Relevant History

links for 2006-08-01

• Hypertext and the scholarly archive
  "This paper argues that the scholarly archive is going though a process of hypertextualization that is not adequately accounted for in theories on hypertext. A methodological approach based on Gerard Genette’s theory of transtextuality is proposed."
  (tags: hypertext)
• The Faith-Based Encyclopedia
  Former Britannica editor-inchief Robert McHenry's critique of Wikipedia.
  (tags: collective_intelligence community Internet wiki wikipedia encyclopedia)
• Open Source = Closed Minds?
  Critique of Wikipedia.
  (tags: collaboration wikipedia encyclopedia)
• The FUD-based Encyclopedia
  Response to Robert McHenry's "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia," a critique of Wikipedia.
  (tags: encyclopedia wikipedia collaboration open_source)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica Online?
  1995 Wired Magazine article asking, "Given that the Web itself is becoming the sum of the world's knowledge, isn't putting the Encyclopaedia Britannica online a spectacularly useless thing to do?"
  (tags: encyclopedia Internet)
• Constructing the Digital Universe » Blog Archive » The New Politics of Knowledge
  Wikipedia, "the amazingly huge, wide-open encyclopedia project has become the locus of a new debate over the politics of knowledge."
  (tags: encyclopedia open_source collaboration collective_intelligence)

But it worked out

I'm back from the Yahoo design expo. It was worth the wait, even if I didn't score any swag, and nearly pulled a Keith Moon on one of the exhibits. Pictures etc., to come.

[To the tune of Gil Evans, "Little Wing," from the album "The British Orchestra".]

Yahoo Design Expo

I'm at Yahoo! corporate HQ this afternoon, taking in a little design expo. I've never actually been to Yahoo! before, so when I got invited, I thought it would be an interesting cultural experience. Plus the expo looks like it could have some cool stuff.

I'm trying to finish up two projects before I got on vacation next week, so it had better be worth my time. I got about four hours' sleep last night, which is the kind of thing I can do only occasionally these days.

The instructions said to get here at 1:30, but no one's here to meet us. Not the most impressive start. But at least I found the coffee machine.

Handling multiple del.icio.us accounts

I've got several del.icio.us accounts that I post to, and have long wanted something that would let me post to any of them. There are rumors that you can do this in Cocoalicious, but I can't figure out how.

However, there's a Firefox extension (actually it also seems to work on Thunderbird) that does it, and seems to do a pretty good job. Hooray!

[To the tune of Yo-Yo Ma, "Suite 6: Allemande," from the album "Bach: The Cello Suites Inspired By Bach, (Disc 2)".]

Quote of the day

From Slate's review of Miami Vice:

In Miami Vice (Universal), the nightscapes of L.A. are replaced by a transnational [Michael] Mann-land: Whether you're in Miami, Havana, or a lawless frontier city straddling the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, there's no shortage of stark-white apartments with spectacular ocean views, where gorgeous biracial women take long hot showers as R&B throbs in the background.

[To the tune of U2, "Miami," from the album "Pop".]

Technorati Tags: movies

Day of the Long Tail

You've heard about the Wired article, you've heard about the book, now see the preview for the movie:

[To the tune of Sting, "If I Ever Lose My Faith In You," from the album "Ten Summoner's Tales".]

Dude, where's my car?

My wife and I both got our cellphones almost two years ago, and both of them have recently been having problems. So this afternoon, I drove over to her parents' house, where the kids were swimming; we bundled into one car, since downtown Palo Alto is always a Parking Challenge on Thursday evening, went to the Verizon store, and got new phones (and the various unfortunate accessories you need to keep them going).

Since we had the children with us, and since "children in a cellphone store" is the sort of phrase you normally imagine hearing when you're telling a story involving bad parenting, some hilarious misadventure with a kiosk, and much apologizing, we thought it made sense for my wife to take the kids and get the car while I did the paperwork, then drive me back to my car.

However, the kids wanted to stay in the store, and promised to behave, so they hung out with me, while I renewed our contracts.

I ended up getting a Motorola Razr, with the Bluetooth headset (handy tip: looks like the phone and headset use the same charger, so when you buy them together, you essentially get a charger for home, and a charger for the offce), and between dealing with that, keeping the kids from getting overcompetitive over who would hold Daddy's old phone, and dealing with the Verizon rep, I had my hands full.

We got out of the store, bundled into the van, drove around the corner, got the kids secured in their seats, then headed home, to more discussion about whose turn it was to hold which bag, me wondering if I could connect my phone to my Mac, and other things.

A block from home, my wife says, "Oh no! We forgot your car!"

Oops.

But the phone is cool.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night," from the album "Anthology 1 [Disc 2]".]

