DeepMind, Google and the NHS - article from the Guardian newspaper

Google's DeepMind shouldn't suck up our NHS records in secret

Randeep Ramesh
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/04/googles-deepmind-shouldnt-be-sucking-up-our-nhs-records-in-secret

The revelation that 1.6 million patients’ records are being used by the company’s artificial intelligence arm rings alarm bells

 A live broadcast of Google DeepMind’s Go match against the world champion Lee Sedol. DeepMind won. Photograph: Ahn Young-joon/AP

Wednesday 4 May 2016 15.36 BSTLast modified on Thursday 13 October 2016 21.05 BST

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When it was revealed that Google’s London-based company DeepMind would be able to access the NHS records of 1.6 million patients who use three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS trust – Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free – it rang alarm bells.

Not just because the British fiercely guard their intimate medical histories. Not just because Google, a sprawling octopus of a company with tentacles in all our lives, wishes to “organise the world’s information”. Not just because patients are unlikely to have consented to Google having this information.

The issue for many is the intertwining of these concerns with the idea of artificial intelligence (AI). DeepMind is no ordinary company. It specialises in AI, developing technology to exhibit something like intelligent reasoning.

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Last year its engineers produced a research paper showing it had created a program that could replicate the work of a “professional human video games tester”. In March, Google’s DeepMind made history by creating a program that mastered the 3,000-year-old Chinese board game Go, thought to be beyond current technology because of the number of possible moves. In what was considered a computing milestone, the company’s AlphaGo program beat the world Go champion 4-1.

Now such a company has a database containing detailed, private, albeit anonymised, records of all these people’s medical history, including HIV status, past drug overdoses and abortions. DeepMind says it needs the data to produce medical alerts for hospitals attempting to prevent acute kidney injuries.

The fear for some is that DeepMind’s database could allow for much more than the original stated purpose. The public is no stranger to the fact that NHS patient privacy has not been safeguarded – in 2014 the government was forced to halt and then scale back its proposals to produce a single English medical database over concerns that medical confidentiality could be put at risk.

DeepMind has not hidden its work with the NHS, announcing in February it was working with the health service to build an app called Streams to help doctors and nurses monitor kidney patients. What it did not reveal was the extent of its data haul, which encompasses historical patient records. Instead of the few thousand patients with kidney injuries, DeepMind got all the patient records of all three hospitals. That’s millions of confidential documents.

It says it needs the entire patient database to make Streams work. Backers of such databases claim that with such data powerful software packages can be created to diagnose diseases sooner.

The New Scientist magazine obtained the data-sharing agreement between DeepMind and the NHS, which revealed just how much information was being made available. The Google company’s skill is to discern complex patterns in huge quantities of data – and the NHS is a goldmine for such “deep learning”.

In this treasure trove of data are logs of day-to-day hospital activity, such as records of the location and status of patients – as well as who visits them and when. DeepMind will also obtain pathology and radiology test patient records.

As well as real-time data, DeepMind has access to the historical records from critical care and accident and emergency departments. Crunching this information, so the theory goes, allows DeepMind to develop predictions based on data that is too broad in scope for any one person to assimilate and analyse.

By comparing patient data, DeepMind might be able to predict that someone is in the early stages of a disease that has not yet become apparent. This is the medical holy grail: not treating a patient when they are ill, but treating them before they become ill. 

Utopian? Perhaps. Behind the promise of these technologies lies the crux of the dilemma in the age we live. Google, Facebook and others feed on the fact we suspend our privacy rights in return for new technology built with our data.

Like Apple, Google is building a reputation in medical apps. It is also true that the use of machine learning in medicine by academics is nothing new. However this data is being passed to and controlled by one of the world’s biggest and most powerful companies. It raises questions over whether it might quickly become the biggest player, a de facto monopoly, over NHS health analytics.

