The RoBlog

Age-Dependent Age Units

2009-04-04T12:55:00.000-07:00

I occasionally think about how the speed of time passing is dependent on the age you are. The basic premise is that the older that you are, the smaller a percentage of your life any increment of time is.

With this in mind, and the fact that my daughter firmly corrected me for saying that that she was six ("six AND A HALF"), today's shower thought was about when we should switch what units we refer to people's age as.

This addresses the question of when you switch from days to weeks when talking about a baby's age, and extends it on to old age (where I take a bit of a back-track; see below).

What I've done is assumed that age 30 (years) is about when years start going by really fast, used the percentage of your life a year is at that point (about 3%) and used that fraction as the point that we should change age units starting with minutes after birth. I adjusted things slightly to better fit with units of time that we frequently use (rather than, say, 3 minute increments I went to 5).

So here we go:

At birth, count age by minutes (i.e. "she is 14 minutes old")
At 30 minutes old, count age in 5 minute increments (i.e. "he is 55 minutes old")
At 150 minutes old, count in 10 minute increments
At 5 hours old, count in half hours
At 15 hours, count in whole hours
At 30 hours, count in 2 hour increments
At 2 days, count in quarter day increments
At 7.5 days, switch to half days
At 15 days, switch to full days
At 30 days, switch to 2 day increments
At 8 weeks, switch to 1 week increments
At 6 months, switch to quarter months (i.e. "she is 7 and a quarter months")
At 7.5 months, switch to half-months (i.e. "he is 13 and a half months")
At 15 months, switch to full months
At 2.5 years, switch to quarter years (i.e. "she is 6 and three quarters years")
At 7.5 years, switch to half years
At 15, switch to full years

Now check this out:

At 30 years, switch to 2 year increments (i.e. you will never be 37, you'll go straight from your 36th birthday to your 38th 2 years later)
At 60, switch to 5 years.

After a while individual years become important again (as a sign of achievement), so I'm suggesting:

At 90, switch back to 2 year increments
At 100, switch back to 1

And there you have it.

So my daughter will be, no doubt, happy to know that she is 6 and three-quarters, my wife that she will be 36 for an additional year, and my parents that they are 60.

No need to thank me. Your eye-rolling will be quite enough.

Group Story Telling on Twitter (Concept)

2008-12-01T07:46:00.000-08:00

Here's an idea I had yesterday about using Twitter as a mass-story-making system. I've been enthralled with story telling through Twitter since nearly its inception (when I tried to get some people to do an arc of Lost during its off season, which each person tweeting from a character account).

Usually my interest is in the blurry line between reality and fiction that you can play with. This idea, however, is more about how to create a story as a group.

Feel free to steal this as I'm unlikely to build it. Let me know if you do.

So here's the idea, as a series of 140 characters or less.

TwitStory
Core
The parameters of a story are set up and made publicly available.
Interested participants follow the TwitStory account on Twitter.
The first line of the story is sent through the account.
Participants have a period of time to respond with an @ message to that account.
The reply message should extend the story.
One response is selected from all received during the timeframe.
The selected response is published through the TwitStory account, and the cycle begins again.

Options
For story parameters:
"Christmas" in 84 cycles (a short story over a week (12 updates a day for 7 days))
"Liberation" in novel length (an interesting experiment in long-form cohesiveness)
"He said, she said" (story telling using only inter-character dialog)

For selecting the next line:
The first @ reply received becomes the next line. Fastest wins, but this can be gamed and may not lead to the best storyline.
Prospective respondents have some period of time (5-10 minutes) at which point people can vote on which of the received lines should be the next one.

For voting:
Everyone can vote (can potentially be gamed by having friends vote for you).
Lines are occasionally chosen at random. Everyone who has been chosen with a line gets to vote. Decreases fraud, may decrease interest.

For publishing:
Publish new lines once an hour from 8am Pacific to 8pm Pacific. Allows people to continue with their life. Hits most active time periods.

Extensions
Every line that comes in becomes its own branch of the story. While not updated through the TwitStory account, they can be updated online.

Fairy Story for an Older Audience

2008-10-13T22:06:00.001-07:00

Here's the same story as in my last post (well, the beginning anyways), only written for a much older audience. Not sure if it succeeds any better than the children's version.