The perils of treating a customer-blogger badly

Josh Marshall, the proprietor of Talking Points Memo, kept his car in a garage owned by Central Parking. It was stolen a couple days ago, after one of the attendants left the keys in it.

It may come to very little, but Josh is blogging the whole thing. The company certainly comes across as not really caring what customers think of it.

[To the tune of George Harrison, "Behind That Locked Door," from the album "All Things Must Pass (Disc One)".]

Technorati Tags: blogging

Frank Gehry on The Simpsons... in Spanish

Ah, the miracle of YouTube. I'm working on a redesign of the office, and was inspired to look for the classic bit in The Simpsons where Frank Gehry designs an art museum for Springfield. It's there, but it's a Spanish dub. Still, brilliant.

[To the tune of 2Pac, "Runnin’ (Featuring Notorius B.I.G.)," from the album "Resurrection".]

Technorati Tags: architecture, IFTF, Institute for the Future, office

Search 2.0

Building on Tim O'Reilly's idea of bionic software is Ebrahim Ezzy's two-part review of "third-generation" search services. These

are designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models; they bring into the equation user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, a rich user experience, and many other specialized capabilities that make information more productive.

Arguably, the collective intelligence and collaboration aspects have always been present in Google, but have been implicit, rather than explicit. Still, making something explicit can be very important, and the posts talk about a number of services that are new to me.

[via twopointouch]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, search, social software, Web 2.0

New Plazes badge

If you're not reading the RSS feed but actually visiting, you might notice the new Plazes badge on the left-hand side of the blog. This is the big version.

It's a definite improvement over the old one: there's a cool zoom-in thing that it does when it first loads up (you can hit refresh to see it again), you can size it any way you want, and there are a number of color palettes to choose from. Very nice.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Where I End And You Begin (The Sky Is Falling In)," from the album "Hail To The Thief".]

Technorati Tags: blogging

My son, iPod defender

This evening, I was reading the latest issue of Wired, with Stephen Colbert on the cover. My son looked at it for a few seconds, then said, "Hey! That guy is sawing an iPod! He shouldn't do that!"

Given that he calls the Apple Store "the iPod store," and was very disappointed when it was closed for renovation, his concern makes sense.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Myxomatosis (Judge, Jury & Executioner)," from the album "Hail To The Thief".]

Technorati Tags: children, ipod

Technorati Tags: children, iPod

Yet more Wikipedia humor

This time from The Onion:

Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence

Wikipedia, the online, reader-edited encyclopedia, honored the 750th anniversary of American independence on July 25 with a special featured section on its main page Tuesday.

Oh boy....

[To the tune of Radiohead, "The National Anthem," from the album "Kid A".]

Technorati Tags: history, humor, wiki

The Age of User Experience

Andreas Pfeiffer argues in ACM Ubiquity that features don't matter any more; user experience is all.

Why Features Don't Matter Any More: The New Laws of Digital Technology

In the seemingly never-ending debate about Apple's successes, announcements, new products and predicted-but-unannounced über-gadgets, features and technical specifications often seem to dominate the debate. Yet if there's one lesson to be learned from the company's recent successes, it is a very simple one: features don't matter any more.

Welcome to the Age of User Experience.

One key aspect of modern digital devices is that technical specifications are easily copied and replicated: mega-pixel count in cameras, storage capacity in music players or processor speed in personal computers are the same everywhere. As a result, they provide only poor distinguishing factors for consumers when it comes to choosing between different brands.

That's where the overall user experience comes in. As computing and digital devices move more and more into the consumer space, features and functionalities will increasingly take the back-seat as motivators for technology adoption: as the iPod abundantly shows, user experience (along with a strong brand, and clever marketing) is much more important for the success of a device then technical specifications. Web designers have grasped the importance of good user experience a long time ago; now it is time the big technology providers to understand where the industry is headed.

All true. But how true-- or new-- is it? In the 1980s, Regis McKenna was saying that people don't really know enough about technical specs to evaluate high-tech products on the basis of processor speed, etc., and that other factors-- particularly influencers-- were more important. Still, perhaps what matters today is that an argument like this seems to self-evident.

Technorati Tags: design, end of cyberspace

Bionic software

Tim O'Reilly has a fascinating concept: bionic software.

[Bionic] systems that combine human and computer activity to produce better results than either can alone are becoming both more widespread and more explicit. Take for example flickr, which introduced the tag cloud to the web design palette. The tag cloud is a powerful user-interface element that is created dynamically by user activity. Or consider how digg.com explicitly harnesses its users to drive which stories go to the front page. (And yes, I'm aware that slashdot did this long before digg, but with digg, this feature is the heart of the site.)

