Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

Juror becomes Facebook friends with defendent during trial and is dismissed from the case

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There are times to friend people on Facebook and times not to. One of the times to refrain should include when you are on a jury and you want to be Facebook friends with the defendant:

Jurors and defendants are not meant to be friends — even if it’s just Facebook friends.

Four charges of contempt of court probably drilled this point home for 22-year-old Jonathan Hudson of Arlington, Texas. While on jury duty, Hudson sent a Facebook friend request to the female defendant in the case.

He was dismissed from the proceedings following the friend request, as well as for posting case information on his profile. Afterwards, he contacted the defendant through a Facebook message to apologize…

His lawyer told the paper the mistake was “a reflection of the times.”

I’m sure someone could develop a defense for this: being Facebook friends isn’t the same kind of friendship that might compromise a decision in a court case. But that then gets into the interesting area of what exactly it means to be a friend on Facebook.

If this is a “reflection of the times,” it suggests people have difficulty knowing when using newer technologies, like Facebook or texting, is appropriate. The courtroom is probably one of the more conservative institutions where it takes some time to change behavior norms. Would Facebook ever be incorporated into courtroom and trial behavior? What if jurors had electronic devices that they could use to interact with each other as they are hearing cases?

Two versions of the ASA 2011 bingo card

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Sociologists at orgtheory put out the annual ASA bingo card several days before this year’s meetings. Interestingly, two other sociologists developed their own bingo card after the meetings, one they argue is “more positive”:

There was a popular “bingo card” for the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association held last week in Las Vegas. It poked a bit of fun at sociologists and the meeting itself. Nathan Jurgenson’s reaction was that the card itself revealed much about the sociological discipline and the problems with the annual meetings. He wrote a posthere on Cyborgology calling for a more positive bingo card that might be helpful to improve the conference experience rather than just complaining about what is wrong. It is easy to be annoyed, much harder to be constructive.

CUNY sociologist Jessie Daniels responded to this call, and, together, we have created a more constructive and useful Bingo card that looks specifically at how to improve a conference by augmenting one’s experience with Twitter.

The card describes how conferences in general benefit from engagement on both the physical and digital levels. Conversations taking place move onto the web, and discussions in the “backchannel” flow back into physical space. In fact, we noted this trend during the Theorizing the Web conference this past spring, calling it an “augmented conference.”

And just as I was wondering how much Twitter was actually used during the conference, the same sociologists have a summary. My quick thought: the Twitter use was pretty limited and I imagine it will be some time before Twitter is fully integrated into the conference.

I wonder if someone has a blogging summary about the conference.

On the whole, are sociologists ahead or behind the curve in adopting newer social technologies, like Twitter? Are the patterns tied more to age or education or some other factors?

How technology may lessen a team’s chemistry

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Technology receives a lot of attention but I haven’t seen this brought up before: technology may be making it more difficult to athletic teams to bond.

Ask many coaches, general managers and older players and you’ll hear a common gripe: chemistry on teams has been altered because of modern technology, and not for the better. The rise of smartphones, with all their instant-communication and entertainment options, have created insular worlds into which distracted players too often retreat instead of bonding with teammates.

Coaches and managers are particularly frustrated at the paradox of players fraternizing less with their own teammates, and more with the “enemy.” Players from opposing teams, they say, too often get each other’s cellphone numbers and start calling or texting back and forth, often griping about playing time and occassionally giving up little secrets about their teams…

Major League Baseball is one sport where the chemistry effects of smartphones, iPads, iPods and other handheld devices might be thought to be minimal, because of the longer workdays and more enclosed environs (dugouts, bullpens, clubhouses). Not necessarily so, according to Colorado Rockies manager Jim Tracy. When the game is over, he says, players quickly rejoin their private, smartphone worlds…

Some NFL teams are said to be contemplating outright bans on smartphones during any “team time” activities, and some coaches have spoken with exasperation at competing with phones for players’ attention. Redskins defensive coordinator Jim Haslett, for instance, told ESPN 101 radio in St. Louis the difficulties of dealing with phone-obsessed players such as former Washington tackle Albert Haynesworth.

