A Computing Future from Microsoft: Large and Cheap Displays

Chris Pratley, the head of Microsoft's Office Labs, gave the PICNIC audience a peek into the future they envision when planning their products. What is that future? It was encapsulated in the above video that they made a year ago. Some of the technologies (Augmented Reality and realtime language translation for example) have already come to the fruition (and they are going to need to make a new video soon before it all happens).

An initial viewing of the video shows that Chris and his team (and Microsoft in general) are concerned with screens of all sizes - from 10-foot wallscreen to 2-inch boarding passes. In all of these displays they imagine that the screen is also the interface. How will the current interfaces scale? For larger ones there is a concern for how to keep the controls near the user. For smaller ones there is no room for controls. The screens will be maneuvered by making the back touch sensitive (called Nanotouch). One of the key Microsoft researchers in this area is Patrick Baudisch.

These interfaces are possible now. I have played with Nanotouch devices at MSR -- some no larger than a 50 cent piece. And not only are the larger displays possible, they will potentially be cheap. The picture below is a new MSR project that shows one method for creating large scale screens cheaply. It uses a pico projector that is the size of the phone and a specially cut piece of plexiglass. The image below shows a display that is only ~2 feet tall, but you can imagine this working at 10 feet. Chris stated that the size of the display is bounded by the projector's brightness and that pico projector brightness is doubling every 9 months. In the future cameras can be added to allow for gestures on the interface.

Tweenbots: Cute Beats Smart

If you wanted to build a robot that could go from one end of Washington Square Park to the other without your help how would you do it? How expensive in time and money would it be? Would you build or buy a navigation system? Construct a sensing system to detect obstacles? Or would you decide to take a different tact and use cute as your primary tool?

ITP student Kacie Kinzer created a 10-inch smiling robot called a Tweenbot that can only go straight. For each journey Kacie would give the robot a destination and clearly label it. Given the obstacles in its way and lack of navigation or steering systems the expectation was that the robot would not make it. However the robot's avoidance of the uncanny valley and clearly written goal helped it out. Humans would redirect the Tweenbot so it successfully reached its destination. Below is a map of one Tweenbot journey:

Mission 1: Get from the Northwest to the Southwest Corner of Washington Square Park / time: 42 minutes / number of people who intervened: 29

As Kacie describes on the site:

Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

So why do people help out the tweenbot? Personally I would not be able to resist assisting the anthropomorphized little robot. The smile signals its innocent intentions and the Tweenbot's label makes it clear how to help. It's something for designers and technologists to remember; sometimes cute and clever can get the job done much cheaper and in less time than smart and expensive.

There are more Tweenbots coming so if you happen to see any friendly robots around your town lend a hand. Here are some of the prototypes that are currently in development.

via Hacker News

It's Really Just a Series of Tubes

Molly Wright Steenson hit the Ignite jackpot at Etech this year with her explanation of the steam powered network of pneumatic tubes of the 1800s. If you're someone that, like me, has a somewhat obsessive relationship with Internet Infrastructure, you must watch this talk.

ETech: Wrapup

I've been attending ETech and the P2P conference that preceded ETech and this conference, and this year I've noticed the best gender balance ever. Granted this conference's focus has changed from the very geeky P2P and Web Services focus it started with and meandered through a host of topics to arrive at a less geeky, but still thought provoking set of topics. I feel that this change in focus has made the conference more accessible to women and as a result we've seen the gender balance improve over the years.

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ETech: Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People

[Quinn managed to scoop me blogging about Tony Jebara's presentation! But after I chatted with her, we both agreed that I should continue with my blog post and see if I can augment her post a little.]

Tony Jebara's presentation "Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People" really opened my eyes to what amazing things you can derive from large data sets. Tony co-founded Sense Networks which specializes in taking GPS and mobile phone location data and deriving as much useful information as possible from it. Sense Networks works with mobile phone service providers who collected data from users who opted in to have their data be collected and mined. All the data they receive from the service provider is GPS location data -- no personal information at all was ever made available to Sense Networks.

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Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons

The first session I attended today was John Wilbanks' "Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons" presentation. John talked about the process of establishing the Science Commons and how creating a science oriented commons presented unique challenges. John first pointed out that Metcalfe's Law works for both networked computers and documents. But, he went on to extend the law to more general data as well -- something I've believed in and espoused for a number of years now.

