Relevant History

Best thing I've read about Bucky Fuller

"He was fantastic at writing menus. But he wasn't interested in cooking dinner." (Edwin Schlossberg)

[To the tune of David Gilmour, "Time," from the album Live In Gdansk (a 3-star song, imo).]

Ah, scientific journals

As I'm finishing off another article to send to the journal (and have a couple others cued up), it was interesting to see this piece about the latest dispute between academic publishers and academia: Nature Publishing Group wants to

impose a 400% increase in its online access fee for UC, a hike the university says would come to more than $1 million a year. The result is talk of a systemwide boycott of Nature publications unless the firm becomes more accommodating.

But the dispute underscores a more far-reaching debate in academia: Whether the old business model of scientific publishing, in which researchers turn their work over to commercial entities for free, then pay through the nose to access it in print or online, hasn't reached the point of ultimate absurdity.

[To the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Green River," from the album Green River (a 2-star song, imo).]

The new old Macbook Pro

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine decided she wanted to sell her MacBook Pro. I've been looking to upgrade the kids' computer, so I bought it from her, and figured I would give the kids my 13" Powerbook.

They were at camp, so I was able to do all this without their knowing, and was also able to swap out the hard drives. Almost a year ago, I upgraded the hard drive in my MacBook, and since it's a 500 mb drive with my entire life on it, I didn't want to just leave it for the kids.

I got online and went looking for instructions for how to install a new drive in a Macbook Pro. Putting a new drive in the old machine was VERY easy; this time it was a little more difficult, but so long as you're patient and careful, even a relative neophyte like me can handle it.

via flickr

I found some terrific, easy-to-understand instructions on Ifixit.com, cleared away some space, and got to work, taking the drives out of both machines, then moving my 500 mb drive to the new Pro.

via flickr

With the white Macbook, replacing the hard drive required just opening up a slot and putting in the new drive; the Pros require more surgery.

via flickr

However, so long as you're patient, follow the instructions, stay mindful and don't panic, you really should be fine. Modern electronics are meant to be modular, to be put together by people who aren't very highly educated (computer assembly stopped being the province of Ph.D.s a couple generations ago), and to be hard to mess up. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to do it.

via flickr

After about an hour, I had the Pro closed up and ready to test. It worked like a dream.

via flickr

The new machine is terrific: the extra 2" of screen make a significant difference, and I like the backlit keyboard. I may to upgrade the RAM before too long, but that's more because I can, rather than because the machine needs it.

[To the tune of Michael Nyman Band, "Fish Beach (from Drowning By Numbers)," from the album The Essential Michael Nyman Band (a 3-star song, imo).]

Kids reenact the American Revolution

My wife has been assigning video production projects in her class, but this raises the game:

While at first it looks like nothing more than a mix of two entertainment genres that were best left unconnected-- namely, elementary school skits and Web video-- it's actually wonderfully subversive at times. The Charles Beard shout-out (at 1:01) makes the whole thing worthwhile, and the First Thanksgiving is just incredible.

[To the tune of Sting, "History Will Teach Us Nothing," from the album Nothing Like The Sun (a 2-star song, imo).]

Life of the mind, Google Scholar edition

I noticed a traffic spike on the blog, thanks to Lexi Lord's essay on post-academic life in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education (thanks, Lexi!). She talks about how she decided to leave a tenure-track position, and her discovery of the fact that you don't have to be an academic to have an interesting intellectual life (and indeed, can have a more interesting one if you're not a professor):

Because I live in a large city, as opposed to the small college towns where I was a professor, I live in a world of museums, lectures, public seminars, extraordinary bookstores, fantastic archives, and libraries. I live in a place that has racial as well as ethnic diversity. All of those factors encourage me to think about historical problems in a rigorous albeit different fashion from how I saw them in academe....

I live where a lot of archives are—which makes research easier than it was in academe. I write and publish. My new book, researched and written completely outside academe, was just published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Since leaving academe, I have continued to endorse the belief that being an intellectual entails analyzing and understanding issues from multiple angles. I hope that in advising their undergraduates, academics will encourage their students to share that view. More important, I hope faculty members will encourage students to do informational interviews and extensive research on career options—before entering a Ph.D. program, which is, after all, only one path to the life of the mind.

This is always good advice, but it's especially timely, given that last night I had an experience that reminded me of the increased feasibility of pursuing academic projects outside the university.

I recently became interested in the concept of unintended consequences, and how the term is used to either describe or excuse the unexpected. It would be obvious to start such an essay with "a Raymond Williams Keywords-like analysis of its history," and last night I decided to poke around a little bit and see if I could find some early uses.

A little time on Google Scholar turned up the fact that Robert Merton wrote an article about the term in 1936, and died with a book on unintended consequences still unfinished-- a warning that I should be very tactical in how I approach the subject. (The fact that Google Scholar has "Stand on the shoulders of giants" as its motto warms my heart, since Merton wrote a book on the phrase.) That took a few minutes.

I then jumped over to the Stanford Library Web site, to see if Poole's Index of 19th Century Periodicals was online. When I was writing my dissertation, I spent a LOT OF TIME with Poole's-- it was an invaluable resource, and I remember many hours in the Penn and UC Berkeley libraries, looking for article citations, then tracking them down in the stacks. Instead, I quickly found the 19C Index, an online repository / directory that includes Poole's, but also a number of other 19th century indexes, publications, scanned magazines, etc.

For the next couple hours, I tracked down various combinations of unintended, unexpected, and unanticipated, and effects or consequences; by bedtime, I had a couple pages' worth of material written (most of it is footnotes and quotations, of course).

All this happened on my couch, with the "Biggest Loser" finale in the background.

I wouldn't give up those days spent in the library for anything; and I still really enjoy going to libraries to read and write. But the point of the story is this: that while fifteen years ago (when I did it) successfully leaving academia but remaining intellectual required geography and attitude-- I could do it because I was living in Chicago, Lexi was in DC, and we both were willing to keep a growth mindset about the next phase of our lives-- today, resources like 19C make it even easier to do serious scholarly work-- at least preliminary scholarly writing-- without being close to libraries. I'm about three miles away from Green Library, but with kids, work, and other stuff, it's hard to get there, and impossible to just dash over to the reference section to check up on something (as I could do when I was single and living a mile from the Berkeley campus).

So what Lexi argues in her recent piece, and what I argued years ago, is more true than ever: the raw resources for pursuing academic projects are more accessible and portable than ever. It still often requires maintaining some kind of connection with an academic institution-- my Stanford affiliation gets me access to the online databases like 19C and JSTOR-- and you still have to manage all the logistical stuff required to carve out time for yourself, but the Web at least seriously lowers the barriers to getting access to the resources necessary to support a real intellectual life.

I know that projects like JSTOR are intended to support academics, but I think it's even more valuable for people who are doing serious intellectual work but who aren't academics. These services were designed to support scholarship is doing that... but the most profound benefits aren't going to the people they were originally designed for.

Hey. That's an unintended consequence.

Two Euro aggregators

Sign and Sight and Eurozine. Both good for those of us whose reading knowledge of German, Norweigian, Romanian, Swedish, Danish, and Polish is rusty. From their about pages:

signandsight.com translates outstanding articles by non-English language authors bringing them to a worldwide audience. signandsight.com gathers voices from across Europe on a variety of topics, aiming to foster trans-European debates and the creation of a European public sphere.

Eurozine is a network of European cultural journals, linking up more than 75 partner journals and just as many associated magazines and institutions from nearly all European countries. Eurozine is also a netmagazine which publishes outstanding articles from its partner journals with additional translations into one of the major European languages.

[To the tune of ABBA, "Chiquitita," from the album Gold (a 2-star song, imo).]

Against Multitasking

Peter Bregman reports on multitasking and its perils:

Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we're getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don't actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.

You might think you're different, that you've done it so much you've become good at it. Practice makes perfect and all that.

But you'd be wrong. Research shows that heavy multitaskers are less competent at doing several things at once than light multitaskers. In other words, in contrast to almost everything else in your life, the more you multitask, the worse you are at it. Practice, in this case, works against you.

I decided to do an experiment. For one week I would do no multitasking and see what happened. What techniques would help? Could I sustain a focus on one thing at a time for that long?

For the most part, I succeeded. If I was on the phone, all I did was talk or listen on the phone. In a meeting I did nothing but focus on the meeting. Any interruptions — email, a knock on the door — I held off until I finished what I was working on.

[To the tune of Tabla Beat Science, "Magnetic Dub," from the album Live in San Francisco at Stern Grove (a 3-star song, imo).]

Context is meaning

I find this amusing:

[To the tune of Joni Mitchell, "Strong And Wrong," from the album Shine (a 3-star song, imo).]