AI also represents something new, a promise that a program could improve itself – and very quickly surpass human intellect. This is the so-called “intelligence explosion” – a point where humanity courts its own destruction. We are some way off this. No one has built a machine that respects social and ethical norms, even at the expense of its goals. It’s difficult enough to get humans to do that.

Some may say such extrapolation is ridiculous. After all Tay – the “intelligent” Twitter chatbot from Microsoft – lasted a few hours until she “learned” to become a racist, genocidal tweeter and was killed off. However as Elon Musk, the inventor who originally invested in DeepMind, said, it was worries over “Terminator” technology that drove him to warn about its dangers.

For perhaps sound commercial reasons, DeepMind operates under the radar. But this often raises more questions than answers. Google’s AI ethics board, established when Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for £400m, remains one of the biggest mysteries in technology, with both companies refusing to reveal who sits on it.

Artificial intelligence needs data to learn. Hence the sucking up of all those patient records by Google’s DeepMind. So why the secrecy? If patients had been told what was going on and why, they could make informed choices. If they think the potential risks of Google dominance over a new critical technology for the NHS are outweighed by the benefits, then let’s have that debate. But if the company does not explain and carries on in secret, the public will rightly not go along with such plans.

Drawing drinking water from the atmosphere - warka water

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-tower-pulls-drinking-water-out-of-thin-air-180950399/

This Tower Pulls Drinking Water Out of Thin Air

Designer Arturo Vittori says his invention can provide remote villages with more than 25 gallons of clean drinking water per day

By Tuan C. Nguyen

smithsonian.com April 8, 2014

Warka Water towers are designed to take advantage of condensation. (Architecture and Vision )

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-tower-pulls-drinking-water-out-of-thin-air-180950399/#O2G7j8eKskDBoiS2.99
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In some parts of Ethiopia, finding potable water is a six-hour journey.

People in the region spend 40 billion hours a year trying to find and collect water, says a group called the Water Project. And even when they find it, the water is often not safe, collected from ponds or lakes teeming with infectious bacteria, contaminated with animal waste or other harmful substances. 

The water scarcity issue—which affects nearly 1 billion people in Africa alone—has drawn the attention of big-name philanthropists like actor and Water.org co-founder Matt Damon and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who, through their respective nonprofits, have poured millions of dollars into research and solutions, coming up with things like a system that converts toilet water to drinking water and a "Re-invent the Toilet Challenge," among others.

Critics, however, have their doubts about integrating such complex technologies in remote villages that don't even have access to a local repairman. Costs and maintenance could render many of these ideas impractical. 

"If the many failed development projects of the past 60 years have taught us anything," wrote one critic, Toilets for People founder Jason Kasshe, in a New York Times editorial, "it's that complicated, imported solutions do not work."

Other low-tech inventions, like this life straw, aren't as complicated, but still rely on users to find a water source.

It was this dilemma—supplying drinking water in a way that's both practical and convenient—that served as the impetus for a new product called Warka Water, an inexpensive, easily-assembled structure that extracts gallons of fresh water from the air.

The invention from Arturo Vittori, an industrial designer, and his colleague Andreas Vogler doesn't involve complicated gadgetry or feats of engineering, but instead relies on basic elements like shape and material and the ways in which they work together. 

At first glance, the 30-foot-tall, vase-shaped towers, named after a fig tree native to Ethiopia, have the look and feel of a showy art installation. But every detail, from carefully-placed curves to unique materials, has a functional purpose.

The rigid outer housing of each tower is comprised of lightweight and elastic juncus stalks, woven in a pattern that offers stability in the face of strong wind gusts while still allowing air to flow through. A mesh net made of nylon or  polypropylene, which calls to mind a large Chinese lantern, hangs inside, collecting droplets of dew that form along the surface. As cold air condenses, the droplets roll down into a container at the bottom of the tower. The water in the container then passes through a tube that functions as a faucet, carrying the water to those waiting on the ground.

