinative creative evolution.

There is more. To achieve any sense of true spirituality in life, we must first be willing to endure at least some aloneness. For better or for worse, all of our principal religious founders consciously sought deeper meanings “inside,” in seclusion, within themselves.

I belong. Therefore I am. Turning Descartes’ fundamental wisdom on its head, and at a time when we desperately need more of what Ralph Waldo Emerson had once promisingly called “high thinking,” this pitiful reasoning is the sad credo expressed by all cell phone addiction. In essence, it presents a not-so-stirring manifesto that social acceptance is immanent to personal survival, and that any necessary individual satisfaction is simply the ironic privilege of private mediocrity.

One can be inconsequential anywhere, but a relentless sadness in America now appears to grow more intense wherever private fears seemingly become incommunicable.

Cell phone addiction is certainly less a diagnosable illness than an imagined therapy. Ultimately, in a society filled with garrulous devotees of a pretended and rehearsed ecstasy,  it offers tantalizing electronic links to presumably new forms of “redemption.”

Here, in these fearful United States, the noisy and uneasy mass has fully infested our solitude. Indeed, upon most of us, the telltale traces of herd life may already have become indelible. Now, embracing an indecent alloy of banality and apocalypse, we Americans ritually seek purpose and excitement within widening cellular-connections. It will, of course, remain an utterly disappointing, vain, and misbegotten search.

"Ask Siri to do things just by talking the way you talk. Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean, and even talks back." Source: Apple

In the end,  life is always death’s prisoner.  Until we can come to grips with this disturbing but still-overriding truth, we can never experience our decisively numbered moments with any intense pleasure. Today, despite our manifold efforts at cell calls, Tweets and Twitters, our personal doubts still seem inexhaustible. This is because we continue to look to others to define who we are, and what we might still become.

At its core, even our current economic crisis was spawned by a lethal other-directedness.

Remember Bernie Madoff? The Ponzi scheme mastermind was merely microcosm. The recession and corollary commercial failures were not caused by “greed.”  Rather, it was all spawned by a widespread and totally consuming personal fear of insignificance. Now ignored by both politicians and economists (earlier, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes et. al. had actually recognized the critical importance of psychology), this primal fear is the starkly immobilizing terror that one is “simply not wanted at all.” Today, with the new voice-activated cell phones, users don’t necessarily even have to await a living human being at the other end. Still ever-fearful of being “not wanted at all,” they can now counter  personal angst with carefully cultivated delusions of authentic conversation.

In part, the immense attraction of cell phones and related social networking “apps” derive from our society’s dutifully robotic or machine-like existence. Doubtlessly, we Americans now celebrate a push-button metaphysics.  Here, absolutely every hint of passion must follow a narrowly uniform pathway. Arrogantly, to be sure, we still insist upon believing that we are somehow the controlling creators of our machines, and not their obedient servants.

Strictly speaking, this is correct. But now there is also an implicit reciprocity between creator and creation, an elaborate pantomime between users and used.  Predictably, our techno-constructions are now making a machine out of both Man and Woman. In fact, in an unforgivable inversion of Genesis, we now generally behave as if we have been created in the image of the machine.

Cell phone addiction is merely the most visible symptom of a deeper pathology. The basic “disease” that we suffer is a painfully insipid cultural order. Whether we look to politics, entertainment, or commerce (it is increasingly hard to tell them apart), our banal national life remains perched precariously upon a humiliating network of battered jingles, advertised meanings, and ready-to-wear slogans.

Small wonder, today, that our entertainments are unapologetically crass, and that overindulging on seriously bad food has become our most enthusiastic national pastime. The core reason for our programmed overeating is not that we are any hungrier, but that we have finally lost our appetite for real life.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is Professor of Political Science at Purdue University. He is author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law. Read his previous OUPblog posts here.

For further reading on how mobile technology is changing our lives, we recommend Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. View more about this book on the

Imagine this scenario: You’re on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and you decide to “phone a friend” for help with that million-dollar question. Only you can’t remember the number. You look helplessly into the camera, shrug, and say, “I call him every day, but he’s on my contacts so I just click the link, and I guess I never bothered to memorize his number, haha.” “That’s some expensive haha,” says the host, waving his cigar, followed by, “O.K., George, who’s our next contestant?”

Now a research report in the journal Science suggests that smartphones, along with computers, tablets, and the internet, are weakening our memories. This has implications not just for the future of quiz shows–most of us can’t compete against computers on Jeopardy–but also for the way we deal with information: instead of remembering something, we remember how to look it up. Good luck with that when the internet is down.

Psychologists call this the “Google effect”: we don’t bother to memorize what we can find online with a couple of clicks. The article, which is only available online, puts this in more academic language:

Since search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up. . . . When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. [Betsy Sparrow, Jennie Liu, and David Wegner, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” Science, July 14, 2011]

Sparrow, et al., found that students who were told that their answers to a battery of questions would be saved on a computer so they could access them before a retest remembered fewer of their answers on the retest than students who were told that the computer would erase their answers.

More and more we’re saying to ourselves, “Why bother memorizing the names of the Oscar-nominated movies for 1939 when I can just look them up on IMDb?” Or, as the psychologists put it, “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”

But this is not surprising. Relying on an external database is nothing new: before digitized contacts files there were address books; before IMDb there were Leonard Maltin books. Before Wikipedia there were analog encyclopedias. And before Google there were librarians. As the experimenters acknowledge, humans have always recognized the role of individual expertise: we quickly learn who to ask for the best recipe, the most-accurate directions, the conversion from Fahrenheit to centigrade. That way we don’t have to remember everything.

Only now, it seems, we never have to remember anything. Because we can look it up. We don’t even have to remember how to spell, because Google asks, “did you mean blahblahblah?” when it doesn’t recognize our keystrokes.

The Greek philosopher Plato conducted similar experiments in ancient Athens. Back then it wasn’t computers weakening human memory, it was another new technology called writing.

In his famous experiment with the inclined plane, which preceded Galileo’s better-known experiment by a thousand years, Plato proved that the more we write down, the less we remember. Plato says, in the Phaedrus (also available online),

This invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

To prove this, Plato got student volunteers in his Intro to Philosophy course (though the word psychology comes from the Greek, it hadn’t been invented yet), divided them into two groups, and asked each to write down the answers to a series of factual questions (How many Greeks can fit inside a Trojan horse?) and mathematical problems (What is the Pythagorean theorem?). They were then given a short writing prompt:

I am a Greek. All Greeks are liars. Explain.

Students were told they’d be retested on their answers a week later. One group of students was told that their answer papyri would be burned as offerings to the gods, while the other group was told that theirs would be stored in stone jars that they could access any time before the retest. (The few students who asked to see their stored papyri so they could refresh their memories were told they had accidentally been burned as offerings to the gods).

After a week had passed, Plato gathered his students in the agora and repeated the test. In their experiments with computers, Sparrow, et al., found that on a similar retest, “those who believed that the computer erased what they typed had the best recall.” But they were replicating what Plato had already found: that the students who were told that their papyri would be burned remembered much more of what they had written than those who had been told their writings would be archived (P < 0.5).

Plato also found that his students didn’t mind that writing was weakening their memories. “Dude,” they told him, “we can always look it up. Is this going to be on the final?”

That’s why Plato called it his experiment with an inclined plane: writing to him was a slippery slope which would lead, not to knowledge, but to paper repositories—libraries, he called them—where knowledge would be stored offline, not in our heads, where it belonged. Plato thought that the impact of writing on memory would be negative. We remember this because one of his students wrote it down.

And now three psychologists from Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Wisconsin have shown that, since the internet is always on and information is never more than a click away, we’ll be depending even less on memory than we did before. Books were a good repository for our memories, but they are so last year. In the future, all we’ll have to remember is where the computer is. And the password.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.

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By Dennis Baron

Each year there’s a contest at the University of Exeter to find the most human computer. Not the computer that looks most like you and me, or the computer that can beat all comers on Jeopardy, but the one that can convince you that you’re talking to another human being instead of a machine.

To be considered most human, the computer has to pass a Turing test, named after the British mathematician Alan Turing, who suggested that if someone talking to another person and to a computer couldn’t tell which was which, then that computer could be said to think. And thinking, in turn, is a sign of being human.

Contest judges don’t actually talk with the computers, they exchange chat messages with a computer and a volunteer, then try to identify which of the two is the human. A computer that convinces enough judges that it’s human wins the solid gold Loebner medal and the $100,000 prize that accompanies it, or at least its programmer does.