It seems to me that what we're seeing now is just the beginning of a really significant trend, as bionic systems become more widespread and variations on the technique more sophisticated....

I was talking about the idea of bionic software with Tom Shields of the Woodside Fund a few weeks ago, and explaining how I thought that the old dreams of artificial intelligence were being replaced by this new model, in which we are creating more intelligent systems by using humans as components of the application. Tom neatly summed up the paradigm shift: "AI becomes IA." ("Artificial Intelligence becomes Intelligence Augmentation.")

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, social software, Web 2.0

Nobody else returned Wade Roush's phone calls...

...is the only reason I can figure for my getting quoted in his latest article in Technology Review, on synchronization services.

[To the tune of 6955, "4bits on 4tracks," from the album "on the 1's and 0's".]

Technorati Tags: memory, Web 2.0

Fuller online

Before I became a futurist, I spend some time at Stanford, working with the Buckminster Fuller collection. One of the things I worked on was digitizing the massive audio and video holdings, which consist of several thousand hours of Fuller's lectures, seminars, and other events.

Back then (in 1999 and 2000), digitizing the stuff looked really hard, and making it publicly available seemed pretty daunting. What a difference a few years make. Now, Stanford's put a big slice of the Fuller audio and video online. Really amazing stuff, particularly in the 1950s, when Fuller was in the habit of turning on a tape recorder when he thought he was doing something interesting, not just when he was about to give yet another lecture.

Technorati Tags: history of science, Stanford University, STS

Picture of the day

IMG_1430
via my friend Jason Tester, on Flickr

One of those moments when Wikipedia is kind of funny

I won't spoil the joke, but the punch-line to this Wonkette post is "Occasionally, we do believe in the wisdom of crowds."

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Day Tripper," from the album "1".]

Technorati Tags: humor

links for 2006-07-22

• Professor Stephen D.N. Graham
  (tags: culture Geography uk cyberspace cybergeography)

Quote of the day: Stephen Graham

Sam Kinsley turned me on to Stephen Graham's 1998 essay "The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualizing space, place and information technology," Progress in Human Geography 22:2 (1998) pp. 165-185:

Too often, then, the pervasive reliance on spatial and technological metaphors actually serves to obfuscate the complex relations between new communications and information technologies and space, place and society. In the simple, binary allegations that new technologies help us to access a new `electronic space' or `place', which somehow parallels the lived material spaces of human territoriality, little conscious thought is put to thinking conceptually about how new information technologies actually relate to the spaces and places bound up with human territorial life. Without a thorough and critical consideration of space and place, and how new information technologies relate to, and are embedded in them, reflections on cyberspace, and the economic, social and cultural dynamics of the shift to growing `telemediation', seem likely to be reductionist, deterministic, oversimplistic and stale.

In this article I aim to explore some of the emerging conceptual treatments of the relationships between information technology systems and space and place. Building on my recent work with Simon Marvin on the relationships between telecommunications and contemporary cities (Graham and Marvin, 1996), and on conceptualizing telecommunications-based urban change (Graham, 1996; 1997a), I identify three broad, dominating perspectives and explore them in turn. First, there is the perspective of substitution and transcendence ± the idea that human territoriality, and the space and place-based dynamics of human life, can somehow be replaced using new technologies. Secondly, there is the co-evolution perspective which argues that both the electronic `spaces' and territorial spaces are necessarily produced together, as part of the ongoing restructuring of the capitalist political-economic system. Finally, there is the recombination perspective, which draws on recent work in actor-network theory. Here the argument is that a fully relational view of the links between technology, time, space and social life is necessary. Such a perspective reveals how new technologies become enrolled into complex, contingent and subtle blendings of human actors and technical artifacts, to form actor-networks (which are sociotechnical `hybrids'). Through these, social and spatial life become subtly and continuously recombined in complex combinations of new sets of spaces and times, which are always contingent and impossible to generalize.

Technorati Tags: city, cyberspace, end of cyberspace, place/space

The annotated man (or suit)

One of my favorite work blogs is English Cut, which is written by a Saville Row tailor named Thomas Mahon. As I wrote a while ago, it shows that many professionals can talk about their work in public in a way that makes them sound very good at what they do, without giving away anything essential: even after reading him, I'm not going to be able to make my own suit.

In a recent post, he explains some of the simpler tailors' marks, which are made on a suit in chalk during a fitting. It turns out that tailors essentially annotate suits, writing instructions to themselves about things like where a sleeve should hang, where a piece of fabric needs to be expanded, or whether a leg should be shortened or lengthened. The annotations are made in chalk, then are transcribed; as he explains, "chalk is not permanent, and by the time it's been in a suitcase for a week and hauled round America, it can all look very confusing. Especially when I open my suitcase with jet-lagged eyes."

