Phillip Alpert, an 18-year-old from Orlando, took a sleeping pill late one night in 2008 after fighting with his former girlfriend. Perhaps it was the fog of the sedative, perhaps a stab of dark emotion coupled with anger over the way she had talked to him. But when he awoke a few hours later, Phillip thought of the nude photos his girlfriend had sent him when they were dating. He went to his computer and e-mailed those photos of the girl, who was then 16, to her ‘contact list,’ which included her parents, grandparents, and teachers.
“… many scientists now argue that the best predictor of good judgment isn’t intuition or intelligence or even experience. Rather, it’s the willingness to engage in introspection, to cultivate what Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, calls ‘the art of self-overhearing.’ The mind that thinks about itself thinks better.”
As everybody knows, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash coined the modern sense of the word avatar, from the Sanskrit word avatāra, meaning something similar to incarnation. Before James Cameron’s runaway hit movie, an avatar was considered a three-dimensional model representing you or an alter ego in computer games; or a two-dimensional icon on Internet forums and other communities.
That was so five minutes ago.
Two dogs are sitting in their master’s office, one next to a desk chair looking up, the other perched on the chair looking down. The dog on the chair has a paw on a keyboard in front of a computer monitor and says knowingly to his canine companion: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
A failed car bombing took place in the heart of Manhattan late Saturday evening May 1st. This is more than the story of a terrorist whose efforts were thwarted due to superior police work; it is also a case history of the rapid building, deployment, and capture of a Metalife.
“Everybody’s got a hungry heart,” Springsteen told us. Everyone also has, it turns out, a unique heartbeat. IDesia, an Israel-based biometrics company, is capitalizing on this phenomenon, taking it to consumer healthcare and the emerging field of bio-identification.
Let’s start with the obvious: gaming is big business. While much has been made of the Apple iPhone app economy, it pales by comparison with gaming. Money is one way to measure our involvement with gaming; time is another. The average number of hours spent gaming per week has gone up from 7.3 hours in 2009 to 8 hours in 2010. This graphic from Online MBA provides an excellent overview:
Here is a compelling graphic showing how mobile devices and digital media are changing the ways kids live and learn. As with many aspects of Metalife, these devices and media create opportunities and present potential dangers. We’ll be writing more about both in the near future.
How does anyone know who you are? On the surface this may seem like a question too abstract (or obvious) to consider. Yet it is a question government officials are facing every day. In fact, governments around the world are presenting an intriguing new narrative that may come soon to a plastic card or digital device near you. With ID cards, at long last citizenry will have something as important as suffrage—an established identity.
Face perception is so hardwired into our brains, it comes as no surprise that we describe social status in terms of face: saving face, losing face, face-off. Showing your face and owning it—owning the right to present it on your own terms, even to sell it if you’re blessed with beauty—is the height of personal empowerment. But our features are also the focus of emerging facial recognition systems that will significantly alter how we think of owning and presenting our faces.