Here are some excerpts from the 2011 contest rules to show how the test works:

Judges will begin each round by making initial comments with the entities. Upon receiving an utterance from a judge, the entities will respond. Judges will continue interacting with the entities for 25 minutes. At the conclusion of the 25 minutes, each judge will declare one of the two entities to be the human.

At the completion of the contest, Judges will rank all participants on “humanness.”

If any entry fools two or more judges comparing two or more humans into thinking that the entry is the human, the $25,000 and Silver Medal will be awarded to the submitter(s) of the entry and the contest will move to the Audio Visual Input $100,000 Gold Medal level.

Notice that both the computer entrants and the human volunteers are referred to in these rules as “entities,” a word calculated to eliminate any pro-human bias among the judges, not that such a bias exists in the world of Artificial Intelligence. In addition, the computers are called “participants,” which actually gives a bump to the machines, since it’s a term that’s usually reserved for human contestants. Since the rules sound like they were written by a computer, not by a human, passing the Turing test should be a snap for any halfway decent programmer.

But even though these Turing competitions have been staged since 1991, when computer scientist Hugh Loebner first offered the Loebner medal for the most human computer, so far no computer has claimed the gold, though one computer came close enough a few years ago to silver. To keep things interesting, each year the most human computer, the one that comes closest to fooling the judges into thinking that they’re chatting with a human, gets a bronze medal and a $4000 prize, a sort of Miss Congeniality for the AI set.

When Alan Turing first proposed the Turing test in 1950, “electronic brains” were popularly viewed, not as high-speed calculators, but as the stuff of science fiction. Even the computer that was supposed to generate appropriate questions for the contestants on the 1950s TV quiz show, The $64,000 Question, turned out to be fictional: it was nothing but an IBM card sorter, an overpriced shuffling machine that generated nothing, since many of the show’s human contestants had already received the answers to the questions they would be asked in advance.

Computers have come a long way since Hal, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, tried to hijack its own space ship, but although computers have yet to carry off the honors on Turing’s talk-like-a-human day, talking computers greet us every day at every turn, answering corporate phones (“Listen carefully, because our options have changed”) and offering technical support (“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. Could you say or touch your account number again?”), announcing elevator floors (“Thirteenth floor. Mind the doors, please”), or giving GPS directions (“Turn left in 200 ft. Turn left in 100 ft. Turn left now. Please turn around and turn right in 200 ft.”). It’s like everywhere we turn, there’s a computer auditioning for a Turing test.

Maybe these computers can’t actually think, but even without independent thought they’ve become most nearly human enough to take over our lives: we can’t drive our cars without computers, or do the laundry, cook our food or refrigerate it, tune our televisions or record shows for later viewing. We can’t make phone calls without computers. We can’t even write about computers without computers.

OK, maybe we’re not completely fooled by computers referring to themselves in the first person and offering to connect us with the next available operator (“I’d be happy to connect you. Please enter your four-digit PIN number, followed by the pound sign. If you would rather continue using our automated system . . . .”). And maybe “the most human computer” sounds more like a children’s story than a bronze-medal-worthy string of code (“Ned, Sally, and their dog Spot were skipping by the ATM when all of a sudden it started to speak. ‘Hi,’ said the ATM. ‘Holy s***,’ said Ned. Spot yelped and ran away.”).

So, while programmers scramble to develop a computer that can pass the real Turing test, we can look for the most human computer another way: by placing an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards, if we wait long enough eventually one of them will trick a panel of judges into thinking they’re communicating with a human by typing out, not Hamlet, but HamBasic, on the computer screen. And as we wait, we can watch our own prose and that of our computers continue to converge, so that, as computers sound more and more like us, we begin to sound more like them as well. We are experiencing unusually heavy user traffic today, so please be patient. Don’t log off. Your request will be handled in the order in which it was received.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.

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By Andrew Trask

In 2002, the Concepcion family received a “free” cell phone when they signed up with AT&T. Unfortunately, the free phone was not as free as the Concepcions thought; AT&T charged them sales tax for it. The Concepcions were angry, and sued. Their case was merged with a large class action. AT&T invoked its right (hidden in the fine print of its cell-phone contract) to arbitrate the case. The arbitration provision was pretty generous: the Concepcions would not have to pay any costs, and if they won more from the arbitrator than AT&T offered in settlement, AT&T would give them $7,500.

The federal trial court in California that heard the Concepcions’ case decided that, since the California Supreme Court had held that arbitration provisions that interfered with class actions were unconscionable, AT&T could not force these California plaintiffs to arbitrate.  The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed. And so AT&T appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

The 2010-2011 term has proven to be an exciting one for class-action lawyers. The Supreme Court agreed to hear a number of cases that will have a large impact on how these giant lawsuits are waged. And AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, which the Court decided last week, has already created a firestorm among consumer advocates.

The specific holding sounds too technical to inspire much hooplah.  The Court, in an opinion by Justice Scalia, held that when a state law conflicts with § 2 of the Federal Arbitration Act, the federal law preempts the state law. Justice Scalia’s reasoning was remarkably simple: the FAA was specifically enacted to prevent state courts from interfering with the results of arbitration. The California decision holding class-action waivers unconscionable specifically prevented individual arbitration of disputes.  So for the FAA to have its intended effect, it would have to have that effect in this case.

So what makes this decision so controversial? A number of consumer advocates argue that, by allowing corporations to bargain for arbitration instead of class-action litigation, the Court struck a “crushing blow” against consumers’ rights.

The situation is not as dire as these class-action Cassandras would suggest.  Their predictions of doom ignore the fact that 48 states had not adopted California’s blanket condemnation of arbitration clauses in the first place. (The lone exception was the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which adopted a similar rule in 2010.) Nonetheless, these other states have not suffered from a lack of consumer class-action cases.  Simply put, not every company can (or will) make its customers sign an arbitration clause, even in order to avoid class-action litigation.

Nor, as some have claimed, has the decision deprived consumers of a fundamental right. The Supreme Court has held since the 1980s that a class action is “an exception to the usual rule that litigation is conducted by and on behalf of the individual named parties only.” And it reaffirmed earlier this year that class actions are procedural tools that cannot alter the substantive rights of litigants. In other words, like arbitration, a class action is a tool, but not a right.

Which tool works better for consumers? That depends on whom you ask. Class-action advocates claim that the large lawsuits deter corporate wrongdoing and get consumers money they could never recover on their own. But consumers don’t usually bring class actions, lawyers do. Moreover, few class actions are ever tried, and classwide settlements often benefit the lawyers far more than they do consumers. Advocates of arbitration point out that the process is quick, informal, and can result in real relief. But, despite the fact that consumers have expressed a preference for arbitration, comparatively few have actually taken advantage of it.

Of course, if both class actions and arbitration are tools, then their relationship is subject to change. And several Congressional Democrats, including Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.), and Representative Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) have already begun drafting a bill they call the Arbitration Fairness Act (not to be confused with the bill of the same name from 2009).

The 2010-2011 Supreme Court term has been very interesting for class actions. And if Blumenthal, Franken, and Johnson can get traction for their proposal, it looks like the 2011-2012 Congressional session will be as well.

Andrew Trask, a practicing class-action lawyer, is the co-author of The Class Action Playbook, and discusses class-action strategy at www.classactioncountermeasures.com

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By Charles D. Ferguson

The ongoing Japanese nuclear crisis underscores yet again the risks inherent in this essential energy source. But it should not divert nations from using or pursuing nuclear power to generate electricity, given the threat from climate change, the health hazards of fossil fuels, and the undeveloped state of renewable energy. Instead, the events at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant should turn more attention to ensuring that nuclear power plants meet the highest standards of safety and protection against natural disasters.

More than 30 nations have commercial nuclear power plants. A further two dozen are interested in having them, including several in earthquake risk areas such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey.

Some nations are pro-nuclear for energy security; some for prestige. Others, including Iran, have invested in nuclear power because they may want the capability to make nuclear weapons. These nations are seeking to acquire uranium enrichment or reprocessing technologies: useful either for producing fuel for peaceful nuclear reactors or fissile material for nuclear bombs.

Although some national leaders profess to be interested in nuclear energy because operating plants do not emit greenhouse gases, this is usually a secondary motivation. If it were their primary concern, nations would invest far more than they have in measures such as energy efficiency and solar and wind technologies.

The Japanese crisis has affected three important criteria: public opinion, safety and economic costs. Governments and utilities have had to grapple with these for decades. Now they must renew their efforts to finance expensive nuclear projects and ensure that existing and future nuclear plants maintain the highest standards — and must be seen to do so by the public.