How Flickr changes my view of the world

In a recent article on experiments using automatic digital photography to improve the memories of Alzheimer's patients, I was struck by these paragraphs:

When researchers began exploring it as a memory aid a few years ago, they had patients and caregivers look at all the pictures together.

Although the exercise helped improve retention of an experience, it was evident that a better way would be to focus on a few key images that might unlock the memories related to it. The interactive nature of that approach would give patients a greater sense of control over their recollections, and allow them to revisit past experiences rather than simply know they had happened.

They soon realized that the capriciousness of memory made answers elusive. For one subject, a donkey in the background of a barnyard photo brought back a flood of recollections. For another, an otherwise unremarkable landscape reminded the subject of a snowfall that had not been expected.

The idea that "the capriciousness of memory" would make efforts to automatically generate summaries of events difficult, mirrors my own experience: I have entire trips that I recall through a couple apparently random things-- the look of a hotel room, what I had for dinner. Likewise, looking at an entire album of pictures doesn't necessarily do much for me in terms of helping me remember more of an event.

I wonder if the scientists have tried getting their subjects to consciously manipulate those records afterwards-- to make a photo album, for example-- and see if that process of sorting helps improve recall. I remember trips much better if I write about them, or choose pictures to put online, much as I remember books better when I take notes on them. In fact, it's safe to say that the ritual of going through pictures, tagging them, and uploading them has both made it easier for me to remember these places, and changed my view of the world.

Let me explain.

Sensecam, Alzheimer's, and memory

An article in the New York Times on experiments using what sounds like Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits technology "to help people with Alzheimer’s and other memory disorders."

The concept was simple: using digital pictures and audio to archive an experience like a weekend visit from the grandchildren, creating a summary of the resulting content by picking crucial images, and reviewing them periodically to awaken and strengthen the memory of the event....

In Pittsburgh, researchers had Mr. Reznick go on three excursions with a Sensecam around his neck, and a voice recorder in his shirt pocket and a GPS unit. On one trip, he went to an exhibition of glass sculptures with his wife, Sylvia, his son and a granddaughter.

The Sensecam takes hundreds of pictures in a short period. When researchers began exploring it as a memory aid a few years ago, they had patients and caregivers look at all the pictures together.

I'm not surprised that scientists would be using this technology for Alzheimer's patients. If today's early adopters are twentysomethings, in the next couple decades we're going to see a shift: the most augmented, information technology-intensive Americans are likely to be the elderly, who will be using these technologies (often embedded in more ordinary-looking everyday devices) to battle memory loss, stay independent, and of course post pictures to their Facebook accounts.

[To the tune of Emerson Lake & Palmer, "Tarkus," from the album Live at the Wheeling Civic Center (November 12 1977) (a 2-star song, imo).]

Sensecam, Alzheimer's, and memory

An article in the New York Times on experiments using what sounds like Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits technology "to help people with Alzheimer’s and other memory disorders."

The concept was simple: using digital pictures and audio to archive an experience like a weekend visit from the grandchildren, creating a summary of the resulting content by picking crucial images, and reviewing them periodically to awaken and strengthen the memory of the event....

In Pittsburgh, researchers had Mr. Reznick go on three excursions with a Sensecam around his neck, and a voice recorder in his shirt pocket and a GPS unit. On one trip, he went to an exhibition of glass sculptures with his wife, Sylvia, his son and a granddaughter.

The Sensecam takes hundreds of pictures in a short period. When researchers began exploring it as a memory aid a few years ago, they had patients and caregivers look at all the pictures together.

I'm not surprised that scientists would be using this technology for Alzheimer's patients. If today's early adopters are twentysomethings, in the next couple decades we're going to see a shift: the most augmented, information technology-intensive Americans are likely to be the elderly, who will be using these technologies (often embedded in more ordinary-looking everyday devices) to battle memory loss, stay independent, and of course post pictures to their Facebook accounts.

[To the tune of Emerson Lake & Palmer, "Tarkus," from the album Live at the Wheeling Civic Center (November 12 1977) (a 2-star song, imo).]

The limits of FourSquare

Jessica Grose on what's wrong with Foursquare:

The major limit to Foursquare’s widespread appeal is what differentiates it from the other location-based apps—game mechanics, which have limited appeal to older users (it should be noted that competitor Loopt has recently acquired similar gaming technology). With Foursquare, you get badges based on participation, and you can compete for badges with your friends. If you “check in” to a particular location often enough on Foursquare, you become “mayor” of that location. If you check in four nights in a row, you get a “bender” badge, and so on. Though hyper-social twentysomethings in cities with endless options may enjoy competing with their friends for the “player please” or “douchebag” badges, the reward system does not hold much for anyone older. “I don’t get any real thrill from the gaming aspect,” one thirtysomething, New York-based Foursquare user told me. “All the badges seemed aimed to a young, single dude,” said another.

Another limitation of Foursquare’s appeal is that users are rewarded—“given pieces of digital candy,” in the words of co-founder Dennis Crowley—for seeking out new venues and experiences as much as possible. This is only valuable in enormous markets like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, where there are constantly new restaurants, events, and bars to patronize.

F6: Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying spacecraft

Having been doing a lot on cubesats recently, I was struck by a Space News report that DARPA is funding a $75 million project "to develop the final design for a radically new space architecture in which traditional, large spacecraft are replaced by clusters of wirelessly connected orbiting modules"-- i.e., networked cubesats.

Dubbed System F6, short for Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying spacecraft, Orbital’s design was selected among four competing study contracts issued in 2008 and 2009, according to a Dec. 18 company news release. The new contract is valued at $74.6 million over a one-year period.

Gregg Burgess, Orbital’s vice president for national security systems in the company’s Advanced Programs Group, said the new space architecture has the potential to transform space systems in much the same way that the Internet changed many aspects of daily life.

“System F6 is not just an incremental improvement in technology, but rather a fundamental transformation of the entire space community,” Burgess stated in the news release. “Fractionated and networked architectures could be the answer to recurring problems that debilitate the space sector, including significant cost increases, late deliveries, launch mishaps and on-orbit failures.”

Burgess said each of the System F6 modules is designed to work with the others in a cluster to perform tasks once reserved for large, traditional spacecraft while providing the same overall mission capability.

For those who aren't that familiar with conventional satellites, what makes this idea revolutionary is that normally spacecraft are expensive; take a long time to design, test and launch; and are all-or-nothing propositions-- if they crash or fail to deploy properly the costs are catastrophic. Theoretically, you could replace some big satellites with constellations of cubesats, which could be upgraded incrementally, reconfigured for different missions, and would be more robust against accidents or attack. Very different.

[To the tune of The Futureheads, "Burnt," from the album News & Tributes (a 1-star song).]

Brain science's last tribute to H. M.

This, pardon the phrase, is kind of mind-blowing . The Brain Observatory, a UCSD lab, is slicing the brain of amesiac patient H.M., one of the most-studied people in the whole history of science, into 2500 sections-- and the process is being broadcast live.

We are slicing the brain of the amnesic patient H.M. into giant histological sections. The whole brain specimen has been successfully frozen to -40C and will be sectioned during one continuous session that we expect will last approximately 30 hours (+ some breaks and some sleep in between). The procedure was designed for the safe collection of all tissue slices of the brain and for the acquisition of blockface images throughout the entire block.

It's really worth checking out, first as a kind of morbid wonder ("oh my god, that's really a brain!"), then as a technically fascinating event ("it's sort of like one of those meat cutters at the deli-- and is that a sumi-e brush they're using to take each slice?"). Where you go from there is up to you. Me, I find it kind of an amazing tribute to someone who contributed a lot to our understanding of the neurological foundations of memory.

The man was named Henry Molaison, though before he died last year he was only publicly known at H.M. According to the Times, he "lost the ability to form new memories after a brain operation in 1953, and over the next half century he became the most studied patient in brain science."

Before H.M., scientists thought that memory was widely distributed throughout the brain, not dependent on any one area. But by testing Mr. Molaison, researchers in Montreal and Hartford soon established that the areas that were removed — in the medial temporal lobe, about an inch deep in the brain level with the ear — are critical to forming new memories. One organ, the hippocampus, is especially crucial and is now the object of intense study.

In a series of studies, Mr. Molaison soon altered forever the understanding of learning by demonstrating that a part of his memory was fully intact. A 1962 paper by Dr. Brenda Milner of the Montreal Neurological Institute described a landmark study in which she had Mr. Molaison try to trace a line between two five-point stars, one inside the other.