---------

It's a little known fact that, upon the final hour before your death, all of the colors of the world become slowly more saturated, and all the sounds more distict and resonant, until, the moment before your death, you may become overwhelmed by them.
It is a little known fact not because it is not common, but because we don't want to see it, the way we don't want to see a vagrant, or a mugging. Few of us are brave enough to wonder at it unless our death catches us wholly unawares. And those that do? Well their time for pondering is limited, now isn't it?
I say these things not because they were apparent to me, at least not the first time, but because I came to see - see in that same way - in time.
It is a myth that rats are dirty in and of themselves. They have ever been associated with disease and evil. Such is their lot in this world. That is, to be misunderstood, not, in fact, to be bad.
The rats have had their own evil incarnate as long as their collective memories can dwell backwards: fleas. It is the flea who is the spawn of the underworld, spreading plagues amongst the innocent and unknowning. It is from the fleas that the rats are given their burden. Ever to be chased. Ever to be reviled. Ever to be destroyed.
Somewhere, just now, a group of small baby rats are being born. Somewhere dark, somewhere warm, and somewhere safe. For a time they will play and nip and run and, once they have weaned, shall assume their role here. To be chased, to be reviled, and even to be destroyed, all while doing their service, and trying to protect.
The rat is not alone in its dual role of vilification and protection. The crow too carries this burden. But, unlike the rat, who accepts his burden with resigned acquiescense, the crow accepts it under great protest. For the crow is endowed with wings that allow it to sit within view while it scolds (ever scolding), and flit away once its dissatisfaction is satisfactorily delivered.
Unlike the rat, whose early days are marked with a joviality soon to be forsaken, the crow is trained early from the start. A crow is delivered the accepted propaganda from the moment its egg is laid. Once hatched, it knows its mission. Once fledged, it undertakes it. Again to be reviled. Again to be disdained. Again to protect.
The squirrel, the final player in this, our opening volley, plays a different role altogether from the rat and the crow. Encased in disarming cuteness, moving with apparent impish glee (and the analogy here is more than skin deep), the squirrel sits on the same frontline in our story as the crow and the rat, but on the opposite side. For the squirrel, you see, is the scout. Able to get close without raising alarm, they watch us, passing their information through complicated networks masked in chasing games and nut hoarding. "To whom?" you may ask. That we shall soon enough see, but the "whom" in this tale is certainly no friend to you or me.
You may have deduced that the story that I am about to tell you has cast the role of evil to the cute and good to the loathesome, but rest assured that this is not so in every case. You may wonder about your playful dog, or skulking cat. Whose side are they on? You can take an easy breath on this count as the animals whom we have domesticated (and they who have domesticated us) are with us (by and large). They sit on neither the side of the rat nor the side of the flea. They sit, as helpless as we do, in the middle, as largely unwitting pawns in the grander game of the squirrels and the crows and theirs.
Let us begin this story proper by introducing a character through whose eyes you will better see the world in which we now find ourselves. As a brief background, suffice it to say that there are special places in this world where the overworld and the underworld meet. By "special" I do not mean to imply that such places are few (as they are not), but that they have an indefinable quality about them that you can feel when you are there, but don't know is missing when you are not.
You may be surprised when I say that this is our world. Or, rather, your world. The very one in which you live now. Such special places are confined to no one corner of the Earth; they exist where ever there are men. The particular one that I will take you to is not special in and of itself save that it is here that we have someone to meet.
She sits on a concrete step, with her legs dangling over the edge reaching nearly half the distance to the tread below. She sings softly to herself, but only because she presumes herself to be alone (she is far too young and inexperienced to see us quite yet). The late spring sun has proven too attractive to resist, so she suns herself here. If you did not know better, you would think that she was waiting for her long absent love to return and sweep her up in his arms; she has that air about her. But she is too young even for that fantasy. What she is expecting is us, though she does not know it. And as we get close enough to make out the curly brown hair hanging like lazy vines down her face, and note the artful orange stroke applied to the length of her otherwise simple white dress, we can also see that she is now positively buzzing with excitement.
But it's about now that you really fixate on the things that are off about this description (perhaps you already were). The scale is off; she is very small relative to the 13 steps running down to the sidewalk. Perhaps you initially thought she was some sort of animal given how this story began, but the mention of curls and a dress, though not entirely unlikely in a story like this, has lead you to think this is more of a person that we are looking at. It is at this point that you might realize that the use of the word "buzzing" in the previous paragraph was somewhat more than just a metaphor (I like to think I'm clever like that, occasionally). It is when she pauses, apparently straining to hear some hint of us (though who we are she has quite no idea), every fiber of her silent, that you can see her wings. For this girl I have chosen to show to you is a fairy, and, so that you will not think of her as an abstract being to whom you cannot relate, I will tell you that her name is Amelia, and she is just on the cusp of turning 5.
Now I realize that you may have had no idea that this would be a tale about faries, much less with a main character so very young, but I do implore you to hang about for just a bit longer. Perhaps it would help that I remind you that this is no fairy tale of yore in some place long shrouded in the mists of time. Amelia lives on Flanders Street, in the Laurelhurst Neighborhood of the city of Portland, Oregon, on the western edge of the United States, and the vehicles that are driving by decidedly horseless.

Children's Fairy Story

2008-10-13T21:54:00.000-07:00

Wow, after reading this for the first time in a while, I realize that it needs a lot of work yet. But since it probably won't get it, here it is for you! It was written to be read to children of about 3-4 years old. It was intended to be a simple first meeting story, with the word choice being slightly challenging.

-------

In the twilight of a summer night, in the neighborhood of Laurelhurst, on a street called Hazelfern Place, a boy named Jack played in theback yard of the red house where he lived.
The sun had just climbed down from the sky, and the full moon was peeking up over the horizon, when he heard a familiar sound.
A brown squirrel was racing, as it often did, down the fence that connected the back yards of all of the houses.
Its claws were scraping loudly on the wood of the fence and it shouted happy squirrel talk as it ran.
Chasing the squirrel was something Jack hadn't seen before. A glowing, yellow . . . something.
The squirrel ran across the back fence of Jack's house so fast that he could only see a blur of brown as it passed.
The yellow something went by just as fast, but as he watched it disappear down the fence, Jack thought he saw what looked likepeople arms, and people legs, and wings that didn't look people-like at all.
And now that he was looking at the something, he heard a new sound too. The something was laughing.
"Cool," said Jack softly at the fading glow.
An excited look appeared on his face and he shouted "Again! Again! Again!" jumping up and down with each word.
The sounds of chattering squirrel, scraping claws, and the laughing something got quieter and quieter until Jack almost couldn't hear them any more.
And then the sounds started getting louder, and louder still until he could finally see the pair running down the fence towards his yard.
When they crossed into his yard, Jack waved his arms, jumped up into the air, and yelled, "HEY!".
Surprised at the unexpected sound, the squirrel stopped its chattering, ran to the nearest overhanging tree limb, and disappeared up it.
The yellow glowing something suddenly became a dark blue something and fell off the fence into a fern in Jack's yard.
Jack ran over to where the something fell, and even though it was getting dark out, and even though the something was glowing only alittle bit, he could see it . . . and it looked like a very small, scared, crying girl.
"Are you okay?" asked Jack. "Did you get a owy?"
The little girl only sniffled, her glow growing darker yet.
Jack's face lit up with a smile. "You want to see what I can do?" He asked. And before the little girl could answer Jack jumped straight up into the air, and landed crouching with his arms out to either side.
The small girl, who Jack could see a little bit better now, was staring at him with her mouth hanging open. She seemed to be waiting for something.
Maybe she was waiting to see Jack do something else.
"Watch this one!" yelled Jack, taking a long run and then leaping into the air again, tucking his legs under him before landing with hisarms and legs extended like a big X.
The little girl's glow changed from blue to green at the same time a smile burst on to her face.
"How about THIS one!" Jack shouted, now smiling himself. He ran up the two stairs to the deck, turned around and jumped off of it with his arms pointing straight ahead. He tried to land on just one foot, but fell over and rolled a couple of times.
The little girl began laughing, her color turning bright yellow again. "That was funny," she said in a tiny voice.
Jack smiled the smile that he smiled when he got ice cream. "You want to try?"
The little girl, still giggling a little, nodded and stood up.
The wings that Jack had seen before unfolded themselves from behind her, and Jack could see that the glow that followed her everywhere was coming from them.
She flapped her wings quickly, and then faster and faster until at last she leaped into the air.
For a few seconds she hung in the air, her wings flapping furiously, before she finally fell back to the ground panting.
"I'm not big enough to fly yet, but soon I'm going to fly up so high I'll touch the sky," she puffed.
"I'm Jack," said Jack, still grinning.
When the little girl with the big wings didn't say anything back, he asked "Are you a butterfly?"
"I'm not a butterfly. I'm Amelia!" said Amelia proudly.
Her face suddenly went still and she looked scared again.
"Oh no!" she said, "It's dark. I have to go home now!"
She turned around part running, part flying towards the back fence where Jack had first seen her.
She bounded up the fence and stopped at the top, looking back at Jack.
"You want to come over and play later 'melia?" asked Jack.
"Ok Jack," she said, and waved and turned to run back across the fence that connected all of the houses.
"Bye 'melia!" he yelled after her, watching her glow disappear down the fence.
Jack watched until he couldn't see her any more, and then started running and jumping as high as he could.
He flapped his arms as fast as he could, but landed on the ground just like always.
He tried again and again until he couldn't run any more.
"Maybe I'm not big enough to fly yet either,' he said, and then went up the deck steps, and inside to have some dinner.