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Two Thousand People Singing Daisy Bell Together via Mech Turk

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

Have you ever heard two thousand people sing and harmonize together? Bicycle Built For Two Thousand splices together over two thousand audio samples to sing the public domain song Daisy Bell, the song sung by HAL at the end of 2001. It is being launched today at ETech. You can watch a demo of the application above.

The crowdsourced song is made from 12 audio and 6 keyboard tracks. On the site you can listen to all of the tracks together, each one individually or the synth version of the song. Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey used Mechanical Turk to capture the samples. Each turker was played a single syllable or note from the synth version and asked to replicate it. People from 71 countries were each paid 6 cents to record their voice. The resulting audio samples were merged together and are now playable through the site.

This is the third Mechanical Turk art project that Aaron Koblin has created. The Sheep Market combined 10,000 sheep drawn by Turkers into a digital art app (Radar post). He also used the work of Turkers to create Ten Thousand Cents, a crowdsourced drawing of the US one-hundred dollar bill. Aaron, a Googler, also did the laser visualizations for the Radiohead video House of Cards.

Ignite Show: Andrew Schneider, Experimental Performance Devices

This week's Ignite Show features Andrew Schneider, a performance artist, and his DIY experimental performance devices, but first a cupcake decorating contest. If you're at ETech this is a preview for his performance tonight with Zoë Keating before the ETech Fest. The cupcake decorating contest and Andrew's talk were filmed at Ignite NYC II.

The Ignite Show will feature a different speaker every Tuesday for free. It's available on YouTube (user: Ignite), on our Ignite site and via iTunes. It is being released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

ETech: Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?

The second session today I'd like to share with you was presented by a personal friend of mine, Jeremy Faludi. Jer started his session entitled "Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?" by pointing out that if we want to change the world, we ought to know what the most important issues are, right? Good thinking! And with so much news about how humans affect the planet its hard to accurately determine what really is important and what we can safely ignore. Jer set out to educate future green hackers about the most important things to focus on. Jer provided a vast amount of information that I can't hope to adequately convey in one blog post. He covered: Climate change, species extinction and habitat Loss, resource depletion, pollution and overpopulation. At the end of his presentation, Jer provided us with an overall list of priorities -- I'll focus on those and will try to augment that summary with points from his main sections.

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Etech Session Liveblogging: Real Hackers Program DNA (Ginkgo Bioworks)

GB is "Making the process of engineering biology easier."

Synth bio is the idea that biology is a technology to engineer novel systems- say drugs, biofuels, other sexy sexy projects.

This is to be a flavor of what engineering biology is all about.

We will be installing a program into E coli to make it turn red, glow in the dark, or smell like bananas... We get to pick!

The DNA is stapled to the pages that describe them in the notebook.

Some of the tools of synth bio: biobricks, interchangeable components that can be strung together into programs. The parts registry lets you snap programs together.

iGem participants get a kit in the mail and pick out parts and mix and match them into new programs they want- much like the one we're holding. The Scottish team made and E coli that turned red in response to arsenic contamination.

Standardized interchangeable components are limited, but let a lot more people get involved and democratizes access to the tools. This is still biology- it can seem kind of scary- do you trust your neighbor to engineer biology?

Question from the audience: how do you prevent the terrorists from building smallpox?
Answer: You can't perfectly. "How do you prevent a car bomb from blowing up outside?" You don't, but you can limit it, and create a community that self polices.

Question from the audience: What about release? Would the arsenic detector be scattered on the ground?
Answer: We don't understand how manufactured organisms will interact with the environment. We work with safe organisms, and we don't release our stuff. These E coli are pretty innocuous, so we're going to wash our hands before lunch.

It's pretty unlikely that anyone is going to make anything in a lab that's dangerous right now, but we should think about that.

It's a bit legally gray, the guidelines everyone follows are only required for people receiving NIH funding, and there's some places with local laws (like Cambridge) ... There's no clear answer.

We're punching out our DNA and dropping it in cells. (Ben has returned our vial, #19 and #10 to ice, while the receptive cells take up our dna)

We're installing on a plasmid. "You're literally just mixing the plasmid DNA with the cells." These cells are competent, which means they can take up DNA easily. We cool the DNA, then do a heat shot- then shock it in a 42 degree water bath for 30 seconds, time it, put it back on ice for two minutes. We're disrupting the membrane of the cells and letting them recover. Then we're adding media, food for the cells. Then we're incubating them with our bodies. I'm going to keep mine in my armpit, I think.

