Four short links: 27 October 2009

Digital Art Programming, DIY Construction Set, Open Source Pedant, Design Principles

1. Field -- a development environment for "experimental code" and digital art. We think that, for many uses, Field is a better Processing than Processing. Includes Python and Java bridges, goal is to connect to as many different programming systems as possible. OS X only at the moment.
2. Contraptor -- a DIY open source construction set for experimental personal fabrication, desktop manufacturing, prototyping and bootstrapping. (via Hacker News)
3. After The Deadline -- open source contextual spelling and grammar checker. (via Hacker News)
4. Design Principles to Choose the Right Ideas -- Often people ask me how we know which ideas to choose from all the hundreds of ideas we’ve generated during brainstorm sessions. Apart from our gut feelings and experience there’s a method that could help us decide: define design principles. Interesting for the different sets of design principles used by Google and Microsoft teams. (via egoodman on Delicious)

Four short links: 21 October 2009

Battlefield Android, DIY Leukemia Hacking, Localisation, Bus Pirates

1. Raytheon Sends Android to Battlefield -- Google's OS sees deployment. Using Android software tools, Raytheon ( RTN - news - people ) engineers built a basic application for military personnel that combines maps with a buddy list. [...] Every part of RATS is tailored for use on a battlefield. A soldier could make an unmanned plane a "buddy," for instance, and track its progress on a map using his phone. He could then access streaming video from the plane, giving him a bird's eye view of the area. Soldiers could also use the buddy list to trace the locations of other members of their squad. (via Jim Stogdill)
2. The Kanzius Machine (CBS News, video) -- inventor lost the race against leukemia, but his DIY RF therapy device is being developed "for real". (via Jim Stogdill)
3. Lost in Translation -- Will Shipley shows how to handle internationalisation and localisation. In this post I'm going to explain to you what internationalization and localization are, how Apple's tools handle them by default, and the huge flaws in Apple's approach. Then I'm going to provide you with the code and tools to do localization in a much, much easier way. Then you're going to think, 'That will never work, because of blah!' and I'm going to respond, as if I can read your mind or I've already had this argument with a dozen developers, 'It already did - I used these tools in Delicious Library and Delicious Library 2 and they've won three Apple Design Awards between them. (via migurski on Delicious)
4. The Bus Pirate -- interfaces to a heap of embedded hardware. The ‘Bus Pirate’ is a universal bus interface that talks to most chips from a PC serial terminal, eliminating a ton of early prototyping effort when working with new or unknown chips (via joshua on Delicious)

Four short links: 8 October 2009

DIY Baby Rocker, Unix Systems Glory, Encrypting Ephemera, and Explaining Creative Joy

1. Linux Baby Rocker -- inventive use of a CD drive and the eject command ... (via Hacker News)
2. I Like Unicorn Because It's Unix -- forceful rant about the need to rediscover Unix systems programming. Reminds me of the Varnish notes where the author explains that it works better because it uses the operating system instead of recreating it poorly.
3. Encrypting Ephemeral Storage and EBS Volumes on Amazon -- step-by-step instructions. (via Matt Biddulph on Delicious)
4. You Have No Life -- if a video smacks even slightly of concentrated effort or advance planning, someone will inevitably scoff that the subject has a) "too much time on his hands" or b) "no life." Ten times out of ten. [...] After six years I lack a succinct, meaningful response to my students' defensive, clannish embrace of mediocrity, though I'm grateful for this tweet, which comes pretty close: dwineman: You say "looks like somebody has too much time on their hands" but all I hear is "I'm sad because I don't know what creativity feels like."