Each time he tried the experiment, it seemed to him an entirely new experience. Yet he gradually became more proficient — showing that there are at least two systems in the brain for memory, one for events and facts and another for implicit or motor learning, for things like playing a guitar or riding a bicycle.

I keep coming back to the Web site, and looking at the computer-driven slicer taking off another section in one window; the control panel of the microtome in another; and some grad students or techs in a third window. Computers and people, workplace and wonder, and the brain-- at once intensely human, and seen this way very alien.

[To the tune of Stereolab, "The Man With 100 Cells," from the album Margerine Eclipse (I give it 1 stars).]

On "Growing Up on Facebook"

Catching up with some reading, I came across Peggy Orenstein's New York Times essay "Growing Up on Facebook," published earlier this year. One of its themes, about the conflict between leaving behind old social circles and reinventing yourself on one hand, and remaining in ambient contact with your old social life on the other, resonated especially strongly:

As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self? The cultural icons of my girlhood were Mary Richards of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Ann Marie of “That Girl,” both redoubtably trying to make it on their own. Following their lead, I swaggered off to college (where I knew no one) without looking back; then to New York City (where I knew no one) and San Francisco (ditto), refining my adult self with each jump. Certainly, I kept in touch with a few true old friends, but no one else — thank goodness! — witnessed the many and spectacular metaphoric pratfalls I took on the way to figuring out what and whom I wanted to be. Even now, time bends when I open Facebook: it’s as if I’m simultaneously a journalist/wife/mother in Berkeley and the goofy girl I left behind in Minneapolis. Could I have become the former if I had remained perpetually tethered to the latter?

This also connects with an excellent William Deresiewicz essay about social media's erosion of solitude-- which in our pop psychology moments we tend to equate with loneliness and want to banish, but which serves a tremendous psychic need. Humans are social creatures who seem to grow in equal parts through being with others and learning to be on their own-- my children are currently both going through a phase in which they spend a non-trivial amount of time in their rooms-- and Deresciewicz argues that solitude offers a chance (as Orenstein puts it) "to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation."

[To the tune of Django Reinhardt, "Swing From Paris," from the album The Best of DJango Reinhardt (I give it 2 stars).]

More on the Facebook as time machine

John Boudreau reports that "the Internet is reconnecting long-lost sweethearts," while Scott Harris writes about Facebook as a time machine (gee, that sounds familiar).

Boudreau:

Not long ago, such rekindlings were largely relegated to once-a-decade school reunions, those awkward gatherings that tend to be more about sizing up past rivals than reconnecting with former sweethearts. But the Internet is now profoundly altering some people's links to the past and sometimes upending their lives in unexpected ways. For some, the outcome is a blissful recoupling; for others, the reignited embers burn down the house....

[T]he Internet, and now social-networking sites such as MyLife.com. and Facebook, make relinking easier and more common. And people are doing it at a much younger age — instead of an uncomfortable phone call to her parents, all he has to do is do a Google search for her name.

Harris:

Many people tell of reuniting with cherished, long-lost friends, or reviving meaningful social circles that had frayed over the years. I've met a couple who were high school sweethearts but had been out of touch for 23 years. Now they credit Facebook for reconnecting them — and the romance is fully rekindled. ...

It's interesting how Facebook has connected a little social network of my high school friends — some close, some not so close. When I couldn't find an address for a friend whose father had died, I contacted one of her classmates through Facebook. She had the e-mail address.

Why is that?

Unlike predecessors Friendster and MySpace, Facebook succeeded by creating a culture of authenticity — not a dodgy realm of alter egos, but a place where people feel comfortable showing off photos of their children to their friends.

I would say that it didn't create that culture of authenticity: it set some initial conditions that allowed users to create it.

[To the tune of Django Reinhardt, "It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got That Swing)," from the album The Best of DJango Reinhardt (I give it 1 stars).]

New Facebook group on "Digital Middle Age"

For a while now, I've been thinking and writing about how Web 2.0 fits in the lives of people my age: how technology affects memory (especially how human and computer memories differ); how the omnipresence of the Web may affect our capacity to forget and grow and mature; and how Facebook serves as a kind of time machines. I've now started a Facebook group on "Digital Middle Age" around these subjects.

There's an assumption that anyone over about 24, pretty much by definition, will find games, new media, and Web 2.0 to be a Strange Foreign Country. Partly this is an extension of the reigning assumption that only the young really "get it" when it comes to new technology. Witness Pamela Satran's gently humorous pieces in More.com explaining how not to act old on Facebook and Twitter. (Okay, a magazine aimed at women over 40 is likely to play on age anxiety more than most; but easy way the articles take for granted that teenagers know the "right" way to behave (certainly the first time in human history we've assumed that!) is still pretty striking.)

But the articles overlook the fact that their readership grew up with PCs, spent thousands of hours in front of computer screens, and is perfectly familiar with the Web. My cohort is one that grew up with computers, but not with social media. I was in high school when the first personal computers appeared. I spent hours with my high school's Apple II; I crunched the numbers for my senior thesis using Lotus 1-2-3; wrote my dissertation on a Mac; and got my first e-mail address when I was a postdoc. People my age have all the technical facility (I refuse to use the word literacy) necessary to rapidly take up services like Twitter and Facebook. There's a good reason older users are the fastest-growing user populations in the Web 2.0 world.

But unlike the teenagers and college students are using these services, we have lives that have taken place offline, largely outside the gravity well of the Internet. These services aren't just continuations of our current lives: they can reconnect us to people we haven't been in touch with for twenty years. Watching myself and my friends online, I sometimes think I'm watching a collision of two very different kinds of social worlds. And if like me you're seriously interested in the social impacts of new technologies, studying these kinds of collisions and transitional groups (like people my age) is a particularly valuable way to see how new technologies affect the way people work and play and socialize and think.

And while teenagers are an interesting subject because they're reckless, extreme, irresponsible, and everyone worries about them-- when you're not certain they're dead in a ditch, you're yelling at them to get off your lawn-- I think its safe to say that their parents have large amounts of disposable income, access to credit, a majority vote in household technology-related decision-making, etc.-- all the things that ought to make them very interesting not just to academic geeks like me, but to advertisers and publishers. (We also have more to lose: drunken blog posts or sexting may be bad when you're 19, but accidentally Tweeting trade secrets is a lot worse, if only because mortgages and parental responsibilities multiply the potential impact of big mistakes.)

So, as part of my ongoing effort to understand how media have affected this transitional generation, I've created the Facebook group. It's open to everyone who's in Facebook, and my hope is that it'll help me better understand how social media function in the lives of people who already have lives. Does reconnecting with people from high school really matter? Does it change your life in some non-trivial way? I think it can, but data is not the plural of anecdote-- especially when you just repeat the same anecdotes (your own) over and over.

Maybe there's an interesting article here. Who knows. We'll see what happens....

[To the tune of Daryl Hall & John Oates, "Out of Touch," from the album Big Bam Boom (I give it 3 stars).]

Transborder Immigration Tool

Via ReadWriteWeb, the b.a.n.g. lab at UCSD has created the Transborder Immigration Tool, an app designed to help illegal aliens map safe routes to enter the United States. As RWW explains,

According to the Transborder Immigration Tool website, the application uses Spatial Data Systems and GPS "for simulation, surveillance, resource allocation, management of cooperative networks and pre-movement pattern modeling (such as the Virtual Hiker Algorithm) an algorithm that maps out a potential or suggested trail for real a hiker/or hikers to follow." In addition to allowing would-be illegal immigrants quick and simple access to map information, the application's creators hope it will "add an intelligent agent algorithm that would parse out the best routes and trails on that day and hour for immigrants to cross this vertiginous landscape as safely as possible."

On startup, the app finds GPS satellites. Once the user begins moving, the app acts as a compass that shows the direction the user is heading and also shows the direction a user must travel to reach a "safety site."

Project leader Ricardo Dominguez is interviewed here. As he explains, the Tool consists of a

Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and create a simple compasslike navigation system. We were also able to add other information, like where to find water left by the Border Angels, where to find Quaker help centers that will wrap your feet, how far you are from the highway—things to make the application really benefit individuals who are crossing the border.

At the same time, it's awfully academic, as this explanation by one of the project members reminds us:

A poetic gesture from its inception, the Transborder Immigrant Tool functions, via the aspirations of such a dislocative medium, as dislocative media, seeking to realize the possibilities of G.P.S. as both a "global positioning system" and, what, in another context, Laura Borràs Castanyer and Juan B. Gutiérrez have termed, a "global poetic system."