Building nuclear power plants has always been expensive. For a large reactor with a power rating of 1,000 megawatts or greater, the capital cost ranges from US$4 billion to $9 billion depending on reactor design, financing charges, the regulatory process and construction time. The recent nuclear crisis is likely to change all of these, pushing up costs.

Contemporary plant designs — ‘generation III’ — have better safety features than the 1970s-era generation II designs for the Fukushima reactors, making them more expensive. Some, such as the AP1000 designed by the Westinghouse Electric Company, headquartered in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, have passive safety features that do not require technicians to activate emergency systems or electrical power to ensure safety after a mishap. Others, such as Paris-based Areva’s EPR, have advanced active safety systems designed to prevent the release of radioactive material to the environment. Further designs, such as the pebble-bed modular reactor, may prevent nuclear fuel from ever experiencing a meltdown. Concerns were raised about the Fukushima designs as early as 1972, the year after reactor unit 1 began operations. But the nuclear industry opposed shutting down such reactors because 32 were in operation worldwide — about 7% of the world’s total. Almost one-quarter of the reactors in the United States are of this type. The remaining plants of this design should undergo a thorough safety review and, as a result, some may need to close. Since the crisis began, several governments, including China, Germany and Switzerland, have called for increased scrutiny of their plants and a moratorium on plant construction until plant safety is assured. Germany has also shut down its seven oldest reactors.

But phasing out nuclear power worldwide would be an overreaction. It provides about 15% of global electricity and even larger percentages in certain countries, such as France (almost 80%) and the United States (about 20%). Eliminating nuclear power would lead to much greater use of fossil fuels, and raise greenhouse-gas emissions. It will probably take at least a few decades to massively scale up use of renewable sources. Meanwhile, nuclear plants can bridge the energy gap.

So governments need to take practical actions to improve nuclear safety. All new nuclear plants should have enhanced safety systems, and plant designs that eliminate or substantially reduce the risk of a meltdown of fuel should be developed. Existing plants deemed to fail improved safety standards should be retrofitted or, when necessary, phased out. Further, governments must force their nuclear providers to remove spent fuel — typically after five years of cooling — from storage pools and place it in dry cask storage. As the world witnessed, spent fuel in the overcrowded above-ground cooling pools at Fukushima Daiichi became exposed to the air. If spent fuel catches fire, radioactive materials can be widely dispersed.

Because of decreased public confidence following the Japanese accident, governments and industry must have an honest conversation about the role of nuclear energy in meeting consumers’ electricity demands, the typically high safety record of almost all plants and the risks of this technology. These discussions must implement one of the primary lessons of the Japanese accident: that officials should dramatically increase transparency of nuclear operations. Simultaneously, nations need to invest far more in renewable energy sources, which offer the path to a truly sustainable global energy system.

Charles D. Ferguson is President of the Federation of American Scientists and an Adjunct Professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. Trained as a physicist and nuclear engineer, he has worked on nuclear policy issues at the U.S. Department of State and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is author of the forthcoming book Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know.

This article originally appeared on Nature.

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By Philip Howard

Political discontent has cascaded across North Africa and the Middle East. Entrenched dictators with decades of experience controlling political life have fallen or had to make major concessions. In the West, some observers discount the role of digital media in political change, others give it too much emphasis.

Digitally enabled protesters in Tunisia and Egypt tossed out their dictator. The protests in Libya have posed the first serious challenge to Gaddafi’s rule in decades and the crisis in that country is not over. Several regimes have had to dismiss their cabinets and offer major concessions to their citizens. Discontent has cascaded over transnational networks of family and friends to Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Ben Ali ruled Tunisia for 20 years, Mubarak reigned in Egypt for 30 years, and Gaddafi has held Libya in a tight grip for 40 years. Yet their bravest challengers are 20- and 30-year-olds without ideological baggage, violent intentions or clear leaders.

The answer, for the most part, is online. And it is not just that digital media provided new tools for organizing protest and inspiring stories of success from Tunisia and Egypt. The important structural change in Mideast political life is not so much about digital ties between the West and the Arab street, but about connections between Arab streets.

But a reasonable foreign policy question remains. If digital media changes the political game in countries run by tough dictators, who will fall next?

The Algerian government has had to lift an incongruous 19-year “state of emergency” and are gearing for more demonstrations. Even in the constitutional monarchies there has been significant turnover in government Ministers and Cabinets in the effort to respond–or placate–citizens. In Bahrain, Jordan and Yemen, regimes have had to make concessions to activists with the newly found gall to protest openly. Last week, the Day of Rage in Saudi Arabia drew modest crowds, and Gaddafi began to retake ground. Still, women from a dozen Arab nations coordinated events to mark International Women’s Day, using digital media to call out record numbers of participants and advance a tech-savvy strategy for capturing news headlines.

It is pretty clear that digital media has had an important role in changing the system of political communication during sensitive moments in regime transition. Images of jubilant protesters in Tunisia inspired others across the region. Facebook provided an invaluable logistical infrastructure for the initial stages of protest in each country. Twitter fed people in country and outside with information about where the action was, where the abuses were, and what the next step would be.

From the point of view of social movement theory, digital media helped a peculiar group of people organize in a peculiar way. For the most part, the early days of protest in each country involved a disaffected, middle class of government workers, students, lawyers and entrepreneurs (not unions, urban poor, and radical Islamists). They organized relatively peacefully, and without clear leaders.

For some observers, the Arab Spring was an inevitable surprise. The rapid diffusion of digital media has been shown to have mostly positive consequences in many parts of the world, though often for different reasons. Both Egypt and Tunisia have more tech-savvy citizens then one would expect given their level of income. The other countries with an educated population and a small but tech-savvy community of student and civil society groups include many of the countries are still “in play”.

The modern recipe for democratization includes several key ingredients. Wired civil society groups have proven particularly agile at sensitive moments for regimes, particularly during rigged elections. Only the regimes made wealthy through oil and natural gas reserves have had the resources to keep civil society actors at bay in these critical moments. Several significant political transitions over the last 15 years fit this recipe, as do recent cases of Egypt and Tunisia.

Social scientists are loathe to predict, and rightly so. So instead of predicting political upheaval, it may be better to think about countries with the kinds of ingredients that go into the modern recipe for democratization. Jordan, Morocco, and Syria all have complex political histories and unique domestic profiles. They also have sophisticated, tech-savvy publics, economies not dependent on fuel exports, and regimes that may try to rig elections in the next two years.

Dr. Philip N. Howard is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. He directs the World Information Access Project and the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam, and is author of The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam.

A Radioactive Situation

By Charles D. Ferguson

Is nuclear power too risky in earthquake-prone countries such as Japan? On March 11, a massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake shook Japan and caused widespread damage especially in the northeastern region of Honshu, the largest Japanese island. Nuclear power plants throughout that region automatically shut down when the plants’ seismometers registered ground accelerations above safety thresholds.

But all the shutdowns did not go perfectly. Reactor unit 1 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station experienced a mechanical failure in the emergency safety system. In response, officials ordered the evacuation of residents who live within two miles of the plant. Also, people living between two to 10 miles were ordered to stay indoors. The Japanese government described this order as a precautionary measure.

A worst-case accident would release substantial amounts of radioactive materials into the environment. This is unlikely to happen, but is still possible. Modern commercial nuclear power plants like the Fukushima plant use defense-in-depth safety measures. The first line of defense is fuel cladding that provides a barrier to release of highly radioactive fission products. Because these materials generate a substantial amount of heat, coolant is essential. Thus, the next lines of defense are to ensure that enough cooling water is available. The reactor coolant pumps are designed to keep water flowing through the hot core. But loss of electric power to the pumps will stop this flow. Backup electric power sources such as off-site power and on-site emergency diesel generators offer another layer of defense.

Unfortunately, these emergency power sources were knocked out about one hour after the plant shut down. Although it is unclear from the reporting to date, this power outage appears to have occurred at about the same time that a huge tsunami, triggered by the earthquake, hit that part of Japan.

Sustained loss of electric power could result in the core overheating and the fuel melting. However, three other backup systems provide additional layers of defense. First, the plant has batteries to supply power for about four hours. Second, the emergency core cooling system can inject water into the core. Finally, the containment structure, made of strong reinforced concrete, surrounds the reactor and can under even the most severe conditions prevent radioactive materials from entering the environment.

But the earthquake — the largest in the 140 years of recorded history of Japanese earthquakes — might have caused some damage to the containment structure. Japanese authorities announced that they will vent some steam from the containment structure to reduce the pressure buildup. This action may release small amounts of radioactive gas. The authorities do not expect any threat to the public.