Four short links: 1 October 2009

Objectivity Be Gone, Public Screens, Lobbying Patterns, DIY Africa

1. The End of Objectivity, Web2.0 Version -- Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society. (via Pia Waugh)
2. Screens in Context -- ideas for the video screens spring up in place of billboards. Whilst the advertising industry has one of the longest histories of trying to understand interaction, it’s a very different set of tools that digitalness brings; ones that designers at the coal face of web and mobile encounter every day. Everything can be considered in context, be timely, reactive, and data-driven. I’m going to try to outline some dimensions to think about, with some incredibly quick, simple, off the cuff dumb ideas [...] The technology to achieve some of these may be over and above what is possible now, but the biggest step - installing powered, networked computers in the real world - is already being taken by advertising media companies.
3. Interactive Network Map of Lobbying Patterns Around Key Senators in Health Care Reform -- fascinating visualization of political activity, via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. The Doers Club -- How DIY design gave a teenager from Malawi electricity, and can help transform Africa.

Four short links: 22 September 2009

Cities, How Things Work, Stylish Google, EC2 Numbers

1. The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future (IO9) -- a great essay by Matt Jones, based on his talk at Webstock this year. Urban design is how we created alternate realities before we had iPhones, and the new technology lets us choose which science fiction future we want to inhabit. We are now a predominantly urban species, with over 50% of humanity living in a city. The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the "maximum cities" of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal - people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said. Hacking post-industrial cities is becoming a necessity also. [...]
2. How and Why Machines Work (MIT Open Course Ware) -- Subject studies how and why machines work, how they are conceived, how they are developed (drawn), and how they are utilized. Students learn from the hands-on experiences of taking things apart mentally and physically, drawing (sketching, 3D CAD) what they envision and observe, taking occasional field trips, and completing an individual term project (concept, creation, and presentation). Emphasis on understanding the physics and history of machines. (via Hacker News)
3. Google Style Guide -- how Google codes. Useful if you're working on their code, starting a job there, or want to mock them for not specifying K&R braces/four space tabs/<insert One True Way here>. (via Hacker News)
4. EC2 Usage Guessed From Sequential IDs -- The Superseries ID changes so rarely that originally I had assumed it was some kind of checksum. This would have been odd as it limits the total available IDs to 2²⁴ = 16.8 million. Up to very recently, the Superseries ID for all resource types - instances, images, volumes, snapshots, etc. - was 69 (in the us-east-1 region (for eu-west-1 the Superseries ID is 74). These days, new instances use the Superseries ID 68. This subtle change, unnoticed by the industry, may hint at an astonishing achievement: 8.4 million instances launched since EC2’s debut! (Instance IDs are even so 8.4M = 16.8M / 2.) (via mattb on delicious)

Four short links: 18 September 2009

More Twitter Clients, GLAM Tech, Retro Homebrew Audio Hardware, Emerging Open Source

1. Echofon -- novel take on Twitter apps: sync your unread list between phone, browser, and (ultimately, they promise) desktop Twitter app. (via auchmill on Twitter)
2. GLAM Tech (MP3) -- Radio New Zealand new technology slot about the use of technology in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector. For links, see the programme page.
3. Man With Miniature Radio -- 1950s DIY proto-iPod amusement.
4. Open Source in Emerging Markets -- the emerging markets — which include India, China, and Brazil — have more FOSS adoption and a higher concentration of effort in open source. Three quarters (74%) of developers in emerging markets use open source software for at least part of their work, compared to 65% of developers worldwide. In this context, "use" means personal use or corporate use, and could include both developer tools and desktop or server applications. (via glynmoody on Twitter)

Four short links: 16 September 2009

Data Sharing, Health Dashboard, DIY Repairs, Crowdsourcing

1. Data Sharing: Empty Archives (Nature) -- asking and answering the question "why don't researchers share their data?"
2. San Francisco Health Visual Dashboard -- Health Matters in San Francisco is a o­ne-stop source of non-biased data and information about community health in the City, and healthy communities in general. It is intended to help planners, policy makers, and community members learn about issues and identify improvements. (via the blog of the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess and titine on delicious)
3. iFixit -- information on Mac, iPhone, etc. repair. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. Crowdflower -- labour as a service. Love the analytics. Don't miss the TechCrunch 50 demo. (via waxy)

