Radar Roundup: Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp)

• The Street as Platform (Dan Hill): amazing essay by Dan Hill (yet another genius formerly at the BBC) about the invisible cloud of data in a city street. "We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. [...] This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street."
• Service Design Notes: Tools, not Services (Chris Heathcote): frustrated by the limited functionality in his Nike+ because the service is intentionally feebly aimed at feeble "typical" consumers, Chris dashed off a quick rant about the trap of designing services. Users want tools, not services. And by building tools, you can build a service people want. The last two paragraphs are gold: "Tools will be bent and misused - which means you sell even more. And you don't have design in the usefulness - just find the useful functionality and package it up in an open-enough way to show possibilities."
• A Very Long Conversation with Dopplr's Matt Jones (SecondVerse): a long interview, mostly about design stuff, with Matt Jones. The bit that resonated with me was "Mother Box is not in the Box", which I translate as "you buy products that are front-ends to services", which is a short hop away from "these days a device needs a network to be useful". If you think of ubicomp as "it's about sensors, outputs, and computation", you can't forget the network that connects them all--and what life is like when that network disappears.
• Review of Everyware by Adam Greenfield (heyblog): a very detailed review of "Everyware" by Adam Greenfield. Matt Jones recommended Everyware to me as the first stop in a quick catchup of ubiquitous computing. "Everyware strikes a good balance between the impenetrable proceedings of the UBICOMP conferences and design writing. Adam expects the reader to get references to “Ctrl-Zing something away, “elevator pitches”, and “user experience” and something about how people behave with mobile phones".
• Being Human (Microsoft Research): subtitled "Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020". Love the "Transformations in Interaction" section: "The End of Interface Stability; The Growth of Techno-Dependence; The Growth of Hyper-Connectivity; The End of the Ephemeral; The Growth of Creative Engagement".
• William Gibson - The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview: "One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi. In a world of superubiquitous computing, you're not gonna know when you're on or when you're off. You're always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it's a drag." I linked to it from the first Radar Roundup but I know you skipped it, so I had to quote it all here. You made me do it.

Radar Roundup: Web

• Active URLs (Ned Batchelder): OmniTI have done something clever with their URLS—turned them into active verbs: their testimonials are at URLs like /helps/ning, their jobs page is at /is/hiring, etc.
• What's This Fascination with Ad Networks (John Battelle): I had breakfast at ETech with jbat (who runs the Web 2.0 Summit) and got a braindump of his thinking around web-based advertising. His end-game is fantastic: brand marketing as a value-adding interactive experience on the net rather than a proliferation of small text splash. He's beginning to blog his thoughts in the leadup to his conference on Conversational Marketing (as he calls this interactive brand marketing).
• Debategraph: anyone who has tried to have a conversation online with a lot of people will welcome any attempt to bring order to the chaos. Debategraph is a wiki debate visualization tool with RSS feeds, open modification, and more.
• In Japan, URLs Are Totally Out (Cabel Sasser): the founder of Panic Software talks about a trip to Japan where he realized nobody gives URLs any more, instead they show the search terms in a searchbox that will give their site. I saw this last year in New Zealand, where an airshow was advertised with huge black and white signs that just read "GOOGLE AIR SHOW". After briefly being confused ("man, is there ANYTHING that Google isn't doing?") I figured it out. Only problems I can see are that you're at the mercy of PageRank or you are committed to outspending whoever else wants to buy that keyword.
• Mail Trends: utility built for GMail but extended to any IMAP-capable server that lets you graph trends and activity in your email. First step to seeing a mail program that gives us insight into our email. Next step is to have the mail reader use that insight to manage our inbox. Are you listening, Mozilla Messaging? (see also 21 ways to visualize and explore your email inbox which has a high number of spam-related visualizations but is still worth checking out)

Radar Roundup: Brains

Today's topic is: our brains, understanding how they work, and living with the consequences of that knowledge.

