Personal tech

Preventing baby-left-in-car deaths – suggestions from aviation

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It’s a very hot summer, and that brings babies dying of heatstroke after they are accidentally left in a parent’s car. Years ago I thought “I could never make such a stupid mistake,” but after the research I’ve been doing on aviation safety, I no longer believe it. My own children are grown up, but many of my former students have small children, and it’s a terrible tragedy for anyone. So I’ve been thinking about how to reduce the incidence, using ideas from aviation.

<rant> One quick pet peeve: if you see someone’s  kid in a back seat looking unconscious, don’t stand around calling 911. Break the damned window and get them out! Yell at someone else to call 911. I’ve seen multiple articles about people standing around in parking lots! </rant>

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The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic

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Some much needed skeptical talk about the current state of Internet innovation. -RB

That’s the microversion of the state of affairs. Here’s the macro version. Thousands of startups are doing almost exactly the same thing, minor variations on a theme. Tech journalists report endlessly on the same handful of well-established companies. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft’s dominate pieces of the web, and they don’t appear to be in shaky positions. Good, long-time tech journalists like Om Malik are exhausted. He recently posted this to his blog after much ink was spilled over who Twitter hired as a public relations person:

Sure, these are some great people and everyone including me is happy for their new gigs and future success. But when I read these posts [I] often wonder to myself, have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?

via The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future.

Information overload – some personal actions

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I attended a conference, Overloaded 2012, last week in San Francisco. Here’s a summary from one of the directors of the Information Overload Research Group (IORG). IORG is small, but addressing deep issues of how constant information deluges flows affect our working and thinking.
My “immediate action” conclusion was to start using #hashtags in my email. Examples: #invite, #meet #teach (for messages to colleagues about teaching). Also to provide longer subject lines in my emails – “6 words” is one suggestion.
And, I’ll take a look at a book by Jonathan Spira, an IORG director, who I’ve talked with but never met. Overload! book by Jonathan Spira

Shut off Internet access – voluntarily

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For those  who have trouble staying on task for hours at a time. Which probably means most computer users. Several applications now exist to block off Internet access, selectively block programs, etc. I do this by not turning on my wireless – but then I can’t stream music. So I’ll try something more elaborate.

Economist article: Software that disables bits of your computer to make you more productive sounds daft, but may help keep distractions at bay

Freeware: SelfControl 1.2.2 Block distracting websites for predetermined periods of time   SelfControl is an OS X application which blocks access to incoming and/or outgoing mail servers and websites for a predetermined period of time. For example, you could block access to your email, facebook, and twitter for 90 minutes, but still have access to the rest of the web.

via Download SelfControl for Mac – Block distracting websites for predetermined periods of time. MacUpdate Mac Software Downloads.