Back at it

2008-10-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

Hi.

Yeah, so this is a little awkward. I realize that we haven't spoken in a couple of years, but I wanted you to know it was mostly me, not you. I got distracted for a while, and, as happens with me, I ended up flirting with other interests. I hope you will understand.

In any case, I'm back (for a bit anyway).

I wrote up a couple of posts criticizing work that other people had done, and thought it might be time to toss some more of my own stuff out there for the same treatment.

The next two articles are stories that I've written (in the first case) or started two write (in the second).

Here's some context:
The first story is one I wrote as a colaborative effort with some friends. We were playing with the idea of creating an illustrated children's book. That didn't end up panning out so I share the last draft that I can find with you. I have some wonderful editting comments from one of the friends, but I can't find a draft that incorporates them, so you're stuck with a rawer form until I can find them, or become unlazy enough to fix it again. This book was to be part of an ambitious series of books, movies, and more, designed to grow up with the children. The stories would get more complicated and sophisticated as both the children in the stories and the children reading them grew up. There was a plot big enough to sustain this epic adventure, with the opportunity for many side trips along the way.

When the book stalled, I toyed around taking the same story to a much older audience with a more distinct writing style. That's the fragment you get in the second story.

I have a couple of other stories that I've started over the last few years that I'll share from time to time.

Since they're all in very raw places, and I'm more of a starter than a finisher, I submit them to you to do with as you will. I expect most people will ignore them, but perhaps someone would be interested in correcting, elaborating, rebutting, or prodding me into working on one that particularly interests them.

Thanks for visiting, regardless. Let's not spend so much time in silence again, shall we?

FutureGrinder: Participatory Panopticon with Jamais Cascio

2006-03-15T17:56:00.000-08:00

Conversation with Jamais (35MB, 49mins)

Jamais Cascio, co-founder and Senior Contributing Editor of WorldChanging.com gave a presentation at the Accelerating Change 2005 converence where he described his idea of a "Participatory Panopticon" - a society where everyone is constantly recording their experiences because so doing helps make their life easier.

As I've been interested in that idea myself for quite some time (and was, in fact, recording constantly at the conference), I was immediately intrigued. I was not disappointed. I found myself nodding heavily in agreement with his thoughts.

After his presentation, I asked him if he'd be willing to talk a bit more about the world of always on recording, and this conversation was the result.

The RobCast: Roadtrains with Bruce McHenry

2006-02-10T21:36:00.000-08:00

Interview with Bruce (53MB, 58mins)

I met Bruce McHenry at the Accelerating Change 2005 conference where we got to talking about the future of transportation. As it happens, he is a transportation consultant helping to bring about (among other things) "roadtrains", which are collections of physically coupled cars travelling together to make better use of both the road and fuel.

I thought it would be fun to record a conversation with him, and he agreed. After many months of schedule jockeying, we finally were able to connect. Our conversation not only covered the direction Bruce thinks we should take passenger transportation on the roads, but touched on collaboration systems and mental illness.

You can find Bruce on the web at DiscussIt.org.

I'd love to hear any comments on the discussion if you care to leave them.

NTalk 3: The Introduction

2006-01-06T07:24:00.000-08:00

An introduction

Accelerating change and system complexity as a braking factor

Magic and the man from 3000 years ago

The N-Type brain

Modern tribes

Left brain versus right brain and personality type

NTalk 2: Internet TV, Africa

2005-12-03T15:12:00.000-08:00

NTalk is an occasional conversation by and for (but not necessarily about) Meyers-Briggs Intuitive (or "N") personality types between Rob (INTP) and Kevin (ENTP) and any other N types we can sucker in.

In this installment we talk about where TV is going and what relationship the Internet has to it, and how Africa may be an economic force of power faster than you might think.

NTalk 1: Zero, Election Systems

2005-11-21T07:05:00.000-08:00

NTalk is an occasional conversation by and for (but not necessarily about) Meyers-Briggs Intuitive (or "N") personality types between Rob (INTP) and Kevin (ENTP) and any other N types we can sucker in.

In this installment we talk about the fabulous-ness of zero, and a couple of different ways of holding political elections that might do a better job of representing the will of the people.

Kurzweil and Transportation

2005-09-30T07:24:00.000-07:00

If Kurzweil's general observations - that "progress" is made on an exponential curve - hold for transportation, would that imply that systems like PRT, or fleeting, or other systems that would increase the average throughput of daily transportation systems, must come into play soon?

It would be interesting to see a plot of the average trip to work time as far back as it could be traced. In the US, at least, I wouldn't be surprised if the time had been getting longer throughout most of the last century. My guess is, however, that the average throughput (people per second?) of a particular segment of land transportation infrastructure has probably gone up. This may indicate that you have to choose your metrics wisely if you're trying to get one of Kurzweil's curves.

Bumpersticker Wisdom, Part 2

2005-08-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

Transform the Ubiquitous

Bumpersticker Wisdom, Part 1

2005-07-22T06:53:00.000-07:00

Create the Dominant Paradigm

London Bombings and Wikipedia

2005-07-07T08:47:00.000-07:00

It's impressive how fast the Wikipedia is keeping up with events. Check out the article on the London bombing, and, more interestingly, check out it's change log.

I haven't read the entry yet, but, at long last, there may be a good community maintained resource for events as they happen.

The RobCast: RealityFlythrough w/Neil McCurdy

2005-06-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

I recently saw an article on Roland Piquepaille's web site about a project called RealityFlythrough. The project aligned so well with where I see pervasive cameras taking us that I just had to talk to Neil McCurdy, whose doctoral candidate project this was.

Fortunately, Neil was gracious enough to spend 45 minutes to talk with me via Skype about what RealityFlythrough is all about, and to touch a bit on where it may be taking us.

Here's a link to the audio interview (~45 mins, ~21MB). Be warned, I noticed at least one drop out at the very end, and there may be more. If you find a significant one, let me know and I'll see if I can recover it from the raw audio.