• Brain Enhancement: Right or Wrong? (NYT): amazing gray areas we're getting into. Is it okay for a scientist to take brain-enhancing drugs? Compare with Wired News's write-up of Quinn Norton's ETech talk on the subject of how new bio technology will make us confront difficult questions around what it means to be human.
• How To Think (Ed Boyden's blog): Ten rules that were originally to be the basis for a class that taught MIT students how to think. Sample: "1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative."
• Notes on “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely (Toby Segaran's blog): fascinating list of ways in which we are irrational. The book looks interesting for its exposure of just these various ways in which we don't do the "right thing".
• Brain Rules: web site for the book by John Medina. Interesting book that tries to help people understand their brains and use them better. Ultimately it's frustrating: too much anecdote, not enough science for me. I came away feeling it would be a good 50 pager. I see a lot of people doing the "use your brain better" thing, possibly inspired by the $110M brain training software market (Nintendo is $80M of it). See gbrainy for an open source version. Vaughn Bell over at the Mind Hacks blog points to research that says the software doesn't work, and along the way coins the killer phrase "the four dopamen of the neurocalypse".
• Why we're powerless to resist grazing on endless web data (WSJ): "coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom." Push the lever, rat, and get your next damn blog post to read.
• Pricing and the brain (Economist): high-priced goods are perceived as better than low-priced, even to the point where high-priced placebos are more effective than lower-priced. Nobody's yet answered the question of what this means for open source/free software, other than to point out that it's a good reason for "free" to mean "freedom" and not simply "price".

Radar Roundup: UI

• Microsoft's Lucid Touch (DanceWithShadows): a semi-transparent device that you interact with by touching the back of the screen. A clever prototype from Microsoft Research, demoed at the recent TechFest.
• Multitouch Rubiks Cube (The Future is Awesome): cube that displays the colours and you gesture to rotate. Cute.
• NextWindow (ZDNet): nifty demo from a New Zealand vender of multitouch sensitive screens up to 100 inches in size. Also see the company site. They also make an overlay for existing screens that just plugs in and goes. Sweet!
• Weather Map Interface Lets You Feel The Wind (New Scientist): using haptic table with mounds to represent high pressure or high wind speed, valleys for low pressure or low speed. They report a region's atmospheric situation being easier to understand when experienced through the table.
• Cyber Goggles: High Tech Memory Aid (Pink Tentacle, which is the perfect name for a manga brothel): Tokyo researchers have built goggles that record everything you see and can annotate and caption objects in your field of view. I'm not sure I buy the idea that it'll help you remember things (anyone fancy captioning the real world to help your goggles? Me neither) but it has some sweet HUD possibilities--train it on Facebook so it'll pop up names of people when I meet them at conferences, etc.
• Multitouch Barcelona: blog of a group building a low-cost multitouch table and software to run on it. See also NUI Group, a group of researchers and hackers building and open sourcing new UI hardware. Check out the wiki to see how they built a multitouch table.
• Every Time I Think About You I Touch My Cell (Will Henderson's blog): hack to add multitouch gestures to new MacBook Pros and Airs. Sweet.

Radar Roundup: Data Mining and Visualization

• Visual Complexity: a proof sheet and index for the visualization projects on the web. cf InfoVis.
• TextRank Paper (PDF): "In this paper, we introduce TextRank--a graph-based ranking model for text processing, and show how this model can be successfully used in natural language applications." Some detective work suggests it might be (at least part of) the algorithm Google uses for book search results, raising the ghastly idea of print books being SEOed.
• SNA, a social network tools package for the R project. "A range of tools for social network analysis, including node and graph-level indices, structural distance and covariance methods, structural equivalence detection, p* modeling, random graph generation, and 2D/3D network visualization."
• Catching a Poker Cheat with Data Mining (Simple Complexity): how did the stats-savvy top players on a gambling website figure out that they were losing to cheats rather than just better players? They gathered and graphed the stats, and the bad guy stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. That's a link to a summary of the story, the full details are also online.
• The Meaning of Confidence (hunch.net): the word "confidence" is used several ways in machine learning papers. This short post teases out the difference senses.
• Data Park Search Engine: full text indexer for web sites. Love the feature list! Multiple languages, IDNA, accent-insensitive search, and more. Disclaimer: only just found it, haven't used it. It might delete all your cat captions and send your money to the moon for all I know.

