QWERTY keyboard

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Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

It was by no means clear yet what a typewriter should be like or how it should be operated. In particular, it was by no means clear that touch typing had to be touch typing as we know it today, on a QWERTY keyboard. Many early typewriters in fact employed chord keysets. It took the emergence of touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard as an incorporating practice to settle The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 71 that issue and to finally seem to banish the chord keyset to the museum of ob- solete technologies. QWERTY keyboards, chord keysets, and, indeed, Morse telegraph keys all share an essential characteristic: the unlinking" of the hand, eye, and letter.

In the different context of electronic computing fifty to one hundred years later, the performance advantages of the five-bit devices that Engelbart employed still existed. Although the QWERTY keyboard lay- out has been severely criticized since the 1930'S at least, with the invention of the Dvorak keyboard and its supposed efficiencies, no other type input device 80 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard ever has managed to challenge its supremacy. 8 As Jan Noyes (19 8 3 a , 278-79) puts it in "The QWERTY Keyboard: A Review": Rearranging the letters of the QWERTY layout has been shown to be a fruitless pastime, but it has demonstrated two important points: first, the amount of hos- tile feeling that the standard keyboard has generated and second, the supremacy of this keyboard in retaining its universal position. . . .

As I eventually discovered, its value as an input device had been well recognized since the nineteenth century. Engelbart was able to ignore its subsequent eclipse and see how it could serve his purposes for user-machine communications in a way that what had become the standard, ubiquitous input device, the QWERTY keyboard, could not. What he was unable to ignore, however, was the hegemony of the QWERTY keyboard. "RE-INVENTING THE HIGH-WHEEL BICYCLE WITH GOVERNMENT FUNDS" The charge that, at this early stage, Engelbart was simply returning to an obso- lete and discarded technology was made by one of his sponsors, Harold Woos- ter, director of the Information Sciences Directorate of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research at the time of Engelbart's second proposal.


pages: 255 words: 76,834

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lock screen, premature optimization, profit motive, proprietary trading, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Fadell, work culture , zero-sum game

It gave taste a purpose, a rationale beyond self-indulgence, an empathetic end. So, is the QWERTY keyboard a pleasing and integrated whole? Is it well balanced and justifiably likable? Is it a design that works? The intervening years have provided the answer. The autocorrecting QWERTY keyboard did not sink the iPhone as a product, as did the disappointing handwriting recognition on the Newton. The opposite happened. Two-thumb typing on a touchscreen is now normal. It’s the default for mobile devices. Even so, popularity doesn’t equal excellence. A better justification is that people can type on a smartphone QWERTY keyboard without thinking about it. The keyboard can melt away, it can recede, and when it does, it leaves a space for what people really care about.

The new single-key QWERTY design provided the definitive solution to the “Where am I?” problem. The single-letter QWERTY keyboard really was better. Greg Christie was right. Within a few days after making this change, I no longer had a pile of problems with no solutions in sight. Now you could type people’s names. You could type like a pirate. You wouldn’t get lost in the middle of words. Even so, solving these lingering problems revealed the next issue, a subtle behavior about the new QWERTY keyboard and the space bar. From the start of my investigations into providing active dictionary assistance, I aimed my user interface and technical designs at helping people type individual words.

Even when I had progressed through to the single-letter QWERTY keyboard layout, my autocorrection code was still extremely simple. It worked something like the tumblers on a bike lock. If you meant to type the word “cold” but typed colf instead, you could imagine how spinning the fourth tumbler to a different letter would produce the desired word. This is a basic concept behind autocorrection, finding the best combination of letters given the taps from a typist, the keys that popped up, and considering the letters in the neighborhood of the popped-up key. Since the letter D is close to F on the QWERTY keyboard, the code could autocorrect from colf to cold.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

It “condemns us to awkward finger sequences.” “In a normal workday,” he continues, “a good typist’s fingers cover up to 20 miles on a QWERTY keyboard.” QWERTY is a “disaster.”2 When we scratch at the surface of this exhilarating anti-QWERTY iconoclasm, however, things begin to look less revolutionary, if not remarkably late in the game. Whereas a vocal minority of individuals in the Anglophone Latin-alphabetic world has been questioning the long-accepted sanctity of the QWERTY keyboard since the 1980s, those outside of the Latin- alphabetic world have been critiquing QWERTY for nearly one hundred years longer.

• QWERTY and QWERTY-style keyboards, as originally conceived, are incompatible with the writing systems used by more than half of the world’s population. Explaining this paradox, and reflecting on its implications, are the goals of this chapter. The False Universality of QWERTY Before delving in, we must first ask: What exactly is the QWERTY keyboard? For many, its defining feature is “Q-W-E-R-T-Y” itself: that is, the specific way in which the letters of the Latin alphabet are arranged on the surface of the interface. To study the QWERTY keyboard is to try and internalize this layout so that it becomes encoded in muscle memory. This way of defining QWERTY and QWERTY-style keyboards, however, obscures much more than it reveals. When we put aside this (literally) superficial definition of QWERTY and begin to examine how these machines behave mechanically—features of the machine that are taken for granted but which exert profound influence on the writing being produced—we discover a much larger set of qualities, most of which are so familiar to an English-speaking reader that they quickly become invisible.

With the advent of computer music in the 1960s, it became possible for musicians to play instruments that looked and felt like guitars, keyboards, flutes, and so forth but create the sounds we associate with drum kits, cellos, bagpipes, and more. What MIDI effected for the instrument form, input effected for the QWERTY keyboard. Just as one could use a piano-shaped MIDI controller to play the cello, or a woodwind-shaped MIDI controller to play a drum kit, an operator in China can used a QWERTY-shaped (or perhaps Latin-alphabetic-shaped) keyboard to “play Chinese.” For this reason, even when the instrument form remained consistent (in our case, the now-dominant QWERTY keyboard within Sinophone computing), the number of different instruments that said controller could control became effectively unlimited.


pages: 423 words: 126,096

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity by Edward Tenner

A. Roger Ekirch, Apple Newton, Bonfire of the Vanities, card file, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, Multics, multilevel marketing, Network effects, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, women in the workforce

It would probably be necessary to find an operating Model 1 or 2 typewriter and experiment with combinations of letters. The QWERTY keyboard, as it came to be known, was clearly a compromise. On the middle row of text there was a nearly alphabetical sequence: DFGHJKLM. The last letter was later moved to the bottom row, where the original C and X were also later reversed. On the top row was a vowel cluster (UIO) out of alphabetical order. Sholes and Densmore were both familiar with newspaper type cases, arranged not in alphabetical order but roughly according to letter frequency. The QWERTY keyboard did not follow these patterns but was conceived in a similar spirit.27 Sholes and Densmore made a fateful assumption about the operator’s technique.

Norman and Fisher found that although the Dvorak arrangement did indeed save on motion as its advocates had long claimed, gains in speed were modest: the advantage was only about 5 to 10 percent. They found the long-maligned QWERTY keyboard surprisingly rational in its high number of alternating-hand sequences. The Norman studies and others bolstered an influential 1990 rebuttal to Paul David’s analysis by two fellow economists, S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, who argued that the Dvorak arrangement had lost on its merits.41 The critics of the Dvorak layout have a point. Typists’ minds are able to manage the additional 37 percent finger travel of the QWERTY keyboard without a corresponding loss of speed. Differentials range from a mere 2.6 percent for Dvorak, to 11 percent.

The QWERTY keyboard did not follow these patterns but was conceived in a similar spirit.27 Sholes and Densmore made a fateful assumption about the operator’s technique. Compositors used thumb and forefinger and looked at the type case as they worked, and it seemed reasonable to think that typewriter operators would do the same—as, indeed, all but a few initially did. For this style of work the QWERTY keyboard was relatively efficient. Its leading twentieth-century critic, August Dvorak, found that the most frequent letters were typed with the first two fingers of the left hand and the index finger of the right. There seems to be a balance between putting all the most frequent characters near the center of the keyboard and maintaining an order that will make it easier to find keys visually, like keeping O and P as well as the middle-row sequence together.


The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting by Anne Trubek

computer age, crowdsourcing, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, lateral thinking, Norman Mailer, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog

“Since the introduction of the typewriter in our junior high schools, there is a tendency to minimize the importance of the teaching of handwriting,” wrote a Pittsburgh school administrator in 1924.14 In 1938 the New York Times published an article, “Of Lead Pencils,” that warned, “Writing with one’s own hand seems to be disappearing, and the universal typewriter may swallow all.”15 The placement of the keys on the typewriter greatly influenced the speed of the typist. The letters were arranged into an idiosyncratic pattern—that, despite it being inefficient and of no purpose to us today, remains: the QWERTY keyboard. QWERTY was invented in 1873 in order to separate common letter pairs, preventing type bars from sticking together when struck sequentially. But QWERTY keyboards did not come with any instruction manual for how best to use them. Most people used either two or four fingers to type. In 1888, Frank McGurrin created a system that all people could use, one that would be the most efficient.

As we keep writing more on different surfaces, we create new methods of making letters: We press our fingers onto glass, we swipe across touch screens, and we talk to Siri, dictating our words to a digital scribe, just as Socrates, Caesar, the popes, royals, and novelists of the past did. The pace of change (with the exception of our stubborn commitment to the QWERTY keyboard) has been so rapid, it is easy to forget how quickly and sweepingly we have changed. If the history recounted here repeats itself, there will be less heterogeneity soon; keyboarding—perhaps done by swiping instead of pressing—will become ubiquitous in American elementary classrooms, and we will develop new cultural, emotional, and individual associations with the rhythm and look and feel of pressing letters, ones that we may then impart to our children when they learn to write.

See also calligraphy; handwriting curricula for, here drills for, here, here, here, here, here master penmen teaching, here, here Palmer Method of, here, here, here Spencer’s method of, here, here, here, here, here standardization of, here, here, here typewriting compared to, here, here and forensic document examination, here, here manufacturers of, here nibs for, here, here quill pens, here, here, here, here, here reed pens, here, here of scribal monks, here, here as writing technology, here writing with, here Persia, here Peters, Cortez, here Petrarch, here Philodemus of Gadara, here Phoenician alphabet, here phonics, here phrenology, here Pinker, Steven, here Pius II, Pope, here Pius IX, Pope, here Plato, here Pliny the Elder, here, here Pliny the Younger, here Poe, Edgar Allan, here Pompeii, here, here, here Powell, Barry, here Powers, Richard, here Preyer, Wilhelm, here print culture, here printing press claims against, here effect on calligraphic tradition, here effect on handwriting, here effect on scribes, here, here, here invention of, here, here, here standardization of fonts, here, here survival of writing from, here prisons and prisoners, here professions, scripts associated with, here, here, here proto-writing, here, here pseudosciences, here Ptolemaic period, here public schools, handwriting pedagogy in, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here punctuation, here, here, here, here, here questioned document examiners, here quill pens, here, here, here, here, here quipus (Incan knotted cords), here QWERTY keyboard, here, here racial hierarchies, here Ravel, Maurice, here Rawlinson, Henry, here reading. See also literacy cognitive effects of, here of cuneiform, here, here effect of handwriting on comprehension, here, here silent reading, here, here, here and standardization of typewriting, here, here teaching of, here, here, here recto, here, here reed pens, here, here reed styluses, here Remington, Eliphalet, here Remington typewriters, here, here, here, here Renaissance, here, here, here rhetorical skills, here Rice, Victor M., here right-handed writing, here Roman alphabet, here, here, here, here Romance languages, here Roman Empire, here, here, here Romans books created by, here, here, here bookstores of, here bureaucracy of, here oral communication of, here, here papyrus used by, here, here scribes of, here, here scripts used by, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here survival of writing by, here, here, here, here, here Romantic era, here, here Rosetta stone, here round hand, here, here, here Rowling, J.


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

But if Kerouac managed to sidestep one of the technical constraints of the format he worked in, he accepted a more fundamental intrusion between his mind as it formed words, and his attempts to record and crystallize them. He used the QWERTY keyboard as the route between his fingers and the paper, or rather between his brain and the paper. The relationship between the two is indirect. The skill with which his fingers manipulate the keyboard does not in itself reflect the quality of his words, in the way that a pianist’s musical performance would do. Just as a steering wheel is not the only method of controlling a car, so the QWERTY keyboard is not the only kind of interface that allows a writer to work. Early automobiles used tillers.

Proceeding through the alphabet, this book does indeed touch upon “B is for Bauhaus,” but as much through an exploration of the significance of a massive exhibition catalogue for the Bauhaus show I saw in London as a schoolboy as through an objective appraisal of the movement. I am equally fascinated by the significance of collection, of the squalor of car interiors, and the impact of a Qwerty keyboard on my approach to writing. This is a book that reflects my life over the last thirty years as a critic and a curator, and is written from the vantage point of the Design Museum. There is no better place to look at the constantly fluctuating, endlessly fascinating world of design. I have a green fishtail parka that I bought in a shop on a backstreet by a canal in Milan.

He made each key into a rounded button, stretching a soft rubber membrane over the whole surface. He somewhat coarsened the effect at his lectures by interspersing close-up photographs of the machine in profile, a single Michelangelo digit reaching out to depress one of the keys with the image of a nipple. The QWERTY keyboard used to be the most effective way to communicate with and control a machine, until Steve Jobs teamed it with a screen and a mouse – what used to be called the graphic user interface. Jobs created not simply the window through which the computer could be coaxed, haltingly, to explain itself to the user, but the place in which the user could work directly with the machine.


pages: 199 words: 43,653

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

Gourville writes that products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial. For example, the technology I am using to write this book is inferior to existing alternatives in many ways. I’m referring to the QWERTY keyboard which was first developed in the 1870s for the now-ancient typewriter. QWERTY was designed with commonly used characters spaced far apart. This layout prevented typists from jamming the metal type bars of early machines.11 This physical limitation is an anachronism in the digital age, yet QWERTY keyboards remain the standard despite the invention of far better layouts. Professor August Dvorak’s keyboard design, for example, placed vowels in the center row, increasing typing speed and accuracy.

Gourville, “Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers: Understanding the Psychology of New-Product Adoption,” Harvard Business Review (accessed Nov, 12, 2013), http://hbr.org/product/eager-sellers-and-stony-buyers-understanding-the-p/an/R0606F-PDF-ENG. 11. Cecil Adams, “Was the QWERTY Keyboard Purposely Designed to Slow Typists?,” Straight Dope (Oct. 30, 1981), http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/221/was-the-qwerty-keyboard-purposely-designed-to-slow-typists. 12. Mark E. Bouton, “Context and Behavioral Processes in Extinction,” Learning & Memory 11, no. 5 (Sept. 2004): 485–94, doi:10.1101/lm.78804. 13. Ari P. Kirshenbaum, Darlene M. Olsen, and Warren K.


Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies by Jared M. Diamond

affirmative action, Atahualpa, British Empire, California gold rush, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, invention of movable type, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, James Watt: steam engine, Maui Hawaii, QWERTY keyboard, the scientific method, trade route

When improve- ments in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60-years. While the story of the QWERTY keyboard may sound funny, many similar cases have involved much heavier economic consequences. Why does Japan now dominate the world market for transistorized electronic consumer products, to a degree that damages the United States's balance of payments with Japan, even though transistors were invented and pat- ented in the United States?

Longley's star typing pupil Frank McGurrin, who thrashed Ms. Longley's non-QWERTY competitor Louis Taub in a widely publicized typing contest in 1888. The decision could have gone to another keyboard at any of numerous stages between the 1860s and the 1880s; nothing about the American environment favored the QWERTY keyboard over its rivals. Once the decision had been made, though, the QWERTY keyboard became so entrenched that it was also adopted for computer keyboard design a century later. Equally trivial specific reasons, now lost in the remote past, may have lain behind the Sumer- ian adoption of a counting system based on 12 instead of 10 (leading to our modern 60-minute hour, 24-hour day, 12-month year, and 360-degree circle), in contrast to the widespread Mesoamerican counting system based on 20 (leading to its calendar using two concurrent cycles of 260 named days and a 365-day year).

Similarly, Japan continues to use its horrendously cumbersome kanji writ- ing system in preference to efficient alphabets or Japan's own efficient kana syllabarybecause the prestige attached to kanji is so great. Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scatter- ing the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand).


pages: 408 words: 105,715

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

affirmative action, British Empire, computer age, Deng Xiaoping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, information retrieval, invention of movable type, machine readable, machine translation, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, QWERTY keyboard, scientific management, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, transcontinental railway

In fact, Zhou noted, “Any such idea as providing one key for each character was little short of absurdity.” That is why, he resolved, “the design of a Chinese typewriter must be fundamentally and radically different from any of the existing American typewriters.” The very idea of a keyboard itself, as Zhou saw it, had to be reimagined. By Zhou’s time, the QWERTY keyboard was standardized and universal. But it must have stimulated his imagination to learn that earlier Western typewriters did not always have the keyboard we recognize today—or even look like modern typewriters at all. A Sholes & Glidden Type Writer at the 1876 Philadelphia fair was encased in a wooden box with a crank and wheel attached to one side of the carriage.

