Relevant History

Linden Row Inn

Wednesday night while in Richmond I stayed at the Linden Row Inn, in downtown. I think technically this is the edge of the historic Fan district, or just outside. I've been staying in lots of different kinds of hotels the last couple years, ranging from serious business hotels to things out of Blade Runner. This is way up there one the historically interesting, quirky in a Southern and slightly Gothic kind of way. It's a tremendous little hotel, and I've had a great time here.

via flickr

The hotel is actually five buildings, built at different times. The buildings facing the street were joined together, forming a walled compound, and two buildings are in the center, in the garden. It's sort of like a topologically complex version of London's Goodenough Club, or the creation of an antebellum Frank Gehry.

via flickr

The buildings have an interesting history. Edgar Allen Poe spent part of his childhood living in the compound after his mother died. (According to the hotel Web site, "Local legend has it that this was the 'enchanted garden' that Poe mentions in his famous poem, 'To Helen.'")

"Nevermore! Nevermore!"

After that, it was a succession of girls' schools-- first the Southern Female Institute (possibly my favorite name for anything anywhere, and a brilliant girls' rock band name), then Mrs. Pegram's, and finally Miss Ellet's School (which eventually became St. Catherine's, where a friend of mine teaches). So that adds an interesting little twist to the place. The doors to some of the suites still have plaques that read "Miss [Teacher's Name] Parlour."

via flickr

There's also a "Miss Scott's Alley." I have to wonder what she taught....

via flickr

The rooms themselves and the service are fine. There's a basic free continental breakfast, and-- and this is the real treat-- the inn will drive you around and pick you up if you're going somewhere in the Fan, Shockoe Bottom, etc.. I hadn't really thought about it when I was picking the hotel, but it's a surprisingly nice perk once you've used it a couple times. And for exercise fanatics, there's a really well-equipped YMCA a block away that you can visit for free. (Outstanding.)

via flickr

So it was cool. I'm staying there next time I come to Richmond.

World 66

Every traveller acquires a lot of weird, but useful, information about places they visit-- everything from what public places have clean bathrooms, to where to get good dim sum after midnight. It's a great example of private knowledge that could be quite useful if it is made public-- and is, in the form of helpful hints from friends and fellow travellers. I recently came across a site that tries to digitize the phenomenon: World66:

World66 is a collaborative project to create an open content travel guide. This means that virtually anyone can edit our articles.

Essentially, it's a travel wiki. I found it's a little uneven-- I created an "eating out" section for Philadelphia, a city with a lot of interesting restaurants, and incredibly, there are no restaurant or cafe listings for the San Francisco Bay Area-- but it's definitely the kind of project that will become more valuable as the number of contributors increases.

Now if I could only access it in real-space as well as real-time-- look up its Washington DC restaurant listings when I'm there, and hungry-- we'd really be getting somewhere.

[via Halavais]

[To the tune of George Harrison, "My Sweet Lord," from the album All Things Must Pass (Disc One).]

Profligacy, efficiency, and emergence

A couple weeks ago, as I was juggling books on symbiosis, Benkler's work on the open source movement, and a few other things, it struck me that one thing connecting all these different examples together was profligacy: the ability to burn through a lot of some kind of resource to advance. Species evolve by turning out gigantic numbers of individuals, most of whom die without passing on their genes. Peer-reviewed open source production systems can enlist very large numbers of people, with little regard to their long-term satisfaction or involvement in the project. Seti@Home and A-life projects can burn through processor cycles.

Turns out that Timothy Burke has been thinking along similar lines:

[T]here is an expectation deeply rooted in most modernist traditions that highly productive or useful systems achieve their productivity through some kind of optimality, some tight fit between purpose and result, in short, through efficiency.

My colleague Mark Kuperberg has perceptively observed that Adam Smith has to be seen as an early prophet of emergence—what could be a better example than his “bottom-up” view of the distributed actions of individuals leading to a structural imperative, the “invisible hand”—but as digested through the discipline of economics, Smith’s view was increasingly and to my mind necessarily parsed in terms of models requiring those agents to be tightly optimizing.

That’s what’s so interesting about both simulated and real-world examples of emergence: they create their useful results, their general systemic productivity, through excess, not efficiency. They’re not optimal, not at all, at least not in their actual workings. The optimality or efficiency, if such there is, comes in the relatively small amount of labor needed to set such systems in motion. Designing a system where there is a seamless fit between purpose, action and result is profoundly difficult and vastly more time-consuming than setting an overabundance of cheap, expendable agents loose on a problem. They may reach a desired end-state more slowly, less precisely, and more expensively in terms of overall energy expenditure than a tight system that does only that which it needs to do, but that excess doesn’t matter. They’re more robust to changing conditions if less adapted to the specificities of any given condition.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "Misty Moutain Hop," from the album Box Set (Disc 2).]

Emergence as excuse?

Some thoughts on the overuse of the concept of emergence, at The Register and lago (and lago again).

[To the tune of The Doobie Brothers, "How Do the Fools Survive?," from the album Minute by Minute.]

