Smart Clothes

What are smart clothes? Smart clothes, at least in this context, are clothes that have wireless technology incorporated into its fabrics so that all manner of devices can connect wirelessly to devices worn by other people.

A report today on ScienceDaily describes how medical monitoring devices have been integrated into smart clothes so that a person's respiration and body temp can be monitored from afar in real time. Isn't this called telemetry?

Even though the article is about medical uses for the technology, I happen to get more excited about other applications. Not too far into the future we will be seeing immense data streams moving wirelessly, through our clothes, from person to person and entity to entity. Think of the possibilities! Stay tuned.

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Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous Ultra-Fast WiFi

Looks like I'm on an AR roll here, but it can't be helped. For AR to work, it seems to me that ubiquitous, ultra fast wireless connectivity will be required. At this point, even wired broadband is far too slow for a believable augmented reality overlay system. Much higher bandwidth wireless will have to be made virtually omnipresent.

A few city centers have made free wireless access available, but it will have to be present in every nook and cranny, every field and forest. Which will come first, the chicken or the killer app? I think the infrastructure and the application will have to encourage each other to be created, perhaps by the same company. (Could this be why Google is quietly buying unused pipes?)

As far as the hardware is concerned, here is a little fellow who doesn't yet exist, but may be developed in time to play a part in the task of making wifi reach every cubic centimeter of livable space on earth. Right now it's called the LANdroid, and it looks like this...



Apparently these guys are on DARPA's wish list. So after they are built and battle-tested, perhaps they can be deployed for peacetime use. Stay tuned.

[via Herself's AI]

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Choose Your Pleasure: VR or AR?

Taking a glimpse into the near-term future, we can see the advents of both virtual reality (VR), and a subset of VR called augmented reality (AR). We have all heard of VR and seen a rudimentary version of it in the movie Disclosure. But virtual reality is headed in the direction of total immersion VR, which will take place at the level of your neurons themselves. Nanobots will stimulate your neurons directly so that you will not be able to tell the difference between real reality and the VR environment, except for some type of indicator inserted for safety reasons. Every one of your senses will be engaged, and your entire environment will be virtual.

So what is AR? AR is a mixture of the virtual and the real, sort of a virtual overlay that is superimposed upon real reality. This could also be activated at the neuronal level, or even projected onto your retinas by means of special contact lenses. Think of how much fun this would be, and how it could increase your productivity.

Imagine the fun part first. Think about people appearing as characters in a game, or dressing up the local environment to appear to be coming straight out of another world or another time. How cool would that be? As far as productivity, there could be educational or informational overlays on people and objects that would give you vital information about them. As you look at the person you're meeting for a business lunch, you see above their heads their name, company, position, etc. As you get started, you could bring up an agenda you had prepared earlier and either share it with your associate or view it privately, like a heads-up-display hanging in the air. The possibilities are virtually endless.

Talk about your killer apps. Let's see Apple and Microsoft battle it out in that arena! Stay tuned.

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Appreciating the Power of Connections

What makes a human brain so much smarter than a supercomputer? After all, transistors are about a million times faster than neurons. The power of that kind of speed advantage is obvious if you were to challenge the simplest calculator to see whether you or it could calculate sums or long division problems the fastest. You would lose. But things that the brain can do with such apparent ease, like recognizing faces and understanding speech, are extremely difficult for room-sized computers. Why is this? Why is it that computers can be faster, and yet human brains are smarter? One word: Connections.

Network-Effect Metabrain

Each transistor in a supercomputer may connect directly to one, two, or perhaps even three other transistors. Each neuron, however, forms 10⁴ to 10⁵ synaptic connections with adjacent neurons. Add up the total number of connections and you get on the order of 10¹¹ for the SC5832 supercomputer and 10¹⁶ for a human brain. But there are wider implications for this appreciation of the power of connections, implications that point to a growing "network-effect" metabrain, comprised of 10⁹ connected human brains, which Robert Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com, writes about in this article on Forbes.com.

Let's Make an Affiliance

I'm currently reading Vernor Vinge's classic sci-fi novel, Rainbows End (Note: the lack of an apostrophe is not an error...read the book and you'll see why it's spelled this way). In it, a world of the near-term future exists where the sharing of information is the engine of productivity, and the forming of connections, or temporary partnerships, among disparate individuals leads to new knowledge and economic growth. In this world, these partnerships are called affiliances. A brief consideration of our current economy and culture will show that this situation is already happening.