Any typist could type on it, even if he or she did not know a single character in Chinese. Every piece of information for locating a character was encoded on those seventy-two keys, which were simply labeled with character components instead of alphabet letters. It was no bigger than a standard QWERTY keyboard, and save for those Chinese inscriptions, it looked just like your average Western typewriter. Lin was as excited as a schoolboy, because he had spent decades developing the Chinese keyboard to be used in the simplest, most straightforward way possible for printing up to ninety thousand characters.

That is the lesson that has been demonstrated with greater and greater clarity in the digital age. For the East Asia region, who gets to provide the most digitally comprehensive representation of Chinese characters first is important. Once a representation becomes embedded in the technological infrastructure—as with Morse code, the QWERTY keyboard, Romanization schemes, the Four-Corner Method, ASCII, Taiwan’s character set for the RLG, and all other attempts to modernize Chinese—it gets reinforced via repeated use within the technological infrastructure until it is embedded within that technology. This recognition has touched off a race among Han script users.


pages: 345 words: 84,847

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

“Design, Evaluation, and Dissemination of a Plastic Syringe Clip to Improve Dosing Accuracy of Liquid Medications.” Annals of Biomedical Engineering 41, no. 9 (2013): 1860–8. doi:10.1007/s10439-013-0780-z. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23471817 Stamp, Jimmy. “Fact of Fiction? The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard.” Smithsonian. May 3, 2013. Accessed May 11, 2016. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-the-legend-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-49863249> Stanley, Matthew. “An Expedition to Heal the Wounds of War.” Isis 94, no. 1 (2003): 57–89. Steinitz, Richard. György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Stevens, Jeffrey R., Alaxandra G.

It seems safer there because it builds on what a community already knows and loves. But moving incrementally carries a risk: the public may move on without you. Consider the BlackBerry smartphone. In 2003, the technology company RIM brought the first BlackBerry to market. Its main innovation was a full QWERTY keyboard, making it possible to answer emails as well as take phone calls. By 2007, BlackBerry phones were such a success that the company’s stock had increased eighty-fold. RIM had become one of the tech sector’s hottest companies. That same year Apple introduced the first iPhone. BlackBerry’s market share and stock price continued to rise for a while, hitting new highs, but the attention of the public began to turn toward touchscreen phones.

(Barbèy) ref1 Oldenburg, Claes ref1, ref2 Ono, Yoko ref1 open-office plans ref1 “The Open-Office Trap” (article) ref1 The Origins of Continents and Oceans (Wegener) ref1 orthogonal thinking ref1 Otherlab ref1 Otis Elevator Company ref1 “outward bound” model ref1 Painting (1954) (Guston) ref1 Palace of Versailles ref1 Palo Alto innovation center ref1, ref2 parachutes ref1 Paramount ref1 parasols ref1 Parks, Suzan-Lori ref1 Parliament (band) ref1 Patent Office (US) ref1 “Pay-to-See” system ref1 peanut crops ref1, ref2 Pegasus ref1 Pei, I.M. ref1 perfume ref1 Persian carpets ref1 Petit h laboratory (Hermès) ref1 Peugeot Moovie ref1 pharmaceutical industry ref1 Philco ref1 Phillips, Bradford ref1 photocopies ref1, ref2 photography ref1, ref2 Physical (album) ref1 Piazza (Giacometti) ref1 Picasso, Pablo ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 variations on Las Meninas ref1 Pilloton, Emily ref1 Pinter, Harold ref1, ref2 The Pioneers (Cooper) ref1 pixilation, digital ref1 Plantinga, Judy ref1 Playstation, Sony ref1 poetry ref1, ref2, ref3 pointillism ref1 polarization ref1 Pompidou Center (Paris) ref1 Portal, Yago ref1 Porter, Edwin ref1 Portis, Antoinette ref1 possibilities, testing ref1 Postal Telegraph Building (New York) ref1, ref2 precedents ref1 see also history, mining Predicta television ref1 predictability ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 predictions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 prizes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Proctor & Gamble ref1 Project Glass ref1 Proust, Marcel ref1 public reception ref1, ref2 Pulitzer Prize ref1, ref2 Pyramide (Elias) ref1 QWERTY keyboard ref1 Radio Corporation of America (RCA) ref1 Radio Shack advertisement ref1 Raimondi, Marcantonio ref1 Raspberry Pi Foundation ref1 Rauschenberg, Robert ref1 raw materials ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 REALM Charter School ref1 recumbent bicycle ref1 Reggio Emilia institutions ref1 Renaissance ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 repetition suppression ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 “Revolution 9” (song) ref1 rewards ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 prizes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Rice University ref1 Richardson, John ref1, ref2, ref3 Riding Around (1969) (Guston) ref1 rigor ref1 RIM ref1 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge) ref1 risk ref1 arts ref1 creativity practice ref1 encouraging ref1 failure ref1 long time horizons ref1 public reception ref1 Roadable Airplane ref1 Robot B-9 ref1 robotics ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Rockwell, Norman ref1 Rocky IV (film) ref1, ref2 Rococo art ref1 Rodin, Auguste ref1 Rolling Stone (magazine) ref1 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) ref1 Roosevelt, Eleanor ref1 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard) ref1 Rosie the Riveter (Rockwell) ref1 Rouen Cathedral ref1 Rouen Cathedral, Set 5 (Lichtenstein) ref1 Royal Shakespeare Company ref1 Ruppy the Puppy ref1 “sailing seeds” experiment ref1 Salon des Réfusés ref1 Sand Castle #3 (Muniz) ref1 “sandboxing” ref1 Sanger, Frederick ref1 Sarnoff, David ref1 SceniCruiser ref1 Schleicher, Lowell ref1 Schmidt, Eric ref1 schools ref1 arts, influence of ref1, ref2 audiences ref1 creative capital ref1 imagination ref1 meaningful work ref1 motivation ref1 precedents ref1 prizes ref1 proliferating options ref1, ref2 risk, encouraging ref1 Schubert, Franz ref1 Schulz, Bruno ref1 science blending ref1, ref2, ref3 breaking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 cultural conditioning ref1, ref2 education ref1 fiction ref1 influence of the arts ref1 Scieszka, Jon ref1 Scofidio, Ricardo ref1 scouting, distances ref1 Scratch software ref1 sea squirt ref1 seeking ref1 Semper, Max ref1 Senz umbrella ref1 September 11, 2001 ref1 Serra, Richard ref1 Seurat, Georges ref1 70/20/10 rule (Google) ref1 Shadow Torso (Rodin) ref1 Shakespeare, William ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Shelley, Mary ref1 Shelley, Percy Bysshe ref1 Sheppard, Sheri ref1 Sherlock (tv) ref1 ShipIt Days (Atlassian) ref1 shipping ref1 “The Shipwreck” (Falconer) ref1 Shockley, William ref1 Short, Bobby ref1 Shrinky Dinks ref1 Shuttlecocks (Oldenburg/van Bruggen) ref1 Siemens ref1 silk ref1 Simon (smartphone) ref1 simulating outcomes ref1 see also future Siri ref1 Sistine Chapel ref1 skeuomorphs ref1, ref2 smartphones ref1, ref2, ref3 Blackberry ref1 iPhone ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Smets, Gerda ref1, ref2 Snowboard Bicycle ref1 Sobel, Dava ref1 social enhancement ref1 Solyndra ref1 Sony Playstation ref1 Sony Walkman ref1 “A Sound of Thunder” (short story) (Bradbury) ref1 SpaceShipOne (Mojave Aerospace) ref1 speculation ref1 Sphinx ref1 spiders ref1 Sprague, Frank J. ref1 stadiums ref1 Starck, Philippe ref1 Starkweather, Gary ref1 steam engine ref1 Still Life with Violin and Pitcher (Braque) ref1 Stoppard, Tom ref1 Stradivari, Antonio ref1 Stradivarius violins ref1 streamlining ref1 The Street of Crocodiles (Schulz) ref1 A Study in Scarlet (Conan Doyle) ref1 A Study in Pink (tv) ref1 Stueckelberg, Ernst ref1 Subscribervision service ref1 Sun Microsystems ref1 Super Mario Clouds (Arcangel) ref1, ref2 super-font ref1 superheroes ref1 surprise ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 each other ref1, ref2, ref3 sweet potatoes ref1 sweet spot ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Swift, Philip K. ref1 Swigert, Jack ref1, ref2 symmetry, visual ref1 Symmetry 454 (calendar) ref1 synecdoche ref1 Szilard, Leo ref1 Szotyńscy and Zaleski (company) ref1 The Taking of Pelham 123 (film) ref1 Tata ref1 Tate, Nahum ref1 tech box (IDEO) ref1 technology bending ref1 blending ref1 breaking ref1 education ref1, ref2 flexibility ref1 proliferating options ref1 testing possibilities ref1, ref2, ref3 Telemeter ref1 television (tv) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Teller, Astro ref1 Teller, Edward ref1 three Bs see also bending; blending; breaking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Three Flags (Johns) ref1 Three Studies for Portraits (including Self-portrait) (Bacon) ref1 3M Corporation ref1, ref2 300 (film) ref1, ref2 Tilman, Congressman John Q. ref1 time bending ref1 blending ref1 breaking ref1 “end of time” illusion ref1 release medications ref1 sharing ref1 timelessness ref1 Time (magazine) ref1 Titled Arc (Serra) ref1 To B.W.T. (1950) (Guston) ref1 “Today in 1963” (article) (Bel Geddes) ref1 “Tom’s Diner” (song) ref1 “Too Marvelous for Words” (song) ref1 touchscreens ref1 Toyota Corporation ref1 Toyota FCV Plus ref1 Toyota i-Car ref1 transistors ref1 “transitron” ref1 The Travelers (Catalano) ref1 Tree of Codes (Foer) ref1 Trehub, Sandra ref1 trolley cars ref1 The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (Scieszka) ref1 Turner, Mark ref1 Twain, Mark ref1, ref2 Twitter ref1 Twombly, Cy ref1 umbrellas ref1 Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte (Seurat) ref1 unBrella ref1 universal beauty ref1 universal language ref1, ref2 Unrecognized (Abakanowicz) ref1 vacuum cleaners ref1 van Bruggen, Coosje ref1 van Gogh, Vincent ref1 variation ref1 Vega, Suzanne ref1 Velázquez, Diego ref1 Veloso, Manuela ref1 ventilators ref1 verlan (French slang) ref1 Verna, Tony ref1 Versailles, Palace of ref1 Versatile Extra Sensory Transducer Vest ref1 Viktor & Rolf ref1 Violin Concerto (Beethoven) ref1 visual perception ref1 visual symmetry ref1 Volute ref1 Waldorf institutions ref1 Walker, Shirley ref1 Walkman, Sony ref1 Wall-less House ref1 Walsh, Craig ref1 Warped Building (“Krzywy Domek”) ref1 Washington, Denzel ref1 Water Lilies and Japanese Footbridge (Monet) ref1 Wegener, Alfred ref1, ref2 The Well-Tempered Clavier (Bach) ref1 Wells Fargo bank ref1 West Side Story (musical) ref1 Westinghouse ref1 what-ifs ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 see also future White Album (album) ref1 White Flag (Johns) ref1 White on White (Malevich) ref1 Whitney, Eli ref1, ref2 Wiles, Andrew ref1 Wilson, E.O. ref1, ref2, ref3 Wilson, John Tuzo ref1 Windows 8 ref1 windshields ref1, ref2 Winehouse, Amy ref1 wing warping ref1 The Winstons (band) ref1 Women of Algiers (Delacroix) ref1 workplace changes ref1 World calendar ref1 World Season Calendar ref1 World Wide Web ref1 World’s Fairs ref1 Wright, Orville ref1 Wright brothers ref1, ref2, ref3 Wyler, William ref1 X research and development (Google) ref1, ref2 Xerox Corporation ref1, ref2 XPrize ref1 X-Space library ref1 Yoko Ono ref1 YouTube ref1, ref2 Zamenhof, L.L. ref1 Zen gardens ref1 zombies ref1, ref2 NOTES Introduction 1 Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 2 Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, Apollo 13 (New York: Pocket Books, 1995). 3 John Richardson and Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso (New York: Random House, 1991). 4 William Rubin, Pablo Picasso, Hélène Seckel-Klein and Judith Cousins, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994). 5 A.L.


Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, means of production, Multics, packet switching, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, trade route, wikimedia commons

.* Tomlinson’s own e-mail address, written using this newly formulated rule, was tomlinson@bbn-tenexa, signifying the mailbox of the user named “tomlinson” on the computer named “bbn-tenexa,” the first of the company’s two mainframes running TENEX.20 Figure 5.2 ASR-33 keyboard. Unlike modern QWERTY keyboards, the @ symbol shares a key with the letter P. With the modifications to his mail program completed and an addressing scheme decided, Tomlinson typed out a brief message on the second machine and sent it to his mailbox on the first. The message was broken down into packets as it entered the ARPANET, which then routed each packet individually to its destination and reassembled them into a complete message at the other end before it was finally appended to his mailbox on bbn-tenexa.

And aside from the immediate dangers of seared flesh, operators of both Linotypes and Monotypes ran the more insidious risk of poisoning from the (highly flammable) benzene used to clean matrices, the natural gas that some machines burned to melt the type metal, and the fumes emitted by the molten type metal itself.51 Figure 7.6 A Monotype keyboard, with punched paper tape, line-width gauge, and drumlike justification scale visible at top. Also shown here are the various QWERTY keyboards used for roman, italic, bold, or small capital letters as required. The red numeric keys (at the top left of the keyboard) are used to punch the computed justification parameters at the end of the line. For more than half a century, printing was dominated by Linotypes, Monotypes, and a host of copycat devices.

Sholes’s nameless hyphen / dash / minus sign (-) had to carry the load for the em, en, figure, and quotation dashes and all their visual relatives. Typographic propriety had suffered an ignominious blow: from a suite of dashes for every occasion, writers were reduced to using and reusing this single character wherever any faintly dashlike symbol might ordinarily have appeared. Figure 8.4 An illustration of an early QWERTY keyboard taken from Sholes’s 1878 patent, with the hyphen-minus character third from the right on the top row. The dashlike character at top-right is actually an underscore.70 Still, though, typists adapted. Even before the nineteenth century was out, Isaac Pitman, inventor of Pitman shorthand, proponent of phonetic spelling, and a steadfastly unsentimental sort of chap, declared that a single, spaced hyphen - or preferably, two unspaced hyphens--would serve perfectly well in place of the absent em dash.71 The practice was not universally admired: the dime novelist William Wallace Cook was one early voice of protest, writing in 1912 that he considered it “poor policy” to be forced into using two hyphens where an em dash should rightly be placed.72 Despite Cook’s misgivings, Pitman’s shortcut was persistent.


pages: 722 words: 90,903

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought by Drew Neil

Bram Moolenaar, don't repeat yourself, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, fizzbuzz, off-by-one error, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, web application

Set yourself the goal of adding a couple of motions to your repertoire each week. Tip 46 Keep Your Fingers on the Home Row Vim is optimized for the touch typist. Learn to move around without removing your hands from the home row, and you’ll be able to operate Vim quicker. The first thing you learn as a touch typist is that your fingers should rest on the home row. On a Qwerty keyboard, that means the left-hand fingers rest on a, s, d, and f, while the right-hand fingers rest on j, k, l, and ; keys. When poised in this position, we can reach for any other key on the keyboard without having to move our hands or look at our fingers. It’s the ideal posture for touch typing. Just as with any other text editor, Vim lets us use the arrow keys to move the cursor around, but it also provides an alternative by way of the h, j, k, and l keys.

And the l key doesn’t move left, it moves right! The keys are assigned this way for historical reasons, so don’t go looking hard for a logical pattern.[15] Here are a few pointers that might help if you’re struggling to remember which key does what. The letter j sort of looks like an arrow pointing downward. On a Qwerty keyboard, the h and l keys are positioned to the left and right of each other, mirroring the direction in which they move the cursor. Although h, j, k, and l may seem unintuitive at first, learning to use them is worth your while. To reach for the arrow keys, you have to move your hand away from its resting place on the home row.