Coase's typewriting monkeys

Reading Yochai Benkler's "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm," an influential study of peer production systems (most famously the open source movement).

One point he makes is that peer production systems succeed when they do a good job of 1) breaking up a big job into lots of small parts, and 2) using scale-- a very large number of contributors-- to correct for defects, either by having proofreading/testing, or by statistical averaging of contributions.

It strikes me that one quality that peer production, evolving species, and many other cooperative systems share is the freedom to be profligate with some critical resource. With evolution, you're profligate with individuals. The larger its population and the more your random mutations, the faster a species will be able to adapt to changes in its environment. With computer systems that use evolutionary techniques to solve difficult problems (like the traveling salesman problem), you're profligate with processor cycles: you don't have to be particularly smart or elegant when you can let the system try out a billion different possibilities. With peer production, you're profligate with creativity: you have a lot of little tasks, and a lot of people, and so each task is bound to be taken up by someone. (And duplication is good, because contributors can double-check each other.)

As someone once said, monkeys sitting at typewriters would, if given enough time, randomly write the collected works of Shakespeare. This is true, but in Benkler is right, they'd get there a lot faster if they had an equal number of monkey proofreaders volunteering small bits of their time to look at a few lines of the typists' work.

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Outside," from the album Outside.]

Not a smart mob

From Recordnet:

Devices spread word of fights

Two student fights that erupted recently at a Manteca park and at Lincoln High School in Stockton nearly turned into riots when dozens of teenagers showed up to watch, apparently after students spread the word using their cellular phones.

Two 17-year-old Calla High School students were cited for fighting in public in the Oct. 8 incident, which began at Shasta Park and then shifted to Chadwick Park after residents saw the gathering crowd and called police, Manteca Police Department spokesman Rex Osborn said.

Police and school officials believe some students used their cell phones to notify friends in advance of the fight, but it's unclear if they phoned them on campus or after school.

"One of the kids (in the fight) called some of his friends and when the other student heard about it, he called some of his friends, and the next thing you know the whole thing blew up," said Manteca police Officer Shawn Cavin, who works at Calla and talked to the two teenagers after the fight.

I especially like the bit about the fight shifting venues. Aren't fights supposed to be more spontaneous?

Clearly I spent too much time in the library when I was in high school.

[via Smart Mobs]

I gotta get out more often

...and do some noderunning. I'd heard of warchalking a while ago, but this game-- where your team collects points by finding open WiFi access points in a certain period of time-- has eluded me somehow. They're doing it in New York, in London, and have been for at least a year.

Must flog my intern for holding out on me. Wait a minute, I don't have an intern.

The power of social networks

It's intended as a funny, cutting piece, but Gawker accidentally makes a point about the uses of social network practices in an article on Manhattan's marijuana delivery services:

Gawker: Hi, Smokey. Thanks for taking time to school me in the ways of modern pot-smoking. I just have a few questions. So: how'd you find your pot delivery service?
Smokey: Someone had to call and vouch for me to their service... I had to set up an "account" up from their phone.
Gawker: Oh wow. So you got screened.
Smokey: Yah.
Gawker: That's genius.... So getting a delivery pot dealer is kind of like getting a date on Friendster.

What amazing things they have in New York.... Fortunately, the interview goes back downhill from there, which is what you expect from Gawker.

Today on Future Now

Only one post today:
Cyborg monkeys and post-humans: On the implications of the Nicolelis research group's work to create a closed-loop brain-machine interface between primates and a robotic arm.
Had I succeeded in finding a copy of Matrix Reloaded tonight at Frys, I would have been blogging about the unbearable lightness of Keanu Reeve's being, rather than substantive stuff. But never fear, the MR category is still live....

Virus hunters

The New York Times (registration required) has a fascinating piece on virus fighters, and the ways they work. One of the most illuminating grafs:

combating a major virus quickly becomes a joint effort of all those involved in antivirus research, regardless of their competitive position.

"There's very fierce competition on the sales side, but on the technical side we share what we have," he said. "The cooperation and communication is very open among the small group who are doing deep research." Mr. Hypponen said that in the 1980's antivirus researchers felt they needed to guard their work for competitive reasons, but they quickly realized that secrecy caused disastrous delays. These days, the roughly 150 researchers around the world know that it is to everyone's advantage to share code samples and information.

This is a kind of social practice, or a mode of cooperation, that historians and sociologists have describes as a defining feature of Silicon Valley, too. AnnaLee Saxenian, in her classic Regional Advantage, talks about how engineers at competing companies would share equipment when they were having problems.

It was just a throwaway line, and it didn't sound like people would cooperate in this same way in the course of ordinary work-- roughing out specs, coding, etc.-- but that people were obliged to help each other under emergencies. The moral economy of the Valley's engineering culture set rules governing when people who normally would be competitors were obliged to compete. Once again , you have to cooperate with your competitors to survive.

For people trying to combat viruses and worms, every day is an emergency; so it sounds like they're in a permanent cooperative mode.

