There've been other studies to this effect, though, and not just for adolescents. Papers often attribute the effects to a combination of lifestyle comparison, echo chambers, and emotional contagion. Check this one out: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pd
Now imagine your entire friend network is nonstop angst. I'd go mad, too.
It could be a just-so story, but I think overuse of SNSs allows our social skills to atrophy. The brain repurposes structures that go underused, and the structures that maintain one's face-to-face social functioning are no different.
Maintaining relationships in realspace is different than maintaining them in the async-y & memetic environment of cyberspace. Of course there is granularity--one can have a healthy analog&digital relationship, but if a SNS connection is a part of an individual's requirement for a friendship, then there is probably some deficit the individual is unaware of.
I'd also argue that this is symptomatic of the growing pains heavy internet users experience in their adolescence-to-young-adult stage. The group self-selects for introverts who have a preexisting difficulty with social interaction. However, we all require some social interaction (analog or digital), to greater and lesser extents, and so it perpetuates.
Books and art end up being a better outlet, but in my experience that's a discovery which people can only make for themselves.
Manufacturing environments are probably among the best use cases for "the Internet of Things" but also magnify the security concerns tenfold. Stuxnet was a similar attack on networked manufacturing infrastructure, and it proved that if you give a sensor/automation network control over manufacturing processes, you create a massive vulnerability in the supply chain itself.
If a Russian student owns my Nest and makes my home freezing cold in the winter, I reconfigure or replace the device and its fine. If the automation system in a Siemens plant gets bricked, that's millions of dollars in damage before considering lost revenues.
The Risk Managers are gonna go wild for this one...
One thing you should know about Stuxnet that I can talk about publicly (I used to work for Siemens) is that it was an attack vector on part of the SCADA RTU drivers that ran on a very old and unpatched version of WindowsNT. People running an nuke plant on something that old (which is typical of Iran, considering how their politics have isolated them over the last 30 years) are kinda asking to get hacked like this.
Of course I'm not saying that this means the problem you're talking about isn't real: security is a real concern, especially with SCADA systems running energy plants. Just putting in some perspective.
I think you are right about the use case being almost ideal for manufacturing, but I have a feeling the general best practice will remain to keep control systems air-gapped. It's the norm for many organizations (as policy, unfortunately not always as implementation), and is the recommendation of ICS-CERT, but there are still way too many jumping onto internet connected controls due to cost savings, convenience or whatever else. Often times the business arm wants data from control systems and are either too cheap or just can't be bothered to implement things like data-diodes and other one-way access that can provide feedback without exposing controls.
The increasing vulnerability isn't so much from networked automation -- PLCs have been networked for decades. The danger lies in dangerous jumping onto the the IIoT ("Industrial Internet of Things") and exposing of SCADA systems to the Internet, or thinking things like VPNs are secure. We are also seeing in a much higher focus of state-actors in controls. Industrial hacking is seeing a big shift away from espionage and IP theft to gaining access/control of processes. It's scary how many PLCs are the number that are freely exposed to the internet and browsable through sites like shodan. Even scarier is the number of infrastructure-critical control systems have already been found to be compromised and phoning home just waiting for a command by some unknown entity.
"...there have been multiple other apps that required me to use my Facebook credentials to log in. Facebook, it seems, is now core to the mobile Web experience."
Most social networks provide very little that a blog and an email address don't, and for that modicum we pay with our privacy. Personally, I don't think the convenience of OAuth is worth what the networks earn from selling my data. I wonder what'll happen to their market share when smartphone OS developers start including authentication layers in their kernels.
Let's not forget that the end-game for fusion is "virtually limitless, safe, clean, carbon-neutral, very high-density power"--a set of characteristics literally none of our other sources of electricity have.
The author also neglects all of the scientific advancements that we've made but haven't yet transmuted into engineering advancements. Graphene, nanotubes, metamaterials, etc.
We could boycott networks & technologies that infringe upon our ability to exist as private individuals and to self-determine: Don't use the wifi toothbrush or the Fitbit, don't use Facebook or Twitter, stay connected with friends using email or (!) the postal service. Use less technology and gain more freedom.