That might sound like a trivial saving, but it adds up. Once you’ve acquired the habit of using h, j, k, and l to move around, using any other editor that depends on the arrow keys will feel strange. You’ll wonder how you put up with it for so long! Leave Your Right Hand Where It Belongs On a Qwerty keyboard, the j, k, and l keys fall directly beneath the index, middle, and ring fingers of the right hand. We use the index finger to press the h key, but we have to reach for it. Some people see this as a problem, and as a solution they recommend shifting your entire right hand one step to the left so that h, j, k, and l are each covered by a finger.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

But within a few years, the company had become a punch line. As with Nokia, it is easy to blame RIM’s decline on bad management. Lazaridis and Balsillie certainly didn’t help their own case, making a number of public statements over the years about their industry that in hindsight were obviously wrong. For example, Lazaridis famously called QWERTY keyboards “the most exciting mobile trend” at the very moment when RIM’s new touchscreen competitors, the iPhone and Android, were starting to eat its lunch.6 Conventional narratives about the decline of the BlackBerry are often based on this explanation. Lazaridis and Balsillie stuck around too long.

As future CEO Heins would later say, the company had a very clear idea what its core product was all about.7 The BlackBerry was focused on battery life, ease of typing, security, and data compression. And on those counts it delivered. Its BlackBerry Messenger application also was a major hit, giving the phone its “killer app.” Over the next half decade, the BlackBerry became the leading smartphone, famous for its reliability and security as well as its iconic QWERTY keyboard. For professionals, the BlackBerry was a must-have, and in popular culture, the phone seemed to be everywhere. Presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, and celebrities across the globe swore by their BlackBerries. There was even a term invented for the growing ranks of BlackBerry addicts—“Crackberry”—which inspired its own website.

It was competing with Android’s entire ecosystem of producers, which was growing exponentially. The trouble was immediate at RIM. The company missed its earnings estimate in the first and second quarters of 2008. But rather than change course, RIM’s response was to double down on its old strategy. It released the BlackBerry Bold, which featured better specs and the company’s usual QWERTY keyboard and trackball. Not surprisingly, the Bold failed to stem the tide. October 2008 was the first month where the iPhone outsold the BlackBerry, selling 6.9 million units to BlackBerry’s 6.1 million.11 And there was no looking back. Business at Apple was booming. “Apple just reported one of the best quarters in its history, with a spectacular performance by the iPhone,” CEO Steve Jobs said at the time.


Practical Vim, Second Edition (for Stefano Alcazi) by Drew Neil

Bram Moolenaar, don't repeat yourself, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, fizzbuzz, off-by-one error, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, web application

Tip 47 Keep Your Fingers on the Home Row Vim is optimized for the touch typist. Learn to move around without removing your hands from the home row, and you’ll be able to operate Vim quicker. The first thing you learn as a touch typist is that your fingers should rest on the home row. On a Qwerty keyboard, that means the left-hand fingers rest on a, s, d, and f, while the right-hand fingers rest on j, k, l, and ; keys. When poised in this position, we can reach for any other key on the keyboard without having to move our hands or look at our fingers. It’s the ideal posture for touch typing. Just as with any other text editor, Vim lets us use the arrow keys to move the cursor around, but it also provides an alternative by way of the h, j, k, and l keys.

And the l key doesn’t move left, it moves right! The keys are assigned this way for historical reasons, so don’t go looking hard for a logical pattern.[15] Here are a few pointers that might help if you’re struggling to remember which key does what. The letter j sort of looks like an arrow pointing downward. On a Qwerty keyboard, the h and l keys are positioned to the left and right of each other, mirroring the direction in which they move the cursor. Although h, j, k, and l may seem unintuitive at first, learning to use them is worth your while. To reach for the arrow keys, you have to move your hand away from its resting place on the home row.

That might sound like a trivial saving, but it adds up. Once you’ve acquired the habit of using h, j, k, and l to move around, using any other editor that depends on the arrow keys will feel strange. You’ll wonder how you put up with it for so long! Leave Your Right Hand Where It Belongs On a Qwerty keyboard, the j, k, and l keys fall directly beneath the index, middle, and ring fingers of the right hand. We use the index finger to press the h key, but we have to reach for it. Some people see this as a problem, and as a solution they recommend shifting your entire right hand one step to the left so that h, j, k, and l are each covered by a finger.


Practical Vim by Drew Neil

Bram Moolenaar, don't repeat yourself, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, fizzbuzz, off-by-one error, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, web application

Tip 47 Keep Your Fingers on the Home Row Vim is optimized for the touch typist. Learn to move around without removing your hands from the home row, and you’ll be able to operate Vim quicker. The first thing you learn as a touch typist is that your fingers should rest on the home row. On a Qwerty keyboard, that means the left-hand fingers rest on a, s, d, and f, while the right-hand fingers rest on j, k, l, and ; keys. When poised in this position, we can reach for any other key on the keyboard without having to move our hands or look at our fingers. It’s the ideal posture for touch typing. Just as with any other text editor, Vim lets us use the arrow keys to move the cursor around, but it also provides an alternative by way of the h, j, k, and l keys.

And the l key doesn’t move left, it moves right! The keys are assigned this way for historical reasons, so don’t go looking hard for a logical pattern.[15] Here are a few pointers that might help if you’re struggling to remember which key does what. The letter j sort of looks like an arrow pointing downward. On a Qwerty keyboard, the h and l keys are positioned to the left and right of each other, mirroring the direction in which they move the cursor. Although h, j, k, and l may seem unintuitive at first, learning to use them is worth your while. To reach for the arrow keys, you have to move your hand away from its resting place on the home row.

That might sound like a trivial saving, but it adds up. Once you’ve acquired the habit of using h, j, k, and l to move around, using any other editor that depends on the arrow keys will feel strange. You’ll wonder how you put up with it for so long! Leave Your Right Hand Where It Belongs On a Qwerty keyboard, the j, k, and l keys fall directly beneath the index, middle, and ring fingers of the right hand. We use the index finger to press the h key, but we have to reach for it. Some people see this as a problem, and as a solution they recommend shifting your entire right hand one step to the left so that h, j, k, and l are each covered by a finger.


pages: 345 words: 75,660

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The QWERTY design has persisted even though the mechanism that caused all the trouble is no longer relevant. When Apple engineers designed the iPhone, they debated whether to finally get rid of QWERTY altogether. What kept them coming back to it was familiarity. After all, their closest competitor at the time, the BlackBerry, had a hard QWERTY keyboard that performed so well the product was commonly known as the “Crackberry” for its addictive nature. “The biggest science project” of the iPhone was the soft keyboard.6 But as late as 2006 (the iPhone was launched in 2007), the keyboard was terrible. Not only could it not compete with the BlackBerry, but it was so frustrating that no one would use it to type a text message, let alone an email.

Many Apple engineers came up with designs that moved away from QWERTY. With just three weeks to find a solution—a solution that, if not found, might have killed the whole project—every single iPhone software developer had free rein to explore other options. By the end of the three weeks, they had a keyboard that looked like a small QWERTY keyboard with a substantial tweak. While the image the user saw did not change, the surface area around a particular set of keys expanded when typing. When you type a “t,” it is highly probable the next letter will be an “h” and so the area around that key expanded. Following that, “e” and “i” expanded, and so on.

See also jobs “Lady Lovelace’s Objection,” 13 Lambrecht, Anja, 196 language translation, 25–27, 107–108 laws of robotics, 115 learning -by-using, 182–183 in the cloud vs. on the ground, 188–189, 202 experience and, 191 in-house and on-the-job, 185 language translation, 26–27 pathways to, 182–184 privacy and data for, 189–190 reinforcement, 13, 145, 183–184 by simulation, 187–188 strategy for, 179–194 supervised, 183 trade-offs in performance and, 181–182 when to deploy and, 184–187 Lederman, Mara, 168–169 Lee, Kai-Fu, 219 Lee Se-dol, 8 legal documents, redacting, 53–54, 68 legal issues, 115–117 Lewis, Michael, 56 Li, Danielle, 58 liability, 117, 195–198 lighting, cost of, 11 London cabbies, 76–78 Lovelace, Ada, 12, 13 Lyft, 88–89 Lytvyn, Max, 96 machine learning, 18 adversarial, 187–188 churn prediction and, 32–36 complexity and, 103–110 from data, 45–47 feedback for, 46–47 flexibility in, 36 judgment and, 83 one-shot, 60 regression compared with, 32–35 statistics and prediction and, 37–40 techniques, 8–9 transformation of prediction by, 37–40 Mailmobile, 103 management AI’s impact on, 3 by exception, 67–68 Mastercard, 25 mathematics, made cheap by computers, 12, 14 Mazda, 124 MBA programs, student recruitment for, 127–129, 133–139 McAfee, Andrew, 91 Mejdal, Sig, 161 Microsoft, 9–10, 176, 180, 202–204, 215, 217 Tay chatbot, 204–205 mining, automation in, 112–114 Misra, Sanjog, 93–94 mobile-first strategy, 179–180 Mobileye, 15 modeling, 99, 100–102 Moneyball (Lewis), 56, 161–162 monitoring of predictions, 66–67 multivariate regression, 33–34 music, digital, 12, 61 Musk, Elon, 209, 210, 221 Mutual Benefit Life, 124–125 Napster, 61 NASA, 14 National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), 222–223 navigation apps, 77–78, 88–90, 106 Netscape, 9–10 neural networks, 13 New Economy, 10 New York City Fire Department, 197 New York Times, 8, 218 Nordhaus, William, 11 Norvig, Peter, 180 Nosko, Chris, 199 Novak, Sharon, 169–170 Numenta, 223 Nymi, 201 Oakland Athletics, 56, 161–162 Obama, Barack, 217–218 objectives, identifying, 139 object recognition, 7, 28–29 Olympics, Rio, 114–115 omitted variables, 62 one-shot learning, 60 On Intelligence (Hawkins), 39 Open AI, 210 optimization, search engine, 64 oracles, 23 organizational structure, 161–162 Osborne, Michael, 149 Otto, 157–158 outcomes in decision making, 74–76, 134–138 job redesign and, 142 outsourcing, 169–170, 171 Page, Larry, 179 Paravisini, Daniel, 66–67 pattern recognition, 145–147 Pavlov, Ivan, 183 payoff calculations, 78–81 in drug discovery, 136 judgment in, 87–88 Pell, Barney, 2 performance, trade-offs between learning and, 181–182, 187 performance reviews, 172–173 photography digital, 14 sports, automation of, 114–115 Pichai, Sundar, 179–180 Piketty, Thomas, 213 Pilbara, Australia, mining in, 112–114 policy, 3, 210 power calculations, 48 prediction, 23–30 about the present, 23–24 behavior affected by, 23 bias in, 34–35 complements to, 15 consequences of cheap, 29 credit card fraud prevention and, 24–25 in decision making, 74–76, 134–138 definition of, 13, 24 by exception, 67–68 human strengths in, 60 human weaknesses in, 54–58 improvements in, 25–29 as intelligence, 2–3, 29, 31–41 in language translation, 25–27 machine weaknesses in, 58–65 made cheap, 13–15 selling, 176–177 techniques, 13 unanticipated correlations and, 36–37 of what a human would do, 95–102 predictive text, 130 preferences, 88–90, 96–97, 98 selling consumer, 176–177 presidential elections, 59 prices effects of reduced AI, 9–11 human judgment in, 100 sales causality and, 63–64 for ZipRecruiter, 93–94 privacy issues, 19, 49, 98 China and, 219–220 country differences in, 219–221 data collection, 189–190 probabilistic programming, 38, 40 processes. See work flows Project Apollo, 164 Putin, Vladimir, 217 Qi Lu, 219 quality risks, 198–199 QWERTY keyboards, 129–130 racial profiling, 195–196 radiologists, 55–56, 108–109, 145–148 recruitment, 127–129 reengineering, 123–135 Reengineering the Corporation (Hammer and Champy), 123–134 regression, 13 failures of, 36–37 multivariate, 33–34 in predicting churn, 32–35 reinforcement learning, 13, 145, 183–184 Rekimoto, Jun, 26 research and development, 218–221 return on investment (ROI), 156, 198–199 reverse causality, 62 reverse-engineering, 202–204 reward function, 79–80, 172–173 engineering, 92–94, 174 strategy alignment and, 162 Rio Tinto, 113–114 risks and risk management, 19, 195–206 biases in job ads and, 195–198 decision making and, 108–109 liability and, 195–198 quality and, 198–199 security, 199–205 society and, 209–224 Rivers, Lynn, 218–219 Robotlandia, 211 robots Asimov’s laws of robotics and, 115 grasping problem with, 144–145 if-then logic and, 104–109 mail delivery, 103 moon-based, 115 quick responses and, 114–115 uncertainty problems and, 103–104 Rockefeller Foundation, 31 Roomba, 104 Rose, Geordie, 145 Rosenberg, Nathan, 182–183 Rumsfeld, Donald, 58 Rush (rock band), 73 Russakovsky, Olga, 28–29 Russia, 217 sabermetrics, 56, 161–162 Salesforce, 190 satisficing, 107–109 scale, 67 Schoar, Antoinette, 66–67 school bus drivers, 149–150 Schumpeter, Joseph, 215 search engines, 50, 64, 216 security risks, 199–205 self-driving vehicles.


Know Thyself by Stephen M Fleming

Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, citation needed, computer vision, confounding variable, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, global pandemic, higher-order functions, index card, Jeff Bezos, l'esprit de l'escalier, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, patient HM, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, side project, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury

In the more prosaic language of neuroscience, we offload well-learned tasks to unconscious, subordinate levels of action control, intervening only where necessary.4 Not all of us can engage in the finger acrobatics required for playing Chopin or Liszt. But many of us regularly engage in a similarly remarkable motor skill on another type of keyboard. I am writing this book on a laptop equipped with a standard QWERTY keyboard, named for the first six letters of the top row. The history of why the QWERTY keyboard, designed by politician and amateur inventor Christopher Latham Sholes in the 1860s, came into being is murky (the earliest typewriters instead had all twenty-six letters of the alphabet organized in a row from A to Z, which its inventors assumed would be the most efficient arrangement).

We know this because one of the easiest ways to screw up someone’s typing is to ask them to type only the letters in a sentence that would normally be typed by the left (or right) hand. Try sitting at a keyboard and typing only the left-hand letters in the sentence “The cat on the mat” (on a QWERTY keyboard you should produce something like “Tecatteat,” depending on whether you normally hit the space bar with your right or left thumb). It is a fiendishly difficult and frustrating task to assign letters to hands. And yet the lower-level loop controlling our keystrokes does this continuously, at up to seventy words per minute!


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Technologies reinforce the status quo once a communication regime is put in place. Technologies are “path dependent,” meaning that once they are in place with a certain technological standard, it is very difficult and expensive to replace them unless there is a major technological revolution, even if they have considerable flaws. We still live with the limitations of the QWERTY keyboard, to take one example, though the rationale for that system disappeared generations ago.31 Likewise, communication technologies invariably have unintended consequences—the more significant the technology, the greater the unintended consequences. Both of these features point to the need for as careful and thoughtful an approach to communication policy making as possible.

Also not surprisingly, the impetus for this change is due as much to commercial imperatives as it is to the nature of the technology. See Alexandra Alter, “Your E-Book Is Reading You,” Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2012. 29. Carr, Shallows, 116. 30. John Naughton, What You Really Need to Know About the Internet: From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg (London: Quercus, 2012). 31. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down typists so early typewriters could function without the keys jamming. If a keyboard were to be designed for optimal efficiency, it would use a different layout. 32. Cited in Rebecca MacKinnon, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 53. 33.

See CEOs’ pay; wages PayPal, 138, 141, 164 pay-per-view model, 147 paywalls, 186–87 PCs. See personal computers The Penguin and the Leviathan (Benkler), 6–7 Pentagon. See U.S. Department of Defense Pentagon Papers, 169 Peoria Journal-Star, 177 periodicals, 93, 156, 176, 205, 237n15. See also newspapers; press subsidies personal computers, 101, 135, 218. See also QWERTY keyboard; tablet computers personalized advertising, 188 personalized news stories, 187–88 Philadelphia, 176–77 Philadelphia Inquirer, 176, 177 Philippines, 192–93 Phillips, Kevin, 18 phone industry. See telephone industry phone tapping. See wiretapping photo repositories, digital. See digital photo repositories Pickett, Kate, 36 Pierson, Paul, 30 piracy, fear of, 123, 125, 126.


Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

Norms and standards can also improve the confidence of potential customers, as people can be unsettled by competition between companies for the right or wrong technological basis (see Box 24.1). Box 24.1. Characterisation of Standards Good Standards, Bad Standards Standards can not only accelerate the innovation process, but also strengthen a company’s market position with its products. The QWERTY keyboard configuration illustrates how a suboptimal technology gained almost total acceptance. The Remington Arms Company received complaints that their typewriters often jammed when typists worked too rapidly. To solve this problem, a Remington engineer had the idea of separating commonly connected letters, such as q and u.

Dvorak subsequently developed a more efficient keyboard, where the right hand does more typing than the left and most typing is carried out on the home and middle row of the keys, including the most common letters. Cassingham [20] estimates that professional typists are 20 per cent faster using a Dvorak keyboard and that, during an eight-hour day, a typist’s hand travels 16 times further on a QWERTY keyboard than on a Dvorak one. Yet, puzzlingly, 99 per cent of all current keyboards are QWERTYbased. QWERTY was a standard for more than 20 years before Dvorak’s keyboard appeared. Norms and Standards 243 The development of the Boeing 777 is an example of how the standardisation of data transfer between the companies involved in a project can significantly reduce costs and time.

The product core can then be standardized; economies of scale can be created in production and marketing. Firms entering the industry during exploratory phases can be led down the wrong technological path, but have tremendous winning potential if they choose the right one. As the example of the QWERTY keyboards shows, dominant designs don’t have to be better than alternative architectures [20]. They simply embody a set of key features and functions that come together at a certain time due to technological path dependence and need not be based on functionality, practicality or customer preference. With autonomous driving, the debate about the dominant design plays a particularly important role in the development of V-to-V communication (Declaration of Amsterdam).


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

On the very first machines, the letters of the keyboard had been arranged in alphabetical order, and the major cause of the jamming was the proximity of commonly occurring letter pairs (such as D and E, or S and T). The easiest way around this jamming problem was to arrange the letters in the type-basket so that they were less likely to collide. The result was the QWERTY keyboard layout that is still with us. (Incidentally, a vestige of the original alphabetical ordering can be seen on the middle row of the keyboard, where the sequence FGHJKL appears.) Densmore made two attempts to get the Sholes typewriter manufactured by small engineering workshops, but they both lacked the necessary capital and skill to manufacture successfully and cheaply.

Palm never achieved more than a 3 percent market share and was quickly overshadowed in its primary market—business users—by Research in Motion (RIM), a Canadian specialist in paging, messaging, data capture, and modem equipment that launched the PDA “Blackberry” in 1999. Blackberry benefited in the business and government handset markets from RIM’s private data network, user-friendly e-mail, and miniature QWERTY keyboard. Microsoft, which came late to the PDA/smartphone platform business by licensing Windows-based mobile operating systems, had some success in the enterprise market before smartphones became consumer oriented and the touchscreen-based Apple iOS and Android systems rose to dominance. While Apple’s Macintosh was a technical success at its launch in 1984, it helped Microsoft far more than Apple itself (by showing the dominant operating-system company the way to a user-friendly graphics-based operating system).

The most recent biography of Watson is Kevin Maney’s The Maverick and His Machine (2003). JoAnne Yates’ Structuring the Information Age (2005) is an important account of how interactions between IBM and its life-insurance customers helped shape IBM’s products. Page 22“let them in on the ground floor”: Quoted in Bliven 1954, p. 48. Page 23the QWERTY keyboard layout that is still with us: See David 1986. Page 23“typewriter was the most complex mechanism mass produced by American industry”: Hoke 1990, p. 133. Page 23“reporters, lawyers, editors, authors, and clergymen”: Cortada 1993a, p. 16. Page 23“Gentlemen: Please do not use my name”: Quoted in Bliven 1954, p. 62.


pages: 580 words: 125,129

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System by Chet Haase

Andy Rubin, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, commoditize, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Ken Thompson, lock screen, machine readable, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, pull request, QWERTY keyboard, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, web application

Nick and his team realized a richer Internet experience wasn’t going to happen without a better keyboard experience. Doing anything interesting on the Web just wasn’t feasible, or pleasant, with the traditional 12-key dial pads on phones at that time.33 So the team was looking specifically for potential devices with QWERTY keyboards.34 T-Mobile was already working with RIM,35 and had convinced them to add phone capabilities to their previously data-only BlackBerry device. But the form factor of those devices (especially with the belt clip popular with those users) wasn’t going to appeal to consumers, who were looking for something less business-centric.

“I touched some other parts of the software, but most of my work went into the text display and editing system. The earliest development hardware was candybar207 phones with only a 12-key numeric keypad, which is why there is a MultiTapKeyListener class for that style of agonizingly slow text entry. Fortunately, we quickly moved on to the Sooner development hardware with a tiny QWERTY keyboard instead. On the left is the early candybar phone, nicknamed Tornado, which the team used until the later Sooner device. The phone on the right is an HTC Excalibur, which was the basis for Sooner after some industrial design modifications (and replacing the Windows Mobile OS with Android). (Picture courtesy Eric Fischer) “I made sure to handle bidirectional text layout from the beginning, which was sufficient for Hebrew, but not for Arabic.”208 Software engineers tend to get emotionally attached to their code, and that was the case for Eric, who displayed his passion in the license plate for his car.

September 23: T-Mobile G1 Announcement Google didn’t gather the media for the developer-targeted SDK launch, but they did get up on stage at a press conference in New York City with T-Mobile to announce the consumer phone that would run 1.0. The same day as the 1.0 SDK shipped, representatives talked about the new device, and T-Mobile issued a press release entitled, “T-Mobile Unveils the T-Mobile G1 –the First Phone Powered by Android.” The G1 device would have a touchscreen, a slide-to-open QWERTY keyboard, and a trackball. It would run Google Maps, search, and it would offer apps from Android Market. It would come with a three-megapixel camera and would run on T-Mobile’s new 3G network. It would sell for $179 on contract, or $399 unlocked, starting in the U.S. and expanding to other countries in the following weeks.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

We may seem largely locked-in to the human-controlled car but daunting as the change may seem, the push and pull factors for change are at least worthy of consideration. But “better” technologies don’t always automatically take over. Those who feel the human-driven car has outlived its usefulness, need to remember that less than ideal, or outdated reasons for retention of older technologies, can and do persist. For example, the QWERTY keyboard[360] was designed in the 1870s to slow down typists but is still in use today despite there no longer being any mechanical reason for it to remain. Will human drivers still be in use in future decades when they are similarly no longer required? Even assuming an unlikely smooth uptake, the journey of driverless cars to market maturity will take 20 years or more to complete.

MOD=AJPERES [348] https://www.automotiveisac.com/best-practices/ [349] https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/23/connected-car-security-separating-fear-from-fact/ [350] http://www.raymondloewy.com/about.html [351] https://www.ft.com/content/97a04f76-3494-11e7-99bd-13beb0903fa3 [352] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35301279 [353] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF [354] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-driverless/ [355] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment [356] https://www.scribd.com/document/333075344/Apple-Comments-on-Federal-Automated-Vehicles-Policy [357] Remarks at Infrastructure Week, May 2017 [358] Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Carlota Perez, 2002 [359] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/14/move-over-humans-the-robocars-are-coming/ [360] https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/a-brief-history-of-the-qwerty-keyboard/ [361] http://www.wsj.com/articles/could-self-driving-cars-spell-the-end-of-ownership-1448986572 [362] https://www.morganstanley.com/articles/autonomous-cars-the-future-is-now [363] https://www.wired.com/2016/04/american-cities-nowhere-near-ready-self-driving-cars/ [364] Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 6 [365] http://time.com/4236980/against-human-driving/ [366] https://www.ft.com/content/e961f914-6ba3-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c [367] Paul Roberts, The Impulse Society: What's Wrong With Getting What We Want, 2014 [368] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2033076,00.html [369] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/da5d033c-8e1c-11e1-bf8f-00144feab49a.html#axzz1t4qPww6r [370] http://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2016/04/29/traffic-future-driverless-cars


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

But there is so much more than that. In 1968, Douglas Engelbart showed off the oN-Line System in what has become known as “The Mother of All Demos.” Engelbart and his team had developed a number of technologies at Stanford Research Institute with ARPA funding that went on to define the computing experience: the mouse, the QWERTY keyboard, bitmapped screens, and even the ability of users at multiple sites to edit the same document simultaneously. Think of it like a very rudimentary Google Docs. These technologies, demonstrated more than fifty years ago, still make up the core of the computing experience—even as Apple promotes its products as revolutions for making minor design tweaks and spec bumps every year or two.

See also specific locations Norton, Peter, 16, 124 Norway, 81–2, 209–10 not in my backyard (NIMBY), 164 NotPetya malware, 129 Noyce, Robert, 40–1 NSF, 55 NSFNET, 50–1 Nuro, 172–3 Ofo, 170–1 oil shocks, 203–4, 226 O’Mara, Margaret, 38 oN-Line System, 54–5 Organization of American States, 76 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, 203 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 76–7 Oslo, Norway, 209–10 Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, 225 Page, Larry, 121 Paris, France bike lanes in, 171 highway system in, 210–1 Paris Agreement, 74 parking free, 30 in Oslo, 209–10 particulate matter, in emissions, 84–5 pedestrians cities without, 191–3 deaths of, 16–7, 31–2 jaywalkers, 124–7, 215–6 Pennsylvania, autonomous robots in, 175 personal computers, compared with automobiles, 36–7 Peters, Benjamin, 57 Pishevar, Shervin, 105 PM10, 84 Portugal, lithium mine in, 226 Prius, 122 Proposition 22 (California), 111–2 public abundance, campaign for, 222 Public Utilities Commission (PUC), 110, 111 Quayside, 229–30 Quebec, Canada, 80 QWERTY keyboard, 54–5 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 118 rate wars, for taxis, 96 Reagan, Ronald, 45, 48 recession, 24, 182, 199 Red Party, 209 regional commercial networks, 51 Renault-Nissan, 70 renewable energy, 190 Revenge of the Electric Car (film), 70–1, 81 Rickenbacker, E.V., 151 ride-hailing services.


The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida

QWERTY keyboard

Naoki’s autism is severe enough to make spoken communication pretty much impossible, even now. But thanks to an ambitious teacher and his own persistence, he learnt to spell out words directly onto an alphabet grid. A Japanese alphabet grid is a table of the basic forty Japanese hiragana letters, and its English counterpart is a copy of the QWERTY keyboard, drawn onto a card and laminated. Naoki communicates by pointing to the letters on these grids to spell out whole words, which a helper at his side then transcribes. These words build up into sentences, paragraphs and entire books. ‘Extras’ around the side of the grids include numbers, punctuation, and the words ‘Finished’, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

The innovations that music inspired turned out to unlock other doors in the adjacent possible, in fields seemingly unrelated to music, the way the “Instrument Which Plays by Itself” carved out a pathway that led to textile design and computer software. Seeking out new sounds led us to create new tools—which invariably suggested new uses for those tools. Legendary violin maker Stradivari’s workshop Consider one of the most essential and commonly used inventions of the computer age: the QWERTY keyboard. Many of us today spend a significant portion our waking hours pressing keys with our fingertips to generate a sequence of symbols on a screen or page: typing up numbers in a spreadsheet, writing e-mails, or tapping out texts on virtual keyboards displayed on smartphone screens. Anyone who works at a computer all day likely spends far more time interacting with keyboards than with more celebrated modern inventions like automobiles.

See also computer technology computer networks of the early 1990s, 170 digital simulations that trigger emotions, 184–85 frequency hopping, 100–101 global creation, 201–202 “global village” of Minecraft, 201 as illustrated in the work of Banu Masu and al-Jazari, 3–5, 4 multiplane camera, 179–81, 180 music’s role in developing, 91–92, 100–101 QWERTY keyboard, 86–87 textiles “Calico Madams,” 28 cotton, 26–28 East India Company, 28 economic fears regarding the import of, 28–29 French weaving industry, 79–83 inventions to aid in the production of fabric, 29, 30 Jacquard loom, 80–83, 81 vivid colors of chintz and calico, 26–27, 27 theft.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In addition, the first row was provided with all of the letters in the word “typewriter,” so that salesmen, new to typing, could type the word using just one row. Quickly, however, mechanical improvements made faster typing possible, and new keyboards placing letters according to frequency were presented. But it was too late: There was no going back. By the 1890s, typists across America were used to QWERTY keyboards, having learned to zip away on new versions of them that did not stick so easily. Retraining them would have been expensive and, ultimately, unnecessary, so QWERTY was passed down the generations, and even today we use the queer QWERTY configuration on computer keyboards, where jamming is a mechanical impossibility.

., 84 Prusiner, Stanley, 240 psychiatry, 232, 233–34, 235, 279 psychotherapy, 41–42 public policy, 93 experiments in, 26, 273–74 uncertainty and, 54, 56 QED moments, 355–57 quantum gravity, 297–98 quantum mechanics, 25, 114, 192–93, 234, 322, 356 entanglement in, 330–32 “many worlds” interpretation of, 69–70 thought experiments in, 28 wave-particle duality in, 28, 296–98 quantum tunneling, 297 quarks, 190–91, 297 Quaternary mass extinction, 362 QWERTY keyboards, 285–86 Ramachandran, V. S., 242–45 Randall, Lisa, 192–93 randomness, 105–8 rational unconscious, 146–49 ratios, 186 Read, Leonard, 258 realism, naïve, 214 Reality Club, xxix recursive structure, 246–49 reductionism, 278 Rees, Martin, 1–2 regression, 235 ARISE and, 235–36 relationalism, 223 relativism, 223, 300 relativity, 25, 64, 72, 234, 297 religion, 5, 6, 114 creationism, 268–69 self-transcendence and, 212–13 supernatural beings in, 182–83 and thinking in time vs. outside of time, 222 repetition, in manufacture, 171 replicability, 373–75 Revkin, Andrew, 386–88 Ridley, Matt, 257–58 risk, 56–57, 68–71, 339 security theater and, 262 statistical thinking and, 260 risk aversion, 339 risk literacy, 259–61 Ritchie, Matthew, 237–39 Robertson, Pat, 10 Roman Empire, 128 root-cause analysis, 303–4 Rosen, Jay, 203–5 Rovelli, Carlo, 51–52 Rowan, David, 305–6 Rucker, Rudy, 103–4 Rushkoff, Douglas, 41–42 Russell, Bertrand, 123 Rwanda, 345 Saatchi, Charles, 307–8 safety, proving, 281 Saffo, Paul, 334–35 Sagan, Carl, 273, 282 Sakharov, Andrei, 88 Salcedo-Albarán, Eduardo, 345–48 Sampson, Scott D., 289–91 Sapolsky, Robert, 278–80 Sasselov, Dimitar, 13–14, 292–93 SAT tests, 47, 89 scale analysis, 184–87 scale transitions, 371–72 scaling laws, 162 Schank, Roger, 23–24 Schmidt, Eric, 305 schools, see education Schrödinger’s cat, 28 Schulz, Kathryn, 30–31 science, 192–93 discoveries in, 109–11, 240–41, 257 humanities and, 364–66 method of, 273–74 normal, 242–43, 244 pessimistic meta-induction from history of, 30–31 replicability in, 373–75 statistically significant difference and, 378–80 theater vs., 262–63 scientific concept, 19, 22 scientific lifestyle, 19–22 scientific proof, 51, 52 scuba divers, 40 seconds, 163 security engineering, 262 security in information-sharing, 75–76 Segre, Gino, 28–29 Sehgal, Tino, 119 Seife, Charles, 105–8 Sejnowski, Terrence, 162–64 self, 212 ARISE and, 235–36 consciousness, 217 Other and, 292–93 separateness of, 289–91 subselves and the modular mind, 129–31 transcendence of, 212–13 self-control, 46–48 self-model, 214 self-serving bias, 37–38, 40 Seligman, Martin, 92–93 Semelweiss, Ignaz, 36 senses, 43, 139–42 umwelt and, 143–45 sensory desktop, 135–38 September 11 attacks, 386 serendipity, 101–2 serotonin, 230 sexuality, 78 sexual selection, 228, 353–54 Shamir, Adi, 76 SHAs (shorthand abstractions), xxx, 228, 277, 395–97 graceful, 120–23 Shepherd, Jonathan, 274 Shermer, Michael, 157–59 shifting baseline syndrome, 90–91 Shirky, Clay, xxvii, 198, 338 signal detection theory, 389–93 Signal Detection Theory and Psychophysics (Green and Swets), 391 signals, 228 Simon, Herbert, 48 simplicity, 325–27 skeptical empiricism, 85 skepticism, 242, 243, 336 skydivers, 39 Smallberg, Gerald, 43–45 smell, sense of, 139–42, 143–44 Smith, Adam, 258 Smith, Barry C., 139–42 Smith, Hamilton, 166 Smith, Laurence C., 310–11 Smith, John Maynard, 96 Smolin, Lee, 221–24 social microbialism, 16 social networks, 82, 262, 266 social sciences, 273 Socrates, 340 software, 80, 246 Solomon Islands, 361 something for nothing, 84 specialness, see uniqueness and specialness Sperber, Dan, 180–83 spider bites, 68, 69, 70 spoon bending, 244 stability, 128 Standage, Tom, 281 stars, 7, 128, 301 statistically significant difference, 378–80 statistics, 260, 356 stem-cell research, 56, 69–70 stock market, 59, 60–61, 151, 339 Flash Crash and, 60–61 Pareto distributions and, 199, 200 Stodden, Victoria, 371–72 stomach ulcers, 240 Stone, Linda, 240–41 stress, 68, 70, 71 string theories, 113, 114, 299, 322 subselves and the modular mind, 129–31 success, failure and, 79–80 sun, 1, 7, 11, 164 distance between Earth and, 53–54 sunk-cost trap, 121 sunspots, 110 Superorganism, The (Hölldobler and Wilson), 196–97 superorganisms, 196 contingent, 196–97 supervenience, 276, 363–66 Susskind, Leonard, 297 Swets, John, 391 symbols and images, 152–53 synapses, 164 synesthesia, 136–37 systemic equilibrium, 237–39 Szathmáry, Eörs, 96 Taleb, Nassim, 315 TANSTAAFL (“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”), 84 Tapscott, Don, 250–53 taste, 140–42 tautologies, 355–56 Taylor, F.


pages: 413 words: 106,479

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

.”* Here’s a few patterns we can observe in keysmash: Almost always begins with “a” Often begins with “asdf” Other common subsequent characters are g, h, j, k, l, and ;, but less often in that order, and often alternating or repeating within this second group Frequently occurring characters are the “home row” of keys that the fingers are on in rest position, suggesting that keysmashers are also touch typists If any characters appear beyond the middle row, top-row characters (qwe . . .) are more common than bottom-row characters (zxc . . .) Generally either all lowercase or all caps, and rarely contains numbers Sure, a lot of these patterns relate to the fact that we’re mashing on the home row of the QWERTY keyboard rather than using random-letter generators, but they’re reinforced by our social expectations. I conducted an informal survey, asking if people retype their keysmash if it doesn’t look, er, smashing enough. While there were a few keysmash purists, who posted whatever came out, I found that the majority of people will delete and remash if they don’t like what it looks like, plus a significant minority who will adjust a few letters.