Amphilphilic smart dust

(Try saying that quickly five times.)

Roland Piquepaille caught word of a smart dust project at UC San Diego. Apparently they've created silicon chips that are amphiphilic-- i.e., they're attracted to water on one side, and repelled by it on the other-- and thus can detect and isolate oil or other impurities:

When added to water, the "dust" will align with the hydrophilic side facing the surface of the water and the hydrophobic side facing toward the air. If a drop of an oily substance is added to the water, the dust surrounds the drop with the hydrophobic side facing inward. In addition to this alignment, which will occur in the presence of any substance that is insoluble in water, a slight color change occurs in the hydrophobic mirror. The degree of this color change depends on the identity of the insoluble substance. The color change occurs as some of the oily liquid enters the tiny pores on the hydrophobic side of the silicon particle....

[T]he dual-sided particles have the additional benefit of being able to collect at a target and then self-assemble into a larger, more visible reflector that can be seen from a distance. "The collective signal from this aggregate of hundreds or thousands of tiny mirrors is much stronger and more easily detected than that from a single mirror," [graduate student Jamie Link] points out. "The tendency of these particles to clump together will therefore enable us to use this technology for remote sensing applications."

It sounds like an elegant little technology, though I'm not sure from the press release whether it's "smart dust" the way that Kris Pister's "smart dust" is smart: reactive, yes, but not using a little tiny computer. Still, it sounds cool.

There's another interesting thing here. There are have been groups influenced by biomimicry who've been working on harnessing amphiphilic molecules in self-assembly and drug delivery, but this is the first example I've heard of the phenomenon being reproduced in a technology.

[via Smart Mobs]

Cory Doctrow on net politics

Cory Doctrow takes the op-ed page of the Boston Globe, and... well... opines... on Net activism. The key graf:

Information is power, but it's not enough. Modern emperors have learned the knack of spinning revelations of wrongdoing and bouncing back. Thus far, the Internet has lacked the follow-through necessary to make a lasting difference. That's changing.

Put another way, the genie of digitally-organized and -amplified collective action is escaping the bottle of the virtual world, and making its way into the real world. And we all remember from the stories we read as children what happens when genies escape their bottles....

[via Smart Mobs]

Wi-Fi in other courtrooms

In some kind of strange precognition over my experience with Wi Fi in the jury waiting room in the San Mateo Country courthouse, Halavais writes in about jury rooms in New York:

I was shocked to find that when I was called to jury duty they had little cubicles with electricity and (whether by accident or intentionally, I do not know), WiFi. It seems that now that New York isn't taking excuses for avoiding jury duty, they are also sprucing up their waiting rooms.

Maybe the provision of the service in mundane public spaces like jury waiting rooms is a really good measure of how quickly wireless access is turning from something that you can make money off of, and into something... that's... just there. There's something show-offy about putting up Wi Fi in highly visible public spaces, like well-used parks; but installing it in drab, workaday spaces where you're likely to get little credit for it (in part because most people don't want to be in those spaces to begin with? That's significant.

Wi Fi in the restaurant

The New York Times (free registration required) reports that Wi Fi is being used more and more in places like restaurants and, very interestingly, casinos.

The casino and hotel operator Harrah's Entertainment of Las Vegas has tested several uses of Wi-Fi at its properties. Curbside check-in lets high rollers bypass the hotel registration desk and shortens lines for all guests. The hand-held terminal can also direct a host to dole out perks on the spot, checking information on specific guests to see if their past business warrants a free meal or show or even a free room, said Tim Stanley, Harrah's chief information officer.

I know only a tiny bit about the gambling industry, but apparently they spend a lot of energy keeping track of regular visitors and high rollers.

Harrah's has also experimented with using roving cashiers, who tote hand-held terminals to verify player winnings and make payments on the casino floor, so the customers can keep gambling when they would otherwise be standing in line at the payout window. A small portable printer even spits out federal tax forms at tableside. "It keeps them in the action longer, frankly," Mr. Stanley said.

Technology making our lives easier....

No! Not another flash mob article!

I've been called for jury duty tomorrow, so I'm likely to be offline.

I know some of my readers are getting sick of articles about flash mobs. Maybe Rob Walker's piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine will be the last, best one for a while.

e-graffiti and social navigation

The New York Times (registration requred) report on a project at Cornell University that lets visitors with specially-equipped Palm Pilots read comments, written by students, about campus buildings and landmarks:

Like ghosts in midair, such remarks surfaced whenever the palmtop, equipped with a small Global Positioning System unit, was carried to any of the spots where they were written a year or two ago.

The electronic tour is part of a research project that explores the next generation of "context-aware" computers - devices that can orient themselves in the real world and provide information about what is around them....

Cornell's tour guide, called Campus Aware, supplements this technology with richer content - the history and lore of campus sites - and with notes left "at the scene" by previous visitors. This e-graffiti, as researchers originally called it, adds a serendipitous and personal touch to the tour.

