Nuevas Tecnologías (Continuación)

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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 »

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By Jeff Johnson, an editor at Jane magazine (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 05/06/06):

LAST month, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers rejected a proposal to create a .xxx domain, keeping lovers of Internet pornography in a virtual Stone Age when it comes to quickly locating prurient material. Here are some domains that should be considered next:

.cat The domain of choice for the involuntarily celibate.

.sal For rotund fellows who love pizza and the people who love them.

.bun For the hot dog and sausage lobby.

.dud The Web home of secondhand fireworks commerce.

.wah The preferred suffix for sites that feature copious MPEG’s of guitar solos.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Por Rosa Pereda, periodista y escritora (EL PAÍS, 27/05/06):

Chatear, que todavía para la Academia es, además de un trabajo agrícola andaluz, «beber chatos de vino», aparece en Internet como «sinónimo de ciberconversación libre de identidades, raza, sexo, talla o nacionalidad». Wikipedia precisa que viene de «chat, en inglés charla», y que habitualmente sus usuarios lo hacen bajo «seudónimos, en Internet nicks». Alias que se entienden como la garantía de la libertad, que independiza la voz escrita de los compromisos de la identidad, la raza, el sexo, la nacionalidad, y, qué curioso pero qué atinado, la talla. Yo supongo que también la edad, la clase y hasta el acento, todas las señales de pertenencia identitaria que nos hacen, a unos por una, a otros por otra, candidatos a la discriminación.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Par Eric Schmidt, PDG de Google Inc. (LE MONDE, 24/05/06):

endant des siècles, l’accès et la transmission de l’information dans le monde ont été réservés à la frange aisée et instruite de la population. Aujourd’hui, il suffit de taper quelques mots-clés sur le clavier d’un ordinateur pour obtenir des informations sur n’importe quel sujet ou presque. En quelques minutes, il est possible de comparer des prix ou des politiques. Rien d’étonnant donc à ce que tout un chacun utilise cette capacité pour acheter des produits et des services, pour demander des comptes et surtout pour s’exprimer.

La démocratisation de l’information nous responsabilise tous en tant qu’individus.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Par Jean-Noël Jeanneney, président de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (LE MONDE, 24/05/06):

Voici seize mois, Le Monde avait accueilli mon appel à un sursaut en face de l’annonce de Google qui promettait d’offrir bientôt sur la Toile 15 millions d’ouvrages aux internautes du monde entier.

Le risque signifié par cette proclamation tonitruante du fameux moteur de recherche était celui du quasi-monopole d’une entreprise : certes, son efficacité économique et ses mérites technologiques apparaissaient éminents, mais elle était vouée à choisir et à classer les livres mis en ligne selon des normes déterminées par la culture américaine et par la recherche d’un profit croissant, c’est-à-dire par l’influence omniprésente de la publicité.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 19/05/06):

I HAVE A FRIEND who has fallen in love with the satellite navigation system in his car. His sat-nav has a female American voice. My friend thinks she may be from the Midwest. He calls her Charlene. He likes the way she tells him what to do, coaxingly, but with complete conviction. Sometimes he deliberately takes a wrong turning, just to make her cross. Charlene is lovely when she’s angry, he says. But then, when he gets to where he is going and she purrs “You have reached your destination”, he feels fulfilled. He loves Charlene.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Brenda Despotin (THE TIMES, 08/05/06):

IN RAY BRADBURY’S apocalyptic tale Fahrenheit 451 firemen are employed to burn all books, driving underground those who cherish them. That such a stark warning of what happens in a bookless society should appear in the very medium made illicit in the tale is an irony not lost on his readers.

We return Bradbury’s book to the shelf alongside the Orwell, Huxley and Atwood, safe in the comforting knowledge that we are far too wise in the real world to allow anything of such magnitude to happen. Surely before any major change to our society becomes a reality there will always be referendums, debate in Parliament, media coverage and discussion everywhere?…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Jackie Ashley (THE GUARDIAN, 24/04/06):

Sometimes the House of Lords throws out speeches so interesting and radical, that you simply cannot imagine them being made in the Commons. One such came this week from the neuro-biologist Susan Greenfield. She asked a question that affects all of us, yet which I have never heard discussed by mainstream politicians: is technology changing our brains?The context is the clicking, bleeping, flashing world of screens. There has been a change in our environment that is so all-embracing and in a way so banal that we barely notice it. In just a couple of decades, we have slipped away from a culture based essentially on words to one based essentially on images, or pictures.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By James Harkin (THE GUARDIAN, 15/04/06):