Adding Value by Connecting Ideas

Social bookmarking, networking, news-marking, etc. on the web are growing in number and in memberships at an amazing rate. Not more than a few years ago, how many people could I interact with in any meaningful sharing-of-informational way? Compare that to how many I am exposed to on the Internet every day. The sharing of ideas and thoughts has already become exponentially more varied and frequent than it used to be. In spite of this, we are still connecting with others at a very narrow and shallow level.

Where will value be added in the future? It seems to me that those who add value to information will be those who make important connections between disparate ideas, thus creating new ideas. I will close this post with Mr. Metcalfe's eloquent final paragraphs:

Over the last 30 years, using Moore's Law transistors and Metcalfe's Law networks, we have gone from zero to 10 9 people on the Internet. With broadband deployment, the quality of an Internet connection is going up while costs go down. Social networking is proliferating and evolving. New collaboration modes are disrupting science, media and politics--for the better, I think.

The network effect is expanding the collective intelligence of the human race. We can hope that on the whole we humans are getting smarter by the square of some very large numbers. It's enough to make one optimistic.

Stay tuned.

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Everything Will Be Connected

Conspiracy theorists like to tell us that "it's all connected." Pretty soon they'll be right, just not it the way they mean.

A recent article in the Economist sketches out the outlines of the coming connectedness of everyday objects through embedded computer chips and wireless technology.

This year around 10 billion microprocessors will be sold, embedded in anything from computers to coffee-makers. The vast majority of them will be able to “think” but not “talk”: they will perform specific tasks but cannot communicate. But this is now starting to change. The cost, size and power requirements of wireless functions are falling rapidly, so some unlikely candidates are now being connected to networks. For example, bridges and buildings are being monitored for structural integrity by small sensors. Farmland is being watched and irrigation systems are being switched on and off remotely.

"a giant network of 'everyware'"

Yes indeed, our world is being radically transformed into a giant network of "everyware." Rather than the current configuration of spokes connecting computers to hubs, everything will become a hub, connected to other hubs...everything else. But what will this uber-connectedness mean?

One of the most transformative effects of everyware will be the ability to be more precise. As in the nanotechnology field, it's all about precision, leading to massive increases in efficiency and productivity. No more "one-size-fits-all," blunt-force approaches, or using a cannon to take out a fly.

To illustrate what that world might be like, Robert Poor, the co-founder of two wireless companies, Adozu and Ember, uses a modest example: light fixtures in buildings. If every one of them contained a small wireless node, people would not only be able to control the lighting more effectively but put them to many other uses too. If the nodes were programmed to serve as online smoke detectors, they could signal a fire as well as show its location. They could also act as a security system or provide internet connectivity to other things in the building.

Devices will talk to each other...

Apple's iPod and Nike's running shoes can interconnect so that the music player can select songs that match the jogger's pace. Large organisations such as retailers, hospitals and the armed forces are using RFID tags for managing stock levels. More robust versions of the technology are deployed in “contactless” bank cards, passports and public-transport passes.

Computers are going to disappear into the fabric of everyday objects. But don't forget that they are there. Talking to each other. Stay tuned.

Via Soft Machines

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Skynet is Now Live

I almost said "alive," but we're not there yet. In an announcement that's eerily reminiscent of Terminator, PublicTechnology.net reported Friday that the UK's latest military satellite, dubbed Skynet 5A, is now in service.

It is the first of three hardened satellites that will be used to ferry communications between the British forces anywhere in the world and their UK headquarters.

Just the day before this announcement came the report that the US was ordering another four MQ-9 'Reapers', worth $59m, to supplement its initial fleet of seven. The British plan to deploy its first "fully armed" Reapers later this year. According to the Register,

The MQ-9 is the most formidable killer robot currently in operation. It's a big beast, 36 feet long with an 86-foot wingspan. It can fly for 14 hours without refuelling, going at a maximum speed of 300mph and as high as 50,000 feet - nine and a half miles up.

The US Air Force describes it as an "unmanned hunter/killer weapon system". This term might perhaps have been coined by a fan of the classic Terminator movies, in which dystopian future battlegrounds are overflown by murderous Flying-HK death-droids intent on wiping out the last vestiges of human resistance to the machine overlords.

The real-world flying HK is at least as deadly as the ones in the movies, able to lift a hefty 3,750 pounds of munitions. This can equate to 14 laser-guided Hellfire missiles, a smaller number of Paveway smartbombs, or GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) with their own satnav/inertial guidance.

The Register makes the perhaps justified assumption that the Reapers will be operated remotely through the new Skynet satellite system. Even if this turns out to be the case, however, it seems that the command to fire on an enemy target will still be the sole province of a human operator.