Alternately, market collusion and the unquenchable desire of people to sell their information in exchange for Javascript-enabled friendships will force us into a grim future where the mistakes of the people we love & an assortment of bureaucratically-mandated sensors impede our pursuit of happiness.
Unfortunately I don't expect a boycott will ever work because there will always be statistically significant number of users for Facebook to run their social experiments on, so there won't be any reason for them to stop, even if the populations of entire countries delete their accounts.
I'm still holding out for a privacy-centric social network. Only problem is I won't join it unless enough of my friends do, so I guess we'll see.
(Though I agree that paywalled content is a nuisance, albeit with some granularity regarding the necessity of paywalls to continued access to quality reporting.)
People barred from flow often experience intense anxiety; I'd imagine that the "addicted" programmer not experiencing code flow would just replace that need with something like a high-complexity videogame.
The author's scope is maybe too narrow by focusing only on programmers. Perhaps this problem can be generalized to a type of individual that requires the flow state to the extent that their other behavior is perturbed or dysfunctional. Compare Richard Feynman's explosive rage when distracted from calculus or drums...
Yeah, when I had to stop dancing--an activity that gives me a flow experience every day--for weeks because of a twisted foot tendon, I became a mess of anxiety, and even resorting to singing sessions wouldn't quite give me my "fix", or fix me so to speak. Likewise, it's not about having to stop programming, it's about, for example, having to stop working on a project in which you have lots of daily momentum and flow. I think it's a proper addiction. Now if it's just half-hearted programming, nobody misses it much.
If the universe was "made of mathematics," then there would necessarily exist a Grand Unified Theory. But, Hawking asserts that Gödel's Theorems imply that not only does a Grand Unified Theory not exist, but that the formulation of one is impossible (http://www.hawking.org.uk/godel-and-the-end-of-physics.html).
The author stresses that all of reality is mathematical in structure, but this is at odds with the fact that all mathematical systems containing self-reference are necessarily incomplete. Physics is a self-referential system.
If the structure of the universe is mathematical, it is probably a very different math than humans are used to. Insert your favorite flavor of metaphysics here!
Suppose we discover our universe is a simulation. This would imply that the universe is Turing-computable. Would there not therefore exist a "Grand Unified Theory" that simply described, with absolute precision, the operation of the simulator? Or would it be impossible to produce such a specification?
So if you Gödelized the universe - mapped every conceivable state to a number (proving that that is possible left as an exercise for the reader) - then created mathematical operations on those numbers that transitioned the universe from one state to another 'physically possible' successor state.. I guess Gödel would be able to give you a number representing a universe such that you could not prove whether its state was possible or not?
Then all you have to do is demonstrate that we live in such a universe, and all the philosophers can retire because we've found the ultimate answer to the ultimate question.
I think we all know exactly what the Gödel number for our universe would be...
A life is certainly not a story, since we are never the sole authors of our circumstances. If you accept the "narrative model," a whirlwind of events and situations authored by others surrounds the tiny moments of our life which we have the ability to author.
Now imagine your entire friend network is nonstop angst. I'd go mad, too.
It could be a just-so story, but I think overuse of SNSs allows our social skills to atrophy. The brain repurposes structures that go underused, and the structures that maintain one's face-to-face social functioning are no different.
Maintaining relationships in realspace is different than maintaining them in the async-y & memetic environment of cyberspace. Of course there is granularity--one can have a healthy analog&digital relationship, but if a SNS connection is a part of an individual's requirement for a friendship, then there is probably some deficit the individual is unaware of.
I'd also argue that this is symptomatic of the growing pains heavy internet users experience in their adolescence-to-young-adult stage. The group self-selects for introverts who have a preexisting difficulty with social interaction. However, we all require some social interaction (analog or digital), to greater and lesser extents, and so it perpetuates.
Books and art end up being a better outlet, but in my experience that's a discovery which people can only make for themselves.