83. Uncharted Territory
Although they might bring great utility to the world, innovations always involve fundamental challenges to the way we think.
The Known World
This podcast contains the essays of David Alan Grier, which discuss the ideas, the culture, and the stories of the digital age. The podcasts come from the column of the same name in Computer, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society. Copyright 2011, IEEE, Inc. All rights reserved. Some of the music provided is from the PodShow Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at "music.podshow.com".
en-us84 Episodes
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Episodes (83)
82. The Honest Give-and-Take
Information technology has not only expanded the scale and scope of global markets, it has also provided the means for probing the meaning of every give-and-take transaction.
The Known World
en-usOctober 27, 2011
81. The Habit of Change
As technology has changed, the fundamental way of extracting meaning from data has also changed.
80. Leisure Science
While it might seem otherwise to most individuals, we live in an age of leisure as much as we live in an age of information or industry or globalization.
79. The Chicken Bus
As with all engineering problems, we need to balance the twin factors of stability and control and do so in a way that doesn't damage either of them.
78. Experienced Hands
Social networking has neither altered the way that technical knowledge is presented nor has it dislodged computer science from its central place in the technical canon.
77. Dumb Grids and Smart Markets
The task of building a smart grid requires us to solve two kinds of problems: technical and social.
76. Not For All Markets
Crowdsourcing is one of the more intriguing forms of computation that employs markets.
75. Where Are You From?
In the Internet's artificial geography, an organization is identified by what it can do rather than by where it's located.
74. The Voice of Wisdom
In most circumstances, computing has faded into the background of our lives as part of the global infrastructure. However, it still has the ability to remind of us its presence.
73. A Very Bad Idea
The grand ideas that led to the 1991 High-Performance Computing Act shaped the modern Internet only as they sifted through layers of the vertical division of labor.
72. The Migration to the Middle
As we look to the future, we must not only anticipate a year of innovation and progress but also a migration of labor that will remake the field of digital technology.
71. Investing in Ignorance
The task of navigating the information hierarchy is harder than we would like to think and involves more uncertainty than we care to admit.
70. Sabotage!
The idea that an organized team of computer scientists might have created a major worm comes at an uneasy time for engineers.
69. The Confident and the Curious
Activities that attempt to coordinate the contributions of the general public with the Internet have a way of disciplining work and overcoming gross inefficiencies with mass labor.
68. Finding What You Want
When we adopt augmentative technologies, we usually find that we have to adjust our ideas, goals, and habits to fit our new tool.
The Known World
en-usSeptember 02, 2010
67. Mental Discipline
The practices of engineering and computer science are influenced by the same forces that shape manual labor and office work. Occasionally, it’s useful to reassess our skills and question the value of our training.
66. The Spirit of Combination
Games on the internet, Wikipedia, and Diderot, and the structure of knowledge. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.210
65. The Value of a Good Name
In the modern age, identity may not be a name or a number. It's a story. And the question may be "who owns it?"
Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.181
64. The Age of Accountability
The failure of a complex product tells just as much about how the organization operates as it does about the skill of individual workers. Article link: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2010.144