The researchers who developed Campus Aware have a summary of the project, and a related program called Graffiti.

From what I can tell, the system isn't super-sophisticated, in that it doesn't require special devices; but that's not to say it isn't very smart. Indeed, some of the smartest products and services are ones that skillfully incorporate, appropriate, or gently poach from existing technologies. Lots of location-aware services are going to be like that: the sparks will fly not after whole new infrastructures are rolled out, but when we get smarter about making existing services and technologies draw on each other.

[via Bill Cockayne]

P-time

Joi Ito talks about going P-time (the term is from Edward Hall, who talks about "monochronic time (M-time)" and "polychronic time (P-time)."

It's interesting watching someone try to describe how their brains change. (Non-sarcasm alert: I mean that.) Joi is one of those people whose life is kind of an extreme version of how many of us will be living in the future, so his experiences may serve as a kind of warning light for the rest of us.

Intel inside, outside, and everywhere else

Technology Review (subscription required) warns, "Dont be surprised if your computer pulls a disappearing act one day:"

Research groups in the United States and Japan this year independently fabricated prototype transistors that are completely transparent. If the kinks can be worked out, the researchers say, the devices will change the way you think about computing. Transparent electronics could enable see-through displayslike video ads on store windows, or warning flashes on your windshield if a child darts in front of your carand even invisible processors.

It seems that we may be a few years away from the growth of entire orders of non-silicon electronics, which will make the whole electronics ecology a lot more complex. DNA computing and quantum computers have gotten more press-- largely because they offer the possibility of some unbelieveable jumps in processing power and memory-- but I think that lower-key things like paper-based computing, printable electronics, and transparent electronics could be more important. These technologies will let you integrate electronics-- and hence sensors, processors, communications, control systems-- into everything. You also wouldn't have to spend as much time in the design process thinking about how the electronics fit into a device: they'll be part of the fabric, or the screen. (As Oregon State electrical engineering professor John Wager put it to TR, "anywhere theres glass, there can be electronics.") In other words, they could be a path to pervasive, ubiquitous computing.

Txt kds nix flix

The Los Angeles Times (registration required) has an illuminating piece on the role that high-tech word of mouth now plays in the success or failure of movies. Of course, buzz has always been important for low-budget independent films. What seem so to be different is that it works a lot faster, and can derail big pictures. This is especially important for the film industry, because movies make most of their money in the first two or three weeks of release:

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " said Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, referring to the millions of dollars studios throw at a movie to ensure a big opening weekend.

"You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience," he said. "Those days are over. Today, there is no fooling the public."

The casualties are everywhere, and even mighty studio marketing machines have been powerless to stem the tide.

"The Hulk" opened with $62 million but fell 69.7% by its second weekend. "2 Fast 2 Furious" started off with $50.4 million but dipped 63%. "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" turned in a disappointing $37 million and then saw its fortunes drop by 62.8%. And the much-maligned "Gigli" was in a class by itself, plunging faster than the scariest summer thrill ride a disastrous $3.7-million opening weekend, followed by a record-breaking drop of 81.9%.

Likewise, The Independent reports:

In Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why.

No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about that.

The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

[via Andrea, Smart Mobs]

Different life lessons of the Amazing Race

On Friday I argued that The Amazing Race is "is an experiment in cooperative behavior in a competitive context." Salon's Heather Havrilesky contends that it's a laboratory for stress-testing relationships:

With so many dating and relationship reality shows on the air, it's remarkable how few actually manage to hold your attention for more than a few seconds. "Perfect Partners," "For Love or Money," "Elimidate," "The Bachelor".... If, instead of watching people pretending to fall in love for the camera, you'd prefer to see established couples fall into a downward spiral of contempt and hysteria -- and who wouldn't? -- then "The Amazing Race" is the show for you. Don't let the silly world-travel challenges fool you. "The Amazing Race" is all about dragging long-term relationships over the red-hot coals of conflict.... As our intrepid couples endure a steady stream of panic-inducing situations, skillfully edited [Ed: as Victoria points out!] to maximize the nail-biting suspense, we can almost see the seams of their relationships ripping before our eyes....

"The Amazing Race" is the ultimate litmus test for a relationship. If only all engaged couples were forced to sleep on the streets of India or navigate the hinterlands of South Korea before they got married, divorce rates in this country would decline faster than you can say, "Do me a favor and shut up!"

Indeed, some of the couples do end up behaving like the proverbial escaped convicts chained together at the ankle (hey, wouldn't THAT be a great reality show?), but nonetheless, I think my argument that the game constitutes an interesting play between cooperation and competition still holds.

Maybe the players would be better-behaved if they realized that. Are you reading, contestants of Amazing Race 5?

Life lessons of The Amazing Race

NOTE: TO APPLY FOR THE AMAZING RACE, GO TO THE CBS WEB SITE. Good luck!

My wife and I have been watching the reality TV game show "The Amazing Race". I'd like to say that I've been watching because of my love of travel and scholarly interest in Victorian expeditions and scientific travel, but who am I kidding. It's eye candy. But it turns out to be eye candy with some nutritional value: the game is an experiment in cooperative behavior in a competitive context.