Here are links to some of the things discussed in the interview:

Neil's Web Site

The link to the RSS feed for his site

Neil mentions the Human Pacman game developed at the National University of Singapore (hmm, I'm getting a DNS error on my original link to the project, so if you find it broken, try this link instead and scroll down)

I mentioned an augmented reality project concerned with projecting virtual objects into real space. I was probably talking about this, although here I mention something that seems in the ballpark as well (the destination link on this page also goes to the Singapore server that I can't see at the moment).

Neil mentioned an Intel research project called Place Lab which is an effort to provide location data both inside and outside, and in a privacy-aware manner. Very interesting.

As an aside, Neil brought up privacy as a potential hurdle to enabling ubiquitous cameras to perform interesting and useful functions. Certainly we'll be running in to this issue of the creeping loss of what we have traditionally seen as "privacy". I think this warrants a series of discussions all on its own. I'd love to hear any opinions out there.

And while you're giving me your opinions, I'd also love to hear about any other cool, forward-looking, potentially tranformative projects going on out there, and also where you think they might be taking us in the future. Feel free to leave a comment below, or drop me an email.

The Internet in an Emergency

2005-06-20T07:58:00.000-07:00

[NOTE: This is the first article that's come out of an experiment I'm doing using Wiki's as a way to formulate thoughts. This one came out fully formed, so it's kind of a cheat, but the Wiki space will hopefully help thoughts grow more organically rather than having to come out complete. Check it out if that seems interesting.]

I've been doing some work on an information system for my neighborhood, so issues relating to information flow in a geographic area have been floating around my head a bit.

It occurred to me that if there is an emergency in a neighborhood or city, that restoring Internet access is increasingly critical.

Given that people are already using the Internet as a primary means of communication, with VoIP capturing an increasing number of users every day, restoring Internet to an effective area has become at least as important as restoring phone service.

Given it's ability to coordinate groups and disseminate information, it is becoming as important as restoring power (though there is a ways to go yet), and it's importance will only increase over time.

I wonder if our neighborhood emergency plan (or the city plan covering our neighborhood) includes an emphasis on getting some semblance of the Internet back up after a disaster. I'd guess not given the wide range of providers and mechanisms involved. For example, do you bring up cable first? DSL? Cellular?

Probably it makes better sense to create a few satellite uplinks where people could bring their increasingly portable computers and connect in pre-determined locations.

Does your community include a plan for restoring communications in an emergency? Does it include the Internet?

Let me know. I'd be interested to hear about it, how it works, and how it got in to the plan.

Neighborhood Information System

2005-06-19T20:42:00.000-07:00

Here's an idea that's been circling in the back of my mind for the last couple of years: a Neighborhood Information System. Basically, this would be a place where all members of a community could contribute information to a central location for the benefit of other people in the neighborhood.

I have some pretty ambitious plans for what such a system might be like, and what it could do...which means it will probably never happen.

The GOOD news (depending on who you are, I suppose) is that it occurred to me that there are plenty of useful tools out there right now to do a pretty good first pass at such a system without having to build it from scratch. Wikis, for example are a good place to host information that is relatively static, like neighborhood history. Blogs are a good way of providing news, and message boards are a great place to share dynamic information, among other things.

My short term vision is that the best of breed open source versions of these tools would be combined into one system for the primary purpose of providing a single login for all of the tools. This would then be released as open source for any other neighborhoods that wanted to put it in to place, and potentially add their own improvements.

The driving force, however, is to allow ANYONE to contribute to ALL aspects of the system. This means add/change historical information, create news items, and create a new topic in the message board. I believe this system will work best if there is no centralized control (though I DO think it's appropriate to have oversight committees for such things as taxonomy, design, and contribution guidelines). Instances where a single person, or group of individuals should have absolute control over some portion of the system should be exceedingly rare.

It is in this spirit that I've started a Wiki for the Laurelhurst neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. This is a test set up on a hosted wiki service that uses ads for revenue. Ultimately the goal would be to get on a system that was not ad supported and ran an integrated system, but at this point I'm thinking baby steps.

If you live in the Laurelhurst neighborhood, feel free to drop by, sign up and start adding stuff. If you are interested in the concept and think it would be interesting, drop me a comment even if you don't live in my neighborhood. As I said previously, I see this as being something that every neighborhood could use for free (though you may have to provide your own hosting) so there's no reason it has to just be about where I live.

I've looked around to find if such a system already exists and didn't come up with much luck. But if YOU know of such a project in progress, leave a comment with a link. I'd much rather not rebuild the wheel if I didn't have to.

Underground Automated Highway System (UAHS)

2005-06-15T20:03:00.000-07:00

John Smart recently included a vision paper on a possible future mode of transit in the most recent issue of the Accelerating Times newsletter. Note that this issue references the availability of the audio portion of Peter Thiel's presentation on Virtual Money at last year's Accelerating Change 2004 conference, where yours truly can probably (I haven't listened to the audio yet) be heard asking the one question I worked up enough nerve to ask during the conference.

He provides a vision for a form of transportation that would relieve the most crowded cities of their surface traffic burden. He envisions a network of underground tunnels in which vehicles can travel in a completely automated fashion. The details of Mr. Smart's vision will not be explicitly repeated here. His short paper on the subject is very consumable, so interested persons should get the PDF here.

Mr. Smart's paper was not intended to be a thorough treatise on the subject of underground travel, but rather to lay out a vision of a
possible future that he believes is likely to unfold.

Similarly, my thoughts are not intended to be a result of a thorough survey of the available literature. They just happened along the way, and I'd guess that these (and probably more) questions would pop up in the brain of the average reader of this paper.

While I am yet un-opinionated ;) on the topic, I did find that it left me with many questions. What follows (in the tradition of my first PRT entry, which seems to have generated some conversation) are my notes and questions as taken during my reading of the paper.

I should note that any errors that show up in quotes I pulled below are probably mine. As for the errors outside the quotes...well I'm still looking for the person that put those there ;)

UAHS Capacity
In what ways does the Underground Automated Highway System increase the "...capacity of goods and transport in our largest and highest
density cities..." that the automation of existing roadways would not?
Would it be due to additional automation that is unlikely on existing roads?
Would it be because of the supplemental real estate devoted to transportation beyond the existing infrastructure?
Or does it simply by the addition of usable lanes?

How does this system increase peak traffic capacity beyond the additional lanes it provides, that are unlikely for on-surface, or
above-surface transportation alternatives?
How does it do so by an order of magnitude?

UAHS System Architecture
Is this system strictly oriented around major hubs, or does it work for more distributed trip patterns?

Where would entry/exit points be on the UAHS, and is there potential for congestion at these points?

If you were going to have a fully-controlled environment, could you regulate the flow of air so that a one-way tunnel had air flowing through it in the same direction, reducing drag?

