Nuevas Tecnologías (Continuación)

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Por Moisés Naím, director de Foreign Policy y autor de Ilícito: cómo traficantes, contrabandistas y piratas están cambiando el mundo. Traducción de María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia (EL PAÍS, 26/12/06):

Un vídeo muestra a unas personas que recorren lentamente, en fila india, un camino cubierto de nieve. Se oye un disparo; la primera persona cae. Se oye una voz en off: «Les están matando como perros». Otro disparo, y cae otro cuerpo al suelo. Un soldado chino de uniforme vuelve a disparar su rifle. Un grupo de soldados examina los cuerpos caídos.

Estas imágenes las captó, en las cumbres del Himalaya, un miembro de una expedición alpinista que asegura que se topó por azar con la matanza.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Por Enrique Murillo, editor y escritor (EL PAÍS, 11/12/06):

No hay congreso de editores ni feria de tecnología en donde no se anuncie, desde hace unos años, la muerte del libro, ese vejestorio, en su forma tradicional, y su sustitución por artilugios de nueva generación. Durante los congresos profesionales, los editores hemos tenido que escuchar numerosas conferencias en las que, so pretexto de darnos información acerca de las tecnologías más avanzadas, sucesivos directores comerciales de ésta o aquella empresa (llámense Microsoft, Sony o lo que sea) nos vendían, con una elocuente perorata en tono de predicador, el Séptimo o Noveno Advenimiento, dicho de otro modo el triunfo definitivo del así llamado «libro» electrónico.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Raúl Fernández, chief executive of the software firm ObjectVideo and co-owner of the Washington Capitals (THE WASHINGTON POST, 09/12/06):

Technology won the 2006 elections for the Democrats. No, not electronic voting machines, but the power of the Internet, fueled by innovative applications that let citizens create and publish their own content. The Internet not only changed the balance of power in the House and Senate, it also helped sack the secretary of defense. Welcome to viral democracy.

In 1994, the last time the House changed hands, the Internet was mainly a university and military application. AOL, with its first 1 million members, was an up-and-coming player in the emerging online world.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Michael Kinsley (THE GUARDIAN, 28/11/06 – THE WASHINGTON POST, 28/11/06):

The first person I knew who had a website of his own was a fellow Washington journalist. This was when many journalists were still just getting into email, but the URL for this site quickly circulated around town and around the world. Why? Well, we were all impressed by the technological savvy. But we were absolutely astounded by the solipsism. What on earth had gotten into Joe? This was a modest, soft-spoken and self-effacing fellow, yet his website portrayed him as an egotistical monster.

Or so it seemed at the time.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Pat Kane, the author of ‘The Play Ethic: a Manifesto for a Different Way of Living, and half of Hue and Cry’ (THE GUARDIAN, 09/11/06):

As the tidal wave of eco-puritanism swells darkly on the horizon, it may not be the best time to launch your latest non-recyclable chunk of plastic and silicon. And Sony’s new computer-game console, PlayStation3 – launched in Japan this weekend, North America next week and Britain in the spring – hardly covers itself in glory.If the aim of this machine, in the words of the technology critic Neil Postman, is «to amuse ourselves to death», it could hardly be better fashioned.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Sarah Dempster (THE TIMES, 06/11/06):

LAST WEEK Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, told the Today programme on Radio 4 that he was concerned about the future of his creation. He feared that, if left to develop unchecked, “bad things” could happen to it. Monocles shattered and bow ties were rent asunder as the man who put the wow in hypermedia knowhow went on to reveal that bloggers may not be entirely trustworthy and fraudsters could erode the “usefulness” of his invention.

