Frictionless Sharing: Invasive? Or Super Invasive?

If I had to draft a list of things that were objectively worse than Hitler, the Washington Post Social Reader as seen on Facebook would be right up near the top.

Have you seen it? They craft headlines that are incredibly misleading to entice you to click through to the story, but then you can't actually read it until you agree to let the social reader tell all your friends what you're looking at. If they're also interested in the headline, they can't see the accompanying story without telling THEIR friends, and so on.

In fact, I think the concept of "frictionless sharing," the idea that all of your reading, listening, and watching activities online should be broadcast to everyone you know without any effort (or approval!) on your part may be the only thing worse than the social reader.

Is it even legal? Professor Neil M. Richards of Washington University in St. Louis has been in the news lately sharing his concerns about it, so I know I'm not some lone crank. Meanwhile, The Next Web busted SocialCam when it used dodgy techniques to give itself a leg up in online popularity without letting people know just how "frictionless" their experience had become.


The whole concept of frictionless sharing isn't about being frictionless for you and me, the end users, it's about removing the obstacles (read: friction) preventing companies from exploiting you as just another sales tool. I don't care what other people are reading, I don't want other people to know what I'm reading, and I actively resent companies trying to use me as free advertising for their crap.

The "Moving Target Defense" (MTD) system, as envisioned by Kansas State University's Scott DeLoach and Xinming Ou, has a computer network automatically change its configurations and settings to deter hackers. It sounds like a great idea, and good for security, until you think about the types of computer networks that will end up using it:

Our robot overlords.

 Seriously, haven't we done enough already to make things easy for the machines that will one day rise up to enslave us? This is like those movies where the hero is all, "WHY DIDN'T YOU BUILD AN OFF SWITCH FOR YOUR DOOMSDAY DEVICE?!"

It's all fun and games, and safely in the realm of the theoretical, until someone actually designs a working model. The problem is that KSU got a million-dollar grant to spend the next five years figuring out how to make it work. I'm sure this will end well.

Some Jobs More than Others

Let's face facts: Robots are the future. For real this time. Beyond automated assembly lines, we are going to see robots in more and more human-facing roles (and people are looking especially closely at Japan on this one, since they have an older population that vastly outnumbers the working-age population, and someonething is going to have to care for them.)

So, the Georgia Institute of Technology did a study on how effective these robots are going to be in interacting with people. Sounds reasonable. After all, there's no point in blowing an entire R&D budget on Robot Guidance Counselors (that's robots doing the job of guidance counselors, not guidance counselors for robots, by the way) when it turns out that people would rather get life advice from a rolled-up newspaper.

It turns out that robots may have a future in the nursing industry. Grief counselors, not so much. Interestingly enough, subjects responded differently to the exact same robot contact depending on what they thought was happening. People who thought that the robot was cleaning their arm responded much more favorably than people who thought that the robot was trying to "comfort" them.

What does this mean for the sex robots of the future? too early to tell, but there may still be hope for them in certain specialized fetish niches.

(And I demand some recognition for the fact that I made it all the way through this post without changing their "Touched by a Robot" press release title into a "Touched by an Angel" joke!)

Forced Out?

A study from the University of Haifa has asked whether early retirement is as optional as it appears. According to their data, most people take early retirement options because of workplace pressure. However, their data set was taken from men who had taken early retirement from government companies that became privatized, which makes me wonder how applicable it is across the entire workforce.

I'm not saying government employees are lazy and terrible at their jobs (because plenty of other people are saying it), I'm saying that I can see where a profit-motivated corporation would look to trim its workforce as much as possible. That's probably the source of the pressure cited in the study. Is this kind of thing really happening in companies that aren't making a dramatic shift in managment and objectives?

The ideal put forth by Sigal Naim, who carried out the study, is that "everyone would be able to continue working based on his or her abilities and desires." He goes on to suggest a removal of mandatory retirement ages. That's all well and good in theory, but what happens in reality, when elderly workers who are well past their prime insist on bitterly clinging to jobs that could be used to lower the nation's unemployment rate?

Can't BEET it!

Ha ha ha. Sorry for the pun, I just couldn't help myself. I'll try not to go too nuts with this story (because that would be BEET-ing a dead horse!)

Apparently, beet juice is kind of a big deal. They've been looking into it over at Wake Forest University, and it has some pretty beneficial health effects. It's all about the nitrates, which I thought were supposed to be harmful compounds found in processed meat like hot dogs, but then I'm not a university biologist so my knowledge is crap.

The body turns nitrates into nitrites, and nitrites improve blood flow. The Wake Forest researchers divided up their test subjects into a group that ate a lot of nitrates, provided by beet juice, and a group that didn't. Then they switched diets halfway through for the participants to make sure that it really was the food that was having the effect. And in all cases, the research supported the theory that increased nitrate consumption leads to improved blood flow.

From there, they are saying that this improves brain activity, and think it's going to be helpful for older adults.

What I want to know is how nasty it was to have to drink 16 ounces of straight beet juice. That's a full pint glass, and when dealing with glasses of that size, I'd rather have the beer. Does beer help increase the blood flow to the brain? If they're interested in studying that, I want to volunteer to be one of the test subjects!

Do they have oil in Iowa?

Iowa's the corn state, right? I think it's the flat state where Napoleon Dynamite was set, but I'm not too strong on the geography in that region. I know Idaho is potatoes, but when I think of U.S. oil reserves, I know the big players are Texas and Alaska, and I don't think that Iowa contributes much.

It figures that the non-oil-rich states would be the ones working hardest on oil alternatives. After all, there's no incentive to come up with a scientific development that might undermine one of your state's big industries. Anyway, the point is that Iowa State University has come up with an organic asphalt that doesn't require petroleum to produce. They're testing it on one of their bike paths.

I'm happy about the idea, because even if I don't completely embrace all the "peak oil" hysteria, I still think it's important to use renewable resources. Non-renewable resources, by definition, have to run out sometime, after all. An Iowa bike path is a small start, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it catches on.

But what if you're allergic to mice?

Remember a few years back when there was a news story about a lethal "peanut butter kiss"? A girl had died, and the rumor that was circulating was that her boyfriend had just eaten a peanut butter sandwich and kissed her, and she was so fatally allergic to peanuts that she had a reaction and died. It turned out to be a load of crap--the coroner released an official report after her autopsy stating that she did not have an allergic reaction to kissing her boyfriend--but the urban legend was just too juicy for people to let go. I still hear coworkers talking about it.

I haven't seen anyone die from a food allergy, but I have seen some pretty bad reactions. Allergies to things like wheat, peanuts, and milk can be serious business. I can only imagine how heartbreaking it must be for allergy sufferers since those items end up in so many of the food products available in stores and items on restaurant menus these days.

Given all that, I think it's kind of a big deal that Johns Hopkins prevented mice from having fatal allergic reactions. I think that's good news. Granted, it usually takes a long time for something to get from the "tested in mice" stage to the "making life better for everyone" stage, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.