The hash mark itself, also known as the number sign, pound sign, or octothorpe, dates back hundreds of years, originally a hastily written version of the abbreviation lb from Latin libra pondo, “a pound by weight,” as in 3# potatoes @ 10¢/#. In the early days of the internet, the hash mark, as a relatively underutilized symbol available on a standard QWERTY keyboard, was repurposed for a variety of technical functions. One of these was organizational. In chatrooms, you could type in “join #canada” or “join #hamradio” to talk with Canadians or ham radio enthusiasts. On the early social bookmarking site del.icio.us and the early photo-sharing site Flickr, you could “tag” your links or pictures with relevant categories like #funny or #sunset, borrowing a metaphor from how a tag on a shirt labels it with metadata about its price or creator.


pages: 210 words: 42,271

Programming HTML5 Applications by Zachary Kessin

barriers to entry, continuous integration, fault tolerance, Firefox, functional programming, Google Chrome, higher-order functions, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, QWERTY keyboard, SQL injection, web application, WebSocket

In many cases, on a mobile device, changing the input type will also cause the device to put up a custom keyboard to enable the user to enter the right kind of data. For instance, if type is set to number, the device can put up a numeric keypad. For a type of tel, the device can put up a numeric keypad that looks a little different but is optimized for entering phone numbers. For a type of email, the keyboard will be a standard QWERTY keyboard but modified for the entry of email addresses. One input type that is especially useful for smartphone applications is the speech input type: <input type="text" x-webkit-speech/>. The speech tag will take what the user said and translate it into text. My Android phone, for instance, has a Google Search widget that can search by voice.


pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

The idea of an individual key for each letter was turned into a working solution primarily by a former newspaper editor, Christopher Sholes, in Milwaukee. On a third try, he produced a small number of working machines that outpaced manual scribes, one of which, from 1872–1873, survives. It is recognizably a modern mechanical typewriter, complete with a QWERTY keyboard. (The original keyboard was in alphabetical order, but Sholes realized that when closely spaced keys, like s and t, were struck in sequence, they tended to jam. The QWERTY sequence was the random outcome of multiple key rearrangements to reduce high-frequency, closely spaced sequences. The DFGH sequence in the middle row is a remnant of the original layout.)

The new company, the Standard Typewriter Company, renamed itself Remington Typewriter in 1902 and was later part of Sperry Rand. Early Surviving Scholes Typewriter, c. 1872–1873. The typewriter developed primarily by a Milwaukee editor, Christopher Scholes, was the first to look like a recognizable modern typewriter. Note the QWERTY keyboard. Schole’s first keyboard was alphabetical, but closely-spaced frequent companion letters tended to jam. The new keyboard arrangement was the random outcome of Schole’s trial-and-error method of addressing the problem. By the 1890s, there was a host of competitors—Hall Typewriters, American Writing Machine, Oliver, L.


pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Because these multiply, we can intuitively compare different longterm effects: between two alternatives, if one is ten times as persistent as another, that will outweigh the alternative being eight times as significant. To illustrate, suppose that we’re in the late nineteenth century and the world is currently on track to use QWERTY keyboards, but if we choose to, we can shift the world to use Dvorak keyboards.5 In the table below, I’ll use X’s to represent the course of the counterfactual possible world p where we make Dvorak the standard, and I’ll use O’s to represent the course of the status quo world q, where QWERTY is the standard, until time period 4, when Dvorak becomes the standard.

That is, p and q could also be propositions that specify (at least) for how long the world would be in state s and how much value this would contribute. (Such propositions could in turn be cashed out as sets of possible worlds in which they are true, though this is not required to use the SPC framework.) 5. I use this example to illustrate, although the claim that QWERTY keyboards are an example of bad lock-in seems spurious. It’s often claimed that the QWERTY layout was designed to slow down users of typewriters in order to prevent jams, but this is an urban legend. And evidence for Dvorak’s superiority is scant; rather, Dvorak’s reputation seems to be largely the product of advertising and biased studies run by August Dvorak himself (Liebowitz and Margolis 1990). 6.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

In the most famous metaphor of chaos theory, a butterfly flapping its wings provokes a tornado thousands of miles away and days later. 18 Systems in which initial conditions affect subsequent behavior indefinitely are path dependent. 19 Path dependency is why the film industry is still based in Hollywood. The design of our computer keyboards is path dependent: the QWERTY layout was devised in the earliest days of typewriting, and although it is ergonomically inefficient, users are familiar with it and the number of QWERTY keyboards and typists is too large to make any change possible. 20 The coevolution of technology and institutions-the development of the social and economic infrastructure of rich states-has been path dependent. But path dependency in which outcomes are sensitive to small details-the problem of the butterfly and the tornado-is fatal to forecasting.

Path dependency then took over. Countries made choices dictated by their colonial masters, or by larger countries in close proximity. It is now unlikely that any major country will switch-the last to change was Sweden, which moved from left to right during one extraordinary night in 1967. The QWERTY keyboard layout is another example of a path dependent solution to a coordination problem. Standards, like keyboard layouts, are everywhere. Currency is a standard. So is Ianguage. We need to use the same money, the same words, as the people around us. Television sets need to be compatible with television broadcasts.


Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin

algorithmic management, Apple Newton, asset allocation, autism spectrum disorder, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy

In order to advance knowledge, the design thinker has to get comfortable delving into the mystery, trying to see new things or to see things in a new way. In the early days of the BlackBerry, Lazaridis saw that laptop users were demanding smaller and smaller devices, while the industry was bumping up against the size limitations of small keyboards and display screens. A standard QWERTY keyboard can only get so small before it becomes awkward and uncomfortable to use. A screen displaying all the information a user expects can be reduced only so much before it becomes unreadable or painfully cluttered. Staring at this paradox—this mystery—Lazaridis stepped back and asked what could be true.


Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

British Empire, Charles Babbage, disinformation, financial independence, global village, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, paper trading, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, technoutopianism, undersea cable

Members of the royal family also had their own private lines installed. Another popular automatic system was devised by David Hughes, a professor of music in Kentucky. Appropriately enough, given his musical background, the Hughes printer, launched in 1855, had a pianolike keyboard with alternating white and black keys, one for each letter (the modern QWERTY keyboard was not invented until twenty years later). It worked on a similar principle to that of the ABC telegraph, but with a constantly rotating "chariot," driven by clockwork, which was stopped in its tracks whenever a key was held down at the sending station. At the same moment an electromagnet activated a hammer, printing a character on a paper tape.


pages: 194 words: 54,355

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Big Tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, financial independence, Google Earth, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, TikTok, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Wall-E

—one of the less taxing requirements on the road to adulthood, and, at worst, an easy B. It turns out not to have been true. Look around and you’ll find plenty of adults hunting and pecking and overtaxing their worn-out thumbs. New grown-ups don’t know how to type. Anyone who has mastered the QWERTY keyboard knows just how excruciating it is to watch someone who doesn’t know how to type, like watching the tail of a rabbit trailing sixty feet behind its nose, humans moving at a puzzlingly slow rate against the warp speed of a 5G network. You can practically see the carpal tunnel develop in the hunt-and-pecker’s tendons as they grope for the shift key.


pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

For instance, the QWERTY keyboard has for years been the universally familiar means of typing and entering information into a computer. QWERTY, which refers to the first six keys on the left side of the third row of a keyboard, was a relic, a keyboard arrangement from the era of manual typewriters that was designed to keep the individual letter-embossing hammers from getting tangled up when the user was typing at high speed. Christie and Ording decided against altering this ubiquitous, albeit hidebound, preference. Instead, they would experiment with having a virtual QWERTY keyboard appear on the screen when you needed to type.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Because they tend to be sticky and non-ergodic, the technologies that win may not be the best-performing ones. JOS might be the superior operating system, but since Microsoft got to market first, we are all stuck with it. The costs for end users to switch operating systems are simply too high. Many inefficient technologies get entrenched simply because they were first. The classic case is the QWERTY keyboard, which was designed to slow typing on manual typewriters so that fast typists did not jam the keys. When electronic typewriters replaced manual ones and computers replaced electronic typewriters, typists still preferred QWERTY to other layouts, such as the Dvorak variant, created for fast typing, because they had originally learned on QWERTY typewriters.

The PalmPilot did not have a keyboard, so users had to learn a new way of writing with a stylus (known as Graffiti). Danger, the company that developed the Sidekick, set out to change how people used their cell phones. The first model—which they called the Hiptop, because it was chunky and surprisingly heavy, and therefore designed to be worn on the hip— not only had a QWERTY keyboard, but also a large screen that slid out to reveal a keyboard that could pivot 180 degrees. The keyboard also contained a “D-pad,” a thumb-operated four-way directional control now found on all video game controllers, with a dedicated numbers row and jump button to switch between apps. The Hiptop came with a free email account, but you could use several email accounts at the same time.


pages: 189 words: 57,632

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

How closely correlated have this person's value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the world's schema combined. Amish for QWERTY (Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003) I learned to type before I learned to write. The QWERTY keyboard layout is hard-wired to my brain, such that I can't write anything of significance without that I have a 101-key keyboard in front of me. This has always been a badge of geek pride: unlike the creaking pen-and-ink dinosaurs that I grew up reading, I'm well adapted to the modern reality of technology.


pages: 272 words: 52,204

Android 3. 0 Application Development Cookbook by Kyle Merrifield Mew

Google Chrome, QWERTY keyboard, social web, web application

The Configuration object provides us with many useful fields such as Configuration.orientation, which we used here and which can also take the value ORIENTATION_SQUARE. The next table contains a list of a few of the more useful Configuration fields and their associated constants: Configuration.field constants .hardKeyboardHidden HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_NO, HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_YES. .keyboard KEYBOARD_NOKEYS, KEYBOARD_QWERTY, KEYBOARD_12KEY. .navigation NAVIGATION_NONAV, NAVIGATION_DPAD, NAVIGATION_TRACKBALL, NAVIGATION_WHEEL. .navigationHidden NAVIGATIONHIDDEN_NO, NAVIGATIONHIDDEN_YES. .touchscreen TOUCHSCREEN_NOTOUCH, TOUCHSCREEN_STYLUS, TOUCHSCREEN_FINGER. These configuration fields are extremely useful when you consider that we have little idea in advance about what hardware will be available for our applications in the wild.


Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual by Peter Meyers

computer age, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, lock screen, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex

For starters, there are the three biggies that every touchscreen typist nowadays expects: the Fire auto-inserts an apostrophe in common contractions (I’m, Don’t); two taps of the space bar gets you a period; and you get auto-correct for common misspellings (“teh” gets changed to “the”). Keep an eye, as well, on the row above the traditional QWERTY keyboard. Here’s where you get an ever-changing lineup of handy helpers. Before you start typing, this row sports a lineup of commonly used punctuation (exclamation point, question mark, @ sign, and so on). When you start typing, those guys disappear and in their place a horizontally swipeable row of auto-complete suggestions appear.


pages: 244 words: 66,599

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

Seeing this, I had to admit that anyone who learned how to play this thing would have a huge advantage over the laggards wed to our current antique. But to get this part of his system in the mainstream, Engelbart would have had to overthrow a technology entrenched more doggedly than the Maginot Line-the QWERTY typewriter keyboard. Everyone knows what a dog that interface is. If it seems like the QWERTY keyboard was laid out deliberately to slow down speed typists, that's because it was. If people typed too fast, they would overwhelm the machine-the keys would jam. So inefficiency was built in. A good idea for the nineteenth century, when text was produced by pounding a lever to make an impact on a piece of paper, but not so good a hundred years later, when hitting a key sends electrical impulses to a silicon chip.


pages: 232 words: 71,237

Kill It With Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems by Marianne Bellotti

anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business logic, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, Dennis Ritchie, DevOps, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, iterative process, Ken Thompson, loose coupling, microservices, minimum viable product, Multics, no silver bullet, off-by-one error, platform as a service, pull request, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Stallman, risk tolerance, Schrödinger's Cat, side project, software as a service, Steven Levy, systems thinking, web application, Y Combinator, Y2K

If a vendor replaced rm by, say, remove, then every book describing Unix would no longer apply to its system, and every shell script that calls rm would also no longer apply. Such a vendor might as well stop implementing the POSIX standard while it was at it. A century ago, fast typists were jamming their keyboards, so engineers designed the QWERTY keyboard to slow them down. Computer keyboards don’t jam, but we’re still living with QWERTY today. A century from now, the world will still be living with rm.10 Just as programmers are now writing lines of code that would fit on a punch card, they also use operating systems whose interfaces were designed to best fit teletype keyboards.


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

That means there’s no guarantee that a non-English email or text will display correctly. Web addresses are still nearly all in ASCII, which is why the most popular website in China is accessed by typing baidu.com, not 百度.中文网. And even if it did have a Chinese web address, users would still have to use QWERTY keyboards—the global standard, designed in New York around the English alphabet—to type it. Roman characters are featured first on the search engine Baidu, the most visited web page in China. The dominance of English on the internet is, in a way, the result of free choices. No government commanded it, no army enforces it.