It makes me wonder at the number of places or occupational contexts in which skilled workers make annotations on things, and how widely technologies like smart fabrics, reactive surfaces, and heads-up displays could affect work. One of the first applications of wearable computers has been in aircraft fault detection and repair: Xybernaut's wearables, for example, let technicians consult schematics and other documents without having to leave their craft. (This sounds trivial until you consider how complex a jet engine is, and how big the manuals are: as Geoffrey Nunberg famously reported a decade ago, "printed documentation that accompanies the delivery of a single Boeing 747 weighs about 350 tons, only slightly less than the airplane itself.")

But while retrieving and displaying information for the "task-at-hand" (as Xybernaut puts it) is good, being able to precisely annotate an object for repairs or improvements is a more complicated matter. But this kind of technology could be more significant than Xybernaut's aircraft documentation system for a couple reasons. I suspect that a lot more skilled work involves annotation rather than rule-following: not many things come with 350 tons of documentation, and a gigantic regulatory and liability framework that mandates how you make repairs. And there are still plenty of skilled craftsmen who can't read: for them, writing on the thing isn't just useful, it's critical.

Technorati Tags: clothing, displays, end of cyberspace, work, ubicomp

links for 2006-07-20

• Futuribles - Prospective Studies and Foresight
  (tags: future)
• TechCast - A Virtual Think Tank Tracking the Technology Revolution
  (tags: technology future forecasting)

More on RFID

Last year the Institute published a series of memos on the present and future of RFID. (I was the principal author on them, but like everything at the Institute, lots of people were involved in the thinking and production.)

I just noticed that they're now publicly available as PDFs on the Institute Web site. Titles and links:

• Thinking About RFID
• Public Concerns and the Near Future of RFID
• Flashpoint and Controversies
• Smart Homes and Sociable Devices
• Implications and Recommendations

Technorati Tags: RFID, future, end of cyberspace, IFTF

Memory Spots

HP announced a new kind of tag for putting digital information on things. Called Memory Spots, they're somewhat like RFID tags in basic structure-- they're passively powered, have an antenna and memory-- but add a small processor and a lot more storage space. The New York Times highlights some differences between Memory Spots and RFID, both in technology and potential use:

In contrast to RFID tags, which store only a few hundred or few thousand bits of information, and which are readable from distances of tens of feet, the H.P. Memory Spots can be read only from extremely close range and store up to hundreds of thousands of bytes of information.

Like RFID tags, Memory Spots are powered from radio fields emitted by reading devices, but the H.P. researchers said they would have new applications beyond the typical supply chain and identification functions of RFID chips. Ultimately, executives said, the reading and writing technology could be added to smart phones or other inexpensive handheld devices.

The Memory Spot chips could be priced as low as 10 cents each if they were manufactured in volume, Mr. Taub said....

One of the advantages of the Memory Spot is that the 1.4-millimeter-square chips contain a small processor and as a result have the ability to offer data protection features.

Interestingly, that "putting bits out in the world" line is getting lots of play: this morning's HP press release is titled "HP Unveils Revolutionary Wireless Chip that Links the Digital and Physical Worlds," and features this bit:

“The Memory Spot chip frees digital content from the electronic world of the PC and the Internet and arranges it all around us in our physical world,” said Ed McDonnell, Memory Spot project manager, HP Labs.

However, many of the applications they suggest are pretty RFID-like:

Some of the potential applications include storing medical records on a hospital patient’s wristband; providing audio-visual supplements to postcards and photos; helping fight counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical industry; adding security to identity cards and passports; and supplying additional information for printed documents.

Currently there are RFID-enabled hospital wristbands, but they don't have patient records on them: they're just an ID device. Likewise, there's been plenty of talk about RFID being used in counterfeiting, document identification, and passports. It'll be interesting to see how and where RFID and Memory Spots actually compete. There are four obvious questions:

• Will Spots (a nice alternative to "tag") will operate on the same frequencies as RFID tags, or require entirely different infrastructure? If they're interoperable, and if RFID deployment is fast enough, that could affect some choices regarding spot use.
• When does it make sense to have large amounts of data embedded in an object, instead of associated with it? HP suggests users could "[s]end a traditional holiday postcard to family and friends with a chip containing digital pictures of a vacation, plus sounds and even video clips." In a world of YouTube, have we passed the point where sending
• Will Spots be more secure? On-board processing and the short read-range suggests the possibility greater immunity to hacks, if they're well-designed.
• When will it be worth the extra cost? HP estimates that the cost of Spots could fall to a dime per, with volume production-- still far above the dreamworld of the penny RFID tag.