Four short links: 20 August 2009

DIY SPY, Screencasting, Social Network Analysis, Term Extraction

1. DIY SPY - a homebrew 2.4GHz wi-fi spectrum analyzer -- As proof of concept (and a cool toy for anyone who has one of these lying around), I have implemented a working Wi-Fi spectrum analyzer on TI’s ez430-RF2500 development kit ($50), a 2-part USB dongle which consists essentially of a CC2500 radio strapped to an MSP430 low-power microcontroller (detachable bottom half) and a USB interface which enumerates as a virtual serial port (top half). The top half doubles as a standalone MSP430 programmer, so this kit is a great cheap way to get started playing with them. (via joshua on Delicious)
2. Screenr -- Instant screencasts for Twitter. Flash-based, uploads to their site and tweets the URL. The whole "for Twitter" thing is going a little too far: who records screencasts only for Twitter? It's like having a spellchecker only for three-letter words.
3. Social Network Analysis in R -- video and slides for talk on doing social network analysis with R.
4. We're Keeping the Term Extraction Service -- Yahoo!'s useful API gets a stay of execution. OK, we heard you. You’ve made it clear to us that shutting down the Term Extraction Service would be a mistake. So, we’ve changed our plans. We're leaving the service up and running indefinitely. (via Simon Willison)

Four short links: 19 August 2009

Survivor Bias, Algorithmic Trading, S3 Tools, DIY GSM

1. Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias -- "Burying the other evidence: [...] Doesn't most business advice suffer from this fallacy? Harvard Business School's famous case studies include only success stories. To paraphrase Peter, what if twenty other coffee shops had the same ideas, same product, and same dedication as Starbucks, but failed? How does that affect what we can learn from Starbucks's success? (via Hacker News)
2. A Bestiary of Algorithmic Trading Strategies -- insight into the algorithms used by quant traders. Statistical arbitrageurs are a sort of squishy area, similar to arbs, but distinct from them. They find “pieces” of securities which are theoretically equivalent. For example, they may notice a drift between prices of oil companies which should revert to a mean value. This mean reversion should happen if the drift doesn’t have anything to do with actual corporate differences, like one company’s wells catching on fire. What you’re doing here is buying and selling the idea of an oil company, or in other words, a sort of oil company market spread risk. You’re assuming these two companies are statistically the same, and so they’ll revert to some kind of mean when one of the prices move. (via Hacker News)
3. s3cmd -- commandline tool for moving files into and out of Amazon S3.
4. DIY GSM Network -- wow. How to build your own GSM network. Bit by bit, the telcos are getting pressured by the hobbyists. This barbarian is looking forward to the day when the walled gardens are sacked. (via Slashdot)

Four short links: 22 July 2009

Augmented Reality, A/B Psych, Open Source Heartbeat, Launchpad Launches

1. ARtisan -- AR Flash library, the fastest and easiest way from point A to point B in browser based augmented reality. Love the demos on the home page. (via and bjepson)
2. How to Increase Sign-ups By 200% -- A/B testing from 37Signals showed that "See Plans and Pricing" got twice the clickthroughs of "Free Trial!" and variations thereon. (via kathysierra on Twitter)
3. Open Source Heart Monitor, Possible Blood Sugar Level Detector -- another step forward in sensor networks and personal data: I’ve set up a quick prototype of a device that will monitor my heart rate while I sleep. It includes a BUGbase + BUGvonHippel module (from my company Bug Labs). I’m also using a custom module we put together that uses a Polar radio receiver (from Sparkfun) and a Polar strap that I wear around my chest. Lastly, we wrote a simple program that runs on the BUG to log the data. (via chr1a on Twitter)
4. Launchpad Opensourced -- Canonical's code hosting and collaboration platform that was heavily lusted after in the open souce world, finally open sourced and in its entirety. GNU Affero license.