Bureau of Puerto Rico; annexation of; chemical weapons tests on residents of; citizenship of residents of; “commonwealth” status of; constitution of; demands for statehood of; disease in; Division of Territories and Island Possessions in charge of; English language in; governors of; on Greater United States map; hurricanes in; independence movement in; industrialization of; mainland indifference toward; medical experiments in; migration to mainland from; National Guard of; nationalism in; nuclear weapons in; population of; rebellion in; slums in; in Spanish Empire; sterilization of women in; sugar plantations in; supporters of statehood for; University of; during war with Spain; during World War II Pulitzer Prize Python coding language Quakers quality control Quapaws Quezon, Manuel Quezon City (Philippines) Quincy, Josiah Quirino, Elpidio, and family Qutb, Sayyid QWERTY keyboard Radio Free Europe Radio Liberation (later Liberty) railroads Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (Roosevelt) Rand McNally Rangoon (Burma) Rankin, Bill Ready Reference Atlas of the World Réard, Louis reconcentration Recto, Claro Red Cross Reischauer, Edwin rendition, extraordinary Republican Party; Puerto Rican Revolutionary War Rhoads, Cornelius Packard (“Dusty”) Rhodes, Cecil Rhodesia Ricarte, Gen.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

The essence of the plot is that the hero falls in love with his digital assistant, with intriguing consequences. Although he uses keyboards occasionally, most of the time they communicate verbally. There will be times when we want to communicate with our “friends” without making a sound. Portable “qwerty” keyboards will not suffice, and virtual hologram keyboards may take too long to arrive – and they may feel too weird to use even if and when they do arrive. Communication via brain-computer interfaces will take still longer to become feasible, so perhaps we will all have to learn a new interface – maybe a one-handed device looking something like an ocarina[cxlv].


pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

And that’s just for accessing the Internet over computers. The mobile Web is huge in Indonesia, and BlackBerrys—not iPhones—are the hip device. You can You can buy BlackBerry data service by the day on prepaid phones, no contract required. For those who can’t afford a BlackBerry, a local company cal ed Nexian sel s Qwerty-keyboard knockoffs from China for a fraction of the price, customized with Indonesian content like local bands and artists. In just a few years, Nexian has surged from a “nobody” to a company sel ing more than 5 mil ion handsets per year, and eating into Nokia’s market share. The Indonesian desire for keyboards—not touchscreens—isn’t surprising given that the country’s Web obsession is built on checking in, Tweeting, and messaging.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

Although its innovative powers for dramatic economic change are clearly evident, it has also created chronic instability and inequality. Economists call the way countries are locked into a predetermined future “path dependency” because it’s difficult to break free of past ways of organizing various forms of economic activity. A classic example is the QWERTY keyboard, which once established makes it difficult to shift to another format. See Paul A. David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economic Review, 75, no. 2 (1985): 332–337. David Kusnet, Lawrence Mishel, and Ruy Teixeira, Talking Past Each Other: What Everyday Americans Really Think (and Elites Don’t Get) about the Economy (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2006).


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

It was clunky, but alongside calls it could manage emails, and even faxes. 30 years earlier, in 1966, in her novel Rocannon’s World, sci-fi writer and general genius Ursula K. Le Guin had devised the ansible – really a texting/email device that worked between worlds. One end was fixed, the other end was portable. We would be waiting a while for that to hit Planet Earth. In 1999 Blackberry released their smartphone with the QWERTY keyboard. Like an ansible, with its keyboard and screen, the Blackberry could do calls, but its main function was email. We had to get into the 21st century for the Apple iPhone. * * * In 2007, when Apple was already making mega-money with its iPod, Steve Jobs was persuaded to ‘do’ a phone that would handle everything the iPod did, plus make calls, send emails and texts, and access the internet.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

They currently exert enough power over the US legislative process to thwart meaningful legislation at the national level.63 However, even without these special interests, some structural characteristics of our global system make it very difficult to change direction. One of these is known as technological lock-in: the fact that, once a technology is widely adopted, an infrastructure is built up around it, making change prohibitively expensive. A frequently cited example is the QWERTY keyboard, which was originally designed for its inefficiency in an attempt to slow down the rate of typing and therefore prevent early typewriter keys from hitting each other. More efficiently laid-out keyboards can double typing speeds, and yet it has been impossible for them to make inroads because everyone is used to the older, inefficient design.

., 311 Presocratics, 146, 148–49, 158, 236, 243 Priestley, Joseph, 315 Prigogine, Ilya, 366 progress human, 78, 420 moral, 432, 434, 440 technological, 410, 431, 440 Western view of, 16, 29, 400–401, 417, 434 Protestantism, 237–38, 245, 273, 346–47, 378 ethic, Protestant, 237–38, 312, 378 Puritans and, 238 Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture, 133–39 Anatolian farming hypothesis and, 134, 624 creation myth of, 137–38 dualism, source of, 138, 489 homeland of, 133–35 Kurgan expansion, 138–39 Kurgan hypothesis and, 134, 138–39, 482–83 language family of, 133, 137, 140, 198–99, 205–207, 302 legacy of, 132–33, 140, 302 source of Greek thought, 136, 144, 150 source of Indian thought, 136, 150 source of Zoroastrian tradition, 136, 139, 150 values of, 137–38, 302, 489 See also Aryans Pseudo-Dionysius, 337 psyche, 113, 153 Ptolemy (astronomer), 319–20, 336, 337 Ptolemy (ruler), 223 Pyramid of the Sun (Mexico), 299 Pythagoras cosmology of, 150–51, 153–54, 164 Indian thought and, 154, 164 mathematics, vision of, 336–37, 340, 345 Plato, relationship with, 143 theorem, 208 travels of, 145 qi, 113, 203, 208, 329 Chinese cosmology, as basis of, 180–83 dynamism of, 181–82, 183–84 health, relation to, 181 li (principle), in relation to, 256–58 modern thought, relation to, 258–60, 271–72 in Neo-Confucian thought, 256–58, 260–62, 265, 269 Qin, Emperor, 188 Qin Jiushao, 324 quantum mechanics, 13, 258, 351–52, 353, 363–64 Quran, 246, 320, 321, 323 QWERTY keyboard, 396 Ramesses II, Pharaoh, 215 Randers, Jorgen, 429–30 reason Cartesian view of, 236–37 Chinese view of, 210, 267, 329–30 in Christian Rationalism, 342–47, 352 Christian view of, 231, 237, 338–44, 424 deification of, 158–59, 185, 190, 424–26 emotion, contrasted with, 196, 209–10, 238, 267, 362, 440–41 faith, contrasted with in Christianity, 245, 338–42, 344 in Islam, 320–24, 338 Greek view of, 148–49, 158–59, 169–71, 175, 177, 332, 336–37, 424 human uniqueness, source of, 211, 237 Indian view of, 170–72, 173, 175 Plato's view of, 155–56, 158–59, 184 Romantic view of, 196, 362 Stoic view of, 159 Taoist view of, 190–91, 210 Western view of, 16–17, 286, 440–41 reciprocal altruism, 44 reductionism, 271, 369–70 as mainstream scientific viewpoint, 357, 364, 368–70, 372–73 rejected by Romantic movement, 361–63 systems thinking, contrasted with, 14, 285, 354–55, 357–59, 365, 368–73 Reformation, 234, 245, 346–47 reincarnation in Greek thought, 153–54, 157, 164 in Indian thought, 163–64, 166, 254 religious thought agrarian culture and, 111–12 evolution of, 72–77 fear of death and, 72–73 hunter-gatherers and, 84–85, 87–88 spandrel, as a, 73–77 ren in Confucian thought, 195 in Neo-Confucian thought, 269–71 Renaissance, 251, 340, 344 Republic (Plato), 155 requerimiento, 311 reverse dominance hierarchy, 47, 463 Rhodes, Cecil, 314 Ricci, Matteo, 250, 302–303 Rig Veda (hymns), 134–36, 137, 162–63 Roman Empire, 131 Christianity in, 243–44, 300, 320, 435 decline of, 225–26, 340, 413–15, 435–36 destruction of Plato's Academy by, 159 religious tolerance of, 241, 243–44 slavery in, 299–300 Romantic movement, 196, 361–62 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques human nature, view of, 83, 91, 95, 470 Royal Society, 285–86 rta, 162, 165, 174–75 ruah, 113 Sacred Depths of Nature, The (Goodenough), 264 Sahlins, Marshall, 91 Said, Edward, 17 Saint-Simon, Henri, 388 Sanskrit, 133, 136, 137, 165, 496 Santiago theory of cognition, 14 “sapient paradox,” 69–72 Sapir, Edward, 198 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 22, 34, 198–99, 200, 205 Whorfianism, modern, 22, 201–203, 213, 496 satcitananda, 172 Saul, King, 242–43 Schrödinger, Erwin, 366, 368 Science and Civilisation in China (Needham), 185, 257–58, 327 scientific cognition, 332–33, 335–55 Christianity and, 335, 337, 340–42 Christian Rationalism as basis of, 342–44, 349–51 Scientific Revolution and, 332–33, 343, 349–51 truth, belief in universal, 351–55 Western thought, relation to, 354–55 Scientific Revolution, 16, 235, 237, 378 causes of, 318, 330–33 magnitude of, 317–18 NATURE AS MACHINE metaphor and, 282–84 as paradigm shift, 372 scientific cognition and, 332–33, 343, 349–51 sources in Greek thought, 331 uniqueness of, 325–26, 330 scientific worldview, 237, 279, 332, 378 and Christianity, 284, 335, 347–49 Christian Rationalism and, 343 universal validity, belief in, 354–55 See also reductionism; scientific cognition Scotus, John, 341 Seattle, Chief, 288, 513 sedentism, 104–106, 475–76 “selfish gene” hypothesis, 44–45, 284–85, 371, 462 self-organization, 366–68 autopoiesis in, 368, 370 Chinese cosmology and, 185, 258–60, 263, 268, 271–72, 289 cognition and, 14 emergence and, 367–69 fractal geometry and, 263, 364–65, 370, 371 human superorganism and, 427 language and, 57–58 living organisms and, 14, 285, 368–70 machine intelligence and, 422–23 mathematics and, 353–55 qi and, 181 reciprocal causality in, 20, 23–24, 368 reductionism, contrasted with, 285, 354–55 See also complex systems; systems thinking Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 311 shamanism, 88–90, 472 agrarian culture and, 88, 112, 118–19 last common source of Greek and Chinese thought, 88–89, 205 monotheism and, 123 pantheism and, 441 reincarnation and, 163–64 sources in Chinese thought, 180, 472 sources in Greek thought, 146, 150 sources in Indian thought, 163–64, 173–77, 472 Upper Paleolithic art and, 89–90, 472 Shamash, 130 shared intentionality, 45, 51, 428 Shen Kuo, 251 “shifting baseline syndrome,” 414, 419–20, 429, 431, 539 Shiva, 173 Sima Guang, 251–52 Simon, Julian, 417 Singularity, 421–28 artificial intelligence causing, 422–23 dualism and, 424–26 human superorganism and, 426–28 Kurzweil's vision of, 422, 423–26, 538–39 Singularity University, 422 Sivin, Nathan, 325–26, 330, 331, 457–58 slavery, 381, 398, 403–404, 354 Smohalla, 288 social brain hypothesis, 42–45 social intelligence, 46–49, 75, 76 Socrates, 143, 155–56, 167, 169 Solomon, King, 217 Solow, Robert, 417 “Sorcerer's Apprentice” (Goethe), 375, 382, 390, 396 soul Aquinas's view of, 360 Aristotle's view of, 359–60, 368 Chinese thought, relation to, 180, 185, 209–11, 250, 265 in Christian thought, 228–29, 230, 231–33, 234, 238, 250, 360 Gnosticism and, 228 in Greek thought, 34, 153–56, 210, 337 Hellenic view of, 360 in Indian thought (atman), 163, 166–73 in Islamic thought, 246 mind, relation to, 236–37, 424 in Platonism, 223–25 Plato's view of, 154–58, 337, 359 reason, relation to, 337 as software, 425 spirit, compared with, 113, 153, 250 See also reincarnation South Africa, 436 Soviet Union, 286, 385, 399–400 Spencer, Herbert, 314 Spenser, Edmund, 234 Speyer (German town), 246 Diet of, 273 Spinoza, Baruch, 361 spirits agrarian belief in, 112–14, 123 belief in as evolutionary spandrel, 75, 76 in Chinese thought, 113, 118–19, 180–81, 192, 193, 250, 328 in Greek thought, 146, 153, 154 hunter-gatherers’ belief in, 32–33, 84–90, 94, 174 shamanic view of, 88–90, 146, 472 soul, compared with, 113, 153, 250 in Zoroastrianism, 139 Sprat, Thomas, 285–86 stenahoria, 201 stirrups, 301–302 St.


pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The goal of continuity is to make the Internet as intuitive as possible, to make the network a natural-feeling extension of the user’s own body. Thus, any mediation between the user and the network must be eliminated. Interfaces must be as transparent as possible. The user must be able to move through the network with unfettered ease. All traces of the medium should be hidden, hence the evolution from the less intuitive “QWERTY” keyboard to technologies such as the touch screen (e.g., Palm and other PDAs) and voice recognition software. Feedback loops. As the discussion of Brecht and Enzensberger shows, the history of media has been the history of the prohibition of many-to-many communication. Many-to-many communication is a structure of communication where each receiver of information is also potentially a sender of information.


pages: 220 words: 88,994

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall by Peter Millar

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, urban sprawl, working-age population

Instead of a portable typewriter – which were never that portable – or scribbled longhand notes that had then to be read to copytakers back in London, which could lead to the sort of error that once saw the Warsaw Pact become the Walsall Pact – there was the Tandy 200. A clunky but functional ‘portable computer’ that was effectively little more than an electronic typewriter with an LCD black-on-green display, the Tandy was the journalist’s lifesaver. It had a full-sized QWERTY keyboard and was powered by four AA batteries, the sort you could buy just about anywhere in the world, even behind the Iron Curtain. There was also the benefit of being able to send your copy directly into the newspaper’s own computer systems. The miracle of written words transformed into electronic signals and transmitted over the ether is so common now that it seems antique to remember that just twenty years ago, the most successful way to do it was to affix two ‘crocodile clips’ from the Tandy’s output directly to telephone wires.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Gary Small, a psychiatrist at UCLA, has found that self-described Internet addicts feel a pleasurable mood burst or “rush” just from booting up their computers. The Internet and cellular communications are ideal vehicles for operant conditioning. SMS (Short Messaging Service) arrived on the scene in 1984.6 But using phone keyboards to type messages was an arduous task. When the Blackberry with its tiny QWERTY keyboard arrived in 1999, the messaging floodgates opened.7 Within a few years, people were continually checking their phones for good news and alerts. The last barrier was breached with the arrival of ubiquitous touch pad smartphones. Operant conditioning environments are everywhere in virtual space.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

As Elinor Ostrom observed, “The institutional analyst faces a major challenge in identifying the appropriate level of analysis relevant to addressing a particular puzzle.”37 This warning suggests that we should be open to the possibility that when the mode of production in the economy changes, its institutional needs do too. The Quebec Innu and lighthouses are cases in point. Inertia Institutions also exhibit inertia. They can persist past their sell-by date, compromising economic performance. The classic example is the QWERTY keyboard layout, which was originally devised to keep frequently used keys apart so as to reduce jamming in mechanical typewriters. Some expertspoint out that you can type faster on different keyboard layouts.38 So, if we ditched QWERTY, we would be able to type faster and a common activity would become marginally faster and easier.


pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

The same listen-to-no-one folly led to the 1985 disaster that was New Coke—a universally rejected replacement for old Coke that precisely no consumers had been asking for—and the serial messes that are Microsoft Word, the all-but-universal word processing program that becomes more confusing, less intuitive and more stuffed with dubious functions with each unnecessary upgrade. Like the QWERTY keyboard, it is a bad system that unfortunately became the dominant system, but at least QWERTY has remained the same since its introduction in 1873. Microsoft Word doubles down on bad every few years. There are “I Hate Microsoft Word” forums and “I Hate Microsoft Word” rant threads. There is an “I Hate Microsoft Word” Facebook page.


The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley Finance) by Feng Gu

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, carbon tax, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Great Moderation, value at risk

The consequence of this disclosure ossification, as we will demonstrate empirically in the following chapters, is the inevitably fast and continuous deterioration in the usefulness of financial information to investors. A DEVIL’S ADVOCATE Perhaps, you may say, this is inevitable. Corporate financial reporting reached its technological apogee 110 years ago, as did double-entry bookkeeping 550 years ago, and cannot be further improved, like the QWERTY keyboard layout introduced in 1878 in the Remington No. 2 typewriter and still on keyboards today. Absurd as this sounds, it would have made some sense if suggestions for accounting change were seriously tried and found to fail. But there wasn’t any serious trial and error in accounting structure over the past century.


pages: 487 words: 95,085

JPod by Douglas Coupland

Asperger Syndrome, Drosophila, finite state, G4S, game design, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, neurotypical, pez dispenser, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, sugar pill, tech worker, wage slave, Y2K

Are you up to that challenge? Let me help you become the Power Clown you know you can be. John Doe . . . Just before the turtle meeting, I went on eBay and bought a Benelux keyboard. Belgian keyboards are totally from hell. For whatever reason, they scramble the character keys even more randomly than a QWERTY keyboard. Thanks to UPS, it ought to be here the day after tomorrow, and Kaitlin shall meet her match. God, I love the twenty-first century. I just heard her on the phone with someone in HR, trying to get out of jPod. Good luck. "What do you mean it's not possible?" [HR staffer] "Do you mean not possible now, or not possible ever}" [HR staffer] "I'm a super-experienced character animator, and I've worked at two other big companies, and none of them would ever have stuck me in this chunk of Siberia with a clump of whacked-out freaks."


pages: 327 words: 102,322

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing

Unbeknown to the students, he was talking in part about his own company. To Balsillie, RIM was in an existential crisis, mired in what he describes as “strategic confusion.” The company’s business had been disrupted on several levels, with no obvious path forward. Was RIM supposed to defend the QWERTY keyboard, or jump all-in and become a touch-screen smartphone maker? Was it supposed to challenge Apple at the high end of the smartphone market or focus on the lower end with devices like its Curve and Gemini models, which were driving heady sales gains in foreign markets where Apple wasn’t yet a factor?