If an "automation test lane" is required, how much lead space is required from an exit point (from a regular highway) for a vehicle to establish its autonimity? Would the driver have to cross existing lanes from, say, a regular freeway onramp, to the far left lane? Obviously this would create its own problems if the freeway was under heavy traffic load. How does this lead space (to establish the autonomous nature of a vehicle) compare to the average commute distance? How much of the original commute waiting time might still be experienced?

Does a megalot become a location where many people would depart from the UAHS, and thus become a bottleneck?

Does a UAHS suffer from congestion for its feeder networks (roads)?

What is the trip length that UAHS would be designed for? The way it's talked about makes it sound like you'd be traveling in it for a while.

If it is true that cities saturate as described, might it be the case that UAHS' order of magnitude more supply might be overkill should it be attainable?

Future Traffic Patterns
Do we believe that traffic patterns will get more focused on fewer destinations over time, or more distributed over a wider range of
origination and destination points?

"Nearly all population growth for the foreseeable future will occur in urban areas...". Does this necessitate that they will happen
primarily in the urban core, or will they be distributed around urban/suburban areas of a city.

Crikey! 8 lanes each direction? Will future demand be that high? What does the world of transportation demand look like 100 years out?

Wouldn't increasing real estate prices in the urban core tend to drive businesses into the suburbs, thus decreasing the number of travelers to that area? Is that effect measurable? Does migration away from the suburbs create new focal destinations, or do they become relatively distributed? Presumably the latter case would be harder to service with something like a UAHS.

UAHS Alternatives
How are existing non-car alternatives to a UAHS inferior? What about those on the horizon?

Surely automated aerial transportation systems are not the only viable alternative to a UAHS? What are the design requirements driving this as the selection set?

Issues with ridership of transit alternatives may be due to the format of existing forms of transit: Linear, multi-stop trips, with limited flexibility in departure time and destination. Perhaps alternative transit forms like PRT or dual-mode transit would increase ridership with less financial impact.

If there is evidence that the cost ratio between surface vs. elevated vs. underground transportation costs is improving for underground transit modes (from 1:3:6 to 1:2:4.5), does the evidence support that elevated transportation costs will also continue to gain? If elevated transit took the form of small guideways (e.g. PRT), could that improve the costs to the extent that they are BELOW costs for surface transportation?

If the same dollars that it took to create UAHSs were, instead, put to improving existing road systems and dedicating lanes for automation where possible, what kind of effect might it have? Would it be enough to offset the benefits of an underground system? What if the ground-level automation included significant numbers of busses? What if this money was diverted into other transit options such as LRT, PRT, or dual-mode transit? How does one establish the average ROI for each transportation alternative?

Costs
Would the costs involved in underground construction truly become advantageous over on-surface or above-surface transportation?

Costs per cubic foot quoted ($1.50) for "mining and lining" should be reduced to costs per square foot to be more directly compared to other forms of transportation, and all supporting infrastructure costs should be added to this to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of finished, working surface area.

Is the disposal cost of tunnel ejecta included in the per cubic foot dollar figure? What is included in this figure?

What would the average cross-sectional area of a tunnel be in this system, and would that account for one-way or two-way traffic?

At $1.50/cubic foot, assuming a square tunnel 16ft on a side (which is probably an order of magnitude too small), the linear cost of digging is $384/ft. At 100ft on a side, it's $15,000 per foot. That's $2,027,520 - $79,200,000 per mile before you lay any infrastructure (e.g. roads, ventilation systems, etc).

Lane widths in the US appear to vary between 9' and 12'. Using 10' widths to make calculations easier, a 4-lane road would be about 40' wide. Assuming that shoulders would be 5' each (again for ease of calculation, 4' appears common) to provide enough ceiling clearance for vehicles traveling in the outer lanes (would be interesting to see if normal long-haul vehicles would be able to travel in these lanes, but not critical for a number of reasons such as the fact that such vehicles may not meet emissions standards enough to use a UAHS, may be redesigned to have a lower maximum height in order to use a UAHS, or may be required to travel in the middle lanes), the total width is 50'. Assuming a circular bore, with a 50' diameter, the cross sectional area would be (pi*(25)^2)), or ~1963 sq.ft. At $1.50 per cubic foot to tunnel, and 5280 feet/mile, the cost/mile is: $15,550,884 for just the tunneling.

The low cost to convert existing roadways to an Automated Highway System (AHS) ($10,000/mile) seems largely irrelevant to the UAHS argument as all savings is lost in the initial construction costs of the tunnel and roadway.

What would the average cost of a "megalot" be?

Emergency Systems and Safety
How would emergency access to such an infrastructure work?

How do various types of emergency plans (that is, for various types of catastrophic failure) compare? Also, how does the probable incident rate compare with each transportation mode?

AHS's are probably safer in general, but, to the extent that non-automated traffic runs in the same area, this safety may be
somewhat compromised. Also, there is an open question as to whether significant numbers of individuals (1 in 100 perhaps) would break out of the automatic control to try to game the system, or just plain speed. Similarly, the extent to which an automated system can handle unexpected obstacles will heavily determine how much emergency response is needed (and, potentially, the limit of wide-spread
adoption of the system). If an animal wanders on to the automated roadway, for example, how does the system react? All in all, it is
not yet apparent that any reduction in law enforcement/emergency response could actually be experienced (although it does seem likely).

Granted that automobile accidents do account for a significant number of deaths each year, but if there is no public outcry, even in the face of general knowledge of the danger, then it would seem that safety cannot be a primary motivator of change in that other safety issues will always gain priority for the dollars.

Misc
By "...eliminating visual blight and noise pollution of freeways.." is Mr. Smart suggesting that existing infrastructures will not just be supplemented, but replaced? If so, how will vehicles not presently equipped to run in an automated mode make trips that would otherwise have required a freeway?

"Productivity loss" has always seemed like a weak reason to improve transportation infrastructure. Is this productivity loss to business (in which case it would seem a result of poor worker planning than anything else; if we're talking about people arriving late on the job), or to the individual (in which case it would be tough to assign a dollar figure to the time of non-working individuals)?

How does a digging rate of 20 ft/hour compare to other transportation alternatives when all prep-for-build requirements are taken into
account?

Are there rights-of-way that need to be purchased/otherwise accounted for for underground construction? Can underground construction be built directly from point-to-point if there is no engineering reason not to? Said differently, are there places that a Tunnel Boring Machine can't go because of political/social reasons that it might otherwise be able to navigate just fine (e.g. below a residential area)?

Among the stakeholders should be those who have a stake in alternative forms of transportation. The automobile industry. And potential system component manufacturers.