I’m tempted to argue that this is simply the outcome of having multiple generations in the clubhouse or locker room: an older generation, particularly coaches and managers, had a particular experience in the past and younger players have a different way of going about things. Perhaps it would be more interesting to talk to younger coaches who are more into technology themselves and ask how they try to build team chemistry. Of course, the topic of team chemistry is open for debate. To me, it seems like it is only really an issue when a team is losing and people are looking for reasons why.

The article does suggest that at least a few veteran athletes have adopted informal/player-directed guidelines for technology use in the clubhouse. I wonder if they have encountered some resistance or whether the spirit of such actions, to “help the team,” is reason enough for other players to comply.

Two other quick thoughts:

1. This could also be interpreted as an indicator of the professionalization of athletes. While athletes in the past might have enjoyed the camaraderie of interacting before and after games, today’s athletes have more personal leeway as most work all-year round and make big money. What matters most (or at all) is their performance on the field/court/ice.

2. The article also hints at how technology has changed how players prepare for games. It is now easy and common for athletes to be able to watch lots of video on their own, theoretically giving them some advantages.

College students don’t know how to use Google

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I recently heard about this study at a faculty development day: college students have difficulty understanding and using search results.

Researchers with the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries project watched 30 students at Illinois Wesleyan University try to search for different topics online and found that only seven of them were able to conduct “what a librarian might consider a reasonably well-executed search.”

The students “appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school,” Lynda Duke and Andrew Asher write in a book on the project coming out this fall.

At all five Illinois universities, students reported feeling “anxious” and confused when trying to research. Many felt overwhelmed by the volume of results their searches would turn up, not realizing that there are ways to narrow those searches and get more tailored results. Others would abandon their research topics when they couldn’t find enough sources, unaware that they were using the wrong search terms or database for their topics.

The researchers found that students did not know “how to build a search to narrow or expand results, how to use subject headings, and how various search engines (including Google) organize and display results.” That means that some students didn’t understand how to search only for news articles, or only for scholarly articles. Most only know how to punch in keywords and hope for the best.

Such trust in technology. Wonder where this came from?

I like how anthropologists were involved in this study. Including an observation component could make this data quite unique. I don’t think many people would think that ethnographic methods could be used to examine such up-to-date technology.

Several other thoughts:

1. How many adults could explain how Google displays pages?

1a. If people knew how Google organized things, would they go elsewhere for information?

2. Finding and sorting through information is a key problem of our age. The problem is not a lack of information or possible sources; rather, there is too much.

3. Who exactly in schools should be responsible for teaching this? Librarians, perhaps, but students have limited contact. Preferably, all teachers/professors should know something about this and talk about it. Parents could also impart this information at home.

4. I’m now tempted to ask students to include all of their search terms in final projects so that I can check and see whether they actually sorted through articles or they simply picked the top few results.

More on examining six degrees of separation on Facebook

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I noted earlier this week that Yahoo and Facebook are conducting an experiment to see how interconnected people are the world are. Here are some more information about the experiment that was revealed in an interview with Yahoo sociologist/research scientist Duncan Watts:

  • On the quality of Facebook’s data:

Cameron Marlow, Facebook’s research scientist and “in-house sociologist,” said that because Facebook’s social graph is essentially the best representation of real world relationships available, “our data can speak more definitively to this question than anything else in history.

Facebook has a treasure trove of information that could be the source of some fascinating research. Does this study signal the start of a new era where researchers will be able to have access to profiles? Will Facebook users, often worried about privacy, stand for this?

  • Watts on the problems in past replications of Milgram’s original experiment:

The problem that all of the experiments have had—and the problem that we’re trying to address with this one—is that you never really know what the ground truth is. You know that there’s some network out there involved that connects people, and you know that messages are being passed along on top of this network. The problem is because you can’t see the network underneath them, you don’t know whether people are making the right choices, you don’t know if the chains are as short as possible, and you don’t know why the chains that aren’t completing are stopping.

