The power of other people’s opinions or bias

I had the opportunity to attend the Time Convention in Auckland, New Zealand today, which was a great opportunity to step out of my normal day and have time to think. I didn’t learn much, but it did remind me about things I know I should be doing, but don’t spend enough time at. I used my Blackberry to take notes which I emailed to myself, as it doesn’t have a notepad or Word application, as my trusty Windows Mobile and Palm handhelds used to.

The final presentation, that I very much enjoyed was from Kevin Billett who, while promoting a 2 day seminar for next week, came up with some thought provoking concepts about taking responsibility for attitudes and accepting experiences that you allow to have control over your life expectations and achievements. This set me to thinking about aspects of my experiences, particularly as a child, that have I have allowed to hold me back in some of my endeavours, but that’s another story.

He raised a topic that has interested me for many years, which is the effect that people’s expectations or opinions about other people, influence them in many ways.

There are countless examples. John’s Hopkins researchers recently found that many physicians had negative attitudes to patients with obesity problems, which negatively affected these patients to the extent that their problems worsened.

There have been many studies that show that a teacher’s expectations of their students, irrespective of any basis on which those expectations were founded, had a significant impact on their results. I recall being told, although I can’t site the source, of a university study that proved this point. If you know of the study, please share it with me.

A group of students of equal ability were split into two groups. The teachers were told that one group was of above average capability and the other were below average potential. The groups were taught the same lessons by the same teachers. Their results were consistent with the information the teachers had been given, those who they said were above average, performed above average and the others under performed.

The world of elite sport is often built around belief that people of the right proportions can become medal winning athletes, even if they have never participated in that sport before. Sir Steve Redgrave has selected people based on height, with a view to having them represent their country in the 2012 Olympics. For rowing, the expectation is that tall people have powerful levers suited to the sport. One would not think that this alone could not be enough, but combine that with the positive expectation that they will become medal winners and history has proven that this can work.

The same occurs in gymnastics, where girls are headhunted at an early age based on being short and enjoying sport. I’ve seen from personal experience that girls who are told they can do things, outperform girls of similar strength and flexibility who are told that they aren’t good enough. What I saw was the same thing, girls over whom coaches had high expectations performed confidently, had less injuries and ended up on elite squads.

Psychology 101 has always featured nature and nurture. In any country where people are to some degree living in communities featuring high proportions of particular minority ethnic groups, there is a tendancy for them to be poorly represented in professions and overly represented in menial work. Students’ expectations in these areas are low, often fostered by teachers who have low expectations of their wards.

I won’t go on with this topic. I would appreciate your opinions and experience. Have you seen this happen first hand?

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Is that a Blackberry in your pocket or?

I’ve spent the last 3 days at the GeoCart’2008 Conference. It was an academic conference with speakers and attendees from all over the world. The content was excellent and I found it fascinating to see not only the results of academic research in the modern world of geography, location based technology research and web mapping, but also some of the great products that have and are being developed. But this is not what today’s blog is about. Perhaps more on the conference in the next few days.

I was an exhibitor at the conference and during the quiet times, was checking my phone for messages and emails as the Internet services at the venue at Auckland Univesity were shocking. I was in a building next door to the Auckland university IT Campus and the best local internet I could get was 128kbps. This morning I was listening to a podcast while I was in the shower about Internet services in Mali and how their pipe was only 2Gbps. Being landlocked they have to rely on other countries for access to the submarine cable. They would be horrified at the speed I got in Auckland, but I digress.

A number of people asked if my phone was a Blackberry and how did I like it. My answer was, yes, indeed it is a Blackberry, as issued by my company. Do I like it? I intensely dislike it. I’m a power user of mobile internet, after all I wrote the book, Unleashing the Roadwarrior and I taught companies how to improve efficiency in the field using mobile and wireless devices. Unfortunately I no longer walk the talk.

You see, to me mobile and wireless computing is about efficiency and touching things as few times as necessary. I’ve come from the world of touch screens and along with the book, published texts including Mastering your Palm and Mastering your Pocket PC.

For people who only use the phone ‘killer apps’ of voice and text, the Blackberry is a wonderful device. It has a qwerty keyboard so if you don’t use txt abbreviations, you can type your messages without having to remember the buttons and as a phone, it is perfectly adequate. If you are a Baby Boomer, the ability to do these things as well as read, send and receive email is wonderful. Attachments are another story, but you can send and receive email and you can do it securely through your MS Exchange Server which makes the IT Department happy. It does also synch wirelessly with Exchange for my contacts and calendar, but that’s pretty much where the fun and utility ends for me.

Here’s what I did with my Blackberry over 3 days at the conference. I sent and received a couple of urgent emails. I sent and received a couple of Twitter messages (which all but exhausted the ability of the browser.

Here’s what I could have done if I still had a Windows Mobile or Palm device. Actually I do still own old models, but they are old and I don’t really want to carry multiple devices anymore, although I could possibly consider a new Windows Mobile, Palm or iPhone, given the right opportunity, especially since there is now an iPhone Reader:)

I could have made lots of notes using handwriting recognition on the touch screen. I can write Graffiti or block characters without having to look at the device, so that I can concentrate on the speaker. These would have been written straight into MS Word, so that I would have them available for other purposes, such as copying and pasting into my blog. Instead I used scraps of paper, one of which I have already misplaced.

I could have taken photos of exhibits, slides and delegates for future use and reference.

I could have beamed my digital business card to others who used similar devices.

I could have shown off some of our mapping technology on the IE browser, even richer if the phone also had GPS, which my Blackberry doesn’t. (Mine is probably 2 years old) Relevant given that I work for a mapping company, specialising in web mapping API’s, routing, tracking and car navigation.