If and when the killer drones become fully autonomous, or are run remotely by an artificial intelligence, the Terminator scenario will become more comparable to the reality. Until then, stay tuned.

(Via Robots.net)

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A "Do-Over" for the Internet

Consider the assumptions made by the researchers who laid the foundation for the Internet. They were a small group of scientists who trusted one another, so they weren't concerned about security. They all had computers that stayed put, so they weren't concerned about mobile connections.

They wanted to use it to send each other information that no one's life depended on, and if it didn't get to its destination immediately, no one would die, so the concept of mission critical functionality didn't enter their minds. One can't blame them for not anticipating the future of the Internet, and even if they had, the hardware they had available weren't up to the task.

The result? The Internet that we all know and love is built on a rickety and extremely limited framework of legacy hardware and software, and much of its present functionality is a cobbled-together hodge podge of work-arounds and duct tape fixes. That simply won't do.

Researchers are very sensibly suggesting scrapping the present Internet and starting over from scratch, this time building a structure that has the underlying robustness, security, functionality and speed that will take us forward into the next several decades.

The National Science Foundation is only one of several organizations currently working on experimental networks; theirs is called the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI. The idea is to build a parallel network that would run alongside the current one and that would eventually replace it.

Another exciting bit of news concerns plans for the first Internet router in orbit, which will allow satellites to communicate directly with one another rather than having to go through ground-based routers. Sounds a bit ominous, I know, but the more distributed the Internet is, the less vulnerable it will be to attack. Hmm, that also sounds ominous.

As always, keep up with developments by visiting this site daily.

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3-D Chip Stacking Comes Much Closer

I've told you before about Moore's Law, which says that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 18 months. People have predicted that Moore's Law will ultimately hit the limits of physics, but new paradigms under development will allow it to continue. One of those paradigms is 3-dimensional stacking. Currently chips are laid out in only 2 dimensions, and have been connected by relatively long wires. According to the International Herald Tribune, "The memory and processor chips are often spaced inches apart from each other, causing a lag in transmission as chip makers multiply the number and voracity of calculating cores on their processors. Slowdowns crop up when data-hungry processors cannot retrieve information fast enough from memory to perform their increasingly complex functions."

But the irrepressible folks at IBM have found a way to connect chips vertically, shortening those distances hugely.

In IBM's solution, two chips are sandwiched on top of one another, the distance between them measured in microns, or millionths of a meter. They are held together by vertical connections that are etched in silicon holes filled with metal. The vertical connections are referred to as "through-silicon vias," which allow multiple chips to be stacked together and for more information to flow between them.

IBM said that its three-dimensional approach creates the possibility of up to 100 times more pathways for information, and divides by 1,000 times the distance that information needs to travel on a chip.

"This is a big step, this is a really historic move," said David Lammers, director of WeSRCH.com, a social networking Web site for semiconductor enthusiasts and part of VLSI Research. "This has been studied to death, but it's the first time a company is saying, 'We can connect two chips in the vertical direction.' "

This development gives chip makers a whole new direction, literally, in which to take their future products. IBM plans to begin full production in 2008. Intel and others are sure to be hot on their heels. Look for computers to become thousands of times more powerful in the very near future.

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Spray-On Computers?

Yes, you read right and I typed right. Scottish scientists (do they all have Sean Connery accents? That would be very cool. They also invented golf!) have done it again, this time in the world of technology and health care. They call it "speckled computing," and it happens to be some of the most advanced tech in the world.

Entirely self-powered and self-networking, they are digital "specks" (matchstick head-sized) that are sprayed on to patients in order to collect huge amounts of important data.

Spraying them directly onto a person creates the ability to carry out different tests at the same time, for example muscle movement and pulse rate. This allows a complete picture of the patient's condition to be built up quickly.

According to Damal Arvind, leading speckled computing professor and director of the Scottish consortium,

"This is the new class of computing: devices which can sense and process the data they receive. They also have a radio so they can network and there's a battery in there as well, so they are entirely self-powered.

"You can do lots of interesting things with this technology. We are seeing this kind of technology in the Nintendo Wii and this is a very, very primitive form of what we will be demonstrating on Friday."

Here we have another step in the direction of nano-sized, networked computers that can roam about in the human body, fixing things and improving things and augmenting other things. The new world is coming. (From The Price of Rice! via MedGadget.com)

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Begging the Question All Day Long

(Picture credit to Propaganda Critic)

I'm not an expert on logical fallacies, but sometimes I know that one has been committed when I hear it. I heard a real fallapalooza the other day, and it's a great example of the kind of fallacy committed by millions of people every day. Want to hear about it? Too bad. You're gonna.