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

The downside to the propensity for knowledge to build upon knowledge is that it makes a radical shift in the course of technology and infrastructure much harder to achieve. Innovation is path-dependent: it is constrained by what has gone on before. Ideas and practices are sticky. Examples abound. It is generally believed that the ostensibly odd design of the QWERTY keyboard was to prevent Englishlanguage typewriters from jamming. Very few typewriters are still in use, but the world is stuck with the keyboard, irrespective of whether it now enhances writing productivity. London’s city plan, including the shape and location of its new skyscrapers, is in part determined by Roman planning two millennia ago.


pages: 111 words: 1

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, financial engineering, fixed income, global village, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, power law, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, Yogi Berra

For our typewriters have the order of the letters on their keyboard arranged in a nonoptimal manner, as a matter of fact in such a nonoptimal manner as to slow down the typing rather than make the job easy, in order to avoid jamming the ribbons as they were designed for less electronic days. Therefore, as we started building better typewriters and computerized word processors, several attempts were made to rationalize the computer keyboard, to no avail. People were trained on a QWERTY keyboard and their habits were too sticky for change. Just like the helical propulsion of an actor into stardom, people patronize what other people like to do. Forcing rational dynamics on the process would be superfluous, nay, impossible. This is called a path dependent outcome, and has thwarted many mathematical attempts at modeling behavior.


Reaper Force: The Inside Story of Britain’s Drone Wars by Dr Peter Lee

crew resource management, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital map, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, QWERTY keyboard, Skype

Gav’s hands were a blur as he responded to the instructions. At the same time, he gave Dunc a quick-fire series of replies: multiple ‘confirmed’, ‘green’, ‘good’ and the occasional ‘happy’. Then all three started translating handwritten notes from the pre-flight briefing into a series of rapidly typed entries using the well-worn QWERTY keyboards in front of them. ‘Handover checks.’ Gav moved on to the next task. And so they continued. Prevailing wind conditions – over Iraq – were hastily scribbled on an old-fashioned office whiteboard on the wall next to his head. Dunc and Marty were writing up their own encoded reminders. Fuel and weapon status.


pages: 394 words: 108,215

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The small keyboard, which looked a bit like a short piano without sharps and flats, could be used either for entering text or for sending commands to the system, making it possible to edit rapidly with two hands without being forced to move a hand between the keyboard and mouse. For those who had been trained to use a standard qwerty keyboard, the Augment system took a while to get used to, and Engelbart glued one of the five-key keyboards to the dashboard of his car so he could practice using it while driving. The Augment researchers tested the system and found that it was easy for the programmers to master and that it enabled blindingly fast and efficient editing.


pages: 442 words: 110,704

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, card file, Cepheid variable, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, index card, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The Draper Classification seems to me all the better because the letters are not in alphabetical order,” Russell declared. “This helps to keep the novice from thinking that it is based on some theory of evolution.” Apparently the alphabet could flout its own order and still remain effective—or even improve its utility—as a labeling scheme. Pickering could see that much on his typewriter’s QWERTY keyboard. The third of the questionnaire’s five questions contained three parts: “Do you think it would be wise for this committee to recommend at this time or in the near future any system of classification for universal adoption? If not, what additional observations or other work do you deem necessary before such recommendations should be made?


pages: 440 words: 109,150

The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war by Michael Smith

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Etonian, haute cuisine, QWERTY keyboard, trade route

In 1927, Commander Edward Travis, a member of GC&CS who oversaw the construction and security of British codes and cyphers, asked Hugh Foss, a specialist in machine cyphers, to test the commercially available machine. The Enigma machine resembled a small typewriter encased in a wooden box. It had a typewriter-style keyboard, set out in the continental QWERTZU manner, which differed slightly from the standard British/American QWERTY keyboard. Above the keyboard, on top of the box, was a lampboard with a series of lights, one for each letter of the alphabet. The operator typed each letter of the plain-text message into the machine. The action of depressing the key sent an electrical current through the machine, which lit up the encyphered letter on the lampboard.


pages: 401 words: 108,855

Cultureshock Paris by Cultureshock Staff

Anton Chekhov, clean water, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, money market fund, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, Skype, telemarketer, urban renewal, young professional

Surcouf; 139 avenue Daumesnil, 75012; tel: 08.92.70.06.00; website: http://www.surcouf.com. Multi-storey bazaar selling computer hardware, software (some in English), peripherals, etc. Also offers technical support and repair. Anglo Computers; tel: 08.11.00.72.39; website: http:// www.anglocomputers.com. English-language software and qwerty keyboards are hard to find in France. If these are important to you, contact Anglo Computers, which offers everything that an Anglophone could want. Technical Support Power outages are rare, but to suppress the occasional power surges, buy a parasurtenseur (surge protector) at computer shops and hardware stores.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

This was an age-old problem which created the need for specialists who could distinguish between the different currency units. These were the ‘money changers’ that Jesus threw out of the temple. Another historic term, ‘touchstone’, derives from a method of assessing a coin’s metallic value. Just as the QWERTY keyboard outlasted the manual typewriter, initial choices of names and weights have had long-lasting consequences. Pepin the Short, the father of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, lived from c.715 to 768. He established that a livre or pound of silver was worth 240 denarii or pennies, while the solidus was worth 12 denarii.15 This was the basis for the British monetary system for centuries until 1971.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

As an economist, I would now say that I was “price-elastic.” Figuring out what to do with the scholarship was easy enough. The first thing I needed was a laptop. The second was an internet connection. The third was a place to sleep (priorities!), preferably not in the graduate computer lab because I don’t enjoy waking up with a QWERTY keyboard imprinted on my forehead. I had already agreed to share an apartment with two classmates, so that took care of the detail of putting a roof over my head. I could thus focus on the serious business of studying, buying books, and purchasing a computer. The US was a great place to get a laptop.


pages: 489 words: 106,008

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

Started as a paper mill in 1865, Nokia adapted into a telecom business in the 1990s. The Nokia 9110 Communicator is a cell phone dinosaur, but at the time, it was one of the hottest items. When the phone was closed, it was your typical dialing phone, but when opened, it had a computer screen and a full QWERTY keyboard—and access to the internet. The device was a revolutionary and intriguing technological feat. Throughout the 1990s, Nokia climbed the ladder to become one of the world’s premier telecom businesses and notably the top manufacturer of mobile phones in the latter half of the decade—a position the company would hold for more than ten years.


pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

At least, not in the conventional sense. The Nokia Communicator of 1998, emblematic of early smartphones. The clamshell case closed to reveal a numeric keypad and a small display to mimic a more standard cellphone—though ironically, the Communicator’s calculator application was accessed via the main screen and QWERTY keyboard.6 “Mobiltelefon, Dummy.” Stockholm: Tekniska Museet, 1998. https://digitaltmuseum.se/021026359221/handdator. CC BY image courtesy of Nord, Truls / Tekniska Museet. First, there are the zombies. Rummage around for long enough in any office, home, shop, or restaurant, and you are more than likely to turn up a calculator or two.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

The internal combustion engine has retained its dominance for over a hundred years, not because it is the best possible engine, but because through historical accident it gained an initial advantage. Subsequent innovations did not seek to supplant it, but clustered around improvements to it, so that it became post factum the best engine.60 The same goes for the QWERTY keyboard layout, named for the first six letters on the top from left to right. In the days of mechanical typewriters, the very inefficiency of this keyboard layout gave it an advantage over alternatives such as the faster DVORAK layout because the mechanical keys would jam less frequently. The mechanical necessity for the QWERTY layout has long passed in these days of electronic keyboards, but its advantage has remained.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

Linus Torvalds’s greater skills in nerd-to-nerd diplomacy got there with Linux. 12. Quotron is another example of the “don’t build special purpose computers” rule. They did, and went from being synonymous with “electronic market data terminal” to being nowhere in a remarkably short time. The first Quotrons were so alien to Wall Street types that they rearranged the “QWERTY” keyboard to be “ABCDE.” Schumpeter was right about capitalism being a process of creative destruction. 13. Large is a relative term here. The bleeding-edge machines of the mid-1980s had 32M of memory. Fifteen years earlier, the onboard computers used on the lunar landings had 64K. 14. Evan’s fine account of his career is in Alan Rubenfeld’s book, The Super Traders: Secrets and Successes of Wall Street’s Best and Brightest (McGraw-Hill, 1995), pp. 227–252. 15.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

That arrogance seemed daring, even at that time. RiM had grown from a small Canadian pager company to a major, multi-billion-dollar mobile company in just a few years. It had made its fortune by mobilizing computer services, enabling people to read and write emails from anywhere in the world using a QWERTY keyboard. It could not have been a distant thought that there would be demand for a new mobile device that allowed people to surf the web everywhere too. And it wasn’t a distant thought. RiM understood that change was coming. But the profits it made from its own blockbuster email device were still too substantial and tempted them to stick just a little bit longer with the old, instead of moving to a new product that had a different keyboard and a screen suitable for web services.


pages: 420 words: 124,202

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, delayed gratification, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, fudge factor, full employment, Higgs boson, independent contractor, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, moral hazard, Network effects, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Setting the distance between the smooth tracks on which the Blucher traveled at four feet eight and a half inches was arbitrary—that was the width of the Killingworth Colliery wagonway—but its specific width was irrelevant. The value of any standard is not its intrinsic superiority, but the number of people using it. Like the famous example of the QWERTY keyboard, the Stephenson gauge became the world standard, and it is still the width used on more than 60 percent of the world’s railroads. Of course, simply laying rails a particular distance apart does not make for a monopoly unless others follow. And others weren’t about to follow Stephenson’s lead until they were persuaded that there was some advantage to it, in the form of either increased revenue or lower costs.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

Apple is reportedly releasing a haptic-feedback, multitouch “mighty mouse” as a replacement for its current Mac mouse series.14 The one perceived shortcoming on the iPhone is the poor comparative usability of the on-screen keyboard, which has an unusually high error rate compared with its RIM competitor or a standard QWERTY keyboard. While Siri is an effort to reduce reliance on an on-screen keyboard, haptics may work as a mechanism to resolve the usability issues of an on-screen keyboard. If we feel like we are using a real keyboard as a result of haptic feedback, then the theory goes that the keyboard (and the user) will behave as if it is “real”, and accuracy will be improved dramatically.


pages: 411 words: 119,022

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

And the BlackBerry die-hards would always tell you that the very best thing about their very favorite gadget was obvious. It was the keyboard. Fig. 3.4.1 Behold, the Blackberry—lovingly known as the Crackberry to its disciples. This is the Blackberry 7290, released in 2004. It had web browsing and email, a backlit QWERTY keyboard, and a black-and-white display that could show a whopping fifteen lines of text. Dwight Eschliman It was built like a tank. It took a couple of weeks to get used to, but after that you could text and email incredibly fast. It felt good under your thumbs. Solid. So when Steve told the team his vision for Apple’s first phone—one giant touchscreen, no hardware keyboard—there was an almost audible gasp.


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

., 168 Thoughtless Acts (Fulton Suri), 179, 297 Three Mile Island (TMI), 38–43, 351n31; accident at, 15–21, 26–32, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 78, 83, 95, 103, 105, 338–39; control panels at, 28–31, 40–43, 105; feedback and, 28, 32, 40, 42; Norman and, 24–25, 30, 38, 338–39; PORV (pilot-operated release valve) light at, 28, 29; simulated control room at, 39–40; worker pairs at, 41–42 Tibbets, Linden, 297–98 Tilley, Alvin, 88–89, 92, 337 “time is money” metaphor, 133–34, 135 Tinder, 256 TiVo, 163, 342 toothbrushes, 163 Toperator washing machine, 69, 87, 335 touchscreens, 41, 104, 127, 145–47, 343 Toyota, 135 traffic signs, 85 Trion-Z, 217 Trump, Donald, 250, 262, 264–67 trust, 107, 119; in digital assistants, 193–94, 208; self-driving cars and, 114; social mores and, 108, 112, 114; and suit to augment muscles of the elderly, 107–108 Turri, Pellegrino, 199, 205 Tversky, Amos, 96 Twitter, 134, 255, 261, 318 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hal 9000 in, 105, 117 typewriters, 64, 199, 200, 203, 205; QWERTY keyboard for, 332 Uber, 121, 259–60, 287, 355n26 UC San Diego, 23–24 U.K. government, 345, 369n2 understanding, 113, 299; in design, 42, 56, 68, 80, 289; incomplete, 271 UNICEF, 315, 369n2 United Nations, 263, 369n2 United States, 59–63, 93 University of Texas, 244 usability research, 171 user-centered design process, steps in, 305–28; building on existing behavior, 314–17; climbing the ladder of metaphors, 317–19; exposing the inner logic, 319–22; extending the reach, 322–25; form follows emotion, 325–27; making the invisible visible, 311–13; moment of truth, 327–28; starting with the user, 306–308; walking in the user’s shoes, 308–10 “user experience,” first use of term, 22, 338 user-friendly design, 3–11, 87, 95, 96, 163, 180, 245, 257, 261, 264, 269, 273–74, 288, 301–302; Apple advertisements and, 8; behavioral economics and, 96; definition of, 3; Dreyfuss and, 71; future of, 196, 297; milestones in, 331–47; paradox of, 272, 273; practitioner’s perspective on, 302–30; use of term, 4, 7, 9–10, 338; user in, 207, 242; user’s entire journey in, 323, 324 user personas, 178, 207, 261, 341 vacation industry, 238; see also cruise ships; theme parks vacuum cleaners, 157, 158, 172, 173, 286, 339, 370n16 VCRs, 26, 177, 230, 257 Velez, Pete, 19–21, 351n31 Venus Snap, 155 Viemeister, Tucker, 305 Visual Basic, 361n22 Vitruvian Man, 89 Volkswagen, 157, 355n5; self-driving cars, 103–104, 113–14, 117 Volvo, 101 von Hippel, Eric, 184 Wable, Akhil, 248, 249 Walkman, 242, 342 washing machine, 69, 87, 335 watches, 46 Watson, Dave, 137 Watson, John, 81 WeChat, 192 Wedgwood, Josiah, 90 Weiser, Mark, 233, 296, 369n11; “The Coming of Age of Calm Technology,” 341 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 337–38 West, Harry, 286–87 What the Dormouse Said (Markoff), 189 Whyte, William, 167 Wiener, Norbert, 32–33, 36, 42, 336, 369n5 Wizard of Oz technique, 193, 312 women, 63–64 Word, Clippy assistant in, 112 work-arounds, 316 workforce, 44–45 World Bank, 284 World War I, 60–61, 77, 81, 86 World War II, 6, 25, 32, 43, 72, 75, 77, 80, 81, 84–86, 88, 188, 190, 261; airplane crashes in, 77, 81–85, 102–103, 106, 121, 257; B-17 Flying Fortress in, 83–84, 335–36; lost pilots in, 75–78, 86, 87; radar in, 32, 76–79, 83, 87; radio in, 76, 77, 79, 84–85 World Wide Web, 131, 132, 147 Wozniak, Steve, 270 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 371n17 Wu, Tim, 242, 273 Xbox, 197, 205–206 Xerox, 178; Apple and, 8, 139–44, 146 Xerox PARC, 8, 127, 146; Smalltalk system at, 140–44 Yerkes, Robert Mearns, 81 YouTube, 243 Zald, David, 254 Zeigarnik, Bluma Wulfovna, 323 Zuckerberg, Mark, 131, 248, 249, 267–68, 344 THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING Find us online and join the conversation Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/penguinukbooks Like us on Facebook facebook.com/penguinbooks Share the love on Instagram instagram.com/penguinukbooks Watch our authors on YouTube youtube.com/penguinbooks Pin Penguin books to your Pinterest pinterest.com/penguinukbooks Listen to audiobook clips at soundcloud.com/penguin-books Find out more about the author and discover your next read at penguin.co.uk This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.


pages: 533 words: 125,495

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Many of our conventions and standards are solutions to coordination games, with nothing to recommend them other than that everyone has settled on the same ones.8 Driving on the right, taking Sundays off work, accepting paper currency, adopting technological standards (110 volts, Microsoft Word, the QWERTY keyboard) are equilibria in coordination games. There may be higher payoffs with other equilibria, but we remain locked into the ones we have because we can’t get there from here. Unless everyone agrees to switch at once, the penalties for discoordination are too high. Arbitrary focal points can figure in bargaining.


