I attended the CRA’s Snowbird Conference last month. The most interesting talk was a keynote from Genevieve Bell (also see here) who is an anthropologist who works at Intel Research. One of her messages was that while we tend to think that technology changes culture, it’s more often the other way around. Cultures are very robust and change slowly. It’s typical for a new technology to be adapted within a culture and used to support existing patterns of behavior.

For example, she said that mobile phone manufacturers have developed popular phones for Muslim users that support their religious practices by (1) reminding them when it is time to pray, (2) orienting them towards Mecca and (3) disabling incoming calls for 20 minutes. She gave many other examples from Africa and Asia that showed how new technology is being used in ways that fit into the existing cultures.

I found the message reassuring. It’s easy to get worked up into a state of anxiety about what our modern world is doing to our societies. Human cultures are apparently more resilient than we naively assume.

This Monday, 10 July 2006, the second hour of the Diane Rehm Show will be about social networks on the Web. This is one of the best interview/call-in shows on US radio and is well known for intelligent discussions on timely topics.

11:00 Social Networks on the Web

Many millions of Americans have joined online social networks. We’ll talk about their appeal and what corporate and government researchers could learn from them. Guests:

• Jennifer Golbeck, research associate, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Univerisity of Maryland, College Park, MD
• Albert-Laszlo Barbabasi, professor of physics, University of Notre Dame and author of “Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else”
• Kathleen Carley, professor, Computer Science, Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University

In addition to listening to it live on the radio (11:00 EDT (GMT-5) on many stations), you can also hear it live on the Internet or download it after a delay of some hours.

Akismet has an interesting stats page that shows a graph of ham and spam comments since Akismet started back in October 2005. It shows that about 93% of all blog comments are spam. Akismet is doing a great job for us. I’ve never seen a false positive and only about 0.2% false negatives.