Today we had a great discussion about connectivity amongst devices \u2013 a concept known as \u201cThe Internet of Things.\u201d<\/p>\n
A quote of interest from the \u201cEmbedded, Everywhere\u201d reading: \u201cAn EmNet that requires extensive user training will have failed in its fundamental promise\u2014computing systems must adapt to users, not the other way around<\/em>.\u201d (emphasis added)<\/p>\n Is this (or has this always been) a hard and fast rule? I may be wrong, but there seems to be some irony here. As the ARPANET was being built just 50+ years ago, the onus was placed on scientists (the users) to create software that would adapt their own local machines to IMPs which would then connect to the overall network \u2013 in order to connect, they had to adapt. Now, according to this article, we expect our computerized consumer electronics (which house EmNets) to be easy to use and, ideally, intuitively adaptable to us.<\/p>\n Waski\u2019s Wired<\/em> article suggests that interconnected sensors are practically living, working together as a single \u201corganism.\u201d I found this comment related\u00a0to Licklider\u2019s original idea of the computer as an almost human entity. \u00a0Licklider died in 1990; it makes you wonder what he\u2019d think if only he were around to see the changes over the past 26 years.<\/p>\n Finally, to take Burrus\u2019 thought (about the Internet of Things being far larger than we realize) a step further: Smart Cities connect to other Smart Cities, States connect to States, and all of America is then connected and then\u2026? How big could this possibly get? A central command hub in the White House that monitors all 50 states? The implications are pretty neat; for example, sensors could assess natural disaster damage across multiple states and decide where first to send responders based on which areas were most harmed. How would national responses to Hurricane Sandy or Katrina have differed had we had this type of technology in place? (At the same time, the national security implications of a central command hub are also pretty alarming.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today we had a great discussion about connectivity amongst devices \u2013 a concept known as \u201cThe Internet of Things.\u201d A quote of interest from the \u201cEmbedded, Everywhere\u201d reading: \u201cAn EmNet that requires extensive user training will have failed in its fundamental promise\u2014computing systems must adapt to users, not the other way around.\u201d (emphasis added) Is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8101,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions\/28"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}