For those who haven't watched "The Amazing Race," a bit of background. The race began with twelve teams, each with two people [1]. It's an around-the-world race with thirteen stage. Each stage takes about a day, and contains a mix of travel (flying or driving, or both) and tasks (which are real dog's breakfast). The last team to complete the stage gets eliminated.

What's interesting about the game is that it's a paradigmatic example of a paradoxical but common phenomenon: you have to cooperate with other teams to survive, but you have to compete with them to win. The winners of the race will get a million dollars, which is a great incentive to compete; but in the early stages, there's a lot of explicit cooperation. Why?

First, each stage has a rhythm that ends up equalizing the teams. The stages usually begin late at night, and teams almost always reach their first destination several hours before they can actually perform the task that will let them move on. This levels the playing field: yesterday's tortises catch up to the hares. Since teams don't accumulate time advantages over the course of the race (as you do in the Tour de France), and since the stages are designed with these equalizers, in any stage there's little opportunity for teams to break away from the pack. In fact, given the structure and rhythm of the game, it's not so important to be first, but it is absolutely critical that you NOT be last.

Since no one can get too far ahead, and since this stage's first-mover advantage will get eliminated tomorrow, there's less incentive to withhold information from people who have caught up with you; you're not too likely to shake them, nor do you necessarily need to.

Second, most players figure out pretty quickly that your team may need help one day, so it's in your interest to help others, and to not be too pushy or mean. It's hard to keep other teams from seeing you get on a particular train, buy a ticket from United instead of Quantas, or whatever; so you might as well be nice about it. Jumping the cue for a flight that won't leave for four hours is pretty dumb: it buys you little, but costs you a lot of social capital. A team that refuses to share or play nicely can get shunned quickly, with potentially bad results.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. There's a tension built into this structure: at what point do you stop cooperating with other teams, and start competing with them? After all, there can only be one winner. Further, as the number of surviving teams dwindles, the odds of you being cut out of the herd increase, which is a good incentive to look out for yourself. A great deal of the drama of "The Amazing Race" comes when teams start to make this calculation.

This cooperation-within-competition tension turns out to be a popular one with reality TV shows these days. "Survivor" operates on a similar model, with people cooperating on tasks, then voting each other off the island. An even better example is the game show "The Weakest Link." There, players take turns answering questions; the more questions they get right in a round, the bigger that round's pot gets; but if one player gets a question wrong, the pot empties. No one owns the pot yet, but everyone wants it to be as full as possible. So each player has an incentive to get rid of people who can't answer questions. But each player also has an incentive to get rid of people who know more than they do.

Thus the tension: you have to cooperate to generate a large pot; you want smart players to make a lot of money; but the players who can best help you reach your goal are also your most dangerous competitors.

At a certain point, the game tips, and you have to shift your attention away from eliminating the weak, to killing off the strong. Put another way, you have to choose between two forms of greed: Do you cooperate with your competitors, increasing both risk for yourself and the reward? Or do you try to target your competitors, thus lowering your risk, but at the expense of a smaller pot?

I suspect you could probably explain a lot of herd animal behavior in similar terms: there's broad cooperation in seaching for food, avoiding predators, etc., even though there's competition for mates and status. David Sloan Wilson identified a similar paradox when he said, "The fundamental problem of social life is that selfishness beats altruism within a group. But altruistic groups trump selfish groups." (Empahsis added.)

One doesn't want to speak too loudly about the benefits of reality TV, but perhaps they'll help some people learn that pure competition isn't the only model for game playing, or real life.

Review is out the door!

I finally sent off the review of Smart Mobs and Natural-Born Cyborgs. I'd been feeling guilty about not having finished it weeks ago, the way a REAL writer would have; and so I stayed up late last night and got it done.

Why is it that twenty years after graduating from college, I still tend to finish tasks the way I wrote term papers?

Next on my agenda: putting away laundry.

Paul Boutin on Wi-Fi

Paul Boutin has a great piece on Wi-Fi as a business in this month's Wired. The key idea: "Wi-Fi isn't a luxury or even a commodity. It's a condiment." Definitely check it out.

While we're at it, can we all agree on whether it should be Wi-Fi, wi-fi, wifi, or what? Can someone just tell me which I should use? [Blatant troll for comments alert!]

Truest things said in jest

The fashion consequences of mobility.

Inbox as commons

Jonathan Rauch applies commons theory in an interesting way, in his latest article in Slate. (David Friedman made a similar argument a few days ago.) Basically, he argues that the problem with spam is that our inboxes (and attention) constitute a commons that spammers are overusing and despoiling. The solution? Require people to pay to send you e-mail-- i.e., make use of your commons of attention. Hmmm....

One more damn flash mob story

This time from the BBC, word that a smart mob storms London.

Storms? ALL of London? [sigh]

As a bonus, there's this bit of news that I'd missed earlier:

The latest New York flash mob caused consternation in the Toys R Us store where flash mobsters gathered for their sixth outing.