Radar Roundup: Collective Intelligence

• Collective Intelligence Foo Camp was last weekend and attendees have been writing up their experiences. Adam from Inkling Markets, Matthew Hurst, Andrew Turner, Greg Linden, and Roger Ehrenberg (both days). From the camp (and Kim Rachmeier of Amazon) came the best definition of Collective Intelligence ever: "the network knows what the nodes do not".
• 6 Influential Datasets That Changed The World (Flowing Data). Food for thought: what will be the 7th?
• TextMap. A system that automatically tracks entities from news stories, as seen in Steve Skiena's MoneyTech talk. Check out Tom Cruise's page for an example. Adrian Holovaty gets data before it is buried in articles; Steve Skiena extracts the data from the articles.

Radar Roundup: Bio

(Feedback to the first week was that there were too many links per day and they were too random. This week I'll try keeping it to 3-5 links, themed each day. First up: biotech and personal genomics.)

• Insurance Fears Lead Many to Shun DNA Tests (NYTimes, reg required): many people not going through doctors to get DNA tested because of fears the insurance companies will learn the results and raise premiums or deny coverage. This suggests the personal genomics testing companies like 23 and Me will be popular.
• More on personal genomics services (Genetics and Health): has a surprisingly (to me) list of personal genomics companies at the end. Interesting that they may differentiate on counselling and services—membership plans, even. Reminiscent of open source business models, only you still have to pay for the tests (at the moment) with the personal genomics companies.
• Knome signs up first two paying clients for whole-genome sequencing (Genetic Future): $350k per person gets you the full sequence of your genome. As the blog points out, though, "no-one has a clue about the functional effects of most variations in the genome". Capability exceeds utility at the moment.
• So Called Life (WNYC, audio): science show episode about moelcular biology. Interviews with the MIT kids creating differently-smelling e. coli, and with George Church (making bacteria that produce biofuels) and Codon Devices founder (they generate genes commercially). (via Jason Stajich's blog)

Radar Roundup

• Reactable video, nifty UI.
• A critical look at the Chumby (NYTimes, reg required). O'Reilly is an investor in Chumby. My take is that it's a bit odd to focus on the author's opinion that Chumby's business model is repugnant to business, without talking to any business who has a problem with it (or a business that doesn't).
• Collective Intelligence in the "I Love Bees" alternate reality game (PDF). (via BoingBoing). They kept pushing the players harder and harder and the players met every challenge, down to "we'll randomly call payphones 15 seconds apart and the second has to repeat what the first said".
• The Evolving Newsroom, blog from Julie Starr who was "chief change agent" for Telegraph Media Group's multimedia newsroom in London. I had lunch with her yesterday and we brainstormed a pile of projects. She talked about FastCompany.com's rebirth as a community, powered by Drupal.
• Vector Magic graduates from Stanford and is now a separate company. Vector Magic produces vector images from bitmaps. Now you have to buy tokens to get the vector files.
• Light Identity Computer Installation (NYU ITP). Beautiful effects. The only three things I wish I'd done when I was in the US: get to an ITP show, attend SXSW, and see the Grand Canyon.
• Andy Baio writes about independent games developers and the games industry vs web industry.
• Random House allows DRM-free audio books (BoingBoing). Brilliant. I love this: "In the announcement, Random House notes that they've been running a DRM-free audiobook program with eMusic for months, and that none of the pirate editions of their audiobooks online came from those DRM-free editions; rather, they've come from DRM'ed editions that were cracked, and from ripped CDs." Good to have confirmation for what we've long suspected.
• Django Goes Pro (Reddit) - Jacob Kaplan-Moss is going to be working on Django, the Python web-application framework full-time at Whiskey Media. Congrats Adrian!