Four short links: 6 July 2009

iPhone Maps, Tooth Milling, Scratch Updated, Newspapers for All

1. Offline Mapping App for iPhone -- carry Open Street Maps maps with you even when you're not in 3G/wifi range. (via Elisabeth)
2. My dentist used an in-office CAD & CNC mill to produce a new tooth for me today (Nat Friedman) -- hello, future!
3. New version of Scratch released -- Scratch is an excellent way to teach kids how to program (I've had success with lots of 7 and 8 year olds). The new version includes keyboard entry, webcams, and support for Lego WeDo. The user interface has also been changed to work on a Netbook's 800x600 screen. Kudos to the Scratch team! (via scratchteam on Twitter)
4. Newspaper Club - a Work in Progress -- blog for the Newspaper Club project. "We're building a service to help people make their own newspapers. This is the blog where we're alarmingly honest about where it's all going wrong." I can't figure out whether this is a brilliant decentralisation move that will disrupt the newspaper industry, or a paper form of steampunk. (via Simon Willison)

Four short links: 12 May 2009

Storage Superfluity, Data-Driven Design, Twit-Mapping, and DIY Biohacking

1. Lacie 10TB Storage -- for what used to be the price of a good computer, you can now buy 10TB of storage. Storage on sale goes for less than $100 a terabyte. This obviously promotes collecting, hoarding, packratting, and the search technology necessary to find what you've stashed away. Analogies to be drawn between McMansions full of Chinese-made crap and terabyte drive full of downloaded crap. Do we need to keep it? Are there psychological consequences to clutter? (via gizmodo)
2. In Defense of Data-Driven Design -- a thoughtful response to the "Google hates design!" hashmob formed around designer Douglas Bowman's departure from Google. When you’ve got the enormous traffic necessary to work out if miniscule changes have some minor, statistically significant effect, then sure, if you can do it quickly, why wouldn’t you? But that’s optimization that should happen at the very end of the design cycle. The cart goes after the horse. Put it the other way ‘round and you have a broken setup. It doesn’t mean horses suck. It doesn’t mean carts suck. Carts are not the enemy of horses. Optimization is not the enemy of design. Get them in the right order and you have something really useful. Get them the wrong way around and you have something broken.
3. Just Landed: Processing + Twitter + Metacarta + Hidden Data -- Jer searched Twitter for "just landed in", used Metacarta to extract the locations mentioned, and then used Processing to build visualizations.
4. Do It Yourself Genetic Sleuthing -- MIT is starting a hotbed of DIY biologists. The 23-year-old MIT graduate uses tools that fit neatly next to her shoe rack. There is a vintage thermal cycler she uses to alternately heat and cool snippets of DNA, a high-voltage power supply scored on eBay, and chemicals stored in the freezer in a box that had once held vegan "bacon" strips. Aull is on a quirky journey of self-discovery for the genetics age, seeking the footprint of a disease that can be fatal but is easily treated if identified. But her quest also raises a broader question: If hobbyists working on computers in their garages can create companies such as Apple, could genetics follow suit? It's unclear what those DIY-started "genetics" companies would look like--the potential is there, but it's yet to met the right problem. (via Andy Oram)

Just Landed - 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

Trying to Track Swine Flu Across Cities in Realtime

John Geraci is a guest blogger and heads up the DIY City movement. He will be speaking about DIY City at Where 2.0 in San Jose on 5/20.

Since early last friday, when I got a tip about swine flu in Mexico City from a health researcher, the team that does SickCity has been working to make the system something that can (or could) detect swine flu outbreaks in cities around the world.

It hasn't been easy.