Participants were told to stare fixedly at the store's giant animatronic dinosaur for three minutes then fall to their knees and react to its roars by moaning and cowering for another four minutes.

But panicked staff quickly shut off the dinosaur and called the police barely a minute into the mass-moaning.

Can't sleep... animatronic... dinosaur... worshippers... will eat me.

Smart mobs dogs

Those of us interested in smart mobs and emergent behavior spend a fair amount of time looking to the animal world for examples of interesting emergent behavior-- swarming, pack hunting, and the like. It was only a matter of time before natural swarming and technology converged, as reported by m-pulse:

In mobility-happy Finland, hunters have taken to strapping wireless phones combined with a GPS chipset to the backs of their hunting dogs. The phone can send the dog's location back from the field, and the hunter can ring up their dogs and give them verbal commands. The hunter also can listen to the dog's barking, which varies depending on the type of prey being tracked.

Most importantly, though, the dog's movements can be tracked. The GPS components in the dog's harness relay coordinates back to a handheld device, displaying a map showing the dog's position relative to the hunter.

Here is an account of a "pawset"-enabled moose hunt.

This is interesting, but I wonder how long it'll be before someone develops a system that will allow the dogs to communicate with each other?

Plankton and God

The Guardian has a stimulating interview with David Sloan Wilson, author of the book Darwin's Cathedral:

David Sloan Wilson's career as a biologist started with zooplankton in the depths of the ocean and has ascended to God. He is convinced the same theoretical tools can be used to analyse the patterns of animal behaviour and human belief; and that the kinds of equations that tell you whether fish will be brightly or dully coloured, depending on the part of a river they live in, will also tell you why Calvinism thrived in 16th-century Geneva but the church of England is in decline today.

This ambition may smack of standard sociobiological imperialism - the belief that the other ways of looking at the world should defer to evolutionary biology. But Wilson's version has two twists. First, he does not believe biological understandings could or should replace the methods of the social sciences.... Secondly, he believes an essential tool for understanding social life is group selection....: "The fundamental problem of social life is that selfishness beats altruism within a group. But altruistic groups trump selfish groups. It's amazing that you can take such a controversial theory and describe it in two sentences."

He really did start by looking at cooperative behavior in plankton:

Because of the way they are broken up by currents, they naturally form patches or groups, on which selection can operate. He was interested in the way clumps of plankton move from the sunlit regions where they can feed, into the darker, safer depths. When he started to model this, he came up with a set of equations that showed how group selection could work in general and not just for plankton.

It's worth reading in full.

[thanks to Howard Rheingold]

Smart mobs and sports

My wife and I have been watching the Tour de France religiously over the last couple weeks, though as many people do during lengthy religious services, we've tended to fall asleep during the rigorous middle parts, waking in up in time for the big finish and the review of the standings.

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, 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.*

Yesterday a friend pointed out this article by David Ronfeldt, "Social Science at 190 MPH on Nascar's Biggest Speedways." Here's the abstract:

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. This provides a curious laboratory for several social science theories: (1) complexity theory, since the racers self-organize into structures that oscillate between order and chaos; (2) social network analysis, since draft lines are line networks whose organization depends on a driver's social capital as well as his human capital; and (3) game theory, since racers face a "prisoner's dilemma" in seeking drafting partners who will not defect and leave them stranded. Perhaps draft lines and related "bump and run" tactics amount to a little-recognized dynamic of everyday life, including in structures evolving on the Internet.

Likewise, 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.

*See extended entry:

Digging for Googleholes

Steven Johnson has a nice piece on Google's blind spots in today's Slate. (Update, 17 July 2003: Steven Johnson has some remarks about the piece, and reaction to it, on his blog.) Here's the key point:

Google may be the closest thing going to a vision of the "group mind," but that mind is shaped by the interests and habits of the people who create hypertext links.... We're wrong to think of Google as a pure reference source. It's closer to a collectively authored op-ed page-- filled with bias, polemics, and a skewed sense of proportion-- than an encyclopedia.

In other words, collaborative filtering technology isn't valuable because it's separate from the judgement of individuals, or because it corrects for personal bias. If anything, it can multiply the biases of those who use and contribute to it:

Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer.... You have to sift through 50 results before you reach a link that deals with apples that grow on trees: the home page for the Washington State Apple Growers Association. To a certain extent, this probably reflects the interest of people searching as well as those linking, but is the world really that much more interested in Apple Computer than in old-fashioned apples?

If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. The whole aim of recommendations systems is to find interesting biases-- to see that people who buy William Burroughs also buy Rage Against the Machine CDs, and never buy things associated with "American Idol." Inasmuch as Google is a giant recommendation system-- possibly the biggest one of them all-- it's reasonable to assume that it would reflect the interests of people who do a LOT of linking, or engage in the other practices that Google's technology assumes is worth analyzing.