Using mesh to facilitate clean drinking water isn't an entirely new concept. A few years back, an MIT student designed a fog-harvesting device with the material. But Vittori's invention yields more water, at a lower cost, than some other concepts that came before it.

"[In Ethiopia], public infrastructures do not exist and building [something like] a well is not easy," Vittori says of the country. "To find water, you need to drill in the ground very deep, often as much as 1,600 feet.  So it's technically difficult and expensive. Moreover, pumps need electricity to run as well as access to spare parts in case the pump breaks down."

So how would Warka Water's low-tech design hold up in remote sub-Saharan villages? Internal field tests have shown that one Warka Water tower can supply more than 25 gallons of water throughout the course of a day, Vittori claims. He says because the most important factor in collecting condensation is the difference in temperature between nightfall and daybreak, the towers are proving successful even in the desert, where temperatures, in that time, can differ as much as 50 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The structures, made from biodegradable materials, are easy to clean and can be erected without mechanical tools in less than a week. Plus, he says, "once locals have the necessary know-how, they will be able to teach other villages and communities to build the Warka."

In all, it costs about $500 to set up a tower—less than a quarter of the cost of something like the Gates toilet, which costs about $2,200 to install and more to maintain. If the tower is mass produced, the price would be even lower, Vittori says. His team hopes to install two Warka Towers in Ethiopia by next year and is currently searching for investors who may be interested in scaling the water harvesting technology across the region. 

"It's not just illnesses that we're trying to address. Many Ethiopian children from rural villages spend several hours every day to fetch water, time they could invest for more productive activities and education," he says. "If we can give people something that lets them be more independent, they can free themselves from this cycle."

Follow your nose...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2012/11/26/the-perils-of-translational-research/

The Curious Wavefunction

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Musings on chemistry and the history and philosophy of science

The Curious Wavefunction HomeAboutContact

The perils of translational research

By Ashutosh Jogalekar | November 26, 2012 |  1

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This is an updated and revised version of an article I wrote for the Lindau Meeting of Nobel laureates and Current Science magazine.

In 1969, one of the more memorable incidents in the public advocacy of science took place. The American physicist Robert Wilson was asked to testify before Congress in support of the construction of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, known as Fermilab. For Wilson, building this huge machine had been a labor of love and nobody had a better background for it. He had worked on the Manhattan Project where he was the youngest group leader in the experimental division, and after the war he had become a professor at Cornell University.

Wilson was a first-rate amateur architect who saw accelerators as works of art. He lovingly designed Fermilab with his own hands and, in order to add to the aesthetic appeal of the place, turned the surrounding acres into a wilderness housing bison and geese. His efforts paid off; Fermilab would become the largest accelerator in the United States and CERN’s primary competitor. In 1969 Wilson was asked to justify the expenditure for the multi-million dollar laboratory in front of Congress. The Cold War was raging, most research and especially physics research was being viewed in the context of national security, and Wilson was specifically asked what contribution the new laboratory would make to national defense. He replied in words that should be etched on the foundation stone of every center of basic research. The research, he said, had no direct bearing on national defense. Instead,

“It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending”.

It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending. In saying these words, Wilson was appealing to the heart of what makes any country great. It is not the fancy cars, the shiny malls, the great financial houses and the cornucopia of industrial food that truly contribute to a country’s progress. At one point or another in history, Athens, Florence, Takshashila, Baghdad, Oxford, Gottingen, Copenhagen and Philadelphia were primarily known not for their wealth and the splendor of their monuments but for the unmatched wealth of ideas about science, art, economics, politics, freedom and human dignity that their citizens generated. These ideas are now the bedrock of much of modern civilization. Many of these ideas were solutions to practical problems, but most only sought to explore and push the boundaries of human creativity, curiosity, passion and tolerance. The creators and dreamers of these ideas were less concerned about their practical application and more concerned about their ability to answer questions about human origins and nature, our place in the cosmos and our relationship to other human beings.