Listening to a radio preacher, just for kicks. He's discussing the truth of Christianity's claims. Jesus really was raised from the dead. How do we know that for sure? Well, because no one could have removed the body from the tomb, so it must have been accomplished by supernatural means, as the Bible says it did. How do we know that no one could have removed it from the tomb? Well, because the tomb was sealed and guarded; Pilate was concerned that some of the disciples might get up to some hi jinks and attempt to abscond with the body and then claim that their savior had been raised from the dead. He wasn't having any of that, so he made sure that a guard was posted outside the tomb.

Now, the preacher gave the appropriate chapter and verse reference to back up everything he was saying. And yes, those verses said what he said they said. But he had committed such an obvious fallacy that I was a bit stunned, until I realized that I used to do the same thing. And millions are still doing it today. Have you seen it yet? I'll give you a minute to read over the account if you need to.

Again, I'm no expert on these fallacies, but I believe the one I'm referring to is called "Begging the Question." This happens when the premises of your argument include the claim that the conclusion is true or assume (directly or indirectly) that the conclusion is true. Ray Kurzweil calls it "assuming your conclusion."

The preacher claims that Jesus must have been resurrected, as claimed by the gospels' authors. OK, how does he prove their claim? By using the very same authors' claims that the tomb was guarded by Roman soldiers. Sorry, but that just doesn't cut the mustard. That's like freeing Charlie Manson because he says he didn't do it. What the preacher needs are some independent sources that confirm the facts as described by the gospel writers.

At the risk of belaboring the point, reduced to its essence, what the preacher is saying is as follows:

Preacher: Jesus was raised from the dead.
Me: How do you know that?
Preacher: Because the Bible says so.
Me: How do you know that the Bible's account is true?
Preacher: Because it couldn't have happened any other way. You see, the tomb was guarded.
Me: Oh. But how do you know that the tomb was guarded?
Preacher: Because the Bible says so.

The general way this is done by millions today is as follows:

Friend: The Bible is the inerrant Word of God and has no contradictions.
Me: But what about this one, and that one?
Friend: Those only appear to be contradictions. There must be ways to explain them away.
Me: Why? Why can't they just be contradictions?
Friend: Because the Bible has no contradictions. It's the inerrant Word of God. Geez, don't you listen?

If you know more about the names of logical fallacies than I do and can more accurately name the one I brought up, please leave a comment. As O'Reilley likes to say, Where'm I goin' wrong? Thanks.

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The Singularity Hits Congress

What's a singularity? "Singularity" is a term invented in the field of physics, adopted in the field of cosmology, and adapted, in this context, to refer to the point in time when the rapidly accelerating pace of technological progress changes society in a radical way, to the point where it is very difficult to see beyond this point. Ray Kurzweil has estimated this point in time to be approximately 2045. Advances in three fields will participate in bringing about the singularity. Genetics; Nanotechnology; and Robotics, or GNR.

Amazingly, a report [PDF] has been published by Representative Jim Saxon (R-NJ), Ranking Member of the Joint Economic Committee, United States Congress, authored by Dr. Joseph Kennedy, Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, titled Nanotechnology: The Future is Coming Sooner than you Think. Looks like someone in Congress gets it. Some excerpts from the report:

Enhanced abilities to understand and manipulate matter at the molecular and atomic levels promise a wave of significant new technologies over the next five decades. Dramatic breakthroughs will occur in diverse areas such as medicine, communications, computing, energy, and robotics. These changes will generate large amounts of wealth and force wrenching changes in existing markets and institutions.

In 1970 Alvin Toffler, noted technologist and futurist, argued that the acceleration of technological and social change was likely to challenge the capacity of both individuals and institutions to understand and to adapt to it. Although the world has changed a great deal since then, few would argue that the pace of change has had the discontinuous effects that Toffler predicted. However, rapid advances in a number of fields, collectively known as nanotechnology, make it possible that Mr. Toffler’s future has merely been delayed. In fact, some futurists now talk about an unspecified date sometime around the middle of this century when, because of the accelerating pace of technology, life will be radically different than at any prior time.