The problem of ambiguous queries is an old one for indexers and search engine folks. When I was at Britannica, one of the great tests of a search engine was how it responded to queries about "depression": could its results indicate the difference between articles on geological depressions, clinical depression, and economic depressions? Most can't.

There's a larger moral that Johnson's story points to. Even the coolest content management technology is only as reliable as the humans who created the content.

We've been able to automate tools for searching and retrieval, but the underlying data that those tools are searching is still created by humans. Britannica Online has a pretty sophisticated search engine. But it runs queries against an index that's created by professional indexers who read every article, and decide what terms should be attached to it. It's possible to do automated indexing, but the results are generally pretty poor, because indexing turns out to be one of those things (like piano tuning) that isn't just a mechanical process. It requires a pretty high degree of judgment, and a sensitivity to context and meaning that we can't put into an automated system yet. (This is partly, but not exclusively, a cultural issue: good indexers in different countries can index the same article differently.)

In other words, the strategy that Britannica adopted to assure that the technology performed-- well, mechanically and predictably-- was to make sure that there were humans in the back end, who could both be predictable and exercise judgments that automated tools couldn't. This may sound ironic, but it isn't unprecedented. History is filled with examples of skilled humans being used to correct the deficiencies of mechanical systems of production. Early attempts to manufacture interchangeable parts required machinists and metalworkers to examine and occasionally file machine-made parts so they'd be truly interchangeable. Bauhaus furniture prototypes, which were supposed to exemplify the spirit of the machine age and potential of mass production, often had to be hand-made because the machine-produced versions didn't look right.

Usually we think of humans and machines as being competitors, and machines as possessed of virtues that humans do not have: they're faster, they're more precise, they can do tasks over and over again without tiring. All these can be true. But there are also many cases where you need to have humans in the loop to get the performance you want from machines. Some more complex kinds of tasks, or more complicated forms of precision, require a combination of human and mechanical strengths.

Rheingold, Clark, and Bricolage

I spent a fair amount of the weekend thinking through the review, though I'll need a few more days to get a stable draft together. Then, after admiring it, I'll let it set for a while, come back to it, and completely tear it apart.

Why it is that everything I write follows a trajectory from "complex and long" to "simple and short" is an enduring mystery to me. Why can't I just go straight to simple and short? I know, partly it's a function of the fact that writing isn't just a matter of spraying words on the page, but a process in which you figure out what it is that you really are trying to say; still, you'd think it would be easier.

Something that occured to me this morning that connects Smart Mobs and Natural-Born Cyborgs with the CTS [Combat Zones That See] project is that all three are describing worlds that could be quite different from today's, but not because of radically new technologies that have to be developed and rolled out into the world. All they require is putting together largely extant technologies and infrastructures, and tapping into existing practices.

For example, take recommendation systems. Individual recommendations systems track your behavior in a single environment (e.g., this online store, that online catalog), and could do some very interesting things if they shared their data with one another. A more compelling example is technology that gives already-embedded devices the ability to communicate with each other (e.g. the roadway and automobile, or cell phone and billboard). The problem is that this process of building up new, smart worlds by tapping into extant infrastructures is very similar to the process required to create something like CTS, or the technologies imagined by the Terrorist Information Awareness program (which, incidentally, faces a serious legislative challenge). As several people noted, the scary thing about CTS is how it could be done with off-the-shelf hardware.

People argue about Star Wars missile defense because it's so hard. They argue about TIA because it's so doable.

Weaving together existing technologies into new systems is deeply political activity, one in which the legal or policy implications should be vividly clear. (It's one thing for me to be able to record and recall my whole life; it's another for an agency or company, using a technology life LifeLog, to be able to do it.) And, conversely, the kinds of policy and privacy rules we build around mobile technologies, recommendation systems, collaborative filtering tools, and the like, will strongly affect how those systems work, and for whom. As Larry Lessig puts it, code is law. The reverse is also true.

Hypertags and the digital/physical divide

Wired News reports on a new system called Hypertag that "will enable mobile-phone and PDA users one-click access to Web pages by pointing and clicking at advertising posters."

The real-world equivalent of hyperlinks, the small battery-powered electronic tags use infrared signals to send Web links to mobile phones. Developed by the Cambridge, U.K.-based company Hypertag, these smart tags can be discreetly attached to any information display surface, such as advertising panels, billboards or walls, enabling any mobile-phone user with an infrared port or Bluetooth to access digital content by downloading a small software application.

The company's Web site explains

It works by allowing infra-red mobile phones, and PDAs (e.g. Palm Pilots or Pocket PCs) to interact with a small electronic tag which is attached to the Advert or Sign. To use the system, you enable your mobile phone and point it at the flashing lights. You wait a few seconds, and then a piece of content will be downloaded to your phone.

The inventor, John Winn, is described by the company as "top of his year in Electrical and Information Science at Cambridge University"-- kind of a latter-day Senior Wrangler, I guess. (Interestingly, his Cambridge site doesn't seem to mention Hypertag.)