I think there's also a bigger trend that one can extrapolate from this data-Spot.

We think of RFID tags as new and unique, but that's wrong on both cases. RFID tags have been around for quite a while; what's new is the emergence of a couple standards that promise to make them cheaper, more ubiquitous, and easier to use (or abuse). They're also not unique; it's better to think of them as the first-to-market examples of a new family or class of devices, with varying levels of intelligence, memory, and range.

Together, they're aimed at a functional merger of bits and atoms-- that embed data in things, facilitates the real-time/real-space retrieval of information, and chips away at the familiar distinction between the "real world" and the "online world." Cypak AB's disposable computer, which is more like an RFID tag on steroids than a competitor to PCs; Ted Selker's work on RFID signatures; and dozens of other prototypes and early adopter products are building on Wifi, GPS, IPv6, and other infrastructure to enable a digital-physical convergence.

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, end of cyberspace, pervasive computing, RFID, ubicomp

Oh no

Anonymous Law Firm LLP, so we can finally see where Anonymous Lawyer blogs. Includes biographies of partners, associates, and summer associates. It must have taken a lot of time to create.

Ah, there's a book coming out. No wonder it's worth all the time.

[To the tune of John Lennon, "I'm Losing You," from the album "Working Class Hero: The Definitive Lennon [Disc 2]".]

Technorati Tags: humor

Japanese Friendship Garden

This afternoon, the kids and I visited the Japanese Friendship Garden, in San Jose's Kelley Park. It's pleasant, and the kids (who are more than a little interested in Asian things, thanks to my wife's China trip) liked the fish.

via flickr

But to tell the truth, having very strong memories of the exquisite Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park when I was a kid, everything else pales in comparison. Except real gardens in Japan itself, of course.

via flickr

But the one nice touch: when we were there, Tejano music was drifting over from a picnic nearby. One of those "only in California" moments.

Technorati Tags: California, san jose

The Bund at night

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one in the family who likes to post pictures of night-time street scenes.

Shanghai's Bund, last night:

[To the tune of Kate Bush, "Top of the City," from the album "The Red Shoes".]

Technorati Tags: China, travel

Monk@Kunming.cn

Taken by my wife, who's traveling in China.

Though to be honest, I always just assumed that monks would be Macintosh users....

Technorati Tags: Castilleja School, China

Cat explorers

This afternoon, I was working at home, and accidentally left the kitchen door open. The cats, who've spent their lives indoors, took the opportunity to explore a little of the back yard.

One of them was a little flipped out by it. The next time I came inside, he spent a couple minutes clinging to my shoulder.

He did a lot of that when he was a kitten.

[To the tune of Pete Townshend, "Slit Skirts," from the album "Gold".]

Technorati Tags: cat

The hive mind stops making suggestions to Steven Hawking, goes back to YouTube*

Via Wonkette, the Ted Stevens video mashup:

Really good.

[*Decode the reference!]

[To the tune of Grateful Dead, "Truckin'," from the album "1973-12-19 - Curtis Hixon Convention Hall, Tampa FL".]

Technorati Tags: humor, internet, music, policy

Keanu and the coolness of emptiness

A perceptive bit about Keanu Reeves (one of my favorite organic synthespians) from Slate's review of A Scanner Darkly (one of those drug-saturated books that really makes you want to not take drugs):

Like the self in Buddhist philosophy, Keanu is less a person than an empty place-holder....

[I]t's often been observed that Keanu Reeves is less an actor than a reactor. But, like the stolen hydrogen-powered device in the 1996 Keanu vehicle Chain Reaction, he can be a reactor of unexpected force and power. This is how the androgynous Keanu has succeeded for more than a decade as an action star. It's Keanu's very passivity, his unflappable Zen emptiness, that makes him a compellingly quiet and focused hero. Somehow you believe he could stay calm while defusing a bomb on the underside of a moving bus, or even halt a bullet using only his mind.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Hey Jude," from the album "1".]

Technorati Tags: movies, science_fiction

Why you don't sit next to experts at movies

One of my worst movie experiences was watching the Robert DeNiro-Jeremy Irons film The Mission. Not because it's a bad movie, or because I was in a bad theatre.

No, it was because I went with my father, who's an expert on Latin American history, and spent the whole time complaining about historical inaccuracies in the movie.

The high point was when he grumbled that a certain ornamental cross in one scene actually wouldn't reach southern Brazil wouldn't fifty years. I must admit I also felt a certain degree of admiration that he'd know something that obscure.

So this critique of Pirates of the Caribbean by a marine biologist struck a familiar, nay even nostalgic, chord.