SickCity is the "realtime disease detection for your city", created by people at DIYcity. The service, launched last month, works by monitoring Twitter for local mentions of various terms that mean "I'm getting sick" and plotting those to location. Up until Friday, SickCity seemed to work reasonably well for the very rough beta tool that it is. It showed incidences of people reporting they had flu, or chicken pox, or other illnesses, broken down by city. You could look at a graph of the past 30 days for your city and see days when mentions of certain diseases and symptoms were higher or when they were lower. You could sometimes see trends. No one claimed that SickCity was ready for prime time, but those working on it felt that there was a very worthwhile idea in it that with a bit of refinement would be of huge value to communities.

On Friday, all of that got turned upside down.

Going to SickCity's Mexico City page early in the day, I saw a sudden, several-hundred percent increase in mentions of flu. The problem was, not a single one of them was about actually having the flu - all were about the gigantic swine flu media event that was just beginning. Our disease detection tool had turned into a media event detection tool overnight.

Since then, we've been in a constant struggle to filter out the media effect from the data. The problem is, as the story grows and changes, the terms we have to filter for keep growing and changing. On Saturday we made a series of changes to the filters and search terms, and thought we were fine. By Sunday, those had become totally insufficient in the face of the growing Twitter storm surrounding swine flu (70 more results in the time it took me to write that sentence). We made more changes Sunday. Today, those additional filters seemed puny and insufficient. People are now calling swine flu "piggy flu", "pork flu", "bacon flu", "wine flu". They're talking about Obama having flu. They're talking about bird flu. The list of tweeting topics grows at an exponential rate. The topic of swine flu is incredibly viral.

So how do you get down below this huge cloud of noise, to the relatively tiny (but very important) signal down beneath? There are probably several thousand tweets happening right now about the idea of flu for every one that is about actually having the flu. The number of people actually coming down with flu right now in fact seems very low (let's hope it stays that way).

Tracking other terms related to flu seems more promising - the term "fever" seems like a good one to look for, and once you get rid of the tweets mentioning spring fever, cabin fever and Doctor Johnny Fever, you've got a pretty good data set to use. But how representative of the flu population is that term?

Maybe tracking actual flu tweets in this situation isn't really possible?

Still, the payoff in terms of value to communities and health organizations is huge if the developers can get something that can be demonstrated to work. As a public health researcher following SickCity told me, realtime outbreak detection is currently terrible at best. To improve on what's there, you just have to give people a reliable signal that *something* is happening in a city. You don't need to have exact numbers. You don't even need to know whether what's happening is actually flu, or food poisoning, or plague, really - the health officials can figure that out for themselves pretty quickly with all of the other tools at their disposal, once they know to be on the lookout. You just need to be able to reliably say "there is a sickness event happening right now in this city", and that's enough. You just need a canary in the coal mine.

So the developers behind SickCity, volunteers from DIYcity (mainly Paul Watson and Dan Greenblatt at this time, plus a few others) keep working on making it that. And right now they're working round the clock. (It's a public project - if you want to pitch in, by all means do so - you can get more info here.).

Even if SickCity fails to detect swine flu in cities around the world, it will have become a much more robust tool in the process of failing. If it doesn't succeed in catching this pandemic, maybe it will be better prepared to catch the next one?

Four short links: 9 Jan 2009

Four questions, one per link: what next, can it solve a big problem, what's the final boss for Python programming, and why on earth would anyone want yogurt that glows in the dark?

1. End Times - gloomy piece on the future of journalism, to be added to the large pile of other gloomy pieces on the future of journalism (e.g., Bad News, Good News). The critical problem is still how to pay for journalism if the new media revenues are significant lower than old, and if the new media economics decree that journalism is dead then who fills the social good role that journalism's death will leave?
2. Ward Cunningham's Visible Workings - an intriguing glimpse, from March last year, into the way Ward lays out web interactions. Nice system for laying out these interactions, but it's also fascinating for how it makes transparent what will happen as a result of the data you submit. How scalable is this? Could it tackle privacy?
3. Project Euler - fun programming exercises that require more than math to finish. We learn by doing, not by reading, so interesting exercises are part and parcel of training. It's interesting to see educators are moving from being authors to being game designers, providing a series of staged challenges that make us stronger by defeating them. I'm presently dieing in as many ways as I can while learning iterators and generators in Python, as a way of ensuring I have Python's "game physics" sussed.
4. Rise of the Garage Genome Hackers - more on hobbyist molecular biology. It mentions DIYBio, the Cambridge biohacker collective that I first heard about at BioBarCamp. (via Glynn Moody)