Can't mix the three bit of dna, because they're the same plasmid - they are ampecillin resistance plasmid, so there's a space collision, things aren't likely to play well together.

DIYbio.org is a good place to learn about good lab practices.

I am now heading to lunch, incubating a tube of e coli in each armpit. (Will update with pictures after lunch)

Update: I've now transferred my E. coli to a petri dish and a vial, freeing my arms.

...and no, I was in a hurry, and I didn't wash my hands before lunch. Phear my bad lab skillz. (& Know your organisms.)

Kodu: Visual Programming on the Xbox with P2P Level-sharing

How do you make programming fun? How do you make it fun enough for kids to want to spend hours learning how to make loops and if/then statements? Simple you give them simple visual commands that let them control robots on the Xbox -- or at least this is the thesis of Microsoft Research's Kodu (formerly Boku).

Kodu (Boku) made a splash at Techfest two years ago and gave a demo at Ignite Seattle (Radar post). Since that time the levels and characters have gotten much sexier and the controls simpler, but more powerful. I sat down with the Matt MacLaurin, creator of Kodu (get it? Code-You) at MSR's Techfest last night. He told me that we can expect Kodu to be released on the Xbox this Spring (it's in select schools right now on the PC, but there's no word about a broader release).

It takes just 8 lines of "code" (see the image to the right) to create a game. Matt and his team have replicated most game types you would expect including Races, RPGs, Shooters (with cool missiles), Strategy and Puzzle. They've also included Sample Levels that teach a specific lesson (like how to change color, create loops, etc.).

Embedded into the game are the notions of sharing and openness. Any level can be tweaked. In fact the first option after finishing a level is "Edit This Game". I saw a working version where levels can also be shared amongst gamer friends via a form of P2P. When you are online you can choose to share all of your levels. Each level could fit on a floppy disk (not that your kid will know what that is). Embedded in each level is the creator and all subsequent editors. Kodu will track changes and try to determine who has made the most significant modifications to the level. When you start playing make sure you share with the Kodu team. They want to track how far levels are spread to create kind of a genealogy.

I took a lot of pictures and video of the game last night. You can see the video after the jump and the pictures on Flickr.

Visual programming environments are on the rise and something that every techie parent will want to keep an eye on. Kodu seems like the most accessible to me. It effectively hides the programming with "fun". I'm looking forward to its release.

We're featuring MIT's visual programming language Scratch at ETech this year. Use et09ffd code for 40% off the admission price.

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ETech Preview: Why LCD is the Cool New Technology All Over Again

In an early test of the OLPC XO in Nigeria, the student users dropped every laptop several times a day. Despite the laptops' rugged construction, they occasionally needed fixing, and a group of six-year-old girls opened up a "hospital" to reseat cables and do other simpler repairs. Mary Lou Jepson, One Laptop Per Child project's CTO, had this response: "I put extra screws underneath the battery cover so that if they lost one, they could have an extra one. And kids trade them almost like marbles, when they want to try to get something fixed in their laptop."

Mary Lou led the development of the OLPC's breakthrough low-power transflective display, combining a traditional backlit color display with a black and white display that could be used outdoors. She left OLPC to form Pixel Qi, and bring the revolutionary engineering used in the XO to the broader consumer market. In this interview, she discusses lessons learned from OLPC and shares her vision of "cool screens that can ship in high volume, really quickly, at price points that are equivalent to what you pay for standard liquid crystal displays."

At ETech, Mary Lou's keynote presentation delves further into Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing.

JAMES TURNER: I'm speaking today with Mary Lou Jepsen, Founder and CEO of Pixel Qi. Dr. Jepsen previously served as chief technology officer for the One Laptop per Child program where she was an instrumental player in the development of the OLPC's revolutionary hybrid screen. She also previously served as CTO of Intel's display division. Dr. Jepsen was also named by Time Magazine recently as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2008. She'll be speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference in March, and we're pleased she's taken the time to talk to us. Good evening.

MARY LOU JEPSEN: Hi. Nice to speak with you tonight.

JT: So in some ways, you're kind of uniquely qualified to comment on the current travails of the OLPC since you've been in highly influential positions both in the OLPC effort itself and at Intel, who some believe tried to sabotage the OLPC. Do you think that the OLPC would've had wider acceptance if the Intel Classmate wasn't competing against it?