What is the likely timeline for UAVs? Likely the biggest hurdle would be social as even automated cars are likely to be able to be
overridden by a human operator in case of failure. This will probably be an issue more of perception than anything else.

How do we prevent - or is it even undesirable - reclaimed roads, should there be any, from becoming more buildings as they would seem
likely to do if real estate continues to become rarer?

It would seem that other possible futures include: the emergence of attractive transit options such as dual-mode and/or PRT that have a good deal of the positive effects (and some added ones, like less reliance on owning a car) of a UAHS with potentially smaller costs; telepresence and telecommuting taking hold requiring fewer people to go to point destinations (like the urban core) simultaneously; and the possibility that trip destinations become more diffuse rather than more concentrated, making the value proposition of UAHS less appealing.

Sony Data Tiles

2005-06-15T13:28:00.000-07:00

A very cool integration of physical objects and computing interfaces, and similarly cool integration of conceptual objects with eachother.

Basically a screen you can put various tiles on to to interact with the computer. Much cooler than I can make it sound.

sony revolution (the newest crazy technology from sony - nifty) - video

Via Gizmodo

The RobCast: GeoWiki

2005-06-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

Here's an idea(~16 mins) I had about how geographical information can be maintained, wiki-style, by everyone as a way to jump-start the Internet's connection to the physical world, and to ensure no one company owns the data.

The RobCast: Wikipedia, Time Lines, and Our Stories

2005-06-02T22:10:00.000-07:00

This is another "commutecast" (10 min), which largely consists of me huffing and puffing noisily after I get out of the car and walk the few blocks to work.

This time, an older idea of mine (one of my "mental whittling" projects) - The Web of History - given new inspiration by Wikipedia and a recent article in New Scientist, and a new idea about collecting human stories on a global level to add depth, perspective, and color to encyclopedia, and other fact-oriented mediums.

What happens when all IP is copyable?

2005-05-30T14:50:00.000-07:00

What happens when the product of all intellectual property (IP) is trivially copyable? Not just for digital goods, but for physical ones?

This podcast (the first I've done while commuting, so it's rougher than usual, if that's possible) doesn't answer that question. It merely poses it.

Climb on the Clue Train. A Retort...of Sorts.

2005-05-28T20:56:00.000-07:00

DISCLAIMERS

The following post does not reflect the opinion of anyone. Not of any companies I work for or have worked for, not of my friends or family. In fact, sometimes they don't even reflect my opinion.

I have not read the book; have not sought out conversations about this topic; have not looked for any criticism. Therefore, what follows may be off-base or worse.

This entry is long. Go get a mug of your favorite beverage if you plan to read it all at once.

I recently attended the Portland Podcast Meetup, where I met some very interesting people.

One of these people was Josh Bancroft who runs tinyscreenfuls.com. Josh was espousing something called The Cluetrain Manifesto. I'd heard of it before, but had never taken the time to delve in to it, so I figured now was as good a time as any.

I found the web site and read through the manifesto, and found I agreed with a good deal of it, but there was something about the tone that just didn't sit right with me. It's a manifesto, so it can't be faulted for using strong wording. Nonetheless, it put me in the mindset to write a response to it.

What follows is a point-by-point retort to the original Cluetrain Manifesto as found here. Since I agreed with the broad strokes of what the Manifesto was saying, it was difficult for me to find a counter argument in several cases. I'll leave you to find where those places are. I tried to answer each point in the tone it was written in, pretending I ran a very large company. Tongue, more or less, in cheek.

Don't take this too seriously, but hopefully it will be interesting.

Here we go:

Markets are conversations.
True enough.

Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
Yes, this is true. However, companies cannot gear all (or even most) of our communications to each human. Technology does not yet enable us to make the salient points to a sub-section of the audience in a language that is easiest for that individual to understand.

Yes, companies can tailor a message to be sent to an individual at a time unique to that individual. Yes, they can include elements relevant to the individual at a fairly high level.

But they cannot talk to every individual in precisely the way they want to be talked to, and cannot say those things to them that would be of most interest to them. Companies' resources don't yet allow it.

Further, not everyone wants to wade through the entire conversation to get the bits important to them.

Companies used to talk to the entire group of interested individuals all at once, saying only those things that were easily consumed by the lowest common denominator (meaning they said the things that would impact the most people, even if a good deal of people weren't impacted heavily).

Then they talked to demographics. And psychographics. And survey sub-groups. And customer lifecycle cohorts. These groups had increasingly more in common that allowed companies to say increasingly more relevant things in ways that matter to that group.

Everybody is an individual. Companies want to talk to each person individually. They're getting there, and you can rest assured that those that remain ignorant or silent will be woken up soon, or not survive.

Technology is making these conversations efficient, and enabling new dynamics. Companies are heavily incentivized to get there. Change takes time.

Companies don't expect you to wait around, but probably most individuals are still trying to figure this out too.

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

Many human conversations sound like mating weasels being attacked by a blow torch.

Companies don't want to sound like that. Market participants don't want them to sound like that.

Humans can afford to sound like that. Companies can't...at least not yet.

Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

It is as open, natural, and uncontrived as it is joyful, inspiring, and irritating depending on who is using it. Not all people are born public speakers, and marketing is public speaking.

The Internet is a quickly moving medium which often means that judgments are harsh and quick, and research and patience is shorter supply than when people talk face to face.

Companies have an incentive to tread carefully so that they are not dismissed by the accidental, unconsidered, natural slip of the tongue by a key player.

So they are finding the people who can best represent them in the ways that most of their customers or potential customers want to hear it.

Make no mistake, however. When they are finally talking to the market how it wants to be talked to, they will still be marketing. They are going to get very good at this very soon. At some point it won't feel co-opted, but it will still be the message they want you to hear.

People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

Companies are not people, legal fiction aside. And while the market may want companies to be humanistic, to have a side that can be plugged in to, the market also doesn't want companies to be human in every aspect.

Individuals want even a company's best customer support organizations (and there is plenty of work for them to do in this arena) to react politely when they are yelled at them for a problem regardless of whose fault it was.

Individuals want to return goods for a refund even when it's obvious it was not the company's fault.

Individuals want companies to source American materials while at the same time being intolerant on price.

Companies can do these, and other things demanded of them. Just don't expect that they will always seem like mere humans.

The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

As it is among companies and individuals, and even, to some extent, between companies and workers. It is something companies are figuring out as are market participants. Companies just have a bit more skin in the game.

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

Hyperlinks without consideration subvert trust.

In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

As are companies with their suppliers, partners, regulatory bodies, investors, employees, and existing and potential customers.

For a company, the nature of these conversations is about money, which is ultimately about survival.