Why am I retelling the story of Robert Wilson? Because I believe it strikes at the heart of what these days is fashionably called “translational research”. Just like physics research was being viewed through the lens of national defense in the 60s, basic biomedical studies run the risk of being viewed through the lens of translational research in the 2010s. The approach is clearly not popular among leading researchers. In 2009, Nobel Laureate Martin Chalfie gave a talk at the Lindau Meeting in which he described the great satisfaction he had gotten from doing non-translational research. Chalfie is not alone; last year I attended a lecture by another Nobel Laureate, Thomas Steitz. Steitz who won the prize for cracking open the structure of the ribosome proudly announced at the beginning of the talk that “the only kind of translation I have worked on is that orchestrated by the ribosome”. And this week in Sciencemagazine, Nobel Laureates Joseph Goldstein and Michael Brown lament the passing of the golden age of basic research at the NIH – an era which produced nine Nobel Prize winners during a single decade. As Goldstein and Brown put it, “translational research relegates basic science to a back burner…individual curiosity-driven science has been replaced by large consortia dedicated to the proposition that gathering vast amounts of correlative data will somehow provide an answer to life’s fundamental questions”.

So what is translational research? Many definitions seem to abound and Wikipedia seems to be as good a guide as any: “Translational research is a way of thinking about and conducting scientific research to make the results of research applicable to the population under study and is practised in the natural and biological, behavioural, and social sciences”. The goal of translational research especially in medicine seems to transform basic biomedical research discoveries from “bench to bedside”.

In the last few years this kind of thinking has has swamped the public discourse on science. New centers are being founded and funded whose mandate is to translate basic research into products directly benefiting humanity. The NIH, the largest biomedical research agency in the world, has also embraced a new National Center for Advancing Translational Research. The director of the NIH, Francis Collins, has not tired of pointing out the exciting advances in discovering new drugs which would be made possible by harnessing data from the human genome project. Not surprisingly, the press has eagerly jumped on the bandwagon, with reports pitching translational research and personalized medicine regularly appearing in the nation’s leading papers. Echoing leading scientists, the press seems to be telling us that we should all look forward to supporting translational research in its various guises.

All this makes the idea of translational research sound promising. And yet there must be a good reason why distinguished Nobel Prize winners like Chalfie, Steitz, Goldstein and Brown bristle at the mention of translational research. The reason is actually not too hard to discern. The problem is not with applied research per se. Nobody can doubt that applied research especially done by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries has saved innumerable lives in the last one hundred years. As Pasteur said, “there is science and the applications of science”, and he saw them lying on a continuum. No, there is nothing wrong with trying to turn basic ideas into applied products.

What is wrong is that translational research is being seen as a panacea that will address the flagging rate of new biomedical advances. The thinking seems to declare that if only more people were given more money and deliberately focused on direct application, we would suddenly see a windfall of new therapies against disease. This thinking suffers from two major problems.

The first problem is that history is not really on the side of translational research. Most inventions and practical applications of science and technology which we take for granted have come not from people sitting in a room trying to invent new things but as fortuitous offshoots of curiosity-driven research. Penicillin was discovered through serendipity by a most alert Alexander Fleming who was trying to plate bacterial cultures, not one trying to actually discover the next breakthrough antibiotic. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (which in turn led to MRI) was discovered by physicists who were interrogating the properties of atoms using magnetic fields, not ones who were trying to find a method for determining the structures of organic and biological molecules. The discovery of most drugs built upon basic discoveries about human physiology and anatomy made by physicians and researchers who were simply trying to find more about how the body works. As Goldstein and Brown describe in theirScience opinion piece, NIH scientists in the 60s focused on basic questions involving receptors and cancer cells, but this work had an immense impact on drug discovery; for instance, heart disease-preventing statins which are the world’s best-selling drugs derive directly from Goldstein and Brown’s pioneering work on cholesterol metabolism. Examples also proliferate other disciplines; the Charged-Coupled Device (CCD), lasers, microwaves, computers and the World Wide Web are all fruits of basic and not targeted research.