I could have quickly referenced web sites discussed during the papers and bookmarked them on the spot for future reference and integration with my favourites on the desktop.

I could have drawn mind-maps to enhance my note taking.

I could have read one of my eBooks, after setting up and while waiting for the delegates to arrive in the morning, or checked the daily paper.

I could have made audible notes and embedded them into an email, or even recorded segments of a presentation.

I could go on, but if you want to know all the other things I could have done, read my eBook, which you can purchase at ReadingIt.

It’s about efficiency, about touching things once but having access to them in lots of ways. It’s about being able to combine real time research with the discussion on the browser. You see, we can think and take in a lot more in the time that a presenter speaks, and in terms of our points of reference. It’s about then being able to access any of those pieces of information, communicate them and collaborate with other people.

Instead I have a few pieces of paper that I hope I won’t lose.

I guess this is about the dichotomy I live and work in. On the one side there is an infrastructure designed to keep data secure and cater to the lowest common denominator, for the most of whom, without training and motivation, even a Blackberry is overkill. On the other side, a busy person who wants to make the most of the information, people and media available at any given point in time. To leverage it.

The conference providers gave the delegates a CD with copies of all of the presentations, which was great. But it is pretty analogue and although I am very interested, I will probably never get around to looking at it. I will hopefully get to some of my notes, along with notes from other events that I havebeen to recently, scribbles on pieces of paper or the backs of business cards.

Then of course there are podcasts. I am big on maximising my time and whenever I am in the car, walking, exercising or doing chores, I am connected to my iPod.

So, yes it is a Blackberry in my pocket. Would I recommend it to anyone? No. Not unless all you want is a phone that does exchange / text email really well. That’s all it was designed for. I want more! I’m a busy person who wants to multitask. I want a touch screen, preferably multipoint. I want efficiency.

The future of personal computing Part One

I was reading a story in a local magazine the other day, I forced myself because I’m interested, but at first glance it was not very insightful in my humble opinion. I get so tied up trying to make the future happen that sometimes I don’t sit back and think about it in more depth and I should.

There has been a lot of talk about the Semantic Web and about sharing data on the web with lots of applications and people, lots of talk about collaborating with other people and for sure that is happening. I use Friendfeed, I’m active on Facebook, sometimes Flickr, Buzznet, LinkedIn and loads more. Twitter is the only one I really use on my Blackberry, which doesn’t suit many of the social networking applications very well.

The problem I have with putting information on web sites such as Gmail and others is can I rely on it being there forever? I love the idea of being able to access everything anywhere anytime and A3 (cubed) is one of my mantras, but ignoring security I still have fears over losing access to my data, like when recently Mucaah.com, a web site in the Netherlands where I was building a fan base disappeared overnight.

But anyway, looking to the future, the big next thing for me is LBS or Location Based Services and on any device, any time. It is about interacting with your environment and your social network in real places in real time. Sure a lot of people including myself spend a lot of time at desktops, but I plan to do much more of my computing, especially social computing at a mobile level.

I have owned a myriad of devices and still have many of them including Palm’s, A Casio Zoomer, Symbol’s, iPaq’s, iMate as well as other Smartphones from a variety of brands. I worked hard to help bring these products into mainstream and not just as clever phones but as tools to enhance the way people react in this world. To that end in the beginning of this century I wrote Unleashing the Road Warrior, Master Your Palm and master Your Pocket PC. All of these were about maximising the potential of these devices and the communications to help you work and play smarter rather than harder, another personal mantra. I don’t mean you shouldn’t play hard, but that it shouldn’t be hard work.

Hopefully my next one, whether it’s a new Blackberry, iPhone, Xperia or something else, will have a GPS chip in it and a variety of applications that will enable my mobile world. I have some major activities in mind to help develop this area of computing and turn it into a reality.

So looking a few years into the future, what is my vision? I could write a book, but like my last ones they date very quickly, so this blog will have to do. The biggest impact of these technologies will be social, after all people do business with people, they have relationships with people and those relationships and networks have far more power when they are spatially enabled.

Over the last few years applications like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Buzznet, Flickr, Twitter and more have been the most popular development in computing or social computing at least and people are loving it, but whilst many of these applications are now able to be used in a mobile environment (for example I use Twitter on my phone), the don’t have a spatial component yet.

So lets have a brief look into the near future. In one of my previous blogs I described a typical day for me on the Internet. Now lets have a bit of a look at what that same day might look like in 2013.

I wake up to the sound of my current favourite song which is being played on my iPhone V6 which is in the dock of my alarm clock. Note this is the latest model, but they have been around since 2008. I get up and go into the bathroom, taking my iPhone with me and put it into my bathroom dock which has water resistant wiring so that it doesn’t corrode from the steam of my hot shower.

While I was asleep my iPhone connected to iTunes, not through Vodafone who are still greedy in their data prices but wirelessly to my wireless router which connects to my fibre-optic internet connection with its guaranteed minimum 100Mbps connection and updated all my favourite podcasts in a matter of 30 seconds.

It automatically starts playing the podcasts in order of preference while I shower and I catch up with the latest in tech news from Channelflip and Geekbrief.

As I have breakfast I plug my iPhone into the projector pod and catch up with the latest personalised news which is displayed on the dining room wall and catch up with the things I am interested in.

I’m going to stop here for now, because it’s obvious that this is going to be longer than I intended and if I don’t post it now it will never finish or will become a book. So RSS or bookmark this blog if this is of interest to you:)

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)