This technology, like efforts to combine geocoding and blog maps, represent the leading edge-- or advance scouts, or insert some preferred metaphor meaning "early experiments that might or might not succeed, and if they fail might or might not influence later successes"-- of something that I think is going to be very important in the future: the intersection of digital and physical information.

Let me explain.

More on "Mobilisation"

I've been reading James Harkin's essay on "Mobilisation", which I mentioned in an earlier post. (Don't I know how to relax and kick back!). I hoped it would offer some more perspective on smart mobs and the ways groups use mobile devices. (You can get your own copy here.) It's written with the aim of serving as a policy resource, but it's pretty light on legal and regulatory stuff, and heavy on ethnographic and interview material: it's intended to influence what policymakers do in the future, but mainly describes what people do with cell phones today.

There are a few useful things that the report highlights, though nothing that will come as a big surprise to anyone who's already familiar with the ethnographic literature on cell phone use. (Test: If you can say who Sadie Plant is and what her last project was about, you should already know most of what's in Harkin's piece.) It begins with the argument that "Mobile technologies have merited relatively little intellectual or political attention-- in contrast to the warehouses full of books, pamphlets and policy papers about the Internet," (10) which strikes me as more or less right. Certainly I haven't heard of ambitious academics turning their critical (in)sights on the lowly cell phone, and there's probably less respect given to the cell phones than to the Web: we worry about a digital divide hurting poor students, but order cell phones turned off on school grounds.

But cell phones are proving to be quite interesting. For example, the meaning, use, and consequences of mobile use turn out to vary greatly with time and geography. "In China... mobiles are aspirational objects," (15) just as they were in the US and UK in the 1980 and early 1990s, when they "had been colonised by certain kinds of professionals: city workers, drug dealers and up-market prostitutes." (15) Today, though, the associations are softer (c.f., Finnish term "kanny"), and "the mobile phone effectively serves as a technological reminder of the network of friends and loved ones." (16)

As many sociologists and anthropologists have found, some of the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of mobile communication have been teens. Teens like cell phones because they are "a communication channel beyond the purview of anxious parents." (21) In South Korea, mobiles are personal (and hence private) devices, while land lines are seen as family (and hence more public). This also makes sense in the context of something a friend told me when explaining the failure of answering machines in Korea:

Why did the answering machine never become popular in Korea, and why was the pager and cell phone so popular? The answer might be: since you are living with your parents, you can't guarantee privacy with an answering machine. It is risky if you have any messages that you want to keep from your parents.

If the cell phone is a device for guaranteeing privacy, it is also "an emblem of group trust and group solidarity as well as a medium for self-expression:" (21) teenagers in Japan and Scandinavia, for example, share messages and loan phones to trusted friends, turning their phones into "a 'collaborative resource' among groups of teenagers as a way of promoting group solidarity." (21)

Another interesting fact is that celcos expected most mobile phones calls to be long distance traffic, and only a few local; but real use patterns turn out to be exactly the opposite. Why? "Within networks of family and friends, the most important use of mobile communications is... for making and shifting arrangements to meet-- so-called "approximeeting'." (29) For those of you who haven't experienced this, here's how it works. You and your friends agree to meet in the Village, or in SOMA (or maybe it just turns out that you're all within easy striking distance of the same neighborhood). As you head toward the neighborhood, you message each other back and forth about where there's parking, what restaurants are crowded, what bars look promising; you stop doing this when you're all about a half block apart, and can actually see each other. As Cory Doctrow so memorably put it, you collapse the waveform at the last instant.

One other good point that Harkin makes is that while we think of mobile phones as emblems of the knowledge economy, they're "silently revolutionizing the wider working environment" (33) of blue collar and service workers-- contractors, plumbers, truckers, warehouse workers, etc.. I hadn't really thought of this much before, but here in Silicon Valley it's rare to see a tradesman without a cell phone-- and I can't think of the last time I saw a supervisor/foreman type without one. As one contractor told me, it makes it a lot easier to keep track of your people, mainly because it eliminates excuses-- e.g. "I couldn't find a pay phone."

Mob rules

James Harkin has an interesting piece in today's Guardian on the growing use of mobile phones for coordinated social activity, ranging from passing on word of celebrity sightings to warnings about SARS. (I find the Guardian never fails to interest me, even when I disagree with it. And they have had some terrific coverage of international news.)

The piece is obliquely critical of Smart Mobs, suggesting that the vision Howard Rheingold lays out is still kind of futuristic-- but that mobile coordination is happening in the here and now, and activist groups should take full advantage of it.

The essay is taken from "Mobilisation: The growing public interest in mobile technology," which is available as a PDF.

Smart mobs, California style

The all-California reviewers' circle of Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs on Amazon has been broken: Robert Steele, a reader from Virginia, has posted a quite positive review of the book.

Interestingly, a few days after I posted my review I got a nice note from Howard thanking me for it. I didn't realize anyone else actually read these reviews....

California mobbing

What does it mean that all the people who've reviewed Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs on Amazon are Californians? Personally I don't think this is a coincidence.