Indeed, the global poetic system isn't just a clever metaphor:

The Transborder Immigrant Tool includes poems for psychic consultation, spoken words of encouragement and welcome, which I am writing and co-designing in the mindset of Audre Lorde’s pronouncement that "poetry is not a luxury."... Postscriptually, Derrida’s vision of hospitality, indexed as scrolling text in "Dubliners," speaks to the Transborder Immigrant Tool’s overarching commitment to global citizenship. For, the excerpt, itself infused with the "transversal logic" of the poetic, acts as one of the Transborder Immigrant Tool’s internal compasses, clarifying the ways and means by which I and my collaborators approach this project as ethically inflected, as transcending the local of (bi-)national politics, of borders and their policing.

Naturally, the project has inspired some pretty passionate responses.

[To the tune of Eric Clapton, "Border Song," from the album Two Rooms: Celebrating The Songs Of Elton John & Bernie Taupin (I give it 1 stars).]

This morning's phishing expedition

Either Gmail has outsourced itself to jetli.org.cn, or this is a phishing expedition.

While as a futurist I don't can't completely rule the possibility of the first being the case, I'm going with the second.

Be careful.

[To the tune of Genesis, "Firth of Fifth / Los Endos," from the album Live at the Hammersmith Odeon, London (June 10 1976) (I give it 3 stars).]

Knowledge Tools of the Future

A report on "Knowledge Tools of the Future" that I co-authored with Mike Love (not the Beach Boy, the other one) is now available on the IFTF Web site. For those of you too lazy to download the PDF, I've summarized it in the extended post. For those too lazy to click on the "Read More," it comes down to this:

Computers good.
People better.
Computers + communities = best.

That's pretty much it. There's also some philosophical (or sociological, depending on team you play or root for) stuff about the nature of knowledge, and the degree to which knowledge tools have to be social; the different types of intelligence that humans and computers exhibit (something I've also written about on The End of Cyberspace); and the future of memory.

It also lays out an argument for why simple, social, and symbiotic knowledge tools are triumphing over complex ones-- why the mouse conquered the world, but the chord keyboard and the rest of Doug Engelbart's system languishes in obscurity.

Update: It occurs to me that this is one of a number of pieces that I wrote or co-authored that are available on the IFTF Web site. Others include:

• The Next Scientific Revolution
• Ecoscience in the Marketplace
• DIY Manufacturing
• Simulation and the Future of Virtuality
• Intentional Biology: Nature as Source and Code
• Science and Technology 2005-2055
• The Future of RFID
• The Future of R&D

I also have pieces in the 2004, 2005, and 2006 Ten Year Forecasts, though those are very large PDFs.

[To the tune of U2 and Johnny Cash, "The Wanderer," from the album Zooropa (I give it 3 stars).]

And I thought the family BBQ was the only fun thing to do tomorrow

Newt Gingrich-- or his tech people, or someone-- is holding a Twitter reenactment-- a Twitternactment, natch!-- of the Battle of Trenton on Sunday.

Despite the fact that a few teachers have used Twitter to "reenact" historic events, it still makes my head hurt, mainly because "Twitternachtment" sounds like a bunch of Web 2.0 fanatics going on an anti-semitic rampage.

I think I'll stick with making dinner for everyone.

[To the tune of Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, "Spirit In The Night," from the album Live 1975-85 (I give it 2 stars).]

From Mighty Mouse to Magic Mouse

Just over four years ago, Apple came out with the Mighty Mouse, its now-standard multi-button mouse with a scroll ball. I talked about the mouse as a canonical example of a device that is "easy to use," but its evolution shows that the definition of "easy to use" changes a lot over time. The release of the Magic Mouse shows the same pattern: it's a device that Apple is presenting as easy to use (and at the same time revolutionary), but its ease of use depends not on the permanent revolutionary genius of Steve & Co., but on the changing repertoire of user skills.

As I explained in a 2005 post, when it first appeared in the early 1980s,

the mouse was a total novelty, and anything with more than one button required users to think and make decisions. In contrast, in an age of Game Boy, Playstation, Treo, Blackberry, and the cell phone (not to mention multibutton mice on Wintel machines), kids can look at a device with four buttons and a scroll ball and think, "Hey, that's easy to use." To me, the best indicator of just how far the goal-posts that define ease of use have moved is the now-pervasive use of thumb buttons on mice. Doug Engelbart wanted to put more than three buttons on his mouse, but couldn't figure out how; apparently they didn't think of putting them on the side of the mouse, under the thumb.

What this tells us is that while the concept of "ease of use" is wonderful, and to be encouraged at all times, just what constitutes ease of use will change over time. It's not some unchanging Platonic ideal; it varies and evolves over time, and is defined by a community's exposure to earlier technologies, levels of mechanical or physical skill, and a bunch of other factors.

The Magic Mouse represents another example of practices that now define "easy to use" but were once obscure. The top surface of the mouse is one big multitouch area, like an iPhone or iPod Touch: there's no physical button, and instead the surface identifies certain zones as the equivalent of a left button, right button, etc.. You can also do two-fingered swiping.

Before the appearance of the iPhone and other devices with haptic interfaces, the physical vocabulary of swiping, of having zones on a device that changed their function depending on what program was being used or what mode you're in, would have been alien and confusing. Now, no longer. It's another section in the secret history of physical skill that's part of the history of computing (and which we still don't pay enough attention to).

[To the tune of John Coltrane, "Sun Ship," from the album The Classic Quartet - The Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings (I give it 3 stars).]

Internet use and brain function among elders

HealthDay News reports on a study of the impact of Internet use on the brains of elders:

Surfing the Internet just might be a way to preserve your mental skills as you age.

Researchers found that older adults who started browsing the Web experienced improved brain function after only a few days.

"You can teach an old brain new technology tricks," said Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatry professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of iBrain. With people who had little Internet experience, "we found that after just a week of practice, there was a much greater extent of activity particularly in the areas of the brain that make decisions, the thinking brain -- which makes sense because, when you're searching online, you're making a lot of decisions," he said. "It's interactive."...

"We found a number of years ago that people who engaged in cognitive activities had better functioning and perspective than those who did not," said Dr. Richard Lipton, a professor of neurology and epidemiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and director of the Einstein Aging Study. "Our study is often referenced as the crossword-puzzle study -- that doing puzzles, writing for pleasure, playing chess and engaging in a broader array of cognitive activities seem to protect against age-related decline in cognitive function and also dementia."...

For the research, 24 neurologically normal adults, aged 55 to 78, were asked to surf the Internet while hooked up to an MRI machine. Before the study began, half the participants had used the Internet daily, and the other half had little experience with it.

After an initial MRI scan, the participants were instructed to do Internet searches for an hour on each of seven days in the next two weeks. They then returned to the clinic for more brain scans.

"At baseline, those with prior Internet experience showed a much greater extent of brain activation," Small said.

Doubtless some readers will recognize this as an updated version of the Proust and the Squid argument, which relies in part on fMRI studies indicating that the brains of literate people have specialized sections for quickly recognizing letters. What's interesting here is that you get a similar kind of stimulation with the elderly.

[To the tune of John Coltrane, "A Love Supreme, Part II - Resolution," from the album The Classic Quartet - The Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings (I give it 1 stars).]

Oh great, the Russians really DID build a doomsday device

And it's still around.

Perimeter ensures the ability to strike back, but it's no hair-trigger device. It was designed to lie semi-dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time—likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour—passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker—bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority. At that point, the ability to destroy the world would fall to whoever was on duty: maybe a high minister sent in during the crisis, maybe a 25-year-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button ... If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then.

Once initiated, the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war. Soaring over the smoldering, radioactive ruins of the motherland, and with all ground communications destroyed, the command missiles would lead the destruction of the US.

Sounds just a wee tiny bit like Skynet.

But there's a mystery: as Dr. Strangelove put it, a doomsday device is useless if you don't tell anyone about it. So why was it kept a secret?

Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves.

By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, Zheleznyakov says, was "to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished."

[via Overcoming Bias]

[To the tune of Vangelis, "Abraham's Theme," from the album Chariots Of Fire (I give it 2 stars).]

Project Prezi

A while ago I created a Prezi for an end of cyberspace talk. Prezi has a cool functionality that lets you create a path or trail through a presentation (very Vannevar Bush).

I've realized that because of the trail feature, this presentation isn't just a single talk, or it doesn't need to be. Rather, I can use it as a kind of online studio for displaying everything I talk about in this project, and just create different paths through the Prezi for different talks.

I think I'm going to make this a persistent post, so it always stays on the front page. If you want to go directly to the Prezi, here it is.

Just testing the Ecto-Twitter connection

Pay no attention to this.

Hackintosh

I may have to try this before too long: running Mac OSX on a netbook. Doesn't look that hard to do.