Although a meltdown will most likely not occur, this incident will surely result in significant financial harm and potential loss of public confidence. For example, it was less than four years ago, in July 2007, when the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, Japan’s largest, suffered shaking beyond its design basis acceleration. The plant’s seven reactors were shut down for 21 months while authorities carefully investigated the extent of the damage. Fortunately, public safety was not harmed and the plant experienced no major damage. However, the government accepted responsibility for approving construction of the first reactor near a geological fault line, which was unknown at the time of construction. The biggest loss was financial. In particular, the fiscal year 2007 loss was estimated at $5.62 billion with about three-fourths of that to replace the 8,000 megawatts of generating capacity from the nuclear plant.

Japan has balanced this financial risk against the risk of energy insecurity. Because it lacks abundant natural resources such as coal, oil, and natural gas, Japan imports more than 80 percent of its energy supplies. The 1973 oil shock from the Arab oil embargo convinced Japanese leaders that they needed to reduce their country’s dependence on foreign oil. At that time, oil was used to generate about 66 percent of Japan’s electricity. Nuclear energy offered a means to reduce this dependency. Today, nuclear power generates about 30 percent of Japan’s electricity while oil accounts for 11 percent.

Tokyo wants to further increase nuclear power’s share of electricity generation to 41 percent in 2017 and 50 percent by 2050. Japan presently has 54 commercial nuclear reactors and is building two more. It has plans for at least a dozen more in the coming decades.

From conversations I have had in recent years with Japanese nuclear energy officials, I have learned that they prefer a balanced portfolio with not too much reliance on a single source of energy for electricity. But moving toward one-half of Japan’s electricity from nuclear power appears too risky in light of the recent massive earthquake. About one-fifth of Japan’s nuclear plants were shut down. A prolonged shutdown of a significant portion of Japan’s electric generators could affect public well-being — for example, hospitals need reliable power supplies — and could harm the Japanese economy.

One possible solution is to ramp up Japan’s use of renewable energy sources. However, politically powerful forces stand in the way of greater development of renewable energy. Japan has 10 major electric utilities that wield tremendous political influence over local and national governments. The utility executives favor large power generators such as nuclear power plants. Wind, solar, and geothermal plants tend to be much smaller in power generation.

In 2010, the Japan Renewable Energy Policy Platform, an association of several renewable energy organizations, issued the first renewable energy white paper published in Japan. Its report underscores the lack of government incentives for increasing use of renewable energy. Japan had been in first place in the world in solar photovoltaic installation until 2004, when the government cut financial support. Moreover, renewable portfolio standards have been set too low. National targets were reached in recent years but have only resulted in a small fraction of electric power from non-hydro power sources. Furthermore, most geothermal power is not included in the renewable energy targets because of concerns about water use and the effects on spas. But geothermal has a huge potential because of Japan’s location in a geologically active zone. In sum, renewable sources could provide about 67 percent of Japan’s electricity by 2050 if the government would implement effective policies.

Japan, a world leader in nuclear power, should also become a leader in use of renewable energies. This will help alleviate safety and financial concerns about too much dependence on nuclear energy. It will also point the way toward a sustainable energy future for the world.

Charles D. Ferguson is President of the Federation of American Scientists and an Adjunct Professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. Trained as a physicist and nuclear engineer, he has worked on nuclear policy issues at the U.S. Department of State and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is author of the forthcoming book Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know.

This article is reposted with permission from Foreign Policy.

In the two-part podcast below, Das talks with none other than the brilliant Kamla Bhatt.

The Satyam Scandal, dubbed as the largest corporate scandal in India prompted Mr. Das to ask how could this be? What induced this moral failure on the part of a well-known Indian entrepreneur? He turned to the Mahabharata, the old Indian epic and wondered if this “dark and epic” tale could provide answers to his question about moral failure in business, government and human beings? He had spent time at the University of Chicago learning Sanskrit and reading the Mahabharata.

The result is his latest book “The Difficulty of Being Good: On The Subtle Art of Dharma.” In it Mr. Das writes that the Indian epic “is unique in engaging with the world of politics.” What is more the epic is “suspicious of ideology.”

“The Mahabharata is about our incomplete lives, about good people acting badly, about how difficult it is to be good in this world,” writes Mr. Das. Can the ancient Indian epic help us understand the moral failure of governance and financial disasters of the 21st century?

Kamla Bhatt is the host and producer of The Kamla Show, an internet radio show where listeners can find stories about the new and emerging India and the global Indian community. Bhatt is a pioneer of the internet radio format in India, but started her media career during the dotcom boom in the mid-1990s in Silicon Valley. Through her work  in Silicon Valley’s tech companies Kamla gained an insider’s perspective into the startup culture, and continues to write and broadcast about technology, politics, economics, and more.

To give you just a taste of how far-reaching her talents and interests are, I’ve also chosen to feature the below (unrelated) video, in which she chats with internet legend Chris Pirillo at CES.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch more videos from Kamla Bhatt.

Western observers have been celebrating the role of Twitter, Facebook, smartphones, and the internet in general in facilitating the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt last week. An Egyptian Google employee, imprisoned for rallying the opposition on Facebook, even became for a time a hero of the insurgency. The Twitter Revolution was similarly credited with fostering the earlier ousting of Tunisia’s Ben Ali, and supporting Iran’s green protests last year, and it’s been instrumental in other outbreaks of resistance in a variety of totalitarian states across the globe. If only Twitter had been around for Tiananmen Square, enthusiasts retweeted one another. Not bad for a site that started as a way to tell your friends what you had for breakfast.

But skeptics point out that the crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square continued to grow during the five days that the Mubarak government shut down the internet; that only nineteen percent of Tunisians have online access; that while the Iran protests may have been tweeted round the world, there were few Twitter users actually in-country; and that although Americans can’t seem to survive without the constant stimulus of digital multitasking, much of the rest of the world barely notices when the cable is down, being preoccupied instead with raising literacy rates, fighting famine and disease, and finding clean water, not to mention a source of electricity that works for more than an hour every day or two.

It’s true that the internet connects people, and it’s become an unbeatable source of information—the Egyptian revolution was up on Wikipedia faster than you could say Wolf Blitzer. The telephone also connected and informed faster than anything before it, and before the telephone the printing press was the agent of rapid-fire change. All these technologies can foment revolution, but they can also be used to suppress dissent.

You don’t have to master the laws of physics to observe that for every revolutionary manifesto there’s an equal and opposite volley of government propaganda. For every eye-opening book there’s an index librorum prohibitorum—an official do-not-read list—or worse yet, a bonfire. For every phone tree organizing a protest rally there’s a warrantless wiretap waiting to throw the rally-goers in jail. And for every revolutionary internet site there’s a firewall, or in the case of Egypt, a switch that shuts it all down. Cuba is a country well-known for blocking digital access, but responding to events in Egypt and the small but scary collection of island bloggers, El Lider’s government is sponsoring a dot gov rebuttal, a cadre of official counterbloggers spreading the party line to the still small number of Cubans able to get online—about ten percent can access the official government-controlled ’net—or get a cell phone signal in their ’55 Chevys.

All new means of communication bring with them an irrepressible excitement as they expand literacy and open up new knowledge, but in certain quarters they also spark fear and distrust. At the very least, civil and religious authorities start insisting on an imprimatur—literally, a permission to print—to license communication and censor content, channeling it all toward politically or spiritually desirable ends. And when pushed too far, they ban the books, shut down the phones, and pull the plug on the ’net.

It’s no surprise that the uprising in Egypt took advantage of cutting-edge communications, and it is possible that without Facebook and Twitter, Hosni Mubarak might still be holed up in the Presidential Palace, planning free and fair one-party elections in September. But it’s also likely that the civilization that brought us hieroglyphics, the riddle of the Sphinx, and the mummy’s curse, might have had a backup plan—after all, when the libraries are burning, the phone lines get cut, the newspaper is shuttered, tanks surround the television station, and the internet goes down, there’s always sneakernet to get the message out.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared.

By Simon Chesterman

The ongoing police investigation into phone-hacking in Britain by the tabloid News of the World has revealed the widespread use of surveillance techniques by private actors, with predictable outrage expressed at the violations of privacy. Yet the recent inquiries only began in earnest after a major story in the New York Times.

This is the paradox of today’s media: investigative journalism is often key to revealing abuses of surveillance powers, yet the commercial reality of today’s market drives unscrupulous journalists themselves towards ever more dubious methods.