The Visible Hand

I wrote this piece about a month ago as the Welcome for Make: 16, which will be on the newsstand soon.

As I write this, there is panic on Wall Street despite Washington’s $700 billion rescue attempt. The crisis is not contained by U.S. borders, but extends to Europe and Asia. Like many people, I’m incredulous. How could this happen?

Wall Street hired the best and the brightest, paid them handsomely, and gave them unlimited resources and technology. It turns out they were building enormously complicated castles made of sand. A great wave washed them away, astounding all the smart people who devoted their lives to speculation, not production. Their models based on historical data predicted future profits, not collapse. Few people saw this coming until it hit.

“It was the triumph of data over common sense,” said reporter Adam Davidson on the excellent episode of This American Life called “The Giant Pool of Money.” Economist Michael Lehmann in the San Francisco Chronicle called it “the triumph of ideology over common sense.” It’s obvious both common sense and the common man have taken a beating.

It’s hard to stomach that our government must bail out Wall Street. It really means we’ve bet our future on the same people who created the present situation. To paraphrase a joke I’ve heard: It’s like going to a casino in Vegas and rooting for the house. One New York Times reader expressed the frustration that many feel: “Why can’t we take half of the $700 billion and just build something?”

These events shake our belief that free markets work to the benefit of all. The fundamental tenet of capitalism is the “invisible hand”: Adam Smith wrote that “by pursuing his own interest [each person] frequently promotes that of the society.” This year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said: “In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism — it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable.”

A headline in the Christian Science Monitor says: “With finance crisis, hands-off era over.” Government will need to be more assertive in regulating Wall Street. But I think it goes beyond that. I wonder if we, as individuals, have been living in our own era of hands-off. Have Americans become so disengaged that we’ve become dependent on some invisible force to provide what we need? Have we gotten used to leaving important matters to experts, until they turn out to be wrong?

Isn’t it time for us to become hands-on again?

We, the people, face enormous challenges. Apart from the economic mess, we know fundamental changes are coming because of global warming. Our dependence on fossil fuels is not sustainable. Change is coming, whether we want it or not.

Better we meet the challenges head-on rather than hide. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed it up: “We need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering. We need to get back to a world where people are able to realize the American Dream — a house with a yard — because they have built something with their hands, not because they got a ‘liar loan.’ ... The American Dream is an aspiration, not an entitlement.”

We have to believe it starts with each of us — not some faceless government or corporate bureaucracy. It’s time for us, individually and working together in business, to reconsider what it means to be productive, not just profitable. It’s time for us to reengage in how our government sets priorities for education, health care, housing, and transportation.

The DIY mindset celebrated in this magazine must again become an essential life skill, rooted once again in necessity and practicality. Our future security lies in knowing what we’re capable of creating, and how we can adapt to change by being resourceful.

A challenge this great can bring out the best in us. We need everyone, because every person has something to contribute. We need a showing of all hands.

Auckland University Bioengineering Institute

I am an industry advisor to the Auckland University Bioengineering Institute and got a tour on Tuesday. It was inspirational! They sprawl over several floors of a tall concrete building in Auckland, expanding from their cramped one-floor presence. Everywhere you look there are people with soldering irons, laptops, and batteries working on devices that sit between hardware and biology.

