Biographies: Gary Wolf
Gary Wolf is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, and the co-editor of The Quantified Self, a web site about self-knowledge through numbers. At Wired, he has been the author of some of the magazine's most frequently cited articles, including "The Curse of Xanadu," about Theodr Holmes Nelson and the invention of hypertext; "The World According to Woz," about Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; "The Wisdom of St. Marshall, Holy Fool," about Marshall McLuhan, and "The Church of the Non-Believers," about the New Atheist movement.
Wolf is the author of three books: Aether Madness: an Offbeat Guide to the Online World, with Michael Stein; Dumb Money: Adventures of a Day Trader, with Joey Anuff (1999); and Wired – A Romance (2000).
Part of the team that launched HotWired, one of the original commercial sites on the Web, Wolf was the executive editor of Wired Digital from 1994 through 1997. He has a B.A. in history and literature from Reed College and an M.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2005 and 2006, he was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.
Abstract
I am going to focus my short talk on the concept of the "petaflop macroscope." This word has been used in different ways by different people. The definition I will use is "computers plus data automatically gathered in nature". I'm going to talk about a subset of nature where the petaflop macroscope can be useful: human behavior. I'll describe some hobbyist uses and pioneering individual experiments, and suggest some of the benefits we could derive from such practices as they spread. I'll also talk about some of the things that stand in the way: in particular, I'll mention the fear (sometimes justified fear; often speculative fear that is nonetheless understandable) that stands in the way of people tracking their behavior, and some ideas of how to lessen that fear.