MLJ: It is interesting. I think the OLPC, and I haven't seen the latest numbers, sold a lot more than the Classmate. I think head-to-head there's no comparison which is the better machine, and I'm not saying that just because I'm the architect. But what's really happened has been extraordinary. I think OLPC's impact in sort of spearheading the movement to Netbooks is fairly undisputed, although OLPC is not the best selling Netbook; 17 million Netbooks shipped in 2008 and that's through companies like Acer, Asus, MSI, HP, Dell. And that impact on the world is starting to be felt.

JT: What were the factors that led you to leave the OLPC program and start Pixel Qi?

MLJ: You know, I started OLPC with Nicholas in his office in the beginning, in January of 2005. And at that point, right after that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, all said it was impossible. So it became my job to sort of take that, create an architecture, invent a few things, convince the manufacturers to work with me to develop it, get a team together, and take it into high-volume mass production. And then it got to the point where my days were spent getting safety certifications for various countries.

And I just realized, it's time for me to continue doing this; this is the best job I've ever done, but to keep going, why not make these components that are inside of the XO and let everybody buy them rather than just exclusively making and designing them for the OLPC laptop. If you make more of something, you can sell it for less. So rather than just serving the bottom of the pyramid, why not take the fantastic technology that we developed at OLPC and serve the whole pyramid? Everybody wants their batteries to last a lot longer. Everybody wants screens that are e-paper-like and high resolution and sunlight readable. So why not make these for the whole world?

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Come to ETech; Experiment with Physical Computing and RFIDs

RFID's are associated with credit cards, passports and inventory systems. However, they can also be used to add a proximity interaction to a service like entering a subway via a passkey (Jan Chipchase has several posts describing these interactions around the world). By linking yourself to an RFID tag you can let a device know who you are. If you add in a link to an online, personal profile the interaction can be very personal.

By having your information at the ready an RFID tag can give you a much simpler interaction with technology. It is very easy to conceptualize the possibilities, but to really get a feel for how RFIDs can effect your interaction It's an area that has to be explored physically.

That's why we are giving all of the attendees at ETech RFID tags (See the tag art to the right) that can be linked to their conference profiles (opt-in). With these tags you can interact with several projects we'll have at the conference. BTW, ETech is happening March 9-12 in San Jose. Use et09pd30 at checkout for 30% off.

We were inspired to do this after I attended PICNIC in 2008 (Radar post) and got to experience first-hand the many, many uses of an RFID badge. Mediamatic linked your profile to it and that information was used to record your experiences. We got help from Mediamatic on our implementation and even used the same vendor.

If you make it to ETech here are the projects you can play with:

Lensley's Photobooth: Leonard Lin's new project is Lensley, a high-end photobooth with online photo-services integration. He's creating a special version just for ETech that will tag photos with your name and tweet that you've just had one taken.

Personal Calendar: Radar's own Edd Dumbill is the fellow behind the profile APIs. He is going to create a project that will show attendees their personal calendar at a public kiosk.

ETech Prophet: Josh and Tarikh of Uncommon Projects (they made the cool Yahoo! geo-bike) are adding an element of play to their project. They sent me a mail describing it as: "Essentially, we’d like to make an “Etech Prophet” a kind of mechanical turk idea (perhaps in another form factor)--you wave your RFID fob, it gesticulates, makes a noise and sends you your pithy fortune via twitter"

People Collector: This is a favorite of mine. Business cards are a waste of time and paper. I just want the person's email address. Nothing else. The People Collector will be a mobile device that people can use to exchange contact information with other attendees. When you meet someone just wave your fob over their People Collector and a message will be sent to both of you. The People Collector will be built in Tom Igoe and Brian Jepson's Hands-On RFID Workshop on 3/9.

Do you have something that you want to make? Let me know in the comments or find me on Twitter. We are still looking for projects.

ETech 2009 Schedule Posted; Early Registration Ends Monday

ETech is a technologist's playground. We specifically design the conference to expose new ideas and learn from the people behind them. This year the focus is on how the way we live is changing -- through policy, technology and ideas. The proliferation of sensors, advances in materials and manufacturing, the changes in government and the financial market will all have a profound effect on our industry.

ETech is a four-day conference that runs from March 9-12 in San Jose, CA. Early registration ends on Monday. Use et09rad at checkout for an additional 10% off (this will work even after early registration pricing ends).