[To the tune of Peter Gabriel, "Intruder (Live)," from the album Plays Live (I give it 2 stars).]

The Internet of Things, sort of

I suppose it was inevitable: coathangr, which describes itself as "social networking for your pants." Less whimsically, it also says it's a "social network for sharing fashion advice," and finding people who share your fashion taste.

It would be interesting to see how the system is used. Does it actually encourages better fashion sense? Is it used maliciously by people giving intentionally bad fashion advice?

On a more serious note, this is a good example of what Jyri Engstrom calls "object-centered sociality:"

the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That's why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about 'socio-material networks', or just 'activities' or 'practices' (as I do) instead of social networks.

[To the tune of Alban Berg Quartet, "String Quartet Op.132 No.15 in A minor: I. Allegro sostenuto - Allegro," from the album Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets (Disc 7) (I give it 5 stars).]

Punishment, reward and cooperation

Harvard University postdoc David Rand recently published an article examining whether cooperation is encouraged more when people are able to punish bad actors, or reward good behavior. Ed Yong describes the experiment:

[Rand] asked teams of volunteers to play "public goods games", where they could cheat or cooperate with each other for real money. After many rounds of play, the players were more likely to work together if they could reward each other for good behaviour or punish each other for offences. But of these two strategies, the carrot was better for the group than the stick, earning them far greater rewards.

Public goods games, albeit in a more complex form, are part and parcel of modern life. We play them when we decide to take personal responsibility for reducing carbon emissions, or rely on others to do so. We play them when we choose to do our share of the household chores, or when we rely on our housemates or partners to sort it out....

As Scientific American explains,

In a series of monetary interactions, individuals decided how much money to contribute to a common pot, and they could then decide whether to reward good contributors or punish bad—both of which would entail spending money.

Previous public goods studies had focused on one-time interactions and found that people were more likely to swindle or punish others. But in situations where interactions were repeated, people found greater success in reward-based structures—in which those that contributed were rewarded and those who didn't were ignored—than those in which costly punishment was doled out to those who didn't contribute.

Ed Yong comments,

Rand's results suggest that when people repeatedly cross each other's paths, carrots are far better than sticks at fostering behaviour for the greater good. Not only do they lead to greater payoffs for everyone concerned but they minimise the threat of antisocial punishment, where freeloaders vengefully castigate the altruists.

[To the tune of The Police, "Hungry For You (j'aurais toujours faim de toi)," from the album Message In A Box: The Complete Recordings (Disc 3) (I give it 2 stars).]

Augmented reality contact lenses

IEEE Spectrum has a very interesting article about a University of Washington project to create "a contact lens with simple built-in electronics" that's an early prototype of more sophisticated augmented reality vision technology.

These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.

Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision. To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.

These lenses don’t need to be very complex to be useful. Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.

But how do you make an image generated on a contact lens visible?

you’re probably wondering how a person wearing one of our contact lenses would be able to focus on an image generated on the surface of the eye. After all, a normal and healthy eye cannot focus on objects that are fewer than 10 centimeters from the corneal surface... [so] the image must be pushed away from the cornea. One way to do that is to employ an array of even smaller lenses placed on the surface of the contact lens. Arrays of such microlenses have been used in the past to focus lasers and, in photolithography, to draw patterns of light on a photoresist. On a contact lens, each pixel or small group of pixels would be assigned to a microlens placed between the eye and the pixels. Spacing a pixel and a microlens 360 micrometers apart would be enough to push back the virtual image and let the eye focus on it easily. To the wearer, the image would seem to hang in space about half a meter away, depending on the microlens.

There's also the problem of power.

Like all mobile electronics, these lenses must be powered by suitable sources, but among the options, none are particularly attractive. The space constraints are acute. For example, batteries are hard to miniaturize to this extent, require recharging, and raise the specter of, say, lithium ions floating around in the eye after an accident. A better strategy is gathering inertial power from the environment, by converting ambient vibrations into energy or by receiving solar or RF power. Most inertial power scavenging designs have unacceptably low power output, so we have focused on powering our lenses with solar or RF energy.

You could also use contact lenses as medical sensors.

We’ve built several simple sensors that can detect the concentration of a molecule, such as glucose. Sensors built onto lenses would let diabetic wearers keep tabs on blood-sugar levels without needing to prick a finger. The glucose detectors we’re evaluating now are a mere glimmer of what will be possible in the next 5 to 10 years. Contact lenses are worn daily by more than a hundred million people, and they are one of the only disposable, mass-market products that remain in contact, through fluids, with the interior of the body for an extended period of time. When you get a blood test, your doctor is probably measuring many of the same biomarkers that are found in the live cells on the surface of your eye—and in concentrations that correlate closely with the levels in your bloodstream. An appropriately configured contact lens could monitor cholesterol, sodium, and potassium levels, to name a few potential targets.

I find this whole project really fascinating.

[To the tune of The Police, "Contact," from the album Message In A Box: The Complete Recordings (Disc 2) (I give it 1 stars).]

The Onion on parental cyberstalking

This is just brilliant:

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

[To the tune of The Police, "Every Breath You Take," from the album Message In A Box: The Complete Recordings (Disc 4) (I give it 4 stars).]

Hands-up displays

John Murrell on augmented reality:

As we know from extensive science fiction research, one day we will be equipped with unobtrusive and tastefully designed technology that will project before our eyes a heads-up display of information related to whatever real-life scene we're looking at. That level of augmented reality, however, is a ways down the road, and unfortunately that road is likely to be strewn with the broken bodies of early adopters.

Thanks to the growth in smartphones equipped with large screens, cameras, compasses and GPS, location- and marker-based augmented reality (AR) is in the early stages of a hype cycle. Companies like Layar are building browser apps that look where you're looking and pull in layers of data from reference sources and social media. Startup Wikitude on Wednesday launched a new update of its software for Android handsets that integrates social tagging of physical locations, and an iPhone version is on the way. Apple's App Store recently got its first AR offering when an app called Metro Paris Subway added a feature that superimposes labels for station locations and points of interest over the view through your iPhone.

At this early stage in AR evolution, however, the displays are not heads-up, but hands-up, and that means we will be seeing a new class of situational zombies roaming our streets. We’ve already grown used to dodging around the people with heads bowed over their phones in the texting prayer position and the distracted pedestrians engrossed in conversation with their invisible companions over their Bluetooth headsets. Soon we'll be seeing more folks shuffling around with their smartphone screen held up in their line of vision, absorbed in their augmented reality data, and we'll be faced with a dilemma: keep a watchful eye on these people and tackle them before they wander into traffic or fall into a manhole, or just allow the Darwinian process to cull the herd.

While part of the point of some augmented reality research is to avoid exactly that kind of zombie state, by creating technologies that layer information on top of views (or displays them on things, or what have you), I suspect Murrell is onto something. I got my iPhone a
Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

[To the tune of The Police, "Every Breath You Take," from the album Message In A Box: The Complete Recordings (Disc 4) (I give it 4 stars).]

http://askpang.typepad.com/relevant_history/2008/11/construction-in.html">few months ago, and quickly found that I couldn't check my e-mail and walk at the same time: listening to music is no problem, and I can even usually stay alert while listening to The Bugle; but e-mail was different. Not because the interface is so incredibly compelling, but because I was so accustomed to tuning out the rest of the world when I checked my mail: my brain had trained itself to go into a kind of tunnelvision mode, which meant I couldn't trust my body to avoid potholes or streetlights while my phone downloaded messages.

[To the tune of Jean Sibelius, "Finlandia, Op. 26," from the album Finlandia/Tone Poems (I give it 3 stars).]

The Onion on cyberstalking your children

This is just brilliant:

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

I kind of worry that I'll turn into one of those parents.

[To the tune of The Police, "Every Breath You Take," from the album Message In A Box: The Complete Recordings (Disc 4) (I give it 4 stars).]

Texting while driving: Still unsafe, stupid, and unaccountably popular

From the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog:

Simple common sense should tell us that trying to text while driving is as stupid and dangerous as trying to crochet. We shouldn’t need a bunch of studies calculating and quantifying the risk to goad us into a response, but if that’s what it takes, here’s the latest. A Virginia Tech study that outfitted the cabs of long-haul trucks with video cameras found that when the drivers were texting, their collision risk was 23 times greater than when they had their attention on the road — a figure far higher than the estimates coming out of lab research and a rate by far more dangerous than other driving distractions. And at the University of Utah, research on college students using driving simulators showed texting raised the crash risk by eight times. The variance in the figures is beside the point. “You’re off the charts in both cases,” said Utah professor David Strayer. “It’s crazy to be doing it.”

And the heck of it is, people already know that and they keep doing it anyway.