That market has been radically altered by the “new media”, with WikiLeaks as its poster-child — ably exploiting the Internet’s capacity for widespread dissemination of data, but at the expense of credible efforts at analysis or minimizing the potential harm to named individuals. It is “journalism” by quantity rather than quality.

These two trends — muck-raking and unfiltered dissemination — become all the more serious when linked to the extraordinary tools of surveillance available to government and, increasingly, private actors.

The spread of surveillance powers through Britain has long puzzled outside observers. On the one hand, Britain is a rare example of a country that developed a comprehensive identity card regime during the Second World War and then dismantled it after the conclusion of hostilities — apparently to the dismay of many in law enforcement circles. Later in the century, however, the absence of constitutional protections of rights, a general belief in the benevolence of government, and episodes like the 1993 James Bulger murder encouraged the growth of a sophisticated surveillance state.

Britain now enjoys the highest concentration of CCTV cameras in the world, manages the London Congestion Charge by recording details of every car entering and leaving the capital, and stores DNA samples from an ever growing proportion of the population.

In the 2010 general election, Britain’s Conservative Party campaigned on a platform of scrapping plans for an identity card that would have been linked to a National Identity Register. Interestingly, the arguments that resonated with the public had less to do with privacy concerns than the expense involved, doubts about government competence to manage the data, and a general wariness that the whole enterprise looked a little too “European”.

Does this mean that Britons do not care about privacy? Certainly not. But as in many other countries it is hard to reconcile the apparent sincerity of individuals claiming to be concerned about their privacy with the nonchalant behaviour of those same individuals in revealing personal information voluntarily or engaging in activities where there is manifestly no reasonable expectation to privacy.

This is not limited to teenagers. The current head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, was embarrassed by photos that his wife posted on Facebook in 2009 revealing the location of their London flat and the whereabouts of their three adult children. Last October his daughter uploaded a suggestive photograph of herself holding a golden Kalashnikov — quickly cut and pasted from Facebook to the Mirror.

There is, however, a generational element to attitudes towards privacy. Whereas in the 1960s activists opposed even the creation of files, today’s fears tend to stress the potential for abuse by private actors — identity theft, stalking — rather than nefarious activity by governments. This may change: high profile scandals might lead to a reining in of intelligence services comparable to the aftermath of Watergate. But it seems unlikely.

The scandals that have emerged in places like the United States and Britain have largely been confined in their impact to visible minorities, allowing a certain complacency on the part of the majority. A more probable scenario is that the activists, like the generation that used to write, sign, and seal envelopes, or confide in diaries locked with a key, will be succeeded by generations that send e-mails with all the privacy of a postcard and blog about the most intimate details of their lives.

Are we, then, ‘sleepwalking into a surveillance society’ as Britain’s Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warned in 2004? The answer would seem to be: no, we are walking in that direction with our eyes wide open.

Which brings us back to journalism.

Given the precarious economic situation of many newspapers, Thomas Jefforson’s well-worn quote on the topic is often cited. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government,” he wrote during his term as ambassador to France, “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Jefferson’s quote is often taken to mean the mere existence of newspapers, though the following sentence in his letter makes it clear that what really concerned him was the level of informed public opinion: “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

In these days when Lady Gaga displaces the sitting prime minister of Great Britain on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people, and when journalists are studying to write articles that are 140 characters long, perhaps the most depressing aspect of the phone-hacking scandal is that it was so trivial. It revealed nothing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the parlous state of Britain’s economy, or the inner workings of 10 Downing Street. It began, it is worth remembering, with a story about a Prince’s sore knee.

Simon Chesterman is Vice Dean and Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore, and Global Professor and Director of the New York School of Law Singapore Programme. His book, One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty, is available now.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written a Linked Up, but with releasing a new episode of The Oxford Comment, working “frak” into my daily vocabulary, and trying to keep up on developments in Egypt, I’ve not found the time! Hopefully, today’s will make up for it. Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

P.S. I promised our Twitter followers that if they came up with at least 5 good questions about insects I would have an entomologist answer them, so send in yours!

Apparently Kobe Bryant told Pau Gasol he needed to be more “black swan” on the court. [NYMag]

I was shocked by this: “Vodafone Forced to Send Pro-Government Text Messages in Egypt” [RWW]

There is a wonderful new Paula-Deen-as-hipster meme [Clabwag]

I have a lot of colleagues in the UK, so this “everything you ever wanted to know about the UK/GB/England in five minutes” was very helpful. My favorite (favourite?) part: “BFFs 4EVA USA?” [CGPGrey]

And since we’re on the topic of geography, I might as well present this from XKDC:

Yes, it’s been around for a while, but I think it’s important to remind everyone that you can talk like a pirate on Facebook. [NextWeb]

You got a few minutes to make some fleeting art? Then try this.

If you didn’t see the update to our article “Why the Trenta?” I’m sure you’ll be delighted to learn that Starbucks’ newest size can hold an entire bottle of wine. [Cockeyed]

Oh Apple, you’re so sneaky. [Atlantic]

Protesters are awesome: Egyptian volunteers clean the streets [Good]

And now,  an enormous infographic:

As the year draws to a close, we’ve been reflecting on all the wonderful books published in 2010, and in doing so, we’ve also realized there are some classics worth revisiting. The authors and friends of Oxford University Press are proud to present this series of essays, which will appear regularly until the New Year, drawing our attention to books both new and old. Below, humorist Mark Peters recommends a book you’re sure to love, “unless you hate puppies and America.”

At some point, I think we’ve all asked ourselves, “When is the best time to start training a kitten to hold a knife?”

That question—written by Tim Siedell, a.k.a Twitter’s badbanana – is one of the expertly crafted one-liners you can find in his new book Marching Bands Are Just Homeless Orchestras: Half-empty Thoughts Vol 1. It’s the funnest/funniest book I’ve picked up in donkey’s years, and it’s also pretty and shiny and full of cool illustrations by Brian Andreas. Unless you hate puppies and America, you should give yourself and your minions this tremendous book, which offers pertinent dietary observations such as: “That Indian dinner was so authentic I think I hate Pakistan.”

To put Siedell and his prolific, consistent Twitter feed in context, you have to know that there are somewhere between a metric buttload and eleventy-bazillion would-be humorists on Twitter. Some are cuttingly political satirists, like Tweetin4Palin (“FRIDAY 13TH!!!! Don’t 4get 2 turn antlers in house upside down & spit into the toaster 2 cast out demons”). Some are woefully underfollowed civilians, like Killorn (“The worst part about yelling ‘I CAN SEE YOUR BUTTHOLE’ at your dog in a Yoda Voice is realizing that people have ears, and they heard that”). Some are professional comedy writers, like Julius Sharpe (“Basketball fans – right before a woman climaxes, whisper in her ear, ‘Van Gundy’”). Some are even me, now that I think about it (“You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you realize you have a terrible bestiality problem”).

But Siedell is the king of the form, churning out endless gems that are fresh and effortless and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Siedell’s work would make Jack Handey—author of Deep Thoughts and primordial predecessor of Twitter comedy—proud. Siedell’s work is diverse, deadpan, and always practical, like “Technology is all well and good until someone hits you in the head with a rock,” or

If you’re not into Twitter, it’s hard to explain how awesome it is when one of these jokes appears. I guess I would compare it to walking down the street, and someone tosses you a hand grenade. Before you can say “Aaaaiiieeee!” you see it’s not a hand grenade at all – it’s a frosting-drenched cinnamon roll, like the kind they make at Ann Sathers in Chicago. Siedell-isms like – “My weirdo neighbors never talk to me unless they want something, like for me to get out from under their couch” – are delicious cinnamon rolls of comedy that inject sugar into our otherwise lame-o lives. They can get you through the day.

I don’t want to give the whole book away, so here are some recent Siedell gems from Twitter to get you in the book-buying mood:

Finally, if Christmas music and winter weather are making you feel like a combination of Scrooge, the Grinch, and an elf-barbecuing serial killer, you’ll surely enjoy this holiday tweet: “The halls can go deck themselves.”

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, language columnist for Good and Visual Thesaurus, and the blogger behind The Rosa Parks of Blogs and The Pancake Proverbs. His column for OUPblog appears here every month.

By Dennis Baron

The English Spelling Society has released a report blaming the internet for what it sees as the current epidemic of bad spelling: “The increasing use of variant spellings . . . has been brought about by people typing at speed in chatrooms and on social networking sites where the general attitude is that there isn’t a need to correct typos or conform to spelling rules.”

Many people have come to the same conclusion, despite the fact that, by popular demand, almost all of our digital devices come equipped with unforgiving spell-checkers that mark every mistake with bright red lynes lines.