Every exponential curve eventually reaches a point where the growth rate becomes almost infinite. This point is often called the Singularity. If technology continues to advance at exponential rates, what happens after 2020? Technology is likely to continue, but at this stage some observers forecast a period at which scientific advances aggressively assume their own momentum and accelerate at unprecedented levels, enabling products that today seem like science fiction. Beyond the Singularity, human society is incomparably different from what it is today. Several assumptions seem to drive predictions of a Singularity. The first is that continued material demands and competitive pressures will continue to drive technology forward. Second, at some point artificial intelligence advances to a point where computers enhance and accelerate scientific discovery and technological change. In other words, intelligent machines start to produce discoveries that are too complex for humans. Finally, there is an assumption that solutions to most of today’s problems including material scarcity, human health, and environmental degradation can be solved by technology, if not by us, then by the computers we eventually develop.

The concept of the coming singularity may seem far fetched and difficult to grasp. But I believe that those of us who take the time to understand it and its implications for our lives will be better able to adapt and take advantage of what is to come. I hope you'll accompany me on this journey.

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The Third Generation

First there was Web 1.0. Of course no one called it that back then, we were all too busy gushing over the fact that there was a Web to wonder about how it would evolve. The first generation web was AOL, CompuServe, Netscape, and dial-up Internet service. These were the heady days when the web was being built and commercialized. More recently, we've seen the development of the second generation, Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 has been characterized by broadband Internet access, social networking sites, Wikipedia, AJAX interactivity and web-based software, and mobile devices. Web 2.0 sites even have their own look, the colorful, rounded typefaces and the catchy little names like Jangle, Clipperz, and Ploud. Web 2.0 has made the web more useful and content rich, interactive and social. Now, get ready for generation three.

Web 3.0, as I predict it will come to be known, has no clearly defined boundary, but it will be the product of several different technologies coming to maturity at approximately the same time. These technologies will comprise what could be called "the intelligent web." Ubiquitous connectivity (meaning you'll be connected no matter where you are), network computing (distributed computing, grid computing, web services interoperability, cloud computing server farms), and the intelligent web (semantic web technologies, distributed databases, intelligent applications like natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning and autonomous agents), will all come together to make the web more powerful and useful (and fun) than ever.

According to Nova Spivac (The Third Generation Web is Coming), "Web 3.0, expected to debut in 2007, will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents."

For the first time in history, you will be witnessing the accelerating curve of technological progress, when you find that you haven't had time to become acclimated to one new technology before the next one crashes over you. Enjoy!

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A Few Things You Must Know to Survive Alongside the Other Gender

This won't be a Mars and Venus kind of thing. We don't care about the reasons why we are the way we are. We only care about the way we are. That's because this is being written by a man. We care about surviving the opposite sex. If you think you can do better than that, you are wrong. When all is said and done, making it through is all you can hope to do. That's because men and women are like cats and dogs. (Except that we can get together and make babies; cats and dogs can't do that.) Cats and dogs can learn to get along. In my home we have a cat and a dog. The dog was always cool about the cat, but the cat initially hated the dog, and probably still does, but has learned to hide his hatred and may even be neutral by now.

Let's go over some of the most important differences you must understand in order to survive the opposite sex.

Talking

Men do not like to talk. Period. Do not attempt to psychoanalyze this. It doesn't matter why, because there is nothing you, or anyone else, can do to change it. Men do not like to talk, ever. Not on the phone, not in the morning, not in the car, and not because it's boring. Men find it almost painful to have to talk. Yes, they will talk when it is absolutely necessary, but they will never like doing it. For men, all communication should be short and sweet. They want to get the job done and get on with whatever else they need to do.

Women, live to talk. I didn't say "love to," I said "live to." There's a subtle yet profound difference. It's almost impossible to find a woman who is not talking. Women have even been known to talk during sex, and not the dirty talk that men dream of, but the most prosaic, practical kind of talk you can imagine. A speechless woman was not so rare before cell phones, but now they can talk no matter where they are or what they are doing. Next time you are out on the road, see if you can find a woman who is not on the phone. They will be in the minority, I can promise you. This is not necessarily a problem. It only becomes a problem when women want men to talk, too.

Sex

For men, sex is primarily a biological necessity. Pressure must find release. That about sums it up. However that can be done, it does need to be done on a semi-regular basis. This is not to say that men don't enjoy it. They most certainly do. They enjoy it a lot. And they would like it if women enjoyed it too. (Sadly, this is often not the case, but more about that later.) Men are aroused by visual cues, just as Pavlov's dog salivated at the ringing of a bell, except that men don't need to be conditioned; they come this way fresh out of the box.