ETech is a broad conference. The first day is filled with three-hour tutorials that range in topics from Refactoring Your Wetware (by Andy Hunt), Lilypad Arduino (was sold-out, but we were able to free up some new spots), an RFID-Arduino project, mapping with Stamen Design, 3D printing with the Reprap, and programming with MIT's Scratch. The following three days will be mix of plenary and breakout sessions. Here's a listing of all the talks and speakers. They'll be focused on:

• One of the major focuses is on the changing tech of cities - how sensors can track the real time city to how mobile phones can reveal habits of its citizens to Dubai's new location-aware playground.
• It's not just cities exploring the use of sensors, companies like the New York Times will share how they have been exploring their use in content delivery, Herman Miller is examining worker controlled sensors in the workplace, and Nike Techlab's has already selling sensor-laiden fitness equipment. Wired's Gary Wolf will expand on the Quantified Self and how personal sensors can teach us about ourselves.
• Many entrepreneurs are moving from virtual goods to physical ones. Bunnie Huang is going to lead a session on manufacturing in China, in another we'll learn about a new high-tech system for manufacturing chocolate. On Monday there is a workshop on 3D printing at home with the Reprap. Tom Igoe will examine where items go at the end of their lifecycle.
• New materials are being developed that will change what products can be built, what biomaterials can be sourced and how flexible screens will be developed in the coming years.
• We're not turning a blind eye to politics and finances this year. We're taking a geeks-eye view at credit risk and the financial markets, at the money in politics, and synthetic biology policy.
• We can't ignore engergy this year. There's a chance for America to become sustainable, for an electric grid to change the tech industry, for each of us to own our energy identity and how we can crowdsource energy-awareness.
• Constraints drive innovation and we can look to developing markets to find progress in action (such as the Playpower 8-bit computer from India). We'll learn about healthcare clinics and mobile versions of Mechanical Turk in Africa. Julian Bleecker of Nokia will share how fictional worlds can help us create new designs.

I hope to see you there.

eInk: A Possible Future for Paper

Guest blogger Nick Bilton is with the New York Times R&D Lab during the day and NYC Resistor at night.

Working in the R&D Labs at The New York Times, I'm constantly asked, "How long will paper be around?" or more to the point, "When will paper really die?" It's a valid concern, and a question no one can answer with a timetable. But there will be a point--and I believe in our lifetime--when we'll see the demise of the traditional print newspaper. After all, paper is just a device. It provides a way to communicate information, just as a TV, radio, cell phone, and billboard do. This isn't to say that newspapers will go away. The way they are delivered will just change, and in turn, the narrative as we know it will have to adapt--more on this in a later post. But paper can easily be replaced--and the factor that will drive this is simple economics.

Let's put books and magazines aside for a moment, and focus on newsprint. The cost of printing a national newspaper like the Wall Street Journal is close to $150k a day. That's just for the newsprint. When you factor in printing plant rental or ownership fees, machine maintenance, shipping, and wages for plant employees, drivers, and packers, the final cost is hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Now if you have an average of 1,000,000 subscribers to the newspaper on a daily basis (this is a rounded-down average of a few top papers) and you stopped printing the paper, but instead gave your readers an eReader at $200 apiece, it would take fewer than six months for you to recoup your costs. If you factor back in books and magazines, people who read more than one newspaper a day, and throw in the odd journal or two, you've got a multi-billion dollar industry that could collectively save billions of dollars a year by moving away from ink on paper.

But there are problems associated with this model. There's the environmental effect--devices may not be as benign as they seem, after the impact of manufacturing, materials, and shipping is considered. There's a human cost--people who print and deliver the paper would lose their jobs. There are the immense difficulties of advertising on small, different-sized devices--do advertisers create one ad at one size, or many different ones, do they animate, etc. And then there's the issue that you have to treat the device with care, something you don't need to do with paper.

But for every argument against digital paper, eInk or whatever you want to call it, there is a rebuttal, or at least there will be over time. The simple fact that an eInk device today can carry a thousand books and that it only needs recharging once a month speaks paramount. The ability to download content over the air instantly--something that the "digital native" generation fully expects--is compelling. And as far as cost goes, this will be a non-issue in the coming years. Look at the cost of a 15 Megabyte hard drive 20-plus years ago, it was $2495! Today, you couldn't buy or find that size hard drive anywhere, and if you could it would cost mere pennies to create. I'm willing to bet that the cost of an eInk device will be negligible in 20 years.