Radar Roundup

• Yahoo! launch world's largest production Hadoop installation (Yahoo!). Hadoop is the open source implementation of Google's map-reduce system of parallel programming. For background on Hadoop, see Doug Cutting and Eric Baldeschwieler's the OSCON 2007 talks.
• Author of this article at Duke University is having his genome sequenced at Harvard as part of his writing a book about personal genomics.
• Brain Control Headset for Gamers (BBC). New UIs are breakin' out all over.
• Tom Coates reviews the OLPC (Tom's blog). I wish more tech writing were this good.
• Library of Congress taps Silverlight to enhance access (via Tim Bray). I like some of the stuff Microsoft has been doing, but this is a backward step for the LoC, accessibility, and openness. It feels like "we'll pay to digitize your data, but your web site can only deliver it to Windows users" and someone at the LoC said "ok!". Tell me this isn't the case!
• An interesting post from Sean McGrath about how programmers keep reinventing the things that make sane parallel programming possible.
• A look back in time to hosting packages from a decade ago (Pingdom's blog). From 150M of storage to >150G, but price is exactly the same.
• Why we banned Legos (Rethinking Schools). I think there are lessons for team leads and open source programmers in how the kids played with Legos.
• Brad Neuberg, Tara Hunt, and Chris Messina in an article on coworking (NYTimes, reg required). Go Foos!
• PlayMotion's core product is a camera and software that lets people interact with projected video. Now they have multitouch interfaces to rear-projected screens. This could be very cool. See their sample movies (WMV) for a sample. (Found via this Tech Journal South article).

Radar Roundup

• Antivia, a Business Intelligence 2.0 Solution. Despite the title, it's an interesting premise—add social networking and collective intelligence (people who liked also liked) to enterprise reports.
• EDGE have a Drew Endy interview. Drew's the Synthetic Biology pioneer from Foo Camp and OSCON.
• Grand Challenges of Engineering from the National Academy of Engineering. Many of their challenges are also on our radar and will be explored ETech: Make Solar Energy Affordable, Advance Health Informatics, Engineer Better Medicines (including personal genomics), Reverse-Engineer the Brain (shades of Mind Hacks here, and I can't wait to see what the Mind Hacks site editor Vaughn has to say about it), Secure Cyberspace (if you need to be convinced, go to a security talk by Foo and author Rasmus Lerdorf—he lays down exactly how difficult this is to get right), Enhance Virtual Reality (I'd argue that virtual and physical are blurring, rather than Virtual is Getting Better; things like multitouch, gestural interfaces, and physical computing are all making this come true. I loved William Gibson's line from his Rolling Stone interview: "One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable."); and on a personal note I'm a huge fan of Advance Personalized Learning and systems like New Zealand's AsTTle for getting there. (via sci Foo Deepak)
• Synthetic Biology used to make biofuels and malaria drugs.
• Surprise Modeling. This is the work of Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz, who attempts to mix machine learning with cognitive insights to help people avoid surprises. His current application (being commercialized) is in traffic.
• Matt Webb's birthday was the 18th. I love how he first describes the significance of his age: "my lightcone is two weeks away from Gamma Pavonis and some weeks ago enveloped its 45th star, Kappa-1 Ceti." Matt's one of that crop of absolutely brilliant thinkers that the BBC had
• Credentica gives security and privacy, they claim. "By protecting privacy, you can actually enhance security," [founder] Brands says. "My goal is to get the best of both worlds.". Talk of a free SDK to get adoption, the way RSA did.
• Bryan O'Sullivan looks at popular Perl packages. Databases, Unicode, and HTML parsing are the most popular.
• The Economist on Chinese Internet use. 210M users, up 50% from previous year, now 3x India's Internet-using population. 70% under 30. Will overtake America in a few months. Ecommerce stifled by government. Mobile content the big moneymaker. Multiplayer games so popular the government's worrying about their impact on productivity. Well worth reading.
• Telex lives on, as a legally valid document transfer system. Love the chart showing the precipitous decline in Telex brought on by teh intarwebs.
• Twitter in the Economist, about Ana Marie Cox (whom we old-timers remember and worship for her time at Suck.com) covering the campaign trail in her tweets.
• The Economist on leapfrogging technology (and again), reporting on a World Bank Global Economic Prospects 2008 report on Technology Diffusion in the Developing World. Takeaway: leapfrogging is rare because many technologies require other tech in place, and this dependence tree acts against adoption.