“Certain undemocratic things could emerge and misinformation will start spreading over the web,” he explained, possibly before running out of the studio, arms flapping wildly about his learned head while screaming something about being “attacked by spy flies”.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Por José Luis Oriuela, profesor en la Universidad de Navarra y autor del blog eCuaderno (LA VANGUARDIA, 29/10/06):

Los weblogs son sitios web autogestionados por sus propios autores, compuestos por entradas individuales llamadas anotaciones o historias que se organizan en la página siguiendo una cronología inversa. Las herramientas de gestión de blogs asignan de forma automatizada a cada entrada su fecha y hora de publicación, así como una dirección URL permanente que facilita las referencias y enlaces externos. La mayor parte de los blogs permite a los lectores comentar cada anotación y, de forma creciente, compartirla con otros usuarios de la red a través del correo electrónico, de los servicios de marcadores sociales (del.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Por Susan D. Moeller, directora del Centro Internacional de Medios y Agenda Pública en la Universidad de Maryland, y Moisés Naím, director de la revista Foreign Policy y autor de Ilícito: cómo traficantes y contrabandistas están cambiando el mundo. Traducción de María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia (EL PAÍS, 24/10/06):

El sábado 7 de octubre, casi al mismo tiempo que se informaba al mundo de que Google estaba pujando para pagar 1.650 millones de dólares por YouTube, una página web de descarga de vídeos nacida hace dos años, la prestigiosa periodista rusa Anna Politkóvskaya fue asesinada a tiros en Moscú. Politkóvskaya escribía sobre las violaciones de los derechos humanos en Chechenia.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 20/10/06):

THE ARMY OF BLOGGERS came in their thousands. They came to muse, complain, laugh, observe and, above all, to record their lives. They came, at the invitation of the National Trust, to document what happened (or did not happen) to them on October 17, 2006, a single, arbitrary day in the nation’s existence. Some entries were fascinating; the majority were fascinatingly dull. A few bloggers were famous, but most were not. This is autobiography as DIY, all-encompassing CCTV in words.

The One Day in History experiment demonstrated that for all our concerns about educational standards, this is a profoundly literate culture; it proved that the British really do regard tea-drinking as a form of life-punctuation, each cup worth recording for posterity; and it proved that we still believe ordinary life can be spiced up by multiple exclamation marks!!!!…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Max Boot, a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the new book ‘War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today’ (Gotham Books) (THE WASHINGTON POST, 19/10/06):

The conventional assumption is that the future of American power lies in our economic strength. There is a great deal of truth in this, but it is not the whole truth. If you look at the history of the past 500 years, a prime determinant of which nations rise and fall has been their success in taking advantage of revolutions in military affairs.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Giles Coren (THE TIMES, 14/10/06):

WHILE THE WORLD waits to see what China will do about North Korea’s foray into nuclear capability, the Chinese themselves were far more excited this week about a technological leap of their own: the invention of the world’s first robot chef.

According to the Xinhua news agency, the romantically named AIC-AI Cookingrobot has been developed by boffins in Shenzen and will go on sale to restaurants in 2007, with a more family-friendly version planned for the domestic market soon afterwards.

According to the Shenzen Economic Daily the AIC-AI Cookingrobot “translates standardised human cooking actions into machine language .…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Robert J. Samuelson (THE WASHINGTON POST, 20/09/06):

Call it the ExhibitioNet. It turns out that the Internet has unleashed the greatest outburst of mass exhibitionism in human history. Everyone may not be entitled, as Andy Warhol once suggested, to 15 minutes of fame. But everyone is entitled to strive for 15 minutes — or 30, 90 or much more. We have blogs, «social networking» sites (MySpace.com, Facebook), YouTube and all their rivals. Everything about these sites is a scream for attention. Look at me. Listen to me. Laugh with me — or at me.

This is no longer fringe behavior.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Richard Adams (THE GUARDIAN, 02/09/06):

Next week London will enjoy an old-fashioned newspaper war, a throwback to the golden age of print when Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst battled over the streets of New York. Dirty tricks, turf battles, spoilers and a sprint to be number one, it has it all – except for something that would baffle Hearst and Pulitzer. Both the new evening papers – Associated Newspapers’ London Lite and News International’s The London Paper – will be given away for free.