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

‘So I could get myself some material on a blank piece of paper and then I’d say, well, this is going to be more important than it looks, so I’d like to set up a “file”. So I tell the machine, “Output to a file.” And it says, “I need a name.” I’ll give it a name. I’ll say it’s “sample file”.’ The screen faded to a shot of Engelbart’s hands. He was working on a typewriter-like QWERTY keyboard that was connected by wires to the monitor on which the words had been appearing and disappearing. To his right was a strange box containing wheels that he used to move the cursor. He called this contraption a ‘mouse’. When it was all over, the crowd rose to their feet and cheered, spellbound, enthralled.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

They stuck with the suboptimal key configuration for the same reason it had migrated to computers half a decade ago—familiarity. “When people pick up this phone in the store, it has to be something that’s instantly recognizable, that they can use immediately. And that’s why we stuck with the QWERTY keyboard, and we added a whole bunch of smarts in there.” Those smarts would be crucial. “People thought that the keyboard we delivered wasn’t sophisticated, but in reality it was super-sophisticated,” Williamson says. “Because the touch region of each key was smaller than the minimum hit size. We had to write a bunch of predictive algorithms technology to think about the words you could possibly be typing, artificially increase the hit area of the next few keys that would correspond to those words.”


How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

Quotron is another example of the “don’t build special-purpose computers” rule. It did, and went from being synonymous with “electronic market data terminal” to being nowhere in a remarkably JWPR007-Lindsey May 18, 2007 11:41 Notes 341 short time. The first Quotrons were so alien to Wall Street types that they rearranged the “QWERTY” keyboard to be ABCDE. Schumpeter was right about capitalism being a process of creative destruction. 7. Large is a relative term here. The bleeding-edge machines of the mid-1980s had 32MB of memory. Fifteen years earlier, the on-board computers used on the lunar landings had 64K. Today, you can get a 1GB memory card for about forty bucks. 8.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

We may well be tuned, long term, to cope well in a world in which less and less changes. We could be well adapted for the stability that is already upon us. However, before we accept that things are no longer speeding up, many of us may clutch at every future small technological discovery as a great advancement. One day I hope I will not have to type words on a QWERTY keyboard, but that day should already have come. That keyboard was designed for slowdown—to actually slow down typists’ speed so that the levers of old typewriters did not jam. A few friends of my age whose hands have also been worn out by too much typing now use voice recognition to dictate their ideas, rather like how businesspeople used to dictate to their secretaries.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

It’s a strategy that has seen considerable success when it comes to helping smokers put an end to their addiction.104 You might even want to consider junking your smartphones and instead buying a Lightphone, an intentionally ‘low-tech’ device that features calling and (gasp!) T9 texting, the most basic of the basic forms of texting – without even the ease of a qwerty keyboard – and that stores only ten contacts at a time.105 Yet this is not a battle we can fight on our own. To curb our digital addiction at a significant scale, decisive government intervention is essential. Think of the measures governments use to discourage the use of tobacco, such as mandating that warnings be printed on all packaging.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

This new generation of maps and models is thus more than a collection of pretty digital guides. They should be the focal point for the synthesis of environmental science, politics, economics, culture, technology, and sociology3—a curriculum curated through the study of connections rather than divisions. We shouldn’t be using static political maps any more than we would cling to QWERTY keyboards when we have voice recognition, gestural interfaces, and instant video communication. Today’s “digital natives”—also known as millennials or Generation Y (and Z)—need this new tool kit. There are more young people alive today than ever in history: Forty percent of the world population is under the age of twenty-four, meaning an even larger percentage has no personal memory of colonialism or the Cold War.


Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology) by Geoffrey C. Bowker

affirmative action, business process, classic study, corporate governance, Drosophila, government statistician, information retrieval, loose coupling, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Occam's razor, QWERTY keyboard, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, sexual politics, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, William of Occam

New participants acquire a naturalized familiarity with its objects as they become members. • Links with conventions of practice. Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice; for exa mple , the ways that cycles of day-night work are a ffected by and affect electrical power rates a nd needs. Genera tions of typists have learned the QWERTY keyboard ; its limitations are inherited by the computer keyboard and thence by the design of today's computer furniture (Becker 1 982). • Embodiment of standards. Modified by scope and often by conflicting conventions, infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures and tools in a standardized fashion


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

Over the next decade, he and his staffers at the Augmentation Research Center invented some of the most ubiquitous features of contemporary computers, including the mouse. Between 1966 and 1968, the group developed a collaborative office computing environment known as the On-Line System, or NLS. The NLS featured many of the elements common to computer systems today, including not only the mouse, but a QWERTY keyboard and a CRT terminal. More importantly, the system offered its users the ability to work on a document simultaneously from multiple sites, to connect bits of text via hyperlinks, to jump from one point to another in a text, and to develop indexes of key words that could be searched. The NLS depended on a time-sharing computer, yet it functioned within the office environment much like a contemporary intranet.


pages: 532 words: 141,574

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

Offer them a choice between pullin a single over on Rikers or an opportunity to take the next step toward becoming a ‘real hacker.’ Is how they put it.” “You know somebody this happened to?” “A few. Some took the deal, some split town. They enroll you in a course out in Queens where you learn Arabic and how to write Arabic Leet.” “That’s . . .” taking a guess, “using a qwerty keyboard to make characters that look like Arabic? So hashslingrz is, what, expanding into a new Mideast market area?” “One theory. Except that every day civilians walk around, no clue, even when it’s filling up screens right next to them at Starbucks, cyberspace warfare without mercy, 24/7, hacker on hacker, DOS attacks, Trojan horses, viruses, worms . . .”


France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition) by Nicola Williams

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, double helix, flag carrier, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information trail, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, post-work, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Sloane Ranger, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

The train station is 800m southwest of place Stanislas. Information Copycom ( 03 83 22 90 41; 3 rue Guerrier de Dumast; per hr €2; 9am-8pm Mon-Sat, 3-8pm Sun) Internet access. E-café Cyber Café ( 03 83 35 47 34; 11 rue des Quatre Églises; per min/hr €0.09/5.40; 11am-9pm Mon & Sat, 9am-9pm Tue-Fri, 2-8pm Sun) A proper café whose computers have qwerty keyboards and webcams. Laundrette (124 rue St-Dizier; 7.45am-9.30pm) Métropolitain ( 03 83 33 14 71; 12 rue Mazagran; Nancy Gare; per hr €3; noon-2am daily) Internet access in a bar-cum-games arcade. Post Office (10 rue St-Dizier; Point Central) Does currency exchange. Tourist Office ( 03 83 35 22 41; www.ot-nancy.fr; place Stanislas; 9am-7pm Mon-Sat, 10am-5pm Sun & holidays Apr-Oct, 9am-6pm Mon-Sat, 10am-1pm Sun & holidays Nov-Mar) Inside the hôtel de ville.

EMERGENCY Duty Pharmacy ( 04 76 63 42 55) Grenoble University Hospital ( 04 76 76 75 75) Hôpital Nord La Tronche (av de Marquis du Grésivaudan; tram stop ‘La Tronche’ on tramway line B); Hôpital Sud (av de Kimberley, Echirolles; bus 11 & 13) INTERNET ACCESS Log in to the tourist office’s two computers (below) for €2 per 15 minutes or €5 an hour. Celsius Café ( 04 76 00 13 60; 15 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau; per 30/60min €1.50/2.50; 9am-11pm Mon-Sat, 1-8pm Sun) Top location and facilities. Neptune Internet ( 04 76 63 94 18; 2 rue de la Paix; per 30/60min €2.50/3.50; 1-7pm Mon-Sat, 2-6pm Sun) A funky, tidy place with lots of QWERTY keyboards. Pl@net Internet ( 04 76 47 44 74; 1 place Vaucanson; per hr €3.50; 8.30am-10pm Mon-Sat) LAUNDRY Pay about €3.50 to wash a 7kg load: Au 43 Viallet (43 av Félix Viallet; 7am-8pm) Laverie Berriat (88 cours Berriat; 7am-8pm) POST Post Office (rue de la République) Next to the tourist office.

The old town, Le Suquet quarter, is to the west of the Vieux Port. Information BOOKSHOPS Cannes English Bookshop ( 04 93 99 40 08; 11 rue Bivouac Napoléon) Get your (English-language) summer reading from the lovely Christel and Wally. INTERNET ACCESS Cap Cyber (12 rue 24 AoÛt; per hr €3; 10am-9pm Mon-Sat) Very central, with several QWERTY keyboards and Asian language software. LAUNDRY Laverie du Port ( 04 93 38 06 68; 36 rue Georges Clemenceau; per 7kg load €5.50, drying per 10min €1.50; closed Sun & from noon Sat) Multilingual staff on-site. MONEY Scads of banks line rue d’Antibes and rue Buttura. Crédit Lyonnais (13 rue d’Antibes) Has an ATM.


pages: 678 words: 159,840

The Debian Administrator's Handbook, Debian Wheezy From Discovery to Mastery by Raphaal Hertzog, Roland Mas

bash_history, Debian, distributed generation, do-ocracy, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Jono Bacon, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, precautionary principle, QWERTY keyboard, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Skype, SpamAssassin, SQL injection, Valgrind, web application, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Selecting the language 4.2.3. Selecting the country The second step consists in choosing your country. Combined with the language, this information enables the program to offer the most appropriate keyboard layout. This will also influence the configuration of the time zone. In the United States, a standard QWERTY keyboard is suggested, and a choice of appropriate time zones is offered. Figure 4.3. Selecting the country 4.2.4. Selecting the keyboard layout The proposed “American English” keyboard corresponds to the usual QWERTY layout. Figure 4.4. Choice of keyboard 4.2.5. Detecting Hardware This step is completely automatic in the vast majority of cases.


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

“In theory,” Chandra wrote, “one can design a zinc finger for each of the sixty-four possible triplet codons, and, using a combination of these fingers, one could design a protein for sequence-specific recognition of any segment of DNA.” These zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs) could be programmed to latch onto any DNA sequence that would serve all manner of applications. Interestingly, Chandra’s choice has stood the test of time. “Like the fact that a [soccer] match lasts ninety minutes or the QWERTY keyboard starts with the letter Q, it is widely accepted,” says Urnov. “People haven’t seen the need to evolve beyond that.” Chandra was in no doubt that his chimeric nucleases—“a new type of molecular scissors”—could transform gene therapy: in 1999 he said his goal was to excise a gene mutation and replace it neatly with its normal counterpart.


Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

As long as the established sources or prime movers work well within established settings, are readily available, and are profitable, their substitutes, even those with some clearly superior attributes, will advance only slowly. Economists might see these realities as examples of lock-in or path dependence as conceptualized by David (1985), who based his argument on a takedown of the QWERTY keyboard (as opposed to a supposedly superior Dvorak layout). But we do not need any new questionable labels to describe what is a very common process of slow, evolutionary progression noticeable in organismic evolution and personal decision making, as well as in technical advances and economic management.


pages: 781 words: 226,928

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

When he was unable to convince Charpentier to develop a handheld LCD computer, he departed for Japan to see if he could bypass his reluctant engineers and obtain the product he desired. Tramiel returned with a Toshiba IHC-8000. The tiny computer looked like a calculator, with a single row of 24 characters on the LCD and a tiny rubber QWERTY keyboard. He rebranded it the HHC-4 (Handheld Computer), and replaced the Toshiba decal with a Commodore logo in order to display the product at the upcoming CES. In the past, Tramiel reacted to the market, often making decisions based on what his competitors sold. In 1982, the Osborne 1 portable microcomputer was selling well, and with it, the Osborne Computer Corporation began remarkable growth.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.” Might be time for you (and me) to rethink our personal priorities. On a related and sad note, Matt’s father passed away unexpectedly weeks after he recommended this article to me. Matt was at his bedside. Qwerty Is for Junior Varsity The normal QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow down human operators to avoid jams. That time has passed, so try the Dvorak layout instead, which is easier on your tendons and helps prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. Read The Dvorak Zine (dvzine.org). Colemak is even more efficient, if you dare. Within Automattic, Matt has held speed-typing challenges, where the loser has to switch to the winner’s layout.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

The idea was to minimize the collision problem by separating those keys that followed one another frequently.... Once {123} adopted, it resulted in many millions of typewriters and ... the social cost of change ... mounted with the vested interest created by the fact that so many fingers now knew how to follow the QWERTY keyboard. QWERTY has stayed on despite the existence of other, more "rational" systems. [Papert 1980, p. 33.]12 The imperious restrictions we encounter inside the Library of Mendel may look like universal laws of nature from our myopic perspective, but from a different perspective they may appear to count as merely local conditions, with historical explanations.13 If so, then a restricted concept of biological possibility is the sort we want; the ideal of a universal concept of biological possibility will be misguided.


pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

A switch from driving on the left to driving on the right could not begin with a daring nonconformist or a grass-roots movement but would have to be imposed from the top down (which is what happened in Sweden at 5 A.M., Sunday, September 3, 1967). Other examples are laying down your weapons when hostile neighbors are armed to the teeth, abandoning the QWERTY keyboard layout, and pointing out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. But traditional cultures can change, too, and more dramatically than most people realize. Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue today, but the members of the diverse cultures don’t always see it that way.


pages: 496 words: 174,084

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages by Federico Biancuzzi, Shane Warden

Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), business intelligence, business logic, business process, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive load, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, continuous integration, data acquisition, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, Douglas Hofstadter, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Firefox, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, history of Unix, HyperCard, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, linear programming, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, millennium bug, Multics, NP-complete, Paul Graham, performance metric, Perl 6, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software as a service, software patent, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, Turing complete, type inference, Valgrind, Von Neumann architecture, web application

Second thing we wanted to do was to get away from the requirements that punch cards imposed on users, which was that things had to be in certain columns on the card, and so we wanted to be something more or less free form that somebody could type on a teletype keyboard, which is just a standard “qwerty” keyboard, by the way, but only with uppercase letters. That’s how the form of the language appeared, something that was easy to type, in fact originally it was space-independent. If you put spaces or you didn’t put spaces in what you were typing it didn’t make any difference, because the language was designed originally so that whatever you typed was always interpreted by the computer correctly, even if there were spaces or no spaces.


pages: 1,197 words: 304,245

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, classic study, clockwork universe, Commentariolus, commoditize, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, interchangeable parts, invention of gunpowder, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mercator projection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, QWERTY keyboard, Republic of Letters, social intelligence, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Pinch appears to think that this is the sole cause of agreement on measurements (Labinger and Collins (eds.), The One Culture? (2001), 223) but that can’t be right, or agreement once established would never break down. xi Under particular circumstances there may be an economic or institutional investment in a bad solution that allows it to persist. The English-language QWERTY keyboard is an example (David, ‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’ (1985)); geocentrism, for the Catholic Church after 1616, is also an example. xii The issue arose, entirely predictably, shortly after the invention of the pendulum clock (1656), which made possible new standards of accuracy, exposing previously invisible anomalies (Cohen, ‘Roemer and the First Determination of the Velocity of Light (1676)’ (1940), 338).


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

A famous example is the way an early technological standard can gain a toehold among a critical mass of users, who use it because so many other people are using it, and thereby lock out superior competitors. According to some theories, these “network externalities” explain the success of English spelling, the QWERTY keyboard, VHS videocassettes, and Microsoft software (though there are doubters in each case). Another example is the unpredictable fortunes of bestsellers, fashions, top-forty singles, and Hollywood blockbusters. The mathematician Duncan Watts set up two versions of a Web site in which users could download garage-band rock music. 273 In one version users could not see how many times a song had already been downloaded.


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

LCD is okay, supertwist LCD even better, EL and PLASMA are even better than that, but if you plan to hack at night or in the dark like most hackers on the road, you should make sure your laptop has a backlit screen. Color LCD screens are useless unless you plan to call Prodigy or download and view GIFs, in which case you should stop reading this article right now and go back to play with your Nintendo. The keyboard should be a standard full-sized QWERTY keyboard, with full travel plastic keys. You don’t need a numeric keypad or function keys or any of that crap. Membrane keyboards or chicklet rubber keys are out of the question. Unless you are utterly retarded, having your keys alphabetized is not an added benefit. Basically, if you can touch type on a keyboard without your fingers missing keys, getting jammed, or slipping around, then it is a good keyboard.