This is a near-perfect example of how most humans are geniuses at rationalization: yes, I know it's dangerous, but I'll be careful and do it just this time, because I really need to let the office know where that file is. Oh wait, they've got another question. Well, it would be more dangerous to wait and put the phone down, so I'll just-- dammit, can't the kids find anything by themselves? Okay, now I'll make up for it by really focusing on the road.

It's also a nice example of the kinds of dissonance created when we take practices and technologies designed for one use context, and move it into another-- a phenomenon that mobile technologies makes increasingly common. It was hard to take a Macintosh SE or IBM PC Junior on the road; a smartphone, on the other hand, is a perfect storm of transportable, always-on, and just usable enough when you're doing other things to be dangerous.

[To the tune of Jean Sibelius, "Tapiola, Op. 112," from the album Finlandia/Tone Poems (I give it 2 stars).]

Citizen scientists and citizen journalists

My friend (and, if the editors smile upon our efforts, soon-to-be coauthor) Darlene Cavalier pointed me to an article by Dan Schultz on Media Shift Idea Lab about what journalists can learn from the citizen scientist movement. Essentially, the piece argues that citizen and professional scientists have developed a division of labor and authority that journalists could emulate.

Two points.

First, this isn't the first time that such a division of labor and authority has emerged in science. In the early nineteenth century, the scientific world in Britain (and in somewhat similar measure the U.S.) consisted of a small elite that ran the Royal Society, was considered (or considered itself) competent to deal with big theoretical issues, and set the agenda for science; and a mass of local observers, ranging from country parson and skilled artisans to teachers and soldiers. Members of this second group could become notable for masterful knowledge of a narrow slice of the universe-- the natural history of their parish, the habits of large mammals in eastern Kenya, Jupiter's moons, etc.-- and could make meaningful contributions to science within their area of expertise.

These boundaries weren't entirely hard and fast-- there was always the possibility of either moving up from the category of local expert to scientific eminence (Charles Darwin might never have made the jump to the second category if he hadn't gone on the Beagle), or reaching beyond one's place-- but people generally (to use an outmoded phrase) knew their place.

The existence of these well-understood boundaries, and the resulting symbiotic relationship that is emerging between professional and citizen scientists, gives Schultz hope that journalists could create something similar:

If you buy my claim that scientists and journalists all care about informational integrity and the quest for truth, then several things can be extrapolated:

1. If professional journalists take the lead by clearly defining expectations, explaining best practices, and implementing an accessible infrastructure, then amateurs can contribute without disrupting the industry.
2. If amateur journalists do a good job of covering a smaller scope of topics or areas (e.g. the hyperlocal), then professionals can focus on the deeper, otherwise inaccessible issues.
3. Professional journalists are responsible for creating and maintaining the citizen network if they want it to meet their standards.
4. Citizen networks need more than a host. In order to reach full potential, they need to be explicitly empowered through tools and guidance.
5. A symbiotic relationship between the professional, the amateur, and the crowd is not just possible, it's socially optimal.

And there we have it: If the journalism industry can create an infrastructure that allows amateurs to contribute reliable information, then professionals will be able to dedicate more resources to epic reporting. If local papers can find the capacity to set up and empower meaningful citizen networks, they will establish a major foothold in the evolving domains of community and information.

But this leads to my second point, which is that this division of labor and authority is exactly what some bloggers argue is unnecessary today-- and which is more at issue in contentious scientific fields like climate change (or alas, evolution) than it should be. Proponents of intelligent design, for example, have quite brilliantly appropriated the language of democracy to suggest that people should be allowed to make up their own minds about evolution, and could easily make a similar appeal using the citizen science movement. Journalists, it seems to me, are likely to have a tougher time differentiating what they do from "citizen journalists," particularly in an age in which the boundary between reporting and opinion has been eroded, and the professional status of journalists is under assault.

Still, it's a good model to follow.

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "So What," from the album Columbia Years 1955-85 (Disc 2): Originals/Moods (I give it 4 stars).]

Slow communications manifesto

I'm noticing an uptick in the number of articles on digital sabbaths, zeroing out, or whatever you want to call it. This from John Freeman in the Wall Street Journal:

It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them. Many of the values of the Internet are social improvements—it can be a great platform for solidarity, it rewards curiosity, it enables convenience. This is not the mani­festo of a Luddite, this is a human manifesto. If the technology is to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but a supplement to our existing world, where the following three statements are self-evident.

1. Speed matters.... "The speed at which we do something—anything—changes our experience of it.... The Internet has provided us with an almost unlimited amount of information, but the speed at which it works—and we work through it—has deprived us of its benefits. We might work at a higher rate, but this is not work ing."...

2. The Physical World matters. A large part of electronic commu nication leads us away from the physical world. Our cafes, post offices, parks, cinemas, town centers, main streets and community meeting halls have suffered as a result of this development.... Sitting in the modern coffee shop, you don't hear the murmur or rise and fall of conversation but the continuous, insect-like patter of typing. The disuse of real-world commons drives people back into the virtual world, causing a feedback cycle that leads to an ever-deepening isolation and neglect of the tangible commons.

3. Context matters. We need context in order to live, and if the environment of electronic communication has stopped providing it, we shouldn't search online for a solution but turn back to the real world and slow down. To do this, we need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of speed from effi ciency, pause and step back enough to realize that efficiency may be good for business and governments but does not always lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships.

In a different register but playing some of the same themes, Mercury News tech columnist Troy Wolverton confesses, "I've been thinking I need to take a break from technology."

Resisting the urge to check my e-mail on my phone, say. Finding something else to do when the TV's not on at night than retreat to my computer for some Web surfing or game playing. Focusing on the people in my life, rather than the gadgets....

Reading a newspaper Web site on my iPhone while sitting next to my son may seem no different from when my dad used to read a real newspaper while I was eating breakfast as a kid. But the iPhone tends to be a lot more engrossing and addictive than a physical newspaper — and not just because the latter keeps getting thinner.

I can peruse hundreds of newspapers on my iPhone, seeking out those stories and topics I'm most interested in. If that gets dull, I can check my e-mail. If there's nothing there to grab my attention, there's always my Facebook app or a game. In short, it's hard to pull away. And once you're entrapped, it's hard to pay attention to anything else.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett Trio, "Five Brothers," from the album The Out Of Towners (I give it 1 stars).]

One last high-frequency trading post for the day

Even though this is a perfect illustration of things I talk about in the book, I'll do one more round of quotes (which'll find their way into the book), then turn to other things.

First, via Andymatic, this piece from Ars Technica:

The Matrix, but with money: the world of high-speed trading

Supercomputers pitted against one another in a high-stakes battle of attack and counterattack over a global network where predatory algorithms trawl the information stream, competing every millisecond to gain an informational advantage over rivals. It sounds like Hollywood fiction, but it's just an average trading day on the stock market.

Because high-frequency trading is, as Richard Bookstaber has recently described it, an "arms race" where relative speed matters much more than absolute speed, this market is one of the few left with a demand for raw performance at any cost. Indeed, my personal introduction to the world of HFT came in bits and pieces over the past few years via parts of briefings from the Intel, NVIDIA, AMD and their would-be competitors, all of whom have been aggressively pursuing this market....

In all, it's ironic that the hardware that HFT platforms are using to battle it out over stocks, bonds, commodities, and other assets is essentially the same as the technology that PC gamers are using to play their own games with much lower stakes.

And this observation from Rich Bookstaber:

I think the days for high frequency trading are numbered. For one thing, high frequency trading is capacity constrained like few other strategies. The high frequency trader is basically a stand-alone market maker; he is sitting there to provide liquidity to others. And one way he provides it is to pull in the positions that others will shortly be demanding – thus the need for speed. If the footprint for high frequency traders gets too large, they become liquidity demanders themselves, and the gig is up. The Renaissances of the strategy will make their way through, but generally we will see a lot of shooting stars.

A second reason is that high frequency trading is embroiled in an arms race. And arms races are negative sum games. The arms in this case are not tanks and jets, but computer chips and throughput. But like any arms race, the result is a cycle of spending which leaves everyone in the same relative position, only poorer. Put another way, like any arms race, what is happening with high frequency trading is a net drain on social welfare.

[To the tune of Transglobal Underground, "Khalghi Stomp," from the album Versions (I give it 1 stars).]

More on high-frequency trading and colocation

This from a 2007 article from Low Latency:

Firms are turning to electronic trading, in part because a 1-millisecond advantage in trading applications can be worth millions of dollars a year to a major brokerage firm. That is why colocation — in which firms move the systems running their algorithms as close to the exchanges as possible — is so popular.