[via Schneier]

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," from the album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".]

Picnic at Peninsula

This evening I took the kids to a picnic and square dance at Peninsula.

from flickr

Naturally, my kids had a terrific time. My daughter is part of a tight circle of girls who've become a cross between Bratz and Steel Magnolias; my son has a couple close friends, but also seems to enjoy the chance to spend time with older kids (something he gets to do a lot of here). I don't think there are many schools where the kids don't want to leave at the end of the day and are enthusiastic about the chance to come back in the evening.

from flickr

And it turned out to be a brilliant summer evening, cloudless and bright without being too warm. Families ate, the children played, everyone danced, eventually the band stopped playing, we collected reluctant kids, and went our various ways.

from flickr

I realized at one point, as I was walking around, snapping pictures and saying hello to about 80% of the people there, that this probably the single most important place I'll ever be connected to. More important than any place I'll work (I'm a firm believer in the idea that emotional overinvestment in an employer is a form of exploitation); more important even than my own alma mater. I've now reached the point where I've been involved in an incredible amount of stuff at the school, much of it good, some of it bad; but it all adds up to the kind of subtle ties that bind you absolutely to a place.

from flickr

Saturday there's going to be a memorial service for a parent (and fellow board member) who died suddenly a few days ago. The week after that, there'll be a wedding.

A couple weeks later, there'll be a picnic to welcome new parents to the school.

from flickr

Then the new year will start. And the circle of life will continue.

[To the tune of Mono, "16.12," from the album "Ex Plex, Los Angeles, September 24, 2005".]

Technorati Tags: menlo park, Peninsula School

Pictures of Caffe Espresso 1929

Taken with my new camera.

I'm very happy with my new camera.

I don't want anything to happen to it. So this afternoon I went to REI and bought a waterproof case for it.

Technorati Tags: cafe, menlo park

Varieties of drug experiences

An interesting article on the relationship between crystal meth use and identity theft.

[To the tune of Joe Walsh, "Turn to Stone," from the album "So What".]

Why does this work?

I'm sure there's some simple math behind it, but I'm a little too freaked out by this to think it through at the moment....

[via Nancy]

Technorati Tags: magic

As I was telling my good friend Bruce Schneier...

Actually, I've never met Bruce. But we were both interviewed for an article in IT Business Net about RFID.

[To the tune of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, "The Enemy God Dances with the Black Spirits," from the album "Works Live".]

Technorati Tags: RFID

Ted Stevens remixed

Sen. Ted Stevens' "the Internet is tubes" remark last week have been remixed by Boldhead. It's pretty great.

[via Alternet and Firedoglake]

[To the tune of Paul Holcomb, "DJ Ted's Techno Tubes," from the album "The Bold Headed Broadcast".]

Technorati Tags: humor, internet, music, policy, politics

Reputation systems in the world

A short forever ago (May 2004), I wrote a piece for my Red Herring blog about carpooling, digital identities, and the possibility of turning underused private resources (at least temporarily) into sharable, public ones. (I've put a copy in the extended post.) Recently on Private Revolution, the blog of the founders of the very cool Xtracycle, I came across a post on a similar concept, hitchiker vetting:

I’ve been thinking about how cool it would be if there was someway to know that the hitchhiker was cool, and that the driver picking you up wasn’t a serial abductor. What if there was an ebay-like system where you get rated by the people who give you rides or by the riders you pick up? Participants could have an ID card linked to their profile. It could all be checked from your cell phone.

What’s more, the cell phone itself could be used with some of the new “who’s in my neighborhood” tech to find people going your way. This capability seems to be right around the corner. More likely, it’s already here, but no one cares enough about hitchhiking quite yet to make it work. I predict its imminent arrival.

Over at WorldChanging, there’s a piece about a universal reputation rating system. Something like this could incorporate the hitchhiking vetting process. It does seem a bit creepy, having an online reputation for everything you do, like maybe a little too transparent. But there are certainly environmental benefits to the sharing scheme that it supposes: if you can trust more people to borrow your stuff, and vice versa, a whole lot more sharing can potentially enable a lot less “I need my own everything” mentality.

How does this connect of the end of cyberspace? It strikes me that if the Internet five or ten years ago seemed attractive as a playground to experiment with identity, or to watch the emergence of new forms of social interaction based on (or enabled and protected by) anonymity, one of the big stories of the last couple years has been the realization that you can do some pretty cool things in the digital world if you reveal the connections between online identities or activities, and real people.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, community

Like the parrot in Monty Python...

...the camera is still dead. And of course salt water is one of the more corrosive things you can dunk electronics in.

