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Showing posts from July, 2013

The weirdest dreams are those that are real- Quantified self and Ubiquitous computing.

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Image Source: API Evangelist My iPhone alarm clock went off announcing the start of another hectic day. My alarm clock also functioned as a sleep cycle  assistant and told me that I did not get the ideal sleep. I said to myself- "oh good. I have to face this hectic day with not enough sleep? perfect." As I felt the exasperation and anxiety boil through my body, my smartwatch detected my mood (after seeing a spike in heart rate and blood pressure) and loged it with an application on my phone. My virtual assistant Siri, found the connection in those 3 independent information ( i. not having enough sleep, ii. hectict day based on my calendar, and iii. the change in my mood ) and decided it was time to pump me up. Siri then sent a command to my bluetooth speaker to play my favorite collection of motivational songs. As I was taking a shower, my phone was hard at work telling my coffee maker to start brewing, pulling the most recent traffic data to map out my route to wrok,

Like, share, and send...but where is delete? It is time to take back our data.

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Image Source: Culture Slurp They draw some analogy with our recent human experience. In the not so distant past, human technology limited us into hunter gatherers living in caves. Then our human brain evolved and so did our technology allowing us to actually domesticate animals and cultivate food and energy sources through herding and farming. This advancement in technology also changed the way humans lived and how they interacted with each other. As a species our technological evolution required people to live in groups/ villages to maximize productive out-put. We started to rely more on other people and the concept of a Community and Communal space was born. We were no longer isolated individuals but members of a group- and as such we gave up a certain degree of independence and privacy collectively as a species. Some people today see the challenges to our privacy as a necessary consequence of our technological evolution- that our experience now is no different from what t