If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that curiosity-driven basic research has paid the highest dividends in terms of practical inventions and advances. Tinkering, somewhat aimless but enthusiastic exploration of biological and physical systems and following one’s nose have been the ingredients for some of the key inventions that have transformed our lives. Radar, computers, drugs, detergents, plastics and microwave ovens were all made possible not because someone sat down and tried to discover them but because they arose as fortuitous consequences of elemental, pure research. The hype of translational research not only deflects attention from curiosity-driven basic research but also creates the illusion – and dangerously so especially in the minds of young scientists – that asking people to discover new things is the best way to generate new ideas. In fact, trying to discover new things by forcing people to discover them will only siphon off funds from those who have the actual capability of discovering these things. This is especially damning for bright young researchers who are trying to survive in an increasingly straitjacketed research milieu.

The second more practical but equally important problem with translational research is that it puts the cart before the horse. First come the ideas; then come the applications. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with trying to build a focused institute to discover a drug, say, for schizophrenia. But doing this when most of the basic neuropharmacology, biochemistry and genetics of schizophrenia are unknown is a great diversion of focus and funds. Before we can apply basic knowledge, let’s first make sure that the knowledge exists. Efforts based on incomplete knowledge would only result in a great squandering of manpower, intellectual and financial resources. Such misapplication of resources seems to be the major problem for instance with anew center for drug discovery that the NIH plans to establish. The NIH seeks to channel the newfound data on the human genome to discover new drugs for personalized medicine. This is a laudable goal, but the problem is that we still have miles to go before we truly understand the basic implications of genomic data. It is only recently that we have started to become aware of the “post-genomic” universe of epigenetics and signal transduction. We have barely started to scratch the surface of the myriad ways in which genomic sequences are massaged and manipulated to produce the complex set of physiological events involved in disease and health.

And all this does not even consider the actual workings of proteins and small molecules in mediating key biological events, something which is underlined by genetics but which constitutes a whole new level of emergent complexity. In the absence of all this basic knowledge which is just emerging, how pertinent is it to launch a concerted effort to discover new drugs based on this vastly incomplete knowledge? It would be like trying to construct a skyscraper without fully understanding the properties of bricks and cement.

Chalfie, Steitz and others like them are also right to criticize the frenzy that translational research generates in the popular press. We live in an age when buzzwords are eagerly generated and assimilated by the media. These buzzwords usually run roughshod over subtleties and ambiguities and the press seldom has a taste for indulging these in the first place. Needless to say, committing national resources and public attention to translational research when most of the basics are still to be understood is an endeavor fraught with great risk and uncertainty. It would be far wiser to bolster basic research that can bring us to the brink of real application. There are places where such research is conducted. They are called universities.

Ultimately, the importance of basic research goes back to what Robert Wilson said to Congress. It has to do with the same reasons that we created the Mona Lisa, painted the Sistine Chapel, built Chartres Cathedral, wrote The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and composed the Goldberg Variations. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, T. S. Eliot and Bach were all trying to find the essence of man’s soul and his relationship with the universe and with his fellow men. So were Einstein, Newton, Faraday and Darwin. They were not trying to invent a better mousetrap, but the world did beat a path to their door. Similarly, once our basic understanding of biological systems is firmly in place, translation will willingly follow. The next researcher, when asked to comment on the relevance of his or her basic studies in cell biology to translational research, should echo Wilson: “It has nothing to do directly with translational research, except to enable it”.

About the Author: Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar is a chemist interested in the history and philosophy of science. He considers science to be a seamless and all-encompassing part of the human experience. Follow on Twitter @curiouswavefn.