My local megabox store has the latest version of the Cybershot, which of course is cheaper and more powerful than mine, but I think I'd prefer to get one of the digital Canons. I had (still have!) an Elph that took APS film, and in terms of form factor and overall feel, was one of my favorite cameras ever.

I may wander up to the Apple Store tomorrow to see if I can try out one of the Canons. But I think I'll go ahead and order a waterproof camera bag!

[To the tune of The Doobie Brothers, "Black Water," from the album "The Best of the Doobies".]

Yellow

Adidas commissioned a series of short videos on color. I don't know if this is what they expected, but "Yellow" is just terrific: a short, sharp meditation on identity and intelligence, and the blurring of the boundary between human and machine.

Technorati Tags: cyborg, movies

Dead camera?

I may have dropped my camera in the water once too often. Yesterday, on the beach in Santa Cruz, I dropped it while getting one of my kids up after she was knocked over by this wave:

That's her more sensible friend in the foreground.

Now it doesn't turn on. It's two years old, been to Europe about six times, and I've probably taken 10,000 pictures with it, so it's had a good life; but I'm hoping I can still get a little more time out of it.

[To the tune of 2 Souls and Bari Koral, "In the Beginning," from the album "In the Beginning (2 Souls Featuring Bari Koral) - EP".]

Technorati Tags: beach, children, Santa Cruz

In how many movies...

...has Keanu Reeves played a character who could download information directly into his brain?

There was the Matrix trilogy, of course, and the lamentable Johnny Mnemonic. Where else has Keanu been able to put information in his head the way the rest of us put money on our cash cards?

[To the tune of En Vogue, "Free Your Mind," from the album "Funky Divas".]

Technorati Tags: science_fiction

Competition, cooperation, and the Tour de France

Someone recently gave me a copy of a recent article, in Fortune, "Pack Mentality," that extracts the "free-market lessons of long-distance bike racing" as seen in the Tour de France:

[A] stage race is less a sporting event than a commodities exchange on wheels. What appears to be a random mass of bicycles is really an orderly, complex web of shifting alliances, crossed with brutal competition, designed to keep or acquire the market's most valued currency: energy.

Amassing it (i.e., letting as little of it as possible drain away) is the only way for a racer to survive the brutal physical strain of a Tour de France, the metabolic equivalent of running 21 marathons in 23 days. Bikers save energy by riding together in a massive slipstream....

But here's the key: To thrive in the angry little swarm that is the peloton, enemies often have to stick together and make deals with one another. Cooperation across enemy lines is the centerpiece of a winning game plan.... Why play nice with someone who might beat you? Racers in the peloton are not pals; they're enemies without options.

So what does cooperation develop? Why isn't it just every man (or team) for himself?

The reason for the cooperation has its basis in physics: Wind resistance is a huge factor in energy use. According to studies done by Nike during its development of Lance Armstrong's speed suit, a bike racer consumes almost 80 percent of his energy cutting through the air and only 20 percent moving his bike.

To overcome that resistance, racers employ "drafting" - tucking your front wheel just behind rear wheel of the man in front of you, thereby gliding in his wind-free slipstream and greatly reducing the amount of energy it takes to ride.

Not surprisingly, there is an etiquette to drafting. Riders who draft too much without volunteering to slice through the wind for others are "wheel suckers."

It's an entertaining piece, though I find it a bit heavy on the "hey Americans, there's this crazy sports thing going on in, of all places, France" angle: it overplays the strangeness of the Tour de France. But I hesitate to criticize it too much, if only because it confirms something I wrote a couple years ago about "Smart Mobs and Sports."

You might think that cycling would just be every man for himself, but it's not: there's a lot of strategy that's involved, and also some cultural norms about what you're obliged to do as part of a breakaway or leading team. (It's bad form, for example, to just stay in someone's slipstream; you're supposed to take a turn leading.) There are also rules about not taking advantage of people's misfortunes, though that's a little trickier. The other day [in summer 2003], when leader Lance Armstrong was in a wreck, his closest competitor slowed down and waited for him to remount and catch up; Armstrong had done the same for him three years earlier. (On the other hand, the race doesn't stop for the person who's dead last.) Part of this is old-fashioned gentlemanly conduct, but it's also a recognition that a bicycle race is a small world, and while everyone wants to win, no one can afford alienate themselves from the group....

it seems to me that the Tour is a great example of an institution in which you see combinations of flocking behavior, smart mob behavior (the teams all have little radios, and can communicate with their coaches to plan strategy on the road), and an interesting tension between cooperation and competition. You have to cooperate to survive: you have to compete successfully to win.