The major difference here is that Facebook [is] the network over which these messages are being passed. We can see through Facebook how everyone is really connected to everyone else. We can see whether people can actually find these short paths. In previous experiments you were missing this background picture, but now we have the background and we can run the experiment on top of it.

It sounds like past experiments allowed researchers to see the outcome – how many letters reached the target – but didn’t allow them to trace out the paths, either successful or unsuccessful. Being able to see behind the curtain could also reveal some insights about the speeds of certain networks.

  • On whether the data is representative:

There are two issues here. You might be concerned that the Facebook network is somehow an unrepresentative sample of the real social graph of the world. The other concern is the people participating in the sample might be an unrepresentative sample of Facebook. I’m not worried about the first concern. Facebook has 750 million users. If it works on Facebook, it’s increasingly difficult to argue that it wouldn’t work for the rest of the world. But the second problem is one that we’re concerned about. It’s really just a matter of getting a broad enough recruiting effort.

I bet there are people who could make a good case that this data is not representative. These same issues plague web surveys: who has consistent access to the Internet and who can be recruited? I would guess that Facebook still skews younger and more educated than the general population.

Watts suggests the results will be published in an academic journal. It will be interesting to read about the outcome and how this is viewed by academics.

Should you worry about your pacemaker, baby monitor, or garage door opener being hacked?

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I ran across a story about five common objects that can be hacked: a pacemaker, baby monitor, automobile, garage door opener, and brain.

Here is my problem with this story: it doesn’t give you any indication about how serious these problems are. Perhaps this is simply meant to be informational: certain common devices can be hacked. But the tone of the article goes beyond this and suggests that mischief can take place and people should replace older items that are easier to be hacked. Here is the question that really should be asked: how likely is it that any of these items will be hacked? Should people with pacemakers really be worried? What is the relative risk of paying less for an unencrypted baby monitor?

Without this information, this article fits a similar narrative of crime stories where readers assume or develop the idea that these are common occurrences when they really are not.

Redoing Milgram’s degrees of separation experiment with Facebook

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Stanley Milgram is best known for one particular experiment but another of his experiments is being replicated with new technology:

Yahoo and Facebook are setting out to test the hypothesis that anyone in the world is connected to anyone else in just six steps.

The experiment aims to prove or disprove that which was first suggested by Harvard sociologist Stanley Milgram when he asked 300 people to get a message to a Boston stockbroker using their personal networks.

Only about 60 of the messages reached their target, with the average number of steps in the chain being six – coining the phrase ‘six degrees of separation’.

Yahoo’s research department is aiming to replicate that experiment, this time using Facebook, which has 750 million users worldwide.

If you go to the official page, you can then choose to participate. But before you can, you have to agree to a “Terms of Use” and four other statements. This is essentially the “informed consent form” for the experiment.

Also, the “Terms of Use” provides this description of the project:

The purpose of this study is to test a long-standing theory in sociology that everyone on Earth is connected together in a giant social network. In this experiment, participants called “Senders” forward messages to their Facebook friends in an attempt to reach a given “Target” individual, about whom they are given certain identifying information, in the shortest number of steps possible.

I can’t say that I have heard this specific sociological theory but I would be interested to see the results.

If you want to read a short (several paragraph) description of Milgram’s initial experiment, find it here.

Since corporations like Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and others are sitting on treasure troves of data, can we expect to see more experiments like this in the future?

From luxury item to throwaway good: cable TV

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Following up on Joel’s post from Wednesday, Figures from the last quarter suggest the cable TV industry continues to lose customers:

The phone companies kept adding subscribers in the second quarter, but Dish lost 135,000. DirecTV gained a small number, so combined, the U.S. satellite broadcasters lost subscribers in the quarter — a first for the industry…

Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett estimates that the subscription-TV industry, including the untallied cable companies, lost 380,000 subscribers in the quarter. That’s about one out of every 300 U.S. households, and more than twice the losses in the second quarter of last year. Ian Olgeirson at SNL Kagan puts the number even higher, at 425,000 to 450,000 lost subscribers.