I've been advising on their Physiome project, which seeks to computationally model human bodies at various levels including genes, proteins, muscles, skeleton, and skin. The idea is to develop a model such that you can "sample" a person's key physical trait, plug it into the model, and predict the details of their body's structure and response. I like to think of it as the OSI 7-layer stack of the human body.

You can see a list of their projects online. I saw the telemetry group's work on powering heart pumps, which assist a failing heart while the patient waits for a transplant. At the moment, heart pump patients have power cables sticking out of their chest and consequently many die from infection before they can receive the transplant. The telemetry group is working on wireless power transfer to the devices. It's the same inductive power ideas that made a splash last month when Intel demoed wireless power devices at their developers forum.

I also saw a lot of very sexy hardware. They have a 3D printer, a laser cutter, and a monstrously heavy metal machining tool that had to be delivered through the window by a crane (and which required multiple engineering checks of the floor's capability to hold it up). All these take designs from CAD diagrams, so the researchers can conceive of a part, design it, and produce it without the lengthy turnaround times and erratic tolerances of traditional machine shops. They're actively expanding their metal shop.

I also saw an artificial muscle in the biomimetics group. It was flapping at an adjustable rate, needing a high-voltage low-current power which can be made quite small and efficient. They were still trying to find an application--candidates they're investigating include moving small devices (the way some organisms use cilia to move around), and using may of them to form a crowd-surfing type of conveyor belt (pictured).

They have programmers, too—modelling is a big part of their work, and every model needs lots of sexy outputs. One of their coders, Duane Malcolm, came to Kiwi Foo earlier this year. He's an open source hacker, with Sparkfun Arduino kits at home, who has been hacking in XUL, RDF databases and Ruby on Rails lately. I didn't get to meet the programmer beside him, but she had a copy of one of O'Reilly's Python books on her desk—good to see!

I realize medical devices aren't new, but underlying these medical devices are sophisticated models and a lot of computational crunching. It reinforced for me the revelation I had at Science Foo Camp in August—science has always had theoreticians and experimentalists, but the days of being primarily one or the other have passed in many fields. Increasingly we're seeing a new class of data crunching scientist, someone who can make sense of the enormous volumes of data that can now be gathered, someone who connects theory and practice with software. There's a lot of that at the Bioengineering Institute and it was very exciting to see up-close and personal.

Why We're Failing in Math and Science

Norman Mailer's brilliant novel Why Are We in Vietnam? doesn't talk explicitly about the Vietnam war; it tells a story about American culture and the American psyche, thereby producing a devastating critique of the war with the title and last line alone.

In a similar way, it may be easier to understand why America is falling behind at math and science with a few simple stories.

Last week, Robert Bruce Thompson, author of An Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, wrote a guest blog post on makezine.com, Home Science Under Attack, which told the sad story of how a retired chemist was arrested and his lab confiscated because he was doing experiments:

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that Victor Deeb, a retired chemist who lives in Marlboro, has finally been allowed to return to his Fremont Street home, after Massachusetts authorities spent three days ransacking his basement lab and making off with its contents. Deeb is not accused of making methamphetamine or other illegal drugs. He's not accused of aiding terrorists, synthesizing explosives, nor even of making illegal fireworks. Deeb fell afoul of the Massachusetts authorities for ... doing experiments.

Authorities concede that the chemicals found in Deeb's basement lab were no more hazardous than typical household cleaning products. Despite that, authorities confiscated "all potentially hazardous chemicals" (which is to say the chemicals in Deeb's lab) from his home, and called in a hazardous waste cleanup company to test the chemicals and clean up the lab.

Pamela Wilderman, the code enforcement officer for Marlboro, stated, "I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere. This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation."

Allow me to translate Ms. Wilderman's words into plain English: "Mr. Deeb hasn't actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don't like what he's doing because I'm ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals..."

I forwarded this message to Dave Farber's IP list (which is now searchable via markmail, the amazing mailing list search engine!), and got back some great stories that I wanted to share.