Women need love, closeness, emotional connection. If all that is happening, then sex may result, but it is not a requirement and may not even be missed. Since men do not know what those words even mean, they can only obtain sex by feigning these qualities with a modicum of accuracy. Women are aroused, to the degree that that is even possible, by feelings of being worshiped by men. They need to feel that they are the most special thing in the world to a man. Men are able to achieve this state of mind only at certain times, like when they want to have sex, or when they have a near-death experience. For women, this limited capacity is troubling.

Self-Esteem

Men think they are great, while women know that men are jackasses. In their heart of hearts, men fear that women are right about this.

Women have learned to appear confident, but they are supremely lacking in self-esteem. This may be why they need men to worship them. The fact that men have demeaned women for millennia may also have something to do with it.

Appearance

Women care very much about their appearance. They especially love shoes, though the reasons for this are not clear. A new outfit for a woman will make her feel like a princess. Makeup is also very important to women. In fact, many men have been frightened by seeing a woman without her makeup for the very first time.

Men do not care about their appearance at all. Men only care about being comfortable. Men care about their appearance only inasmuch as it might persuade women to have sex with them.

Conclusions

So what can you do about these immutable differences between the genders (I almost said species...oops)? Compromise. Men, give it some effort. Women, don't expect so much. OK?

Disclaimer: This entire essay is satirical and should in no way be construed to say anything whatsoever about my relationship with my wife, whom I love very, very, very much.

Who Invented Valentine's Day?

Many of us might suspect the greeting card industry of this one. They certainly profit from it, but they didn't invent it. Like many traditions of old, the origins of Valentine's Day are hazy at best. Several ancient saints vie for the honor of being the honoree of the day of love, but the one who is most likely the winner is Saint Valentinius (c. 100 - c. 150) of Alexandria. It seems that Valentinius became associated with romantic love due to his emphasis on the marriage bed as possessing a central place in Christian love.

Valentine's Day makes its next appearance in the Middle Ages, particularly during the period when courtly love was in vogue. In Paris, on February 14, 1400, a High Court of Love was established to deal with contractual disputes about love, betrayals and the abuse of women. It is said that judges were selected by women on the basis of poetry readings.

We have Esther Howland (1828-1904) of Worcester, Massachusetts to thank for the first mass produced Valentine's Day cards in North America. Contratulations and a big thank you to Esther! Various marketing efforts since then have made V Day a very big day for greeting cards, flowers and chocolates. You may be interested to know that in Japan, women are expected to give men candy, chocolates or flowers, and not just men they like, either. In many Japanese offices, women feel obligated to buy gifts for all the men who work there. Wow!

I hope you've learned something. Now, if you still haven't got flowers or chocolate for that special person, head on over to Barry's Best, where you'll find some helpful links. Hurry!

So Convenient it Means (Virtually) Nothing!

Can something be made so convenient to do that it loses all meaning? Technology has brought us a long way, but along the way, have we lost some human connection? Are you old enough to remember when receiving a long-distance telephone call was a big deal? I am. The whole family would gather by the phone (which was tied by a wire to one particular spot in the house) to get a chance to say hello to Aunt Mildred. (Do you remember when women had names like "Mildred"?) Today, getting a call from a different city, state, or even country is a ho-hum experience. If you're like me, you're secretly thinking, "Why couldn't they just send me an email like everyone else?" Pretty soon you'll be saying, "A call from Io? It's probably a marketing call. I don't want to talk to anyone from Io. Take a message."

What got me to thinking along these lines was a web site offering the most convenient way to send flowers that's ever been available...send virtual flowers! You have to see it to believe it. It sounds like a great idea to me, but I don't know if my wife, or my mother, would be overly impressed by a bouquet of these beauties. Too bad, really.

Get Your Life Back (Part Four)

Your goal, as we’ve stated, is to be able to leave work at a reasonable hour without your employer feeling that you haven’t done enough. To accomplish this Herculean task, you must help your employer to feel the opposite, that you consistently get the job done and do it well. That’s a reputation that will go a long way towards reclaiming your life.

When I was in high school, I cultivated such a reputation with my teachers, at least with most of them. They weren’t concerned about an absence here or there, or a tardy once in a while, because they thought of me as a diligent student. In the same way, when your employer or supervisor thinks of you as dependable, resourceful and motivated, he or she will not begrudge you time for your family or yourself.

One of the most effective ways to cultivate this kind of reputation, with a relatively small investment of time and effort, is to master the art of follow-up.