The need for speed has opened up opportunities for nontraditional competitors in the space, and it has provided established exchanges with new revenue opportunities, such as colocation services for companies that wish to place their servers in direct physical proximity to the exchanges' systems. Electronic trading also has created opportunities for a new class of vendors — execution services firms and systems integrators promising the fastest possible transaction times....

Physical colocation eliminates the unavoidable time lags inherent in even the fastest wide area networks. Servers in shared data centers typically are connected via Gigabit Ethernet, with the ultrahigh-speed switching fabric called InfiniBand increasingly used for the same purpose, relates Yaron Haviv, CTO at Voltaire, a supplier of systems that Haviv contends can achieve latencies of less than 1 millionth of a second....

The NYSE will begin reducing its 10 data centers, including those associated with Euronext, to two in the next couple of years, says CTO Steve Rubinow. Colocation, Rubinow says, not only guarantees fast transactions but also predictable ones. "If you've got some trades going through at 10 milliseconds and some at 1 millisecond, that's a problem," he says. "Our customers don't like variance."

There's also this interesting tidbit about place and security:

Later this year, Nasdaq will shutter its data center in Trumbull, Conn., and move all operations to one opened last year in New Jersey, with a backup in the mid-Atlantic region, the exchange's Hyndman says. (Trading firms and exchanges are reluctant to disclose the exact locations of their data centers.)

So what's this mean for the future?

Once you hit physical limits to data-transmission speeds, where do you go from there?... There are two schools of thought on this issue. One is that traders, exchanges and brokers must shave latency from other parts of the system — in the applications they use, for instance — and that the race will continue.

The other is that latency will cease to be an issue once everyone has access to the same trading infrastructure and that other, older-school elements of the business, such as customer service and market savvy, will once again become the differentiators. "Shortly, we'll be talking micro- versus milliseconds, and at that point speed will probably have less and less relevance," says Lime Brokerage's [Alistair] Brown. "Once you've got half a dozen systems that can all handle that kind of throughput, then you have to distinguish yourself somewhere else."

[To the tune of Fear Of Pop, "In Love," from the album Versions (I give it 3 stars).]

High-frequency trading and the persistence of place

One of the enduring expectations about cyberspace is that it would erase the importance of place in commerce. A group of designers working in ateliers and studios in Nairobi, Munich, Buenos Aires and Perth, financed by money pulled together in Silicon Valley, would create products sourced to factories in Malaysia and China, thence to be sold in Seoul, Mumbai, Toronto... you get the picture. Talent was what would matter in this world. Place wouldn't.

Ironically, you can make the case that the trend toward placelessness has been most evident in manufacturing, though it's been so for a combination of brutal economic rather than utopian technological reasons, and has required an enormous amount of labor to make those transfers work. Put another way, manufacturing has become more placeless not because technology has made place irrelevent, but because it's helped connect multinationals to mouth-wateringly cheap labor markets. But it hasn't been a matter of effortlessly transferring zeroes and ones around the world at the speed: to make this system work, you've got to put a lot of engineers on planes to Shanghai, just as you need to get a lot of farmers' kids into the cities.

Placelessness has also had a mixed record in finance, the most abstract of economic activities. On one hand, I can transfer money between my checking and savings account on my iPhone. On the other, the financial centers in New York and London are now even more tightly connected together, and process a greater portion of the world's wealth, than ever before. (And as recent events have shown, they have a greater capacity to destroy it, too.) So place continues to matter in finance, even as technology makes some kinds of transactions easier to conduct in a wider variety of places.

This trend is something that's interested a number of cultural and economic geographers, though they're still lots to do on the subject. As Caitlin Zaloom, an amazingly smart observer of the enduring materiality and social nature of financial markets, says,

Globalization theorists such as David Harvey and Manuel Castells argue that under neoliberalism, capitalist institutions have used information technology to flatten the distinctions among places, reducing the significance of spatial distance and temporal difference. They claim that this is nowhere more true than in the sphere of global finance, since economic networks are bound together with technological systems that permit institutions to coordinate activity in real time on a planetary scale, and that allow modern financial instruments to turn commodities—oranges, grain, Treasury bonds, and the like—into abstractions that are bought and sold thousands of times without ever moving an inch. Even global skeptics, it seems, are willing to admit that the speed and scale of financial markets enabled by innovative communications technologies is something new and profound. Never before have financial actors been able to trade with dealers from Frankfurt to Singapore at any time of the day or night. However, these depictions often overstate the role of technology, leading observers to believe that such interconnections were inevitable, a narrative that obscures the human activities that propel money through technological channels, including the labors, false starts, and complex histories of the social and technical forms of global work. (Zaloom, "Markets and Machines: Work in the Technological Sensoryscapes of Finance," American Quarterly 58:3 (September 2006) 815-837, quote on 816.)

Today I ran across another example of how place continues to matter in finance, but at a very small scale: high-frequency trading. If the concentration of wealth and financial services in places like New York and London is like gravity, high-frequency trading is like the strong force in particle physics: it operates at very small scales, but at that scale is incredibly powerful. As the New York Times explains in a July article, "in 1998, the Securities and Exchange Commission authorized electronic exchanges to compete with marketplaces like the New York Stock Exchange. The intent was to open markets to anyone with a desktop computer and a fresh idea." But things have't quite worked out that way:

But as new marketplaces have emerged, PCs have been unable to compete with Wall Street’s computers. Powerful algorithms — “algos,” in industry parlance — execute millions of orders a second and scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously. They can spot trends before other investors can blink, changing orders and strategies within milliseconds.

High-frequency traders often confound other investors by issuing and then canceling orders almost simultaneously. Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading. And their computers can essentially bully slower investors into giving up profits — and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there.

High-frequency traders also benefit from competition among the various exchanges, which pay small fees that are often collected by the biggest and most active traders — typically a quarter of a cent per share to whoever arrives first. Those small payments, spread over millions of shares, help high-speed investors profit simply by trading enormous numbers of shares, even if they buy or sell at a modest loss.

In this world, as UCSD graduate student Martha Poon observes,

The trades are so fast that materiality matters. ‘Co-location’, which involves situating the trading room next to the exchange so that the wires and cables running between them are as short as possible, actually confers an advantage to high frequency traders.

As a result, LSE lecturer Yuval Millo points out,

In a world where every millisecond counts, event at light-speed speeds, physical distance counts. In fact, we should say ‘physical distance’ counts AGAIN. Yes, physical distance, which used to be an all-important factor in the face-to-face trading pits, is now making a comeback in the form of vicinity from the exchanges’ servers.

This, of course, brings back the issues about the politics embedded in market spatiality. Kate Zaloom shows how important were the top steps of the trading pit in the Chicago futures exchanges, and, consequently, how the political (and sometimes physical!) struggles for these coveted locations. Can we expect similar fights to rage over positions in the electronic communication network that transmits trading orders? Judging from the evolving competition for ‘electronic proximity’ the answer is positive. For example, Wall Street & Technology reports that in 2007 about a 100 trading firms relocated their serves into Nasdaq’s trading headquarters, just to be close to the executing servers and to shave off about 7-35 milliseconds from the communication time (depending on previous location of trading servers). Similar trend is evident in NYSE and the Chicago futures markets.

What does trend teach about the techno-social nature of markets? From an actor-network perspective, this is yet another evidence that markets, just like any other social institution, do not exist in a baboon society. That is, materiality, in general, and tools and devices, in particular, are delineating and indeed, shaping social interaction. There is at least one more insight to be gleaned here, though. It is true that physical space is reintroduced to markets through the relocation that comes along with HFT, but something much more important is being introduced to market with it: the rich, nuanced information that used to be the lifeblood of face-to-face trading and the infrastructure of liquidity supply is now communicated electronically.

This last point is kind of subtle, but it's interesting to think of algorithmically-executed orders as a form of "rich, nuanced information."

So what can we conclude? Place still matters because there's money to be made in occupying distinct physical locations; and it matters even in electronically-driven finance because, at bottom, this is still a physical activity: while it's easy and fashionable to think of modern finance as just a bunch of digitized signifers, the reality is that those zeroes and ones exist on servers, move through Ethernet cables, and are analyzed and responded to by software sitting on computers. Under some conditions we can ignore all that; but the fact is that even in the most information-intensive, abstract activities, materiality is still there.

[To the tune of Isabelle Antena, "Nothing To Lose," from the album Versions (I give it 2 stars).]

First post from new machine

Not exactly a completely new machine, but tonight I installed a new hard drive in my MacBook (the one the Institute let me have when they let me go). I'd long had less than 5 or 6 gig free on my factory-installed 80 gb hard drive, and had to carefully manage my remaining space-- regularly burn DVDs of pictures of the kids (which I should do anyway, but still), look for attachments and downloads to clean out, etc..