Armando Stettner wrote one story that illustrates just how much our culture has changed. His story also involves the cops, but here, they understand and support science. Too bad that was 40+ years ago:

When I was about 13 or so, I also had a chemistry set in my basement. I was living on Long Island - Freeport, to be exact. I also remember the hobby shop with ALL sorts of glassware and little labeled bottles of chemicals. I had some really neat stuff: all sorts of chemicals - I seem to remember potassium ferrocyanide with which I did some chemoluminescence (I think that's one of the ingredients), sodium in liquid form, various acids, a few rolls of magnesium - not to mention all the paraphernalia: lots of pyrex stuff, triple beam balances, etc. All the chemicals were neatly arranged in this cabinet.

One day, I had mixed a concoction and was carrying it (premixed!) in a tin coffee can. Myself and a friend were carrying the stuff to the train tracks to test it out (light it) where it was relatively safe. The stuff started getting warm but I thought it was the sun heading the can up. Then it started getting REALLY warm. As it got hot, I dropped it in the middle of the street. The stuff flashed over. It was VERY cool.

But, I decided I didn't want to stay around any more and left.

Unfortunately for me, this all occurred in front of the house of someone who knew me (she was a 'friend' of my parents). She called the cops.

The Freeport police came to my house questioned me and my parents, joined in a little while by some county detectives. They were very polite. We took them down to the basement where I showed them all the stuff. The uniformed police left and the detectives continued to look at all the stuff and ask questions. They called somebody to ask some advice. It turns out they called the county labs. The guy got off the phone and asked 'you're not making any drugs down here are you?" I said no!! He smiled - he winked at my parents. Then he said the most unexpected thing: he said the gang at the labs offered to give me a tour of the labs anytime I wanted.

Then they left asking me to be careful. For me, it was actually a positive experience.

Today, I'm sure I'd face a visit from the Hazmat teams and the DHS. And, because of the triple beam balance, my house (or my parents') would be confiscated under the forfeiture rules.

At Maker Faire earlier this year, Robert Bruce Thompson gave a talk (video unfortunately truncated at both ends) that highlighted how attitudes towards chemistry have changed since he was a kid, starting with a tour of the powerful chemistry sets available in 1964 (courtesy of the Sears Catalog), and tracing the dumbing down and rising fear of liability that doomed them, until, as Kevin Kelly noted in a recent review of Robert's book, we reached "the so-called chemistry sets today which boldly (and insanely) advertise they contain 'No Chemicals!'" (Review sent out in Cool Tools email, up on the Cool Tools site soon.)

Why are we failing at math and science? Because it isn't fun any more. When you put safety on the highest altar, what do you give up? When fear of lawsuits -- not to mention fear of technology -- drives product design, marketing, and public policy, you eliminate science at its roots, in the natural experimentation of kids who want to know how the world works.

Radar Theme: Art and Technology

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

Art is emotion hacking, intended to provoke or illuminate rather than profit. Artists play on the boundaries of new materials, new modes of interaction, new technologies. Often what they build can inspire or inform useful and commercial hacking.

Watchlist: Natalie Jeremijenko, NYU ITP, We Make Money Not Art.

Radar Theme: Materials Science

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

New materials follow a curve: initially expensive and so used by R&D only, but many eventually become mass-produced and cheap and so enable mainstream applications. By tracking new materials with interesting possibilities, we can be ahead of the mass-manufacturing curve. The trick is to identify the alpha-hardware-geeks prototyping great things from the new materials.

Watchlist: Inventables.

Radar Theme: Make

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

DIY culture is back, from rocket cars to simply tweaking things you already own to make them better. People want control over their devices again, whether access to the internal computer systems of their car or the ability to make a simple flashing LED toy. Physical electronics skills are important but, thanks to the low price of microcontrollers, hardware is becoming software.

Watch List: Arduino, Tom Igoe, NYU ITP, Make Magazine, Maker Faire.