Radar Roundup

I'm trying a new idea here, a summary of news about Foos and the themes that we're tracking on Radar (It's testament to how well ETech reflects our Radar that so many topics show up there). Hope it gives you some interesting reading.

• Nathan Eagle's Reality Mining slides on Slideshare. Nathan will be speaking about reality mining at ETech.
• Adam Nelson discovers face detection is hard. He was thinking of it for the Gallery 2 PHP image gallery software, but OpenCV's sample code is still pretty unreliable. CV is still in the early days of going mainstream, and the code is more for early stage proof of concept than deployment. In other words, you still need a masters or better to know how to tweak it so it works. At least, that's what I think. It'll be fun to hear Gary Bradski who wrote OpenCV talk about it at ETech.
• GestureTek is one of many companies out there selling new interface technology. They let you shake your mobile phone, multitouch a screen, wave a Wii-like remote around, or point with your finger. Others we've had at Foo Camps include Jeff Han and Onomy Labs. At ETech we have Dan Saffer from Adaptive Path talking about Designing Gestural Interfaces. See also this survey of hand posture and gesture recognition techniques from Pankaj's Haptics blog.
• Barack Obama is given an easy question at Google. It reminded me, if incidentally, of a nascent movement to press Foo Larry Lessig into running for office. Larry will, of course, be at ETech.
• Boston Globe article on synthetic biology. Precis: we're not creating life yet, we're barely starting down that road. Great quote from Venter in 2000: "we know shit about biology". See yesterday's post on Personal Genomics and Synthetic Bio for more.
• Jade, a Mac image correction program. Significant because they're working towards making it all automatic. Worth watching, and interesting because they're Italian and running this from a gorgeous place to visit.
• PhotoSketch Google TechTalk from June last year.
• Jon Gregorio's "Me", an aggregation of all his readily-remixable online traces. Fascinating idea. I see the Social Graph API heading this way (wish I could have been at Social Graph Foo Camp to hear more of the plans for the API). Hopefully it'll also make companies like Spock unnecessary.
• Kevin Kelly on the need for Top Down as well as Bottom Up.
• Tinkering School teaches kids to take control of Make-ing things. As seen at TED. Fantastic. I wish I could send my kids.

Morning Links

Don't have time for any reflective blogging this morning, but I've been frustrated by all the stories going by that I don't have time to comment on, and wonder if it's worthwhile just to put up a link post every morning, as well as any commentary. Let me know if you think that this kind of link-list post is worthwhile to you. (We've also been kicking around adding some kind of widget to radar that would let us collectively share our del.icio.us links, or something like that. Feel free to share any thoughts on the best mechanism for us to share our backchannel linking with you.)

At any rate, here are this morning's notable links:

• EMC wants to build distributed cloud computing (via Peter Brantley)
  
• Microsoft 'Frees' Office Formats (via Dave Farber)
  
• Viruses in Virtual Worlds (via Dave Farber)
  
• National Academy of Engineering On the Singularity (via Slashdot)
• Personal Democracy Forum June 23-24 (via Micah Sifry)
  
• Matt Webb's latest mindblowing presentation (via Nat)
• Google as Energy Intensive Industry (Harper's shows plans of latest data center on the Columbia River).