At first I thought about taking it to one of the shops around here, and having them do it for me. Then I figured I knew enough technical people, I could mail order a hard drive and get someone to do it for a case of beer. The new drive, a 500 gb Seagate, and a plastic external enclosure for the old drive (I found a deal online), arrived yesterday.

I started poking around a little at the instructions for doing a hard drive upgrade on a MacBook, and soon realized, I could do this myself. Not only that, but I wanted to try.

So today I went to my local Frys, bought a couple tools and an anti-static wrist strap, borrowed an OS X install disk from a friend, and after dinner, cleared off some space on the dining room table. My son joined me, even though he was a little disappointed that he wouldn't get to smash up the old hard drive (he really likes taking things like that apart). We watched a couple videos on YouTube and followed some instructions I found online, and 10 minutes later, we had the drives changed out.

men at work, via flickr

After that, it was a matter of booting up from the install disk, then using Time Machine to do a complete restore of my old machine-- really just a matter of clicking on some buttons and then going for coffee. Or in this case, putting the old hard drive in its new enclosure. (I haven't had something so aggressively transparent since my Palm IIIc, or maybe my iMac.) A couple hours later, the restore was complete, the old internal hard drive was happily working as an external hard drive, and all was well.

old and new drives, via flickr

Considering how much (really how little) work it was, the payoff is pretty spectacular. I have what feels like a new machine, with a boundless amount of memory; and I have the experience of having done it all myself.

I think I'll upgrade the RAM next. Now that it's my machine, I can improve it as much as I want. That's as good a metaphor for my new life as any.

look at the size of that thing! via flickr

[To the tune of John Coltrane & Don Cherry, "The Invisible," from the album The Avant-Garde (I give it 2 stars).]

Maybe it's time for another digital sabbatical

It's things like this that make me think that I should disconnect my computer and go back to writing letters on nice stationary.

And I was just about to start thinking nice things about Tweet the Future.

I'm going back to thinking about how to apply Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Linked Web to improve the lives of disorganized professionals (not ones who are personally disorganized, but professions that aren't connected together very tightly by gatekeeping institutions, training programs, journals, etc.). And I may not come back.

[To the tune of Jefferson Starship, "Runaway," from the album Earth (I give it 2 stars).]

Tim Berners-Lee on the Linked Web

Just watch it, if you haven't already.

As Ron Miller comments, "This is a fascinating talk and what jumped out at me was how excited he was about all of this. Rather than being jaded after after 20 years in the field, he's genuinely pumped to take this to the next level."

[To the tune of The Cars, "Magic," from the album The Cars: Complete Greatest Hits (I give it 2 stars).]

Prezi embed player

One of the more exciting things I worked on when I was at IFTF was a project with Kitchen Budapest, an innovation lab in Hungary that Anthony and I kind of stumbled across. I've been using their fantastic presentation tool Prezi for a while, and it's now getting some well-deserved attention.

They just released a player that lets you embed Prezis in Web pages. This is a presentation I made on the use of Prezi at the Institute:

from prezi.com

I've been waiting a while for this functionality, and am glad it's finally out!

[To the tune of The Malah, "Roundabout," from the concert 2004-10-09 - Gottrocks (I give it 3 stars).]

Large Hadron Collider Rap

Words do not suffice. Not quite as wonderfully over the top as the Singaporean MDA Senior Management Rap, but close. So close.

There's also an MP3 version.

Hitler finds out his subtitles are wrong

The whole re-subtitled Downfall thing reaches its logical endpoint here:

Scientific databases as tacit knowledge

I'm supposed to be taking some of the summer off, finishing the book and a couple articles, but like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, every time I think I'm out they pull me back in. I was at the first day of SciBarCamp today, playing local host / fixer / keeping an eye on the furniture. Sean Mooney (who in addition to being a former professor at Indiana University, was a World Wrestling Federation announcer) gave a very interesting talk about current challenges in bioinformatics.

A fair amount of Sean's talk dealt with the technical challenges of creating federated databases, the differing demands of bench scientists and funders-- the former want tools for managing and analyzing data in today's problems, while the latter want to attack Big Questions-- and the issues involved in getting people to share their data. The issues aren't so much philosophical or competitive, but practical: people believe in sharing data, and once they're done with it are generally willing to share so long as it doesn't put a burden on them.

But as Sean was talking about how different labs used different procedures for similar experiments, and how those differences manifested themselves in the ways they produced and consumed data (at least, this is what I took away from his talk-- he might have meant something complete different), a thought came to me. Projects intended to let scientists assume that data can be converted into something like the reagents or instruments labs buy from suppliers-- a commodity that you don't have to think about, you just use. But what if data can't be black-boxed this way? Or, more specifically, what if only really uninteresting data-- the kind that everyone understands very well, the kind that's solidly in the realm of normal science-- can be cleaned up, repackaged, commodified and standardized, and put online into generally-usable databases?

On one hand, this idea might seem stupid. After all, science is science: data is data, and facts about nature are true no matter where they're created. That makes them scientific. On the other hand, if you buy the argument of people like Harry Collins, scientific research is as much a craft as a-- well, a science. Databases tend to reflect the specific, local interests of researchers, working on particular problems. This tends to work against the generalizability of data: the more it's a product of craft, and an object tailored to a particular job, the harder it'll be to make it useful to other people.

So depending on how much databases are expressions of craftwork and problem-solving and bricolage, and how much they reflect a timeless, placeless crystallization of nature's order, they're going to be less or more easily poured into big projects to reuse data.

The kids will want one of these

The next generation Macbooks. Top this, Windows!

John Oliver on information technology

John Oliver, in the latest issue of The Bugle (the funniest thing in the world), talking about the use of information technology in Iranian protests:

John Oliver: The reinforcements of modern technology stepped to the front line: the twin soldiers of YouTube and Twitter answered their planet's calling. People in protests used their cellphones to shoot footage, and then put it on the Internet. All it took was a potential Iranian revolution to find a practical use for Internet video.

And so I would like to hereby issue a public apology to the piano-playing cat; to the teenage boy receiving a nut-shot from a whiffle bat; and to the fat lady falling off a table. All of your clumsy attempts at entertainment were in fact vital experiments in the development of this communications tool.

Andy Zaltzman: They were very much the John the Baptists to the Jesus of Iranian video.

Read it in the line for tickets to Maker Faire

My latest article, on tinkering and the future, has been published in the latest issue of Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. The piece is an effort to draw together a couple of my research and personal interests (though the boundaries between those two categories is pretty blurry), and to see the tinkering / DIY movement as one piece in an emerging strategy for creating better futures.

Almost forty years ago, the Whole Earth Catalog published its last issue. For the American counterculture, it was like the closing of a really great café: the Catalog had brought together the voices of contributors, readers and editors, all unified by a kind of tech-savvy, hands-on, thoughtful optimism. Don't reject technology, the Catalog urged: make it your own. Don't drop out of the world: change it, using the tools we and your fellow readers have found. Some technologies were environmentally destructive or made you stupid, others were empowering and trod softly on the earth; together we could learn which were which.

Millions found the Catalog's message inspirational. In promoting an attitude toward technology that emphasized experimentation, re-use and re-invention, seeing the deeper consequences of your choices, appreciating the power of learning to do it yourself and sharing your ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog helped create the modern tinkering movement. Today, tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

Read it in the line for tickets to Maker Faire

My latest article, on tinkering and the future, has been published in the latest issue of Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. The piece is an effort to draw together a couple of my research and personal interests (though the boundaries between those two categories is pretty blurry), and to see the tinkering / DIY movement as one piece in an emerging strategy for creating better futures.

Almost forty years ago, the Whole Earth Catalog published its last issue. For the American counterculture, it was like the closing of a really great café: the Catalog had brought together the voices of contributors, readers and editors, all unified by a kind of tech-savvy, hands-on, thoughtful optimism. Don't reject technology, the Catalog urged: make it your own. Don't drop out of the world: change it, using the tools we and your fellow readers have found. Some technologies were environmentally destructive or made you stupid, others were empowering and trod softly on the earth; together we could learn which were which.

Millions found the Catalog's message inspirational. In promoting an attitude toward technology that emphasized experimentation, re-use and re-invention, seeing the deeper consequences of your choices, appreciating the power of learning to do it yourself and sharing your ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog helped create the modern tinkering movement. Today, tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

The piece is also an attempt to think more deeply about things we talked about at the conference on tinkering that Anne Balsamo organized last year (and I continued thinking about in other venues).

[To the tune of Elvis Costello, "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down," from the album The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions (I give it 2 stars).]