Free newspapers in themselves are nothing new. People in Newcastle, Leeds and Cardiff, as well as London and other big UK cities, are used to getting them every day.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Robert X. Cringely, the host of PBS’s NerdTV (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 01/09/06):

OVER the past two weeks Apple Computer and Dell Computer have recalled approximately six million lithium-ion batteries powering their notebook computers. The batteries, all made by Sony, had an annoying problem: they were prone to explode. While we as consumers might wonder why vendors are selling batteries intended to go in pockets and briefcases that have greater energy storage density than dynamite, recent history actually shows that we’ll accept almost any risk for more power.

Lithium-ion is just the latest in a succession of relatively toxic rechargeable battery technologies, each intended to pack more available electrons in smaller and smaller packages, with li-ion besting the field by a resounding five times, explosions be damned.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 01/09/06):

Today, at the push of a button, you can download and print the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy, using only a computer, an internet connection, a paving stone of paper and a small bucket of ink. Technically, the service is free, although it would be easier and cheaper simply to buy the book, which could then be read in the bath, while saving on printer cartridges and trees.

The new service is the latest step in the stated goal of Google, the internet search engine, “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and, although few may be rushing to print out the Digitised Dante, it marks an important development in world literature.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges. He is on the advisory boards of two university presses and a university library (THE WASHINGTON POST, 22/08/06):

The nation’s colleges and universities should support Google’s controversial project to digitize great libraries and offer books online. It has the potential to do a lot of good for higher education in this country.

The rapid annual increase in the number of new books and journals, coupled with far-reaching technological innovations, is changing relations between academia and the publishing industry. In the recent past, college and university libraries collaborated with publishers in creating online collections of selected published works.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Alice Miles (THE TIMES, 16/08/06):

THE WORLD WIDE WEB had its 15th birthday this month. It is no coincidence that over the same period of time, radical Islamist terrorism has emerged as Western democracy’s deadly new threat. Al-Qaeda and the web are the same age.

Before the web, terrorism remained local. It had to. There were limited physical and secure ways of reaching sympathisers farther afield, of channelling money, of propagandising and recruiting internationally. Before the early 1990s, and al-Qaeda’s move to Sudan, Osama bin Laden’s operations were local, and limited.

Today the Islamist terror network operates internationally through a series of dedicated and sometimes restricted websites; doubtless it uses the web to channel money around the world as well.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Ben Macyntire (THE TIMES, 11/08/06):

FIFTEEN YEARS after the birth of the world wide web, the lines of battle are clear. On one side the still young culture of the internet — anarchic, playful, joyfully (and sometimes wilfully) inaccurate, global and uncontrollable; on the other, a paper-based set of priorities — precise, polite, often national in perspective and increasingly paranoid. The latter seeks to manage, limit and define the culture; the former delights in its resistance to regulation.

The battle rages in the conflict between Wikipedia, the sprawling internet encyclopaedia, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the canon versus the loose cannon.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Por Ernest Abadal, profesor de la Facultad de Biblioteconomía i Documentación de la UB (EL PERIÓDICO, 02/07/06):

Como en el caso de otras polémicas culturales, el grito de alarma fue lanzado por los franceses. En enero del 2005, Jean-Noël Jeanneney publicaba en Le Monde un combativo artículo titulado Quand Google défie l’Europe. ¿Qué ocurría? ¿Cómo podía una empresa privada desafiar a todo un continente? En el artículo se alertaba de los peligros de una iniciativa de Google de digitalización de libros que podía suponer un atentado contra la diversidad cultural.
Se trataba, en concreto, de Google Books, un proyecto presentado en agosto del 2004 como un servicio que facilitaría el acceso al texto completo de unos 15 millones de libros digitalizados procedentes, básicamente, de bibliotecas norteamericanas y britá- nicas.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Lawrence Lessig is a law professor at Stanford University and founder of the Center for Internet and Society. Robert W. McChesney is a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-founder of the media reform group Free Press (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 08/06/06):

Congress is about to cast a historic vote on the future of the Internet. It will decide whether the Internet remains a free and open technology fostering innovation, economic growth and democratic communication, or instead becomes the property of cable and phone companies that can put toll booths at every on-ramp and exit on the information superhighway.…  Seguir leyendo »