Let’s say you’re given an assignment. Keep your boss up to date on your progress. Let him or her know when you’ve completed it. If you’ve got customers or clients, do the same thing. Let them know what’s happening. You’ll keep them happy, and you’ll cut way down on the calls and emails you’ll get from them wanting to know what’s going on, especially the ones that come in at night or on weekends. I hate those. Put yourself in their shoes. Don’t you hate it when you have to hunt down information from people to find out the status of something you’ve delegated to them? Don’t you appreciate it when they keep you informed before you even have to think about it? Sure you do. Do the same for your boss and your customers and they will never worry about what you’re up to when you’re not around.

And one related tip: Teach those who work for you to do the same for you!

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Get Your Life Back (Part Two)

(I learned this tip from Stuart R. Levine.) Consider how much time is wasted by over-explaining. When someone is going over a project they want you to handle, sometimes they continue explaining it long past the point when you understood. (In a large meeting, you’re more or less stuck listening to them drone on. You may not be able to just stand up and walk out, but you can work on something else while they’re repeating themselves ad infinitum. When I was a preacher I came up with some of my best sermons while listening to another preacher make his point for the fifteenth time.) But when you’re one-on-one, you can simply say, “I got it.” This lets them know that you understand and that there’s no need to continue. In the same way, when someone says that to you, take the hint and move on. Some people really enjoy the sound of their own voice, and others are insecure either about their ability to explain or your ability to comprehend. In either case, you can save a great deal of time by letting them know you understand and are ready to go to it.

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Get Your Life Back

I live in Florida. As it turns out a significant portion of my State is what’s known as “reclaimed land.” That means, apparently, that some kind of water, either sea, lake or swamp, at some time, came and took our land. Just stole it, right out from under us. Well, we weren’t having any of that. So we went in with our heavy machinery and low-wage labor and flat took it back. We reclaimed what was rightfully ours! No, that’s not what happened. It would be more accurate to call it “claimed” land. In fact, if the global warming folks turn out to be right, that water is going to come and reclaim it from us. And it will take back more than what we took from it. Teach us to mess with the oceans.

Our lives can be like that. We wage a constant battle against external (and sometimes internal) forces that are trying to claim whole sections of our lives. We feel besieged, under assault, claustrophobic. We no longer have control of our lives, and everybody wants more of us. Our employer isn’t happy with our efforts; our families feel cheated; we feel cheated. Not a pretty picture.

In the fight over our time, the two combatants are usually family and work. Neither one will cede and inch, or a second. And so we often make the mistake of seeing our choice as giving more time to one or the other, which obviously can never please both because it’s a zero sum game: giving more to one takes away from the other. Then what’s the answer? The answer is not some complex magic formula for dividing 24 hours to make everyone happy. The answer is being more effective with the time you do have.

So I want to give you a few tips on being more effective with the time you put in at work, so you can get everything done well in a shorter amount of time. A recent survey showed that people who work in offices get distracted from what they’re doing every 11 minutes on average. The Productivity Institute estimates that 20 percent of the workday is spent on “crucial” or “important” things, and 80 percent is spent on things that have “little” or “no value.” There are countless ways that your time at work can be frittered away on things that keep you from what you really need to get done. If you can identify what these time-stealers are, and learn how to eliminate, or at least severely curtail them, you can begin to reclaim your life.

If you’re feeling the pressure to get things done at work, it’s unlikely that you are the chatterbox, but you are probably the target of one or more of them. If you added up the actual time you spend, on average, every day, in social interactions with coworkers, what do you think would be the grand total? Do you think you could use that time to get more done? Do you want to reclaim it? The trick is to find a friendly, inoffensive way to cut these conversations short, or better yet, keep the chatterboxes at bay altogether. One very creative office worker came up with this method:

Very early in my career I learned the trick of creating a folder for each person I had regular contact with (i.e., boss, peers, direct reports, suppliers and others). Items I needed to discuss with these folks (but which were not urgent) got tossed in their file along with a list of commitments they had made to me in terms of future deliverables. I used the files to prepare for one-on-one meetings, staff meetings, etc. A side benefit was that if someone arrived on my doorstep uninvited and unwelcome, all I had to do was grab their folder and start to ask them about the work they owed me and like magic they would remember somewhere else they had to be!

Some other ideas:

Say this: “I can’t talk right now because I’m right in the middle of something that’s due soon. Let’s talk later.”

Do this: When you see them coming, pick up your phone and pretend to be speaking to someone.

Whatever you come up with, the most important thing is to decide that you cannot afford to let chatterboxes steal time from you or the people you care about.

Please check back for more tips to come!