'right to be forgotton'

http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2012/01/23/reding-details-sweeping-changes-to-e-u-data-laws/

Wall Street Journal blog

Reding Details Sweeping Changes to EU Data Laws

• January 23, 2012, 1:37 AM GMT

By Ben Rooney

Getty Images

Reding: Companies must report data losses within 24 hours.

MUNICH — European Commission proposals over the strict handling of data will give European companies a competitive advantage in the world, said EU Commissioner Viviane Reding.

“Personal data is the currency of today’s digital market,” the European commissioner for justice told delegates at the DLD conference in Munich. “And like any currency, it needs stability and trust. Only if consumers can ‘trust’ that their data is well protected, will they continue to entrust businesses and authorities with it, buy online, and accept new services.”

In a bill to be published Wednesday, Ms. Reding aims to reform comprehensively European data regulations, eliminate red tape and save €2.3 billion in costs. Her proposals would see a pan-European regulation, replacing the existing patchwork of 27 national codes, as well as giving citizens the right to control their data, including the right “to be forgotten.”

“A company will have to comply with one law for the whole of the EU territory. It will only have to deal with one single data protection authority. It will be the data protection authority of the member state in which the company has its main establishment. It will not matter anymore which data protection authority deals with a case. All data protection authorities in whatever EU country will have the same adequate tools and powers to enforce EU-law.”

She calls for the establishment of clear rules for international data transfers.

“It seems odd that data held by a European company is adequately protected whilst it is inside the borders of the European Union, but not when it is transferred to a different part of that same company in Asia or South America.

“In the Internet age, data protection laws need to take account of this global dimension. If they only focus on the activities of a company within a given country, they will not reflect reality.

“I therefore want to improve the current system of binding corporate rules to make these exchanges less burdensome and more secure.”

Ms. Reding outlined her proposals for how European citizens would be able to control their data.

“First, people need to be informed about the processing of their data in simple and clear language. Internet users must be told which data is collected, for what purposes and how long it will be stored. They need to know how it might be used by third parties. They must know their rights and which authority to address if those rights are violated.

“Second, whenever users give their agreement to the processing of their data, it has to be meaningful. In short, people’s consent needs to be specific and given explicitly.

“Thirdly, the reform will give individuals better control over their own data. I will include easier access to one’s own data in the new rules. People must be able to easily take their data to another provider or have it deleted if they no longer want it to be used.”

This last point includes the controversial, “right to be forgotten,” which some commentators have seen as an attempt to change history. What Ms. Reding proposes is any data that a user has given to site should be able to be recalled. She stressed that it was not about deleting content from archives.

“The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate and legally justified interest to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right of the total erasure of history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media.”

And in a clear swipe at the tardiness with which some companies have delayed informing users of breaches of their data, Ms. Reding’s proposals would require companies that suffer a data leak to inform the data protection authorities and the individuals concerned, and they must do so without undue delay.

“As a general rule, without undue delay means for me within 24 hours,” she said.

Back to the Facebook phenomenon...

... which I still find freaky.

An excerpt from the Guardian

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, recently reiterated his suggestion that internet users may one day be able to change their identities in order to distance themselves from personal information shared so freely in their formative years. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he told the Wall Street Journal.

Zuckerberg takes a different tack. "You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity," he was quoted as saying in David Kirkpatrick's book, The Facebook Effect.

Guardian - issues of facebook and privacy in the technological age

For me, this indicates that either Zuckerberg is behaving like a businessman and defending his business against logic, or that he really does not understand that as you get older, do different things, and interact with different people, it is perfectly normal and natural to behave slightly differently to different people, and exhibit different facets of your personality in different situations. Of course, we have one identity. But not in the way Zuckerberg either understands it, or cleverly chooses to state it. There is no lack of integrity in behaving in one way with close family members and friends, having more private and in-depth conversations, and in a more superficial (but no less polite) way with acquantices or collegues. Not everyone needs to know everything about everyone one. And only the abnormally nosy (and those who potentially lack integrity) would want to have to have that level and depth of information on so many individuals.

mind stunting technology

Confessions of a Tech Apostate - newsweek

President Obama says devices like Apple's iPad are rotting our brains. He's right.