A common response to the prospect of an eReader is, "But I love the feel of paper, I love a good book in my hands." I can empathize with that sentiment, but I don't think the digital generation can. If it's not a touch screen, or hyperlinked, or instantly available at the press of a button, then it's not worth their time. And as soon as a reasonable iPod-like replacement comes along, paper won't be worth the publishing industry's time either.

Update: The title was updated.

Violet's Mirr:or: Internet of Things Via RFID

Today at PICNIC, Violet announced that it is releasing a mass-market RFID reader. The Mir:ror will connect to your computer via USB. It will read RFID tags placed near it and can perform actions based on them. I am not sure that the mass-market is ready for an RFID reader, but I think this will one will make headway in the geek community.

Via the Mir:ror any RFID tag can be used to trigger information retrieval, an application to load or a file to open. For example a metro card can bring up traffic conditions to help you decide how to get to work in the morning -- or anything else you assign it to do. Based on the screenshots there are a lot of actions that will be available at launch.

For objects that don't have RFIDs (known within Violet as Nobjects) there are Violet supplied stamps (I think that we have found a razor-blades revenue model). Two examples used in the presentation were: apply a stamp to your umbrella and you could bring up the weather or apply a stamp to a bottle of prescription medicine and you can track when you take your meds. I might use it with my passport to bring up my future travel schedule. In an ideal world I could use it to inventory my bag before, during and after travel to make sure no gadget is left behind. Violet will also be partnering with companies so that their products are pre-configured (the example in the talk was a children's book that could start an audio track).

The talk was high-concept, but from what I could tell upon reading an RFID tag client software will perform the requested action. It seemed however that most of the configuration would happen on the web. Like the Nabaztag, the Mir:ror will be a dumb-device and all the smarts will be on the computer. The Mir:ror will have an API (from what I could tell from the talk).

Violet is the company known for releasing the Nabaztag, the first-ever internet-connected Rabbit. The company strategy for connecting objects to the internet is simple:
* One: connect the Rabbits.
* Two: connect everything else.
Profit! is an unstated third part of the strategy. The Mir:ror is definitely a step towards completing this strategy.

PICNIC Network 2008

The week of September 22nd I am going to be flying across the Atlantic for the third PICNIC Network. Ever since i heard about the conference last fall I've wanted to attend. My friends' stories last year focused on the many RFID-enabled art pieces. As discussed in this interview these were developed by Mediamatic, a digital art lab.

Last year Mediamatic offers PICNIC delegates some fun and intriguing services. An RFID-tag was added to the PICNIC badges, and linked to the delegates profile on the PICNIC network. A team of top notch hackers, developers and dreamers got involved and came up with cute, fun and relevant new services. Remind us!.

"Last year we had the first version of the hackers camp where we built some cool physical interfaces for the PICNIC social network. We had the Photobooth, Badger, The Friend-Drink station, I-tea and of course a whole range of inspiring designs that we only could realise later."

Mediamatic is going to be hosting another hacking workshop and I'll be volunteering. Additionally there are a number of sessions and day long minitracks:

Surprising Africa has a great selection of content. I've never been to Africa, but there is an increasing amount of tech heading there. Google, Nokia and Vodafone are going to be describing their initiatives. Ethan Zuckerman will be discussing citizen journalism in Africa; Ethan gave an amazing talk at last year's ETech on this topic (Radar post).

Visible City is exploring the data available from cities. As their page states "What if an entire city could be visible from above, like we see it from an airplane? Not simply buildings and squares, but also the aggregation of people who populate it, outdoor as well as indoor. We could detect public gatherings and traffic jams, estimate which neighborhoods are most crowded, reconstruct commuting patterns during the day." This is very relevant for this year's ETech.

In the Internet of Things speakers from SAP, OpenSpime, and ThingM (amongst others) will be discussing how they are moving devices and objects online. This session makes me think of the soon-to-be released Fitbit, a personal web-enabled activity tracker. Soon it won't be just things online, but our passive data as well.

Perhaps the most significant event of the week be the Green Challenge. The winner will get €500,000 from Sir Richard Branson. Last year's winner was Qurrent, an energy consumption monitoring company.

If you're going to be there drop me a line.

Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers

There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF.

