Notes from the Electronic Cottage 5/13/10

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

So what’s the fastest growing music distribution format these days? If you answered vinyl, you’re absolutely right, even though vinyl still only accounts for about 1% of music sales. But what’s going on – isn’t vinyl dead? Apparently not, and its proponents say that’s because the sound of vinyl is superior to CDs and certainly to mp3 and other compressed formats.Is that true? Well, if you look at the physics…

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 5/6/10

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

This is national Choose Privacy Week, so it might be  good time to reflect on how important privacy is to each of us in the digital age. Any such reflection might start with the question: exactly what does the word “privacy” mean? That question, in turn, leads us to wonder where the concept of privacy actually comes from. Is it a legal right, or a moral right, or a biological instinct or something else entirely. Let’s wax philosophical for a few minutes and think about privacy and its place in our lives in the digital age, and what value it has – or doesn’t have – to us personally.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 4/29/10

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Location based services – neat things that happen when service providers like Yahoo or Google or Foursquare know where you are at any given moment – can be very cool and convenient. But as a new web site called “Please Rob Me” (pleaserobme.com) points out, they can also tell very undesirable characters that you’re not home. This is only one example of how privacy is changing in our digital world, a good topic of conversation during the first national  Choose Privacy Week (www.privacyrevolution.org) sponsored by the American Library Association. It’s happening May 2-8, and may be happening at your local library. If privacy, or its demise, concerns you, join in the conversation.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 4/22/10

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Time for another quick look at some of the things going on in research labs that will probably have a real effect on our lives in the not too distant future. From machines that read minds to ways to make pacemakers safe from outside attack, researchers are busy making what formerly seemed like science fiction more science and less fiction.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 4/15/10

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Google has as its mission to organize the world’s information. Pretty cool, eh? Included in the world’s information, of course, is information about you and me – what we search for, who we talk with, what maps we want to look at, who we correspond with, who we donate to, and on and on. Hmmm. Maybe not so cool if all that information is gathered in one place for advertisers and government agents to pick through. What do you think.

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