This is hardly the first time that the ‘net has been unjustly blamed for bad English. Studies emerge with depressing regularity charging that texting, chatting, and email lead us to abandon the civilizing rules of standard English—whatever that may be—and replace them with monosyllables, abbreviations, and emoticons that are barely a step away from brutish barks and growls.

It turns out, though, that digital technology is only the most recent culprit in the supposed decline of a language that apparently reached perfection at some unspecified point earlier in its history and has been going downhill ever since. Over the past half-century critics have blamed the decay of English on movies, television, comic books, rock ’n roll, permissive parenting, educational reform, Webster’s Third, and the war in Vietnam.

The English Spelling Society holds technology only partially responsible for our current literacy crisis. According to them, an even more basic problem turns out to be the very basis of that literacy, the alphabet:

The irregularity of English spelling starts with children being taught the alphabet and finding that it is a poor guide on how to reliably pronounce the written form or reproducing spoken words in writing.

The solution is spelling reform, though apparently not the kind of spell-as-you-please reform encouraged by the internet which renders “to be or not to be” as 2b or ∼2b. Instead the Spelling Society favors a more rational spelling on the analogy of the metric system and decimal currency:

To improve literacy in the general population, modernisation of the spelling system will bring similar benefits to what decimalisation brought.

But while such modernization might consist of simplified spellings like thru for through or modernization for modernisation, why not go really decimal and create an alphabet of 100 letters and have every word be ten letters long? Or we could write in binary code, with every word spelled as a string of zeroes and ones, so that “to be or not to be” might be transcribed as

01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101

Better yet, we could switch to a writing system where every word is written with scannable vertical lines and spaces, like a bar code:

“To be or not to be,” written as a barcode – very rational, though it might be a little hard to read.

But before we ditch our modern passion for one-spelling-per-word, even if it does allow for variants like theater and theatre, or color and colour, we might consider that our much-maligned text, chat, and email may not be so harmful after all. True, the English Spelling Society reports that the majority of 18-24 year olds surveyed believe that the pressure to write fast on the internet has turned variant spellings into the norm, but a third of them maintain that standard spellings are preferable. This confirms my own nonscientific finding that most people in the 18-24 demographic think that text-speak like cu l8r for ‘see you later’ or OMG for ‘oh, my god,’ is just a developmental phase, something one grows out of after middle school, when conventional writing takes over.

As they mature, most internet writers seek correctness, and to satisfy their continuing demand for standard English, programs for texting, chatting, and email typically come with spell-checkers which mark suspected errors and often suggest corrections. It turns out that, thanks to digital technology, no matter how bad you are with pencil and paper, on the internet, nobody need know you can’t spel spell.

Above,  a Facebook “note” with misspelled words automatically underlined. FB’s spell-checker is even programed to mark Facebook as incorrect. Below, Mail also underlines misspellings. Mail finds Facebook is correct, but it marks lower-case facebook as wrong.

So far as the question of to spell or not to spell goes, it’s not the internet, but the technology of pencil-and-paper writing, that truly lends itself to creative spelling. Speaking of “to be or not to be,” Shakespeare, one of the greatest English writers, signed his own name six different ways in the six surviving documents that bear his signature: Shackper, Shakspear, Shakspea, Shackspere, Shakspere, and Shakspear, none of them matching the standard spelling, Shakespeare (he penned variants on William as well), and contemporaries spelled his name about 30 more ways, including Shackspyer, Shackspeare, Shagspere, and Shakysper, all of this centuries before the invention of the keyboard.

Had the English Spelling Society been around in 1594 (it was founded in 1908, at a time when some scholars wrote the name of Hamlet’s author as Shakespere), it would have blamed these Shakespearean variants on the undependability of the leading writing technology of the day, the quill pen, which did not come with a spell checker, or possibly the recently-invented pencil, which exploded onto the European scene in the 1560s.

Writers like Shakespeare used the age-old technology of the quill pen (above) and the recently-invented hi-tech pencil (below, the first known picture of a pencil and a piece of graphite appears in a book printed in 1565). Both of these technologies could be blamed for the horrendous spelling of the day.

Maybe instead of blaming technology or the alphabet or writers themselves for the fact that English spelling is inconsistent, unphonetic, and difficult, we should just come to terms with the fact that, no matter how strong we feel the need to control it, language, like all human activities, is hard to rein in. We have no mechanism to guaranty spelling—or is it guarantee? Our words, either spoken or written, are variable, not fixed, and we remain free to follow or ignore the spelling recommendations of giants like Microsoft or small bands of orthographical malcontents like the members of the English Spelling Society.

Hamlet in the internet age: If you sit an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of computers, they will eventually type out, not Hamlet, but HamBasic.

By Michael A. Carrier

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has caused concern for many reasons, such as secret negotiations and controversial provisions.  Today, more than 70 law professors sent a letter to President Obama asking that he “direct the [U.S. Trade Representative] to halt its public endorsement of ACTA and subject the text to a meaningful participation process that can influence the shape of the agreement going forward.”

Despite this beneficial attention, one clause has slipped under the radar.  Article 2.14 of ACTA would require participating nations to “ensure that criminal liability for aiding and abetting is available.”

This liability would apply to parties that assist others in engaging in “willful . . . copyright . . . piracy on a commercial scale.”  Such scale includes “commercial activities for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage.”  These terms are not defined in the agreement.  As a result, it would appear that any activity that would give an “indirect” commercial advantage (including the downloading of a single copyrighted song) could lead to criminal liability.

While such a consequence would appear severe, it is not even the most concerning part of Article 2.14.  That distinction is reserved for the “aiding and abetting” basis for liability.  Any party that plays a role in assisting infringement could be liable for criminal liability.  The identity of such parties is worrisome:  Personal computer manufacturers.  Electronic device makers.  Search engine operators.  Each of these entities could play a role, however indirect, in contributing to copyright infringement.

Although copyright’s secondary liability law is not a model of clarity, courts have sought to ground its elements in balanced policies.  Judicial tests have asked if devices have noninfringing uses (Sony).  If the party has knowledge and materially contributed to the activity (contributory infringement).  If it has a financial interest and the right to control (vicarious liability).  If it has an intent to induce infringement (Grokster).

Aiding-and-abetting liability lacks such nuance.  It is borrowed from criminal law.  And it is used to punish those who assisted in the crime.  The getaway driver.  The fraudulent check presenter.  The cocaine distributor.  In the criminal law arena, such liability reaches broadly to deter true criminal conduct.

In the context of secondary copyright liability, in contrast, such a standard is not appropriate.  Not when copyright is subject to competing public policies.  Not when technologies could be held criminally liable for allowing search, performance, or retrieval.  Not when these monumentally significant issues—which would dramatically expand U.S. liability—were never even debated.

In 2004, Congress considered adding “aiding and abetting” liability to copyright law.  Its attempt, the Induce Act, failed.  The secretive ACTA is not an appropriate vehicle to circumvent this failure and dramatically expand secondary liability.

Michael A. Carrier is a Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School-Camden who teaches and writes in the areas of antitrust, intellectual property, and property law. He is the author of Innovation for the 21st Century: Harnessing the Power of Intellectual Property and Antitrust Law and editor of the forthcoming volume, Critical Concepts in Intellectual Property Law: Competition.

By Bram Vermeer

Overoptimism and overpessimism sells. But let’s face reality. Here are 10 things we won’t have by 2030:

1. Asteroid bomb

Asteroids with a diameter of more than 100 m (109 yd) reach our planet once every 2000 years. Distressing as that may be, their impact remains local. Bad luck if this asteroid hits Washington DC, but humankind as a whole will be able to survive that. The likelihood of a collision that has a real global impact is still 1000 times smaller. So we’d better prepare for more likely catastrophes, like flu pandemics and water shortages.

2. Moore’s law

The incredible miniaturization of microelectronics will inevitably come to a halt. Extrapolating the current pace, we will reach components of atomic sizes by 2020. But long before that, we will have given up the endeavor of making electronics smaller. We face tremendous technical difficulties in the next steps of miniaturization. Even if we succeed, the costs would be staggering. The speed of single processors already stalled at a few gigahertz. We would be better off investing in connecting processors with sensors and small motors, which would make clever devices that interact with us better.

3. Population stabilization

In many countries, birth and death rates are declining, but not at the same pace. It would require careful tuning of the number of babies to achieve demographic stabilization. There is no such stabilization in natural ecosystems, and we won’t see it in human society either. So be prepared for population growth, population decline, and an uneven age distribution in societies. All of these are concerning.