We often think of cooperation and competition as polar opposites, but in the modern world I suspect that's rarely the case: the norm now is something far more complex. A few years ago, high-tech pundits talked about "coopetition" as a new business model: but this notion of cooperation among competitors strikes me as highly tactical, and not terribly profound. (I could be wrong, of course.) Games like cycling and car racing point to something more basic: under many circumstance, you have to cooperate to compete.

But the one place the article really goes wrong is in its argument that "Nothing in American sports resembles the bizarre dynamic of the cycling peloton." First, as the article itself makes clear, there's nothing bizarre about it: cooperation in the context of competition often is perfectly rational, whether in playing-fields or markets.

In fact, it's rather like companies cooperating around technical standards. Computer companies agree to standardize around USB, Google and Yahoo both use HTTP protocols, shipping companies all use standard sized containers. Deviate from the standard, and you may gain a vast advantage (as Apple arguably has with its music system); more likely, you're make yourself irrelevant. Nobody makes money off standards. But everybody makes money because of standards. Likewise, in the Tour, you have to compete to win, but you have to cooperate to finish.

Second, there is at least one rather popular American sport in which the peleton dynamics, and a set of cultural norms that define what constitutes good versus unfair competition: Nascar. As David Ronfeldt argued several years ago,

In aerodynamically intense stock-car races like the Daytona 500, the drivers form into multi-car draft lines to gain extra speed. A driver who does not enter a draft line (slipstream) will lose. Once in a line, a driver must attract a drafting partner in order to break out and try to get further ahead. Thus the effort to win leads to ever-shifting patterns of cooperation and competition among rivals.

And as anyone who's seen the Pixar movie Cars can tell you, competitors who play too rough don't get respect.

links for 2006-07-09

• Smart City 2020 | Metropolis Magazine
  "Preindustrial cities were mostly skeleton and skin—inert material arranged to provide shelter, security, and intensification of land use. In the industrial era, buildings and neighborhoods acquired more and more elaborate flow systems [and infrastructu
  (tags: design environment future technology endofcyberspace cities)
• Snapshots from the future
  Seven scenarios by Danish futurist and author Peter Hesseldahl of life in 2030.
  (tags: future ubicomp)

Quote of the Day

William Mitchell, writing in Metropolis on "the emergence of a new stage in the evolution of cities:"

Preindustrial cities were mostly skeleton and skin—inert material arranged to provide shelter, security, and intensification of land use. In the industrial era, buildings and neighborhoods acquired more and more elaborate flow systems for water and energy supplies, sewage, ventilation, transportation, and trash removal. With their inputs, outputs, and artificial physiologies, they began to resemble living organisms. Today these organisms are developing artificial nervous systems that enable them to behave in intelligently coordinated ways. As the cities and their components become smarter, they begin to take new shapes and patterns. They become programmable. And the design of their software becomes as crucial—socially, economically, and culturally —as that of their hardware.

[via Smartspace]

Technorati Tags: city, design, digital-physical, pervasive computing, ubicomp

Smartspace

One of my Technorati watchlists pointed me to Smartspace, a newish blog (started in February, not long after this one) on

annotated environments, intelligent infrastructure and digital landscapes--the merging of technology with the environment around us, and the overlay of digital environments on the physical ones we inhabit.

Hmm, sounds like familiar stuff. And the banner is one of the most beautiful I've seen on any blog. Is that Hong Kong? Tokyo?

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, end of cyberspace, mobility, pervasive computing, place/space, ubicomp

Confused birds

It's a few minutes after midnight, and either a dozen birds are outside my window singing, or one mockingbird with severe jet lag has taken up in the backyard.

So long as it doesn't wake the kids.

[To the tune of Oleta Adams, "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me," from the album "Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin".]

Technorati Tags: menlo park

One of those strange chains of association

The sort of thing James Burke has made a career of spinning, but this one is from Brian Aldiss, writing in the Guardian:

In the years of the Han emperors in China, two centuries before the birth of Christ in the west, the Chinese perfected the crossbow with which to defeat the barbarians. The barbarians did not have the skills necessary to cast the bronze locks the crossbow requires. With the barbarians taken care of, a time of peace prevailed within the newly united states of China.

So from this crossbow developed one of the great aculturing factors by which civilisation itself is judged. I refer to the restaurant - and here I am guessing. But imagine the confidence, the civility required for people first to come to a strange table, possibly in a shady courtyard in Loyang, and to sit down with others whom they do not know, or only remotely know, without fear of being attacked or stabbed. An unknown chef then serves food, which they eat without fear that it may be poisoned. It's a revolution! The restaurant opens a new era in social relationships. In those remarkable circumstances, one not only eats, one converses. And from conversation new ideas are born.

[To the tune of Al Green, "Let's Stay Together," from the album "Let's Stay Together".]

Technorati Tags: China, culture