Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Popular culture
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Broadband: Oxygen for a Digital World
Broadband networks, wired and wireless, are the oxygen that lets the world of devices and services breathe. However, the air remains perilously thin. For many, digital inclusion remains a dream, rather than a reality.
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Globally Interconnected, Globally Worried
In a world of global interconnectedness, we are united not only by ubiquitious and nearly instantaneous communications but also by coupled economic systems. The European sovereign debt crisis , pressure on the Euro, the fractious debate over raising the United States’ debt limit and the interdependence economies and global trade mean that we truly are…
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What Really Matters
With a seven year old’s theological certainty, I knew she in heaven, and the preacher did too. The only question in his mind and mine was whether the rest of us were good enough to get there with her. With the bar set this high, the preacher and I both had some serious doubts.
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On Licking the Cookies
Licking the cookies refers to claiming action or skill in an area but in a way that prevents anything from happening. It is intended to conjure an image of a cookie plate, where one licks the cookies then returns them to the plate, rendering them inedible by all.
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Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations
That picture of you at a family reunion, squinting into the sun, can rarely be delimited by a physical location. Instead, information flows freely and often globally. We need to rethink our notions of information privacy, moving beyond concepts rooted primarily in person and place, and considering logical privacy.
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Technology and Everyday Skills
I generally believe that successful technologies become invisible, dissolved into the fabric of society. They supplant older, previously valuable skills. Few of us would now survive as hunter-gatherers, but almost all of us can now use a search engine to query the world’s knowledge base. Having said that, qualitative reasoning and intuition regarding orders of…