The second quarter is always the year’s worst for cable and satellite companies, as students cancel service at the end of the spring semester. Last year, growth came back in the fourth quarter. But looking back over the past 12 months, the industry is still down, by Moffett’s estimate. That’s also a first.

The article goes on to mention a number of reasons for this: a bad economy so consumers are cutting back, younger people don’t see the necessity of cable, and there is a lot of content available through the Internet.

More interesting to me is the idea that cable TV is no longer the luxury good that it once was. Once the industry began in the 1970s and later consolidated, cable moved from being a rarity to being a necessity. As late as mid 2009, “11% of U.S. TV homes only have the capability to receive TV reception “over the air”.” Having cable simply became part of how Americans spend their disposable income. Cable became prism through which many Americans viewed the world. Certain channels arose, such as MTV which has been getting a lot of attention recently because of its 30th anniversary or ESPN which was the subject of an interesting book, and became part of the national consciousness. These channels, for better or worse, came to represent American culture and were exported around the world. I wonder if having cable at home signaled a middle-class lifestyle even if other traits don’t match this standing.

But now the world may have moved on. (At the same time, despite all the articles suggesting people stop paying for cable, bad economic times, and more competition, the drop in subscribers was only 0.2-0.3%.) How exactly will cable companies convince people that their product is a necessity, particularly among the younger generations? What will be the new narrative regarding cable that will push people to include this in their lives?

The first Apple sociology app?

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I didn’t see this coming:

Wiley-Blackwell, the scientific, medical and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is launching its first mobile application in Sociology, accessible via iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Wiley-Blackwell Sociology Spotlight is a must-have app for all Sociologists. It shines a powerful spotlight on Sociology, enabling you to instantly read all of the latest news and developments in the field. Whether you want to keep track of broad trends across the discipline or focus in on a subfield, Sociology Spotlight is an essential tool for your research and teaching.

A few questions:

1. Is there a market for this? It does appear to be free…

2. Might this set off an arms race among publishers to make their content available through apps?

3. The iTunes preview app page suggests certain articles have “video abstracts.” Is this the new wave of the future?

The threat to iOS

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Ars Technica has a post about Apple’s latest response to a lawsuit filed by Lodsys, a reputed patent troll, against of Apple’s app developers:

Lodsys began threatening both iOS and Android developers with lawsuits in May if the developers didn’t pay licensing fees for its claimed in-app-purchasing-related patents. Many independent developers lack the financial and legal resources to litigate a patent infringement claim, so a number of iOS developers began a campaign to get Apple to help, threatening a boycott of in-app purchasing if only to avoid such legal threats.

Lodsys acquired its four patents from former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures patent holding company. It turns out that Apple already has a license to those patents by virtue of an investment deal in Intellectual Ventures. That deal gave Apple (among other companies, including Google) a license to some 30,000 or so patents under Intellectual Ventures’ control.

(In case you missed it, this is the same Intellectual Ventures that was the subject of a recent This American Life episode, which has sparked—to put it mildly—quite a discussion around the blogosphere.)

If Apple isn’t successful in defending its developers here, the whole iOS app ecosystem may be in jeopardy.  As innovative as Apple has been in creating and updating iOS devices—iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad—over the past few years, a lot of their success is due to non-Apple creativity.  There’s no way that Steve Jobs’ company could have created 425,000 apps over the past four years, and those apps are a (the?) main selling point for consumers purchasing iOS.

If Apple’s licenses with Lodsys/Intellectual Ventures don’t cover its developers and those developers can get sued one by one, two things will probable happen.  First, the largest/financially strongest developers will (like Apple itself) reluctantly pay off the patent trolls, surviving by ultimately passing the costs onto consumers.  Second, small developers will go out of business.