There has been some incredible discussion on the humanitarian tech and Geo lists in the past 24 hours around adapting/improving existing collaboration services to work with the tools in the field. Mikel Maron and I will be speaking about this at Where2.0 next week, and it looks like some exciting work will be happening there and at WhereCamp.

Eduardo Jezierski from InSTEDD is currently working to localize the Sahana Disaster Management System

Jonathan Thompson's organization, Humanlink, has been working on adapting technology for aid workers for some time. You can follow recent developments on the Aid Worker Daily blog.

Update: Paul Currion posted a big list of other projects now underway to the humanitarian.info blog:

• A Sahana instance is being set up for the use of anybody who needs it, with the support of INSTEDD and possible uptake by NetHope members.
• Direct Relief International have done up a KMZ file of health facilities in-country, based on the WHO 2002 Global Health Atlas.
• OCHA are prepping a HIC to support the existing Myanmar Information Management Unit, who have already put out some W3 maps.
• UNOSAT have also got their sat on with a KMZ file of the cyclone path and the usual satellite mapping.
• Ditto ITHACA, who have released a series of satellite maps showing the impact of Nargis.
• ReliefWeb’s info stream on Cyclone Nargis is of course like drinking water from a hose, with their map filter probably most useful.
• The WorldWideHelp blog roars into action with all the news that’s fit to blog.
• A couple of the mailing list discussions that I’m on are talking about ways in which we might leverage cellphone and/or satellite phone communications if they become available, particularly for tracking relief and relief personnel.
• Digital Globe and Geo-Eye have hopped the NASA satellite for an updating KML layer on the cyclone.
• Microsoft apparently have a team on standby to deploy the refugee tracking software that was developed for Kosovo (no reference yet).
• Telecoms sans Frontieres are also on standby out of Bangkok, waiting for access to free up.
• Also Infoworld points out that - with regards to early warning - IT didn’t fail Myanmar, people did.

(continue reading)

roBlocks: Simple Blocks To Make Robots

roBlocks are small, computerized cubes that can be combined to make robots. They began as research project at Carnegie Mellon. They look like great fun for fooling around or teaching programming concepts.

The catalog page shows about twenty different blocks. Each of those blocks has a single purpose. There are four types of blocks: Sensors (light, sound), Actuators (movement), Operators (negative, min/max) and Utility (power). When put together they can be made to perform complex actions.

The creators provide an example of roBlock's interactions in their paper "The Robot is the Program: Interacting with roBlocks":

It is easy to understand the basic idea of roBlocks by considering a simple light seeking robot made of two roBlocks: a light sensor block placed atop a tread block. The sensor measures the ambient light level and produces a number. The tread block gets that number from the light sensor block that sits on it, and runs its motor with a speed that corresponds to the magnitude of that number. To make the robot avoid light, take the two blocks apart and insert a red Inverse block between them. This operator block takes the number produced by the light sensor block, inverts it and transmits it to the tread block at the bottom. The new three-block robot moves away from a light source just as the previous robot moved toward it. This sort of modularity is possible because each of the blocks operates independently without knowing its place within the construction.

The creators are going to be commercializing them later this year. To see the prototypes in action check out this video. or play with their online simulator . No word on whether or not they will open source the hardware.

The world of programmable hardware is expanding. Between roBlocks, IPRE (the open-source robot-kit that was at ETech), BugLabs (the programmable, open-source gadgets -- Radar post) , and Lego MINDSTORMS NXT there is starting to be something for every sophistication level and wallet-size.

Baseball Simulations

How likely are the world records we hold dear? Should they have happened? Should they been set by the people who did them? There's an New York Times Opinion piece written by some researchers who examined Joe DiMaggio's 56 game hitting streak to determine how likely it was to happen again. Turns out it's very likely.

In the 10, 000 simulations the researchers ran on the entire history of baseball:

More than half the time, or in 5,295 baseball universes, the record for the longest hitting streak exceeded 53 games. Two-thirds of the time, the best streak was between 50 and 64 games.

In other words, streaks of 56 games or longer are not at all an unusual occurrence. Forty-two percent of the simulated baseball histories have a streak of DiMaggio’s length or longer. You shouldn’t be too surprised that someone, at some time in the history of the game, accomplished what DiMaggio did.

The real surprise is when the record was set. Our analysis reveals that 1941 was one of the least likely seasons for such an epic streak to occur.

In the rest of the article they discuss the other people more likely (based on the simulations) to have made the streak.

(via slashdot)