President Obama has been taking some heat in techie circles over comments he made at a commencement address over the weekend about iPods and iPads and other digital distractions. Because of these things, he said, "information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation." To his critics, it made him sound, well, like a Luddite, not the cool, tech-friendly, BlackBerry-carrying president they thought he was.

I hate to say this, but he's right. In fact I'd expand his list of distractions to include Web sites like Facebook and Twitter. And I'd go further on the notion of emancipation and say that in many ways our digital tools serve only to enslave us. This may sound like heresy coming from a technology editor but hear me out.



Remember when computers were supposed to save us time? Now it seems just the opposite. The Internet just keeps giving us more ways to do nothing.

We have more information than ever before. We're never away from it. The air around us fairly hums with it. Computers are all around us too—they're on our desks, in our pockets, on our coffee tables.

And yet I can't shake the sense that we are all becoming stupider and stupider—and that we are, on average, less well informed today than we were a generation ago.

I mean, look at us, lining up outside Apple stores like a bunch of kooks. Or walking around, staring down at our phones. We've been turned into zombie people.

Oh, but we're very, very busy zombies. We're reading e-mail. We're tweeting and retweeting. We're downloading apps, and uploading photos. We're updating our Facebook status and reading our news feeds and telling the whole world what we like and don't like, because for some reason we imagine that the whole world actually cares. You know what we're not doing? We're not thinking. We're processing. There's a difference.

We're putting our brains into neutral, and revving the engine. We're digitally dithering, clicking on links and swimming through a torrent of useless garbage being thrown at us by idiots and self-promoters, pundits and PR flacks and marketing people.

We're immersing ourselves in games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, obsessing about earning energy packs, spending billions of dollars on virtual gardening tools.

We're turning the world around us into a videogame, using sites like Foursquare to tell our friends where we're eating lunch, and competing to see who can become "mayor" of some restaurant.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, Glenn Beck has become an influential television commentator, and Sarah Palin is a credible candidate for president in 2012. You think this is a coincidence?

No way. What's happening is this: we are being so overwhelmed by the noise and junk zooming past us that we're becoming immune to it. We've become a nation of Internet-powered imbeciles, with an ever-lower threshold for inanity.

Beck and Palin are the inevitable outcome of that devolution. They are what we deserve. They are, in fact, what we've created.

We have amazing new systems and tools for communicating information. The problem is we've become so fascinated with the means of transmission that we've lost sight of what's actually passing along over the wires and airwaves.

Sadly, I don't see that changing any time soon. If anything, I imagine it will get worse.

Daniel Lyons is also the author of Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs and Dog Days: A Novel.

© 2010

Calling abroad using mobiles

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/technology/personaltech/07basics.html?em

Cheaper ways to do so

computer advice

Keeping your PC clean from the New York Times

School starts soon, and many people are getting spanking-new computers. Ah, the joy of a new and more powerful toy — and a clean slate.
A new PC, whether you know it or not, may well have freed you from many malicious programs that steal credit card numbers and other valuable information or otherwise obstruct your safe and private use of the Internet. Now is the time — while you’re getting everything set up just the way you like it — to take some steps to keep your new machine clean and free of malware. Here is what you need to do before you do anything else.

CHECK YOUR FIREWALL SETTINGS
Do this before you even connect your computer to the Internet. Firewalls prevent certain unwanted traffic from reaching your computer, including worms that spread through network connections. New laptops and desktops with Windows Vista (and, come Oct. 22, the next version of the operating system, Windows 7) and netbooks using Windows XP SP2 or higher have a firewall that is built in and turned on by default. You can make sure all is well by going to the Windows Security Center, clicking Start, then Control Panel, then Security Center and Windows Firewall.
Mac users can check and adjust their firewall settings by clicking on the Apple icon and going to System Preferences and clicking on Security and then Firewall. At a minimum, choose “allow only essential services.” A better option is to select “set access for specific services and applications” and play gatekeeper, allowing programs to connect as you need them, said Rich Mogull, founder of the security consultant firm Securosis.

