So I was installing a fresh version of Acrobat Reader 9 on an XP machine a few days ago and guess what … it comes bundled with AIR runtime by the looks (and there is no option to select/deselect when you try to install).
“Interesting” tactic by Adobe to rapidly grow the installed base who can run AIR applications.
Installer options:
Acrobat Installer
My Add/Remove programs after installation
Air installs with Acrobat Reader
Nick Carr wrote a piece a while ago about the pros and cons of easy information distribution of information. Specifically the double edged sword: GPS http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/01/looking_at_a_se.php
As GPS transceivers become common accessories in cars, the benefits have been manifold. Millions of us have been relieved of the nuisance of getting lost or, even worse, the shame of having to ask a passerby for directions.
But, as with all popular technologies, those dashboard maps are having some unintended consequences. In many cases, the shortest route between two points turns out to run through once-quiet neighborhoods and formerly out-of-the-way hamlets.
Scores of villages have been overrun by cars and lorries whose drivers robotically follow the instructions dispensed by their satellite navigation systems.
That’s the problem with the so-called transparency that’s resulting from instantly available digital information. When we all know what everyone else knows, it becomes ever harder to escape the pack.
There is, of course, much to be said for the easy access to information that the internet is allowing. Information that was once reserved for the rich, the well-connected, and the powerful is becoming accessible to all. That helps level the playing field, spreading economic and social opportunities more widely and fairly.At the same time, though, transparency is erasing the advantages that once went to the intrepid, the dogged, and the resourceful … The commuter who pored over printed maps to find a short cut to work finds herself stuck in a jam with the GPS-enabled multitudes.
You have to wonder whether, as what was once opaque is made transparent, the bolder among us will lose the incentive to strike out for undiscovered territory. What’s the point when every secret becomes, in a real-time instant, common knowledge?
I don’t buy the argument.
It’s safe to assume that technological advances (like GPS) will lead to externalities (unintended side effects, both positive and negative). I live in a village which suffers every now and again from GPS-enabled truck drivers getting stuck in narrow lanes – so I can see where he’s coming from with this particular criticism. But it seems to me that Nick is arguing something more than just about side-effects. He seems to arguing that there is something in the very nature of the technological advances – “what was once opaque is made transparent” – that devalues us. That makes us less willing to strike out for something new.
Hogwash. What is the point of striking out for undiscovered territory? People will always do that just for the hell of it, in the hope of commercial gain or personal aggrandisement. For a number of reasons. What they are striking out for may be different to what their grand-parents considered undiscovered but they will continue nonetheless.
I like analogies. When I think of Nick Carr railing against GPS making it “too easy” to get from A to B I try to imagine similar scenarios. So how about going back 1000 years to the introduction of the abacus into Western Europe which made it far easier to do your maths than it would have been to multiply CLXI by XIV in Roman Numerals. In the same way that GPS democratises navigational data, the abacus democratised the ability to do mathematical calculations. That’s a good thing, right?
Here’s a nice quote from Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure Of English
It is difficult now to realise the excitement and pride in British engineering which the Great Exhibition [1851] brought to the country. An extract from the journal of Queen Victoria after her visit gives us a taste of it:
”Went to the machinery part, where we remained two hours, and which is excessively interesting and instructive …. What used to be done by hand and used to take months doing is now accomplished in a few instants by the most beautiful machinery.”
I wonder to what degree the powers that be today are as excited by technological innovations as Queen Victoria was in 1851.
Nick Carr’s article “Is Google Making us Stupid?” certainly provoked some brouhaha across the global interwebs. I read a lot of the commentary, particularly this before the article so I was surprised on finally reading the article to find that I really enjoyed it. Even though the question in the title was obviously intended to rile people.
How about asking: “Did the motor car make us lazy?”
You know what – the motor car probably did make some people lazy. And at the same time, for others opened up more possibilities than ever before.
Overall it’s not a very useful question. Nor is “Is Google making us stupid?” It may be a useful soundbite but it’s not a useful question.
The question is really asking two different things:
(a) Can use of google cause a fundamental change in the brain?
(b) If so, is this a change for the worse?
There seems to be a lot of agreement that (a) is possible. Nick Carr references some examples to demonstrate that the mind re-wires itself according to how it is used. “.. readers of ideograms, such as Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet”.
Here’s another example that suggests that the brain not only re-wires itself, but changes physical shape according to how it is used: Apparently the brains of London taxi drivers have been seen to physically change in response to their work.
A study of London cabbies used brain scanners to show that a part of the brain linked with navigational skills is bigger in taxi drivers than in other members of the public. The scientists also found that the size of the hippocampus – which lies deep within the temporal lobes of the brain just behind the eyes – gets bigger in proportion to a taxi driver’s length of service.
Sounds strange when you first hear it but starts making sense in a “paving the cowpaths in your brain” sense. but makes sense. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about then check: http://www.classy.dk/log/archive/001522.html, and esp. the link from there to here: http://www.peterme.com/archives/000073.html)
So I buy part (a) – using google (i.e. the internet) can change the way my brain operates.
But (b) is far less clear. Assuming this kind of brain re-wiring has happened is it “bad” or “good”? Or “neither”. Or “both”. Look back at the motor car again. Was it able to effect changes in how people physically interact with the world? Yes. They were able to drive rather than walk. Was this change “bad” or “good”? How bad is it to be a bit “lazier” because you can drive rather than walk?
Nick seems to assume that “stupid” equates to skim reading rather than deep reading. I’m not so sure that intelligence is as simple as this. I have known plenty of people far smarter than me who spent their whole university lives skim reading books and yet apparently understanding them.
Does Google encourage us to skim read? Possibly yes. But possibly, just possibly, faster and easier access to information might even help people reach better understanding better than was possible before. Just like the motor car enabled us to get from A to B more easily than ever before.
I generally have faith in the innate smarts of my fellow human beings. And so I tend to subscribe to the view that software can make things better – from recording accounting transactions more accurately all the way through to bringing people closer together. And that people are not slow to adopt a new technology if it makes their lives easier, or restores a childlike wonder to their worlds. I don’t believe in “change management”: if you set out on a software project in the full knowledge that you are going to need a lot of change management then you are setting yourself up to fail (*).
But I also like the idea of “local maxima”. which I have seen referenced in Genetic Algorithms. From the Genetic Algorithms page on Wikipedia
[A Genetic Algorithm] may have a tendency to converge towards local optima or even arbitrary points rather than the global optimum of the problem. This means that it does not “know how” to sacrifice short-term fitness to gain longer-term fitness. The likelihood of this occurring depends on the shape of the fitness landscape: certain problems may provide an easy ascent towards a global optimum, others may make it easier for the function to find the local optima. This problem may be alleviated by using a different fitness function, increasing the rate of mutation, or by using selection techniques that maintain a diverse population of solutions, although the No Free Lunch theorem proves that there is no general solution to this problem.
Here is Guns, Germs and Steel on QWERTY keyboards – a great example of a suboptimal technology that only the churlish would seriously challenge these days.
Unbelievable as it may now sound, [the QWERTY keyboard] 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 scattering the commonest letters over all the keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typerwriters 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.
What a great example of a local maximum in technology adoption.
(*) If this sounds naive my approach is a bit different. You need to do all your change management before you start your project. Not when you are about to implement it.