4. Singularity

Will machines outwit humans and take over our civilization? For robots to procreate, they would have to take possession of mines, material plants, microelectronics foundries, assembling sites, and probably some military facilities as well. The collective power of 8 billion human minds will certainly prevent that in the next decades and defeat any machine “gone wild”. And what about our PCs, brain aids, and other appliances becoming increasingly part of us? I think we already crossed that boundary when we started to use cells. We live in a symbiotic relationship with technology, which means that we continuously have to nurture it. Technological evolution is about mastering science, not about submission to it.

5. The greenhouse flood

I live below sea level, as do many people in the Netherlands. The water authorities are already raising the dikes in preparation for climate change. By 2030 the sea level will have risen by only 4 cm (1.6″). So I needn’t be afraid for my house. Climate change is slow compared to the length of a human life. Precisely that makes it difficult for us to act. Also, counteractions only take effect slowly. But I am worried for the generations to come. The last time the earth saw a CO₂ level comparable to what we are experiencing now, seas were 70 m (77 yd) higher. Long after 2030, we’ll probably have to give up the lowest parts of my home country. The same is probably true for cities like New Orleans.

6. Clean electric cars

Even in the most optimistic of scenarios, only 10 percent of all cars in Western societies will be electric by 2030. And even these cars won’t really be clean as they depend on fuels burnt in power plants. Worldwide we are still building two new coal-fired power plants a week; the pace of installing renewable power is much, much slower. Moving away from fossil energy is a huge task that requires more than adjustments. We have to prepare for a transformation that touches all aspects of society. Probably we’ll have to rethink the very concept of moving by car.

7. Invasion of nanobots

Crystal-gazers are dreaming about nanorobots that will swim through our veins and take over our internal functions one day. They will fire electrons at the right moment into our brains, triggering our neurons with artificial signals and fooling our senses. We’d hear the birds singing while, in reality, we are operating heavy machinery. But nanotechnology proves much harder to realize than initially thought. Scientists are now very glad they can produce nanodots, nanorods, and nanowires. No nanoarms and nanobodies, yet. And thanks to Moore’s law stalling, there will probably never be nanoelectronics on a small enough scale to equip a nanoinvader with enough intelligence to master our brains.

8. Terrorists taking over

It’s extremely difficult to kill a lot of people at once. Even a biological attack with smallpox would not kill many people, as there are many countermeasures in place, and this kind of attack is extremely complex. We should be more concerned with attacks on critical parts of our infrastructure: disrupting electricity networks, chemical plants, or communication links. That has the potential to knock out an entire society for much longer.

9. Equality

In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, the recovery period for poor people was much longer than for rich people. As a result, the gap between rich and poor became wider in the city. The world is even more divided than New Orleans. Poor countries have smaller buffers to cope with financial crises, for example. We are facing a future with much variability in terms of weather, food prices, oil supply, and water provision. Each crisis will increase inequality. Equality requires stability. As long as our planet rushes from one crisis to the next, we cannot expect to have a more stable and therefore equal world.

10. The Mayan catastrophe

No, the world will not end in 2012. We probably just misinterpreted the Mayan calendar. We still have about 50 years’ respite, at least that’s according to cataclysmic arithmetic. For those who believe ancient fortune tellers, personally I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

Bram Vermeer is a freelance science journalist with a background in physics who has been writing about technology for Dutch newspapers and scientific journals for 25 years. He lives and works alternately in Amsterdam and Berlin. He is author with Rutger van Santen and Djan Khoe of 2030: Technology That Will Change the World.

By Dennis Baron

Apple’s latest iPhone app will clean up your text messages and force you to brush up your French, or Spanish, or Japanese, all at the same time.

This week the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved patent 7,814,163, an Apple invention that can censor obscene or offensive words in text messages whie doubling as a foreign-language tutor with the power to require, for example, “that a certain number of Spanish words per day be included in e-mails for a child learning Spanish.”

Parents are sure to love this multitasker, which puts an end to teen-age sexting while also checking homework. In the spirit of the Supreme Court’s 1978 ban on George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on TV,” Apple’s app will shrink their children’s stock of English expletives—or at least render them unprintable—while setting the kids on the path toward bilingualism, or at least a passing grade in French. This new invention from Apple is two things in one: Mary Poppins and the Rosetta Stone, or, for those parents of a certain age, it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.

Of course, when Apple closes one door, it opens another. Apple may cut off access to bad words in English, but it then redirects that lexical energy in the profitable direction of foreign-language learning. Teens may find their texting vocabulary circumscribed, but if children’s grades go down, Apple’s iPhone censor lets parents activate a tool that “can require a user . . . to send messages in a foreign language, to include certain vocabulary words, or to use proper spelling, grammar and/or punctuation based on the user’s defined skill level. This could aide [sic] the user in more quickly improving his or her fluency of a language.”

As if Steve Jobs wasn’t already intruding enough into people’s wallets and their private lives, the iPhone device will not only watch your language, it will require you to correct your mistakes and rat you out if you screw up. The app doesn’t just make you do your homework, it even tells you when to do it. According to the Apple patent,

The control application may require a user during specified time periods to send messages in a designated foreign language, to include certain designated vocabulary words, or to use proper designated spelling, designated grammar and designated punctuation and like designated language forms based on the user’s defined skill level and/or designated language skill rating. If the text-based communication fails to include the required language or format, the control application may alert the user and/or the administrator/parent of the absence of such text.

The control application may require the user to rewrite the text-based communication in the required language, to include the required vocabulary words and/or to correct spelling and punctuation errors. The control application may require the user to locate the error. If the user cannot correct the error, the control application may provide hints as to the location of the error by first indicating the paragraph, then, the line and, finally, the exact location.

As figure 10 from Apple’s patent application shows (see below), writers of objectionable texts will be given the choice of revising anything offensive or deleting the entire message. But teens bent on sexting are only going to circumvent these word restrictions by exchanging even more explicit photographs of themselves instead. It’s also not clear that typing the odd bit of Spanish will get them ready for study abroad, plus what parent is really going to believe that the children are doing homework on their cell phones?

In the end, parental controls are just one option. Even if you comply with Apple’s protocols for English or for foreign languages, the device could still decide to override the user and the administrator and refuse to send a text message if it judges that message to be obscene or grammatically incorrect.

And it’s not just for kids. It turns out that adult sexting is a problem as well, and here’s where Apple’s invention really stands to pick up market share. A Wisconsin district attorney recently had to resign after it was discovered that he sent sexually-explicit texts to a number of women, including dozens of messages to a sex-abuse victim whose abuser he was prosecuting at the time. So employers will relish their new ability to control employee texts.

Spouses, too, may have an interest in limiting the texts of partners whom they suspect of having roving fingers, or they may simply want to improve their partners’ foreign-language skills in anticipation of that long-awaited European vacation. And both liberal and conservative legislators may actually welcome a phone app that prevents them from soliciting sex with their pages and interns, or at least soliciting it in a way that leaves a digital trail. But most of all Apple’s new invention will be welcomed by Tea Partiers who favor limited government but can’t resist controlling the minutiae of other people’s lives.

Apple’s new device doesn’t have a catchy name yet, and although the company takes out many patents, they don’t all find their way to the marketplace. Plus all Apple products are officially just rumors until Steve Jobs dons the black turtle neck and announces them at the company’s twice-yearly product launch, so in the end nothing may come of this. But a device for censoring text messages while making us do homework may be just the first step for a company where controlling what users do with its products comes second only to getting users to buy those products.

Apple has already blocked x-rated apps from its iPhones. What’s to stop the company from launching the new language censor/teacher on iPhones, then porting it to iPads and even MacBooks? First Amendment bars against prior restraint on speech be damned, just slip this new device into everyone’s word processor and the next thing you know, the man in the black turtle neck will be telling us all what to write, how to write it, when to write it, and whether we wrote it right, and after blocking any words it doesn’t like, Apple will report the results not just to our parents, teachers, spouses, or employers, but also to the National Security Agency, or worse yet, it will sell that proprietary information to advertisers so they can offer us even more things we never thought we’d need. And if we try to modify the device to circumvent its demands, the company will simply brick our computers.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site,  The Web of Language.

By Dennis Baron

A computer at Carnegie Mellon University is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge, by soaking it all up and figuring it out in our heads.

People’s brains work better some days than others, and eventually we will all run out of steam, but the creators of NELL, the Never Ending Language Learner, want it to run forever, getting better every day in every way, until it becomes the largest repository imaginable of all that’s e’er been thought or writ.