UPDATE YOUR SOFTWARE
Even though you have a new machine, chances are that security fixes have been issued since the manufacturer loaded the software, so you will want to download those as soon as you get online.
Your new PC may prompt you to check for updates from Microsoft, but, if not, open Windows Update by clicking the Start button, then All Programs and then Windows Update. On the left pane, click “check for updates.” (For more information about Windows Security, see microsoft.com/protect.)
To help you keep Microsoft products up to date, Windows will prompt owners of new machines to sign up for automatic updates. You will see a screen asking if you want to “Help protect Windows automatically.” Choose the first option, “Use recommended settings,” so you get everything and don’t have to worry about it again.
Barring an urgent problem, updates come out on the second Tuesday of the month. To schedule exactly what time your updates are installed — say at 3 a.m., when you are asleep — open Windows Update and select Change Settings and make your choices. This is also a good time to turn on the Internet Explorer Phishing Filter, which can help keep you from turning over personal information to the wrong people.
For Mac users, your computer will automatically check for updates once a week. If you are a paranoid person, have it check more frequently by clicking Software Update in the System Preferences panel and then choose Daily.

ADD SECURITY SOFTWARE
Firewalls won’t help fend off viruses or Trojan horses that can come through e-mail messages, Web sites and pop-up ads. Given the frightening number of malicious programs that aim for Windows PCs, owners of these machines really need to use some security software. There are several free antivirus programs, like AVG 8.5 Free, Avast Antivirus and the forthcoming Microsoft Security Essentials, so even penniless students have no excuse to go without. Note that Vista comes with Windows Defender, which blocks spyware and pop-up ads, and that program can be downloaded free by Windows XP SP2 machines.
Since a lot of malicious programs now come through Web sites, you will also want to use one of the many free tools available to help you avoid malicious sites. Microsoft’s newest browser, Internet Explorer 8, will warn you if you try to visit sites it deems unsafe, deceptive or carriers of a common Web attack type called “cross-site scripting” attacks. Other browsers, including Chrome, Firefox and Safari, also warn users about potentially unsafe sites, using a blacklist kept by Google. There is also McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, a free add-on for the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers (the latter works on both Windows and Mac), that shows site reputation information within search results pages, including warnings about potentially dangerous sites.
There are few malicious programs that aim for Macs, so an antivirus program isn’t essential at this point. That said, some Mac experts think that the days of peace and security for Macs may be waning. There have a been a few Trojan horses recently, and some Web attacks don’t care which operating system you use. If you frequent file-sharing sites, or your employer requires it, buy a Mac antivirus program.

SORT OUT THE APPLICATIONS
New Windows PCs typically come loaded with all kinds of third-party programs, many of which you will never use.
“In a lot of cases, that’s extra software that might have vulnerabilities” that hackers could exploit, says Chad Dougherty, a vulnerability analyst at the CERT Program at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute.
To avoid problems, eliminate the programs you don’t need by clicking the Start button and choosing Control Panel and then Programs to see a list of what is on your machine. Select unwanted programs and then hit the Uninstall button at the top of the program list.
Then sign up for automatic updates from the makers of any software you intend to keep — or that you later install yourself, for that matter. To help you make sure you have checked out everything, download Secunia PSI, a free tool that will help you make sure that all the programs on your PC get security patches.
Speaking of that, always be careful about which software you install from the Internet, whether you have a PC or a Mac. These programs can contain vulnerabilities, and pirated programs and random add-ons may be outright malicious.