Solving Problems We Don't Have

In spite of my attraction to technology and deep seated love of tools and gadgets, I occasionally come across a new item that brings forth the sarcastic alter-ego that I try to suppress.

Apparently there are quite a few people working on boosting the IQ of dumb objects around the house – i.e. making them smarter. One is a light bulb that notifies you when it has burned out by sending an SMS message to your network which then either pops up an annoying message on your computer or calls your cellphone, even more annoying. Another is an idea for a refrigerator that keeps track of what you have in there and reminds you to throw away outdated stuff or to go to the store an restock. Maybe it even re-orders stuff by itself.

Think about it, what will happen to our brains if we no longer have to remember anything? We already have pretty much lost the ability to do multiplication and division. What’s next?

Let’s fast forward 50 years into the future where people don’t make grocery lists anymore, and they don’t have to remember to pay their bills, they don’t have to remember phone numbers and they don’t even have to know their SSN or their anniversary. Everything will be accessible via our personal communicator – no thinking required. We won’t have reference books anymore; pretty much all knowledge will be catalogued and indexed and accessible through some electronic device every where we go 24/7.

50 years ago a person with a great deal of accumulated knowledge was once highly valued. Now, in the year 2055, that knowledge can be fetched by just writing or speaking a query. All that cerebral power that was once constantly expanding will quickly atrophy and the number of ganglia and synapses will wither away, or, in the case of young people, never form in the first place. Administrative personnel will only have to master data entry and retrieval.

I remember Sci-Fi movies where life forms from advanced civilizations were depicted as having huge heads in proportion to their spindly bodies. Now I’m beginning to wonder if the reverse will be true. 50 years from now medical science will keep our bodies very healthy and septuagenarians will no longer be an anomaly. Maybe we will all have great bodies but no brainpower to speak of. The alien with the tiny head played by Tony Shalhoub in Men In Black comes to mind.

I can see it now, I’m cruising down the road in my hovercar and my cellphone beeps. I look over at my data screen, punch a button to retrieve the message and discover to my horror that the third light bulb from the end on my side yard has burned out. Damn! That smart bulb cost me $12. I glance up just in time to see that the guy in front of me has slammed on his brakes and I’m heading right for him! 2.3 seconds later I come to a stop half way up the back of his hovercar and my front fan is chewing up his new AstroBrat something fierce. I’m thinking, “at least I know that I need to stop and get a smart bulb on the way home.”

Search: “human devolution” + “brain size” + causes

Stupid Medical Acronyms

This morning while eating breakfast I was watching the Today show for a few minutes. They were interviewing a doctor who was discussing a disorder called BDD, short for Body Dismorphic Disorder. Apparently it has similar characteristics to OCD and can be treated with either AD drugs or by administering CBT.

Never mind what these terms mean, I’m beginning to think that the medical profession has totally eclipsed the military in the use of acronyms. Long revered as the master chef of acronyms for cooking up 3, 4, even 5-letter acronyms designed to speed up communications, the military may have met their match in the medical industry.

The problem is that the ad agencies are seeing this as a goldmine. When a new commercial comes on that introduces yet another SA (stupid acronym) for some condition that is either so obscure or so common that it doesn’t even warrant an acronym, I just get really annoyed. My instinct is to TOTS (turn off the sound) or SC (switch channels). It also reinforces my respect for my PVR and adds yet another reason to record everything and watch it later BTC (bypassing the commercials).

What happens is that what was meant to be a shorthand form of communication becomes a form of code that burdens the listener with trying to decode the conversation. Miss one acronym and the whole conversation can either get way off track or the listener is forced to interrupt for clarification.

I worked for many years at Mattel where exactly the same thing was happening. In the early days the list of commonly used acronyms was fairly short, maybe 20 or so. By the time I left, there was a ten page book that was informally given to new employees that explained the hundreds and hundreds of different shorthand codes that filled almost every conversation and e-mail. New employees were at a loss to figure out the gist of the conversation, especially when the same acronym was used in different contexts. What was meant to save time quickly became a handicap.

I think this is expecially true of the medical acronyms. Since they are often formed from scientific terms that don’t usually find their way into our spoken vocabulary, people sometimes know what the acronym means without knowing what the letters actually stand for.

More often they are simply interpreted as gibberish, designed to make the speaker seem more educated or more sopisticated. They become a tool for pretentious people and a goldmine for ad agencies.

Of course, they have infiltrated every aspect of our lives; you can’t escape them.

ROM, RAM, USB, DSL, IBS, ED, MS, OCD, ADD, BDD, DDT, SBC, QVC, HP, MS, LAX, OC, LA, JFK, ABC, NBC, CBS, JPG, MP3, TLC, WTF.

In case you are stumped by any of these handy shortcuts that save us so much time, you can simply punch in this website and try to find out what the combinations of letters mean. There are about 2.5 million acronyms in the database so far. Clearly we need some sort of AAT (automatic acronym translator) that lurks in the background of our computers and suggests what the combination of letters might mean, in context of course.

One scary thought: We all know how foreign words quickly get assimilated into our vocabulary. What happens when the acronyms are made up of a combination of English and French or Swahili and Chinese? I seriously need to get on the list for a brain transplant with an AAT feature, among other things.

Best Intentions

Maybe it's the season, or maybe misalignment of the planets, but I obviously have prioritized the writing of this blog somewhere below the threshold of actually getting to it . I have recently gotten deeply involved in a work project and never seem to have any extra time or extra brain power to write.

Not a good admission for someone who claims to be a writer, but then you gotta pay the bills too.

So, with this short post, I hearby resolve to steal some time and try to get back into my routine of criticising stupid ttech things I come across and writing about them.

Honest.

The Only Thing to Fear is Fear Itself

The subject today is about science, not technology.