Since the first “electronic brains” began to appear in the late 1940s, it has been the goal of computer engineers and the occasional mad scientist to fashion machines that think and learn like people do. Or at least machines that perform functions analogous to some aspects of human thought, and which also self-correct by analyzing their mistakes and doing better next time around.

Setting out to create an infinite and immortal database is a big task: there’s a lot for NELL to learn in cyberspace, and a whole lot more that has yet to be digitized. But since NELL was activated a few months ago it has learned over 440,000 separate things with an accuracy of 74% which, to put it in terms that any Carnegie Mellon undergraduate can understand, is a C. In contrast, I have no idea how to count what I’ve learned since my own brain went on line, and no idea how many of the things that I know are actually correct, which suggests that all I’ve got on my cerebral transcript is an Incomplete.

NELL’s programmers seeded it with some facts and relations so that it had something to start with, then set it loose on the internet to look for more. NELL sorts what it finds into categories like mountains, scientists, writers, reptiles, universities, web sites, or sports teams, and relations like “teamPlaysSport, bookWriter, companyProducesProduct.”

NELL also judges the facts it finds, promoting some of them to the higher category of “beliefs” if they come from a single trusted source, or if they come from multiple sources that are less reliable. According to the researchers, “More than half of the beliefs were promoted based on evidence from multiple [i.e., less reliable] sources,” making NELL more of a rumor mill than a trusted source. And once NELL promotes a fact to a belief, it stays a belief: “In our current implementation, once a candidate fact is promoted as a belief, it is never demoted,” a process that sounds more like religion than science.

Sometimes NELL makes mistakes: the computer incorrectly labeled “right posterior” as a body part. NELL proved smart enough to call ketchup a condiment, not a vegetable, a mislabeling that we owe to the “great communicator,” Ronald Regan. But its human handlers had to tell NELL that Klingon is not an ethnic group, despite the fact that many earthlings think it is. Alex Trebek would be happy to know that, unlike Sean Connery, NELL has no trouble classifying therapists as a “profession,” but the computer trips up on the rapists, which it thinks could possibly be “awardtrophytournament” (confidence level, 50%).

NELL knows that cookies are a “baked good,” but that caused the computer to assume that persistent cookies and internet cookies are also baked goods. But that’s not surprising, since it still hasn’t learned what metaphors are—NELL is only 87.5% confident that metaphors are “tools” (plus, according to NELL, there’s a 50-50 chance that metaphors are actually “book writers”).

Told by its programmers that Risk is a board game, NELL predicts with 91.4% confidence that security risk is also a board game. NELL knows that a number is a character, but then incorrectly classifies the plural, numbers, as a character trait (93.8% confidence). The computer is also 99.9% confident that business is an academic field, which may be reassuring to those in the b-school if not to those small business owners worrying about the continuation of the Bush tax cuts.

Most recently, NELL learned that grain products is also a “baked good” and anti-American cleric Muqtada al Sadr is a “terrorist organization.” But First Amendment proves a stumper: NELL with weak confidence calls the First Amendment a musical instrument, classifies the Second Amendment as a ‘hobby,’ and is completely unwilling to confess any knowledge of the fifth amendment at all.

But NELL’s programmers weren’t at all surprised that they needed to perform some minor tweaks to get the computer back on track, since as they put it, “One might expect a nonnative reader of English to make similar mistakes.” In their view, NELL is only human.

It remains to be seen exactly how life-like NELL’s language learning really is. For one thing, the computer is reading its input, while most human language learners acquire language by listening and talking. Putting our love or fear of anthropomorphic computers aside for the moment, it’s clear that while NELL may have a bigger and more accurate memory than any human, it’s still a long way from being able to parse a question like, “What has four wheels and flies?”—something children learning language find both easy and funny, but machines don’t.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site,  The Web of Language.

By Bram Vermeer

Science can create a better world. We are no playthings in the Earth’s fate. Here are my personal top 10 breakthroughs that are badly needed to ensure our future.

1. Smart irrigation

When farmers irrigate their land, they usually water it 100 percent of the time. But isn’t it silly for farmers to ignore the rain? Often they have no alternative, as reliable rain forecasts are not available. Ethiopia, for example, has only a dozen weather stations that report online. But nowadays many farmers own a cell phone. Google.org came up with a simple, yet brilliant idea: let farmers text their own weather observations to a central computer. That will allow experts to make a forecast and text an irrigation advice to the farmers. This is only the beginning for how information technology can revolutionize farming.

2. New energy from the earth

This century we will probably say goodbye to oil. I have great hopes for deep geothermal energy, but it doesn’t feature in many energy scenarios. Planners usually base their ideas on existing technologies. A breakthrough may make it possible to tap the heath of the Earth. If we can really learn how to drill 5 to 10 kilometers through hard rock, we can make many artificial geysers. That would make large amounts of energy available within the next 20 years. A few trials are already underway. If they succeed, we’ll have to completely revise our energy future.

3. Solar cells printed on rollers

For solar energy to provide 5 percent of the world’s energy needs, we would need to cover a surface as large as California with solar cells. We have no way of doing that with current solar cell technology, except if we start using plastic or other thin materials that can be processed on rollers. That means you can use printing techniques, which allow for faster production. Plastic solar cells have progressed over the past decade from a scientific curiosity to a promising breakthrough technology. But we need to improve their lifespan and efficiency.

4. A factory in a shoebox

Size matters. Modern electronics makes it perfectly viable to minimize the size of a chemical plant without sacrificing efficiency. So why not reverse the trend of sizing up installations and start shrinking the equipment? You can miniaturize all the vessels, pipes, and distillation columns that make up a chemical plant—down to the size of a shoebox. The local supermarket could produce your washing powder. No logistics required.

5. Personal genetic profile

Long before 2030, all parents in the US will probably be able to afford to have their baby’s DNA sequenced. Knowing the details of the DNA will make it easier to predict the effects of pharmaceuticals. And it will generate a mass of significant data for scientific research, which will further accelerate progress. Probably we’ll learn that nurture may compensate for our genetic nature. When DNA tells us where our weaknesses lie, we’ll probably start training to improve on that. Learning from DNA will make us less dependent on our genetic fate.

6. Fertilizer factories in Africa

Africa currently imports most of its fertilizers. So why not produce them locally? This would reduce the hassle of transportation on bad roads and connecting to international markets. It would bring the benefits of the Green Revolution to rural communities. Technically, we ‘would have to scale down the chemical installations to meet the local requirements, but new developments in chemistry will make that possible.

7. Antidote for the real pandemic

Not much happened in the 2009 pandemic. But we learned that 85 percent of the world’s population has little chance of being vaccinated. A mere nine countries produce almost all the influenza vaccines, and all of them are located in the developed world. In a real pandemic, the rich will survive, and the poor will die. We need new approaches to produce small-scale immunization technologies that would be available worldwide on day one of a pandemic. Pharmaceuticals like statins, fibrates, and glitazones are good candidates.

8. Herd knowledge

Social sciences are now experiencing a data revolution. Scholars are benefiting from the enormous amount of digital traces of almost every aspect of human activity. They can also use computers to create virtual societies. These resemble computer games like SimCity, in which individual citizens interact. All this offers a new quantitative approach to sociology. Upcoming breakthroughs in this field will allow us to understand financial crashes, how viruses spread, how people move through a city, and how they are influenced by others. This will give us real insight into mass movements and herd behavior. That will help in rescue operations, stabilizing the financial system, and securing democracy against manipulation.

9. A robot for everybody

Most western societies are graying. It’s unrealistic to think we can find enough personnel to properly care for the elderly in 20 years’ time. Who is going to lift people out of bed twice a day? We’ll have to look to technology for help. Metal hands are needed around the house—lifts to help you raise yourself onto the bed or to get off the toilet. This will ultimately mean domestic robotization. Some years from now, there will be a form of robot in many houses. For now the challenge is to learn how to manage the complexity of robot interaction with people.

10. Stable cities

In 20 years’ time, most people will live in cities. We will then enter an era of posturbanization. Growth will no longer come by drawing people in from the outside. Will cities maintain their scale? Or will urbanization go into decline, turning downtown Shanghai, Mumbai, and Chicago into wastelands? Cities will have to find a new dynamic to prevent them from falling apart under their own weight. Insight in human behavior and industrial innovation will prove vital in designing a new future for our cities.

Bram Vermeer is a freelance science journalist with a background in physics who has been writing about technology for Dutch newspapers and scientific journals for 25 years. He lives and works alternately in Amsterdam and Berlin. He is author with Rutger van Santen and Djan Khoe of 2030: Technology That Will Change the World.