Technological progress and decreasing prices have given rise to an interesting movement. Quantified self or self tracking describes the idea of people collecting and analyzing data about themselves. This is now possible in ways that really was not practical a decade earlier.
I would like to tell you that it’s also for self-knowledge. The self isn’t the only thing, it’s not even most things. The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.
I think, people generally like data. The ability to collect and subsequently analyze and view the data, can lead to powerful feedback loops that can help us make better, more informed decisions about how we live.
All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.
All three perspectives make an important contribution to the thinking around this and none of them should be ignored. I think this is particularly true, because there really is no turning around anymore: Having introduced new knowledge and technology, once a massive progress has been put into motion, it is not going to be simply undone.
I am counting myself in the Never-Betters camp, for the most part. The above article is an excellent contribution to the discourse though. I am looking forward to learning more, particularly about the Ever-Wasers perspective that emphasizes that similar debates (and struggles) occurred at other times in history in comparable manner, when significant changes were introduced.
In addition to the ease of using and developing visualization on the Web, visualizations on the Web can also be easily modified, updated, customized, and recreated by other users thanks to the use of Uniform Resource Identifiers. This “linking” of data is a key feature of the new vision that Fox and Hendler outline. It is of particular importance when dealing with what they refer to as “big science” on topics such as climate change that involves data that ranges from distinct fields like biology to geology.
I think a significant issue here is that the typical form of presenting a piece of research online is in the form of a document, most likely in PDF, PostScript or LaTeX format. A file like that has several strong advantages: It can be easily printed, emailed or viewed in a document viewer. It is also inherently static though: A PDF file does not integrate well with the dynamic experience of the web.
Compelling visualizations, perhaps allowing readers to experiment with different views, subsets of the data or modifications of it could go some way in bringing life into the presentation. Currently, consumers of those documents are just that: consumers, readers. There is no widespread way for them to interact with the presentation – and other readers.
It would be excellent to see those presentations move from static documents to dynamic experiences. Perhaps a semantic wiki for research papers might take this in the right direction?
It is often suggested that users are hopelessly lazy and unmotivated on security questions. They chose weak passwords, ignore security warnings, and are oblivious to certificates errors. We argue that users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective. The advice offers to shield them from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with far greater indirect costs in the form of effort.
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Thus we find that most security advice simply offers a poor cost-benefit tradeoff to users and is rejected. Security advice is a daily burden, applied to the whole population, while an upper bound on the benefit is the harm suffered by the fraction that become victims an- nually. When that fraction is small, designing security advice that is beneficial is very hard. For example, it makes little sense to burden all users with a daily task to spare 0.01% of them a modest annual pain.
In other areas of life we have long ago come up with a way to deal with similar costs. We invented insurance for health, car, property, etc. for what-if scenarios and our policies are typically priced in a way appropriate to our risk profile. I am sure we will see lots of progress in terms of security user education, computer security research – as well as sophistication of attacks.
Could personal insurance policies against cyber attacks also become a realistic, mainstream option?