You see, I recently read State of Fear by Michael Crichton, and am feeling somewhat vindicated. Based on my analytical nature, together with a healthy dose of skepticism, I have long questioned all the doom and gloom pseudo-science about global warming from our news media, especially when they predict global catastrophes like the state of Florida being submerged in 50 years by melting icecaps. The basis of my skepticism comes from reading about the extreme climate changes that have occurred on our planet over the last few million years, and most recently, by books like State of Fear.

We are actually at the end of the fourth major glacial epoch; the current one having gone on for a million years. At the height of the current ice age, ice as deep as two miles blanketed North America as far south as St. Louis and Europe as far south as France. Given that such extreme global climate changes occur naturally (i.e. not man made), it is ludicrous to me that “scientists” can extrapolate 100 years of temperature readings into a global climate trend that they can definitively tie to human causes. Hell, for all we know, maybe the magnetic poles are fixing to reverse again as they have done 9 times in the last 3.6 million years. If that should happen, no doubt some scientist eager to get a research grant will postulate that we have taken too much iron out of the ground and redistributed it willy nilly.

Apparently Mr. Crichton shares my skepticism. As a student of science and it’s impact on society, he actually spent three years researching every scientific journal and publication he could find on the subject and concluded that the “theory” of global warming was nothing more than that, and more importantly there was a great body of data that contradicts this so-called theory – e.g. data that shows that Antarctica is actually getting colder, not warmer, and the Ross Ice shelf that environmentalists like to focus on only represents about 1% of the mass of ice in Antarctica. Also the mean temperature of North America has either stayed the same or decreased over the past 100 years, suggesting that we Americans were right in denouncing the Kyoto treaty.

After a great deal of study, Mr. Crichton has adopted the risky position of taking on both the environmental establishment and the media in his latest novel. It’s nice to come across influential people that actually have something important to say, as opposed to self-important yahoos like Tom Cruise.

After reading his book and noting the 175 or so listings in the bibliography, references to scientific journals and other publications that he studied on the subject, my respect for the man has risen considerably above what I would have for a normal novelist. Although I understand that a novelist has a responsibility to do research and fact checking, especially if the subject is technical in nature, the depth of Mr. Crichton’s study is very impressive. He even goes to the trouble of summarizing his personal views on the subjects covered in the book, in order to clairfy the points he is trying to make here. This is the first “novel” I have ever read that has over thirty pages of scientific bibliography and comments.

His premise is that there are a great number of organizations that benefit from manipulating the truth about global crises, and that the whole issue of global warming is a complex, perpetuating media snowball ranging from subtle subterfuge to outright lies. He reminds the reader that the number of people who believe in something is totally irrelevant to whether it is true or not. If the science doesn’t support the theory, then all you have is a lot of people who believe in something that may not be true. As he says “an educated guess is still just a guess.” This is clearly a area that he feels strongly about and is not just another novel to him.

Suffice it to say that until someone can accurately predict the weather for at least 20 years running (no one has succeeded in this to date), I remain convinced that the global warming “phenomenon” is 1) little more than a construct formed by carefully selected scientific data that supports the premise while ignoring all the conflicting data, 2) being used as a tool by certain disingenuous scientists to gain exposure and grant money, and 3) a handy emotionally charged issue being abused by environmentalists to grow their power and organizational clout, and loved by the media because it fuels peoples fears and sells newspapers and TV time.

The most interesting part of this whole issue is that virtually no one really knows if a slight increase in global temperature over a hundred or a thousand years is necessarily bad. Who can say that it won’t change global weather patterns and bring more moisture to Africa to support more farming and save millions of lives? Who’s to say that a 2 degree increase in temperature in one part of the globe won’t be offset by a 2 degree decrease in other areas that is beneficial?

Until someone develops a computer climate model that is even slightly accurate, I choose to think that all this BS about global warming is nothing more than hot air.

Dear Vonage

Approximately 3 1/2 months ago, I received an automated e-mail message from Vonage stating that my adapter did not respond correctly to an automated software upgrade. I checked and discovered I had no dialtone. The instructions told me to try to reset my adapter, and if unsuccesful, reply to the e-mail and a replacement would be sent "immediately" along with a one month credit on my next billing statement.

After 6 days went by with no dial tone, no replacement adapter showing up in the mail, and no confirmation that my reply was even received, I called. What I found out was that nothing was happening at Vonage regarding my problem. The person I spoke to said that there was no indication on my records that a replacement adapter was being sent, or that one was needed.

The representative was very polite and worked with me over the phone to try to correct the problem. Resetting the adapter once more had no effect, so finally he tried switching the service to the second line on my Linksys adapter. That worked, in fact, line quality improved slightly over what I had before. I mentioned the one month credit promised, and he said it would appear on my next billing statemtent.

When the next statement appeared, no credit was there. Surprise surprise.

I again called and this time, another polite Vonage person was able to apply the credit immediately, which appeared on the subsequent billing statement.

Now, all of three months later, I get an e-mail from "Vonage Management" indicating that your records show that no replacement adapter was ever sent, and asking if I still need one. The e-mail also directed me to call the Technical Staff at "the following number." No number followed, suggesting that maybe you didn't really want me to call.

This clearly indicates that for a communication company, your internal communications are in near total disarray. Your follow-up systems are woefully inadequate as well.

Because my VOIP phone is working fine now and I don't wish to change my number at this time, I will continue the service. However, as a technology writer, I certainly cannot recommend Vonage to any of my readers.

If you attribute these problems to the rapid growth of Vonage, I don't buy it. Come on guys, your folks sent me a follow-up 3 months after a service call number was assigned.

A well-managed company will anticipate needs before they overwhelm current systems. Vonage is certainly not there yet.

Regards,
John Woolington