The real money to be made out of the world wide web, it turns out, was never in sex or shopping but in the simple act of putting people together. The internet’s second coming, it is now universally agreed, is taking its inspiration from the rise of so-called «social networking sites», such as MySpace.com, in which people chat with and open up their lives to perfect strangers.MySpace now boasts 70 million members. If it were a television programme, it would be the most popular and valuable in American history – which is why Rupert Murdoch has just shelled out nearly $600m to buy it.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Natalie Hanman (THE GUARDIAN, 13/04/06):

Next month Planet Funk will become the first band to release a single exclusively via mobile phones. This month the song Crazy by Gnarls Barkley became the first track to hit No 1 on the strength of digital downloads alone. With the internet, mobile phones and multi-channel TV all vying for their attention, teenagers clearly no longer hold dear the habit of forking out pocket money on CD singles in Woolworths each weekend.

Which is fine by me. As entertainment audiences become increasingly tech- and media-savvy, they are gradually tuning their ears to less manufactured sounds.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Robert X. Cringely, the host of the online PBS program»NerdTV.» (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 08/04/06):

HELL froze over this week as Apple Computer unveiled Boot Camp, a free program that will allow its new Macintosh computers with Intel microprocessors to run Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system as an alternative to Apple’s OS X. The news media were agog and Apple’s stock price zoomed at the announcement. In my view, it was mildly interesting, but hardly the revolution Apple users want to see.

Many Mac enthusiasts view Boot Camp as a huge coup for Apple that will eventually take the computer hardware leadership away from Dell and the software leadership away from Microsoft.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By E. J. Dionne Jr. (THE WASHINGTON POST, 04/04/06):

When old regulations meet new technologies, there is bound to be confusion.

Last month the Federal Election Commission issued a rule regulating political activity on the Internet. To see how the new rule was reported, I fired up one of my favorite search engines, and what did I find?

One headline summarized the new rule as follows: «Proposed FEC Rules Would Exempt Most Political Activity on Internet.» Another headline read: «FEC Rules Would Regulate Paid Internet Ads.»

So which is it, more regulation or less? The best headline summarizing the controversy appeared over an article by Dave Helling in the Kansas City Star: «Oh, what a tangled Web we weave.» Indeed.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Por Salvador Giner, catedrático de Sociología de la UB y presidente del Institut d’Estudis Catalans (EL PERIÓDICO, 02/04/06):

El afán de libertad es la aspiración más antigua del hombre. Sin embargo, solamente los tiempos modernos lo han asumido como cosa propia, como bien alcanzable por parte de todos. Nuestra civilización se ha edificado sobre ese anhelo.
A medida que nos adentramos en el siglo XXI vamos asumiendo con mayor serenidad las dificultades de hacer realidad esa gran aspiración. Por primera vez, los tiempos modernos ya no son tan nuevos. Ya llevan 200, 150, 100 años –según los cómputos de cada cual– en plena marcha (hacia lo desconocido, por cierto).…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Jock Percy, a senior analyst atACE*COMM, an operations support systems solutions provider (THE GUARDIAN, 30/03/06):

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’s (QCA) annual report, released on Friday, found that more than 1,000 pupils were disqualified in last year’s public exams for taking mobile phones into the exam hall.While this is a fairly small percentage of those taking examinations, it is indicative of a much larger trend. The report concluded that many of the miscreants were penalised simply for having the phones in their pockets, having brought them in unintentionally. This highlights the fact that for today’s teenager, the mobile is so much an essential item, that it is unthinkable not to have it available at all times.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By James Harkin (THE GUARDIAN, 18/03/06):

In a scarcely reported move a few weeks ago, the makers of the online medieval role-playing game World of Warcraft reluctantly allowed teams of openly gay players, introducing the battle for sexual equality into the virtual world. Apparently players had begun to organise gay pride marches within the game, which must have raised eyebrows among the more conservative wizards and elves.Computer and video games are now big business. Their growing importance was recognised last week when the British Academy of Film and Television Arts announced that they are henceforth to be regarded as an art form alongside film and TV.…  Seguir leyendo »

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By Esther Dyson, an investor in technology start-ups, is the editor of Release 1.0. (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 17/03/06):

A company called Goodmail Systems thinks it has come up with a potential (and partial) solution to the problem of spam and fraud on the Internet. According to Goodmail, market forces are the answer, rather than the kinds of ineffective regulations that have so far failed to solve the problems.

What Goodmail is proposing is a sort of FedEx for e-mail. For a penny or less per message, the sender gets guaranteed delivery for mail and the promise that it will stand out in the user’s mailbox.…  Seguir leyendo »