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The Art of Persuasion: Ethos in Rhetoric

The Greek word ethos refers to someone’s character. One of Aristotle’s three pillars of persuasion, it is an essential part of any successful argument. In the minds of an audience that you need to convince of your point’s verity, there is that question upon which their ultimate decision rests: Is this speaker credible on this subject? Of course it’s unlikely that the question is consciously being posed in this particular way, but rest assured that it is there. You may also rest assured that if you do not answer it decisively in the positive, you will find it almost impossible to prevail in your attempt to persuade.

In a former life, I was a preacher. I preached in various cities and countries for 14 years as my full time career. It was my job to persuade and I worked very hard at it. I preached to audiences filled with individual people, many of whom were convinced by my arguments. Of course it is also true that many more were not. In any case, I learned a great deal about what I am relating to you here.

In case you missed that, I was just attempting to establish my credibility with you. But establishing credibility is only one facet of the use of ethos. There is another question that your audience has about you: Do I like this person? It stands to reason that if I dislike you as a speaker, I will most likely reject everything you say. At the very least, convincing me that grass is green will be an uphill battle if I can’t stand the sight of you. But how do you get your audience to like you? By exemplifying likeable traits. Do you come across to people as likeable? Do people perceive you as sincere, humble, self-assured, brave, caring, et cetera? Or do they see you as snobbish, stiff, conceited, cowardly, fearful, or selfish? Some of us are not very aware of how we are portraying ourselves by the words and mannerisms we use in our speech. If this is so, getting the help of someone whose judgment and honesty you trust can be extremely valuable.

I once knew a speaker who regularly belittled and insulted (not by name, but if he was aiming at you, you knew it with absolute certainty) anyone who didn’t see things his way. Those who agreed with his viewpoint, at least many of them, received these taunts with great enthusiasm. On the other hand, he lost many people’s goodwill in the process. A very helpful exercise is to read, listen to, or watch great speakers in action, so you can learn how to win over your intended hearers. Remember: If they like you and trust you, you will have a much greater chance of convincing them that you are right.

Each of these three techniques have a certain degree of effectiveness, but in sum, their power cannot be compared with the power of the three used in concert. Logos: Logic. Pathos: Emotion. Ethos: Character.

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The Art of Persuasion: Emotion in Rhetoric

The inclusion of pathos in rhetoric is an attempt to engage the emotions of your audience. Pure logic (logos) may be effective if you are Captain Kirk trying to convince an electronic probe, bent on destroying all imperfection, that it must destroy itself, since it has made an error in assuming that Kirk is its creator, and it is therefore imperfect (episode 37, "The Changeling," for those of you who aren't familiar with the story). Logic, by itself, worked on Nomad, but rarely works on people. When you use pathos, however, you must be subtle. People react negatively when they feel they are being manipulated. You will have engaged their emotions, but not in the way you had hoped.

The emotions people can feel are varied (love, pity, sorrow, affection, anger, fear, greed, lust, hatred), and so you must consider which emotion you need to engage to advance your argument. Let's say you are trying to convince your employer to give you a raise. You could appeal to his or her pity by telling the story of your kids not being able to get the presents they wanted for Christmas; or you could appeal to fear by hinting that you are being recruited by other firms. Again, you must avoid being heavy handed or the effect will be negative. (Just think about your reaction to TV ads asking for your donations to help starving children. If they overplay it, how are you likely to respond?)

Think about the emotions an advertiser is trying to evoke in you the next time you watch a commercial on TV. What are they appealing to? The guy who wants you to invest in gold is appealing to your fears…what will happen to all your assets when stocks crash and inflation runs amok! The car commercials appeal to your pride…think of how good you'll look in this car! Listen to the soundtrack that goes with the commercial. Doesn't the music augment the emotional appeal? Advertisers use pathos because it is effective.

As a further example, Robert Abbott shares the story of a magazine appealing to his emotions to get him to renew his subscription. The appeal is made in one simple sentence.

"The other day I received what's apparently the last issue of Fortune magazine before my subscription runs out. Now, I like reading that magazine, but I'm swamped with reading matter so I don't plan to renew.

Of course, I've received many reminders and offers about renewing; magazines try very hard to keep the subscribers they've got. So when the last issue came with a special promotional wrapper on the cover, I wasn't surprised.

But, what made this one interesting was a clever piece of copy that hit an emotional chord: inside the back cover of the special wrapper were the words, "You're about to be dropped from our list of active subscribers. Unless you act now."

Personally, I thought it was an effective piece of copy (even though I still won't renew). It made an emotional case for what is essentially a business-to-business offer.

Many people who write persuasive copy, whether in sales letters or internal memos, say the power of emotion will help us get t