These conversations are all over the place in terms of their risks and their rewards. Conversations with customers and potential customers would seem to have an inherent risk, with an uncertain reward. As these factors become well established, companies will change their behavior accordingly.

These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

They are also enabling new forms of business process, organization, and networking. Members of the market that think that they are the only ones playing with the new toys have clearly spent too much time writing manifestos.

As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

The same holds for companies (which are, after all, only collections of individuals, frequently participating in other such markets). Companies are getting faster, smarter, and understanding individual members of a market much more thoroughly. The logical end point of this process may give individual market participants pause when well considered.

People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

Yes, some companies do not provide very good support where they should. But adding value to a commodity is not just about support. It's as much about providing and supplying the context for the commodity as anything.

The fact that people CAN be better informed, doesn't mean they ARE. And being better informed does not always lead to better decision making. Not all decisions are rational, for good or ill. The goal of advertising is to lend credence to people's irrational feelings of affinity and trust.

It has been well known for quite some time, for example, that raising the price on a product for no good reason will attract certain buyers even when two products are shown to be equivalent in every meaningful way.

Look at bottled water; companies have been selling that for years at higher prices than the soda they use that water to make.

There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

Unfortunately it is increasingly difficult to tell fact from fiction in the networked world, and well-intentioned participants in the conversation from would-be saboteurs.

The information is out there, and there are some good hubs, but lay people, and many experts, are relatively unskilled at the tools (and effort) that separate assertions from reality.

What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called "The Company" is the only thing standing between the two.

Where "Company" is interpreted to mean "arbiter of work-time resource allocation"; agreed.

Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

True. And some companies can get away with speaking more humanly without practice, or be better at it, and other companies cannot or are not. However, most companies are in the process, or soon will be, of figuring it out.

In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business - the sound of mission statements and brochures - will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

Perhaps. Language serves the purpose of its time.

Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

No, these companies are speaking to each other, and that's important. Those that confuse their peer companies with their intended customer audience, however, may be in for some work.

It is the potential and existing customer that are the influencers of what organizations say and how they say it, but it is the customer's implicit needs at least as much as their explicit ones that drive the action of those who would attract them.

Individuals must ensure that their actions match their words, and that the words of the loudest individuals match those of the rest of the group. As organizations can increasingly tune their message to the recipient, they can discern between those individuals who are noisy, and those that are either representative of valuable customers, or those who create change amongst them.

Individuals should not expect that their one voice alone will make change (though it can now more than ever), and that loudness is all that is required.

Organizations will increasingly know who their customers are and accurately determine whether or not to listen to the noise-makers.

As companies can no longer be lazy about their communications, individuals cannot be lazy in their actions.

Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

Things have changed a lot since this was written in 1999.

In any case, companies are getting much better at determining what is the right use of which media, though there is plenty left to figure out.

Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

Probably. And they are likely avoiding participation for fear of the unquantified risk.

Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

Exactly why many companies choose to proceed carefully.

Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

Market participants need to realize that, for a company, being laughed at by individuals who continue to buy your products is not such a bad thing.

Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

Fair enough. But individuals may do well to take themselves a bit more seriously and actively vote with their dollars.

Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

Just as it is difficult for the bloggosphere to have a single point of view, a multinational corporation may have a difficult time creating a single point of view that reflects its disparate operations, products, and employees.

Allowing individual employees to speak on its behalf will only make this more difficult.

A single point of view for many companies requires speaking in a way that represents the entire organization. This kind of point of view, especially for companies that are not the reflection of a single, visionary, individual.

This is the problem with all large groups where one person speaks for them. It is, therefore, unreasonable to require a single point of view for a large organization and expect it to sound like a human.

Of course it's only unreasonable for now, and certainly a single entity can have multiple points of view.

Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.

The kind of "positioning" that is happening in this sense often has to do with issues not directly related to things the market will care about. Being a sole supplier, for example, is one way a company might position itself for success that has little to do with public statements the company might make for the benefit of the market.

Bombastic boasts - "We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ" - do not constitute a position.

Correct. Though statements such as "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it." are probably equivalently valuable.

Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

For those of companies where the "Ivory Tower" mentality still remains, it is likely that they are too big to get killed by mistaking PR for a consumer dialog a couple of times. Those that can get killed by that probably have many other problems as well.

Companies are still trying to figure out how best to deal with the flood of voices that they now have access to. They don't necessarily have the tools to handle it well. But once they figure it out, they won't have to be directly how good they're doing. They'll see it in the bottom line.

Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

People that write manifestos about companies would seem to be concerned about, or afraid of the direction they're heading. They might otherwise abandon such rhetoric and allow the companies to find out the hard way.

By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.

Manifestos would not seem to be the best vehicle for tearing down walls. Vote with your dollars; companies know how to listen to them.

Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what's really going on inside the company.

Most marketing programs are based on the idea of making the company's excitement about its products or services known. At the very least, they are about getting the company's brand into the ever more crowded brain of an individual.

Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds."

"It's a two-way street, it a two-way door..." - Ginuwine

Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable - and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

So long as there is a valid alternative supplier (one that is equivalent to less desirable choices in terms of product, deliverability, support, trust, and a dozen other ways). This is turns out to be fairly rare; especially for non-commodities.

Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

Who constitutes "Your"? Who is "us"?

We are you. You are us. This is just as much a result of the internetworked world as anything else.

Networked markets can only switch suppliers is there is an equivalent supplier available. And the cost to switch is rarely zero.

Smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language.

And smart suppliers will learn to speak the language of the market is that lends them an advantage.

Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference.

Not yet.

To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.

No, to speak with a compassionate voice, companies must understand the concerns of their communities (or individuals). Humans infrequently share the concerns of other humans.

But first, they must belong to a community.

Belonging to a community is not a requirement for speaking like a "human", though it may be a requirement for speaking like that particular group of humans.

Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.

Manifesto writers must consider the tradeoff between brevity and clarity.

If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.

Now who's speaking in confusing jargon?

Human communities are based on discourse - on human speech about human concerns.

In fact, many human communities are based on an active program of discourse repression, and what is a concern varies from human to human.

It does not follow that if an individual does not understand the point or meaning of discourse, that that discourse is either pointless or meaningless. Of course it is also true that people will not make the effort to understand you if there is no reason for so doing.

Companies can't (and typically don't) expect individuals to come to the message, but neither should an individual expect that every message will be made plain to them.

The community of discourse is the market.

While it may be true that markets are conversations, this does not mean that all conversations are part of a single market or that all markets are composed of a single conversation.

Companies communicate in many markets and in many ways. Each conversation needs to adapt and grow as is appropriate for the market.

Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

Agreed, insomuch as they would not be able to acquire resources, distribute products, or gain customers. However, to believe that there is a single community of discourse that a company participates in, or that it necessarily must participate in all of them, is folly.

Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.

What damage can the workforce do that does not involve a competitor? What competitors are there that are not in a company's own market?

By what means has this observation been made? What evidence comprises it?

Are readers supposed to take statements like this on trust? Where are the actions against ideals touted in this manifesto that a company can model its behavior on?

As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company - and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.

As it ever was.

Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.

Companies are increasingly trying to make those conditions right, and to find a balance between participating in these conversations and doing the work of the company.

Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.

Companies that install intranets top-down should be commended for making information generally more available. They should also be encouraged to take the next step with the infrastructure they have created.

Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.

It is not enough to merely allow these conversations to build. Companies must be able to assimilate this information and take action on it (non-trivial tasks, both) or little benefit will come of it.

Further, organic, bottom-up networks are inefficient and messy. This is not an excuse not to build them, but it is a reason why a company may proceed carefully with it's resources (which include an employee's time).

A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.

The problems arise when these self-organized networks are not healthy.

While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to "improve" or control these networked conversations.

What also scares companies witless is the possibility that, in addition to emails to family, instant messages to friends, and phone calls to potential new mates, that workers will spend more time "communicating" than actually doing work.

Even critical knowledge has an acceptable price.

When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.

Confused, bitter and impatient? That DOES seem the same.

Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.

Org charts are just a tool. Anyone who depends too much on a tool is likely to be one.

Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.

Hands-on knowledge is not the same as complete knowledge of the situation. Workers at different levels of a hierarchy typically have different views of what's going on, and different takes on priorities. It is not true that a spectacular technician also makes a spectacular strategist. Listening should occur at all levels and in all directions, but hierarchies are not evil in and of themselves.

Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.

Hands-off management styles derive from utopian beliefs that everyone, if given the change, will make the best decisions on behalf of the company. In practice, this is not true. Surely there's a middle ground here.

Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.

Companies that are run by idiots will be undone by absolute transparency. Most people feel that they are idiots.

There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.

There are a vast number of conversations going on. Between workers. Amongst markets. Through suppliers and subcontractors, to distributors, retailers, affiliates, partners, and even the competition. Not to mention the conversations going on between distinct factions of these audiences, that can be sliced a myriad of ways.

Companies must become conversant in all of these dialects to excel.

In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.

Companies must strike the balance between no change and radical change. Both paths lead to premature death. Notions of command and control may be obsolete, but the alternatives are still unfolding, and adopting the wrong attitude can be devastating.

As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.

Everything is met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers. Companies might as well stick with what they know.

These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other's voices.

Some of them recognize some of the other voices. The rest they still think are idiots.

Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.

The only things that are inevitable are death and corporate taxes. All other futures can be guided, even if not controlled. Merely jumping out of the way and letting everyone talk to everyone is an interesting experiment. And when some company proves that it can be done well, others will follow, but jumping into action whenever someone posts a manifesto is not a good way to run a company.

If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few companies have yet wised up.

"Willingness to get out the way" is not a measure of corporate IQ; profits are. By this measure, many companies are wise indeed.

However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.

The phrase "However subliminally..." sounds overly vague and convenient. What evidence is there of this, and what real meaning can you ascribe to this if it's true?

This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.

And companies want to talk to markets. Companies, however, have a limited amount of resources to listen, so they try to make wise decisions about who they are listening to. Those who do a good job of this survive. Those who try to listen to everyone inevitably fail.

Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false - and often is.

Happily, where it makes sense, this is changing.

Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

Of course they do. And they want each of their voices to be heard. They want each of their visions to be fulfilled, and each of their demands met. This may not be unreasonable in the long run, but companies with true vision may not feel the need to succumb to the average voice of a market. Visionary companies are such because they surpass the average in unexpected ways.

Finding which voices in a market are exceptional is non-trivial. Markets are not one voice, but many. Not one ear, but an ocean of them. Not of one mind, but individuals in the best and worst senses of the word.

Flacks and hucksters will be upgraded to better converse with the market as necessary, but not every worker wants to or is able to converse directly with the market. And certainly not every employee is appropriate for officially representing the company.

De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you.

As we do you. You are our reason d'etre.

We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.

Though a company's strategies and best thinking might be of benefit for society and general, how can they trust you to do with it what's in our best interest?

We're also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.

How does a company prevent a disgruntled shipping employee from blogging a negative image for a company? Workers need to be sure they've tried having a conversation internally before bringing it in to the market.

The market needs to understand that shit happens and occasionally the company and an employee are not able to see eye-to-eye. When fewer such exposures make massive headlines in the bloggosphere, more companies will allow the dialog. Conversely, when more companies allow this dialog, the market will get the idea that not every unhappy employee represents bad or unfair practices.

The question is which companies are going to take the first steps and get burned. Clearly, not all companies are suitable for this adventure.

As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?

You don't, but just as you can't know everyone in a big city, nor is a one-to-one relationship between the market and workers possible for every member of both groups. Tools such as these help each group better understand the other in a short period of time. This should be the beginning, however, not the end of the relationship for interested members.

COMPANIES are run by people. People frequently make poor decisions. Companies have a stronger incentive than people to make better decisions.

Making demands is not opening a dialog. It is building a wall.

As markets, as workers, we wonder why you're not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.

Where in the organization do people stop becoming "workers" and start becoming "you"?

The inflated self-important jargon you sling around - in the press, at your conferences - what's that got to do with us?

Sometimes a lot. Sometimes nothing. Different "human" conversations require different dialects. We try to speak the dialect that is appropriate for the conversation at hand. Sometimes we forget which dialect goes with which conversation. We have many different skills, and not all of us are able to speak the language of your market. If you want to talk more directly to us, you are going to have to be tolerant of these mistakes.

Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressing Wall Street. You're not impressing us.

Impressing investors is one of the conversations we are having. Impressing the market is another. In a truly internetworked world, you get to hear much more of all conversations. The challenge is taking the time to appreciate the context.

If you don't impress us, your investors are going to take a bath. Don't they understand this? If they did, they wouldn't let you talk that way.

They don't "let" us talk that way, they require us to. It is their money that we are managing, just as it is yours we are trying to convince you to spend. They have different needs than you do; want to hear us say particular things, as do you.

Your tired notions of "the market" make our eyes glaze over. We don't recognize ourselves in your projections-perhaps because we know we're already elsewhere.

We aren't describing you for you.

We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

We are creating parts of it as well, but we're sneaky, so you might not recognize that it's us behind the curtains.

You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

We'd rather see you getting on your camel. If the new level of our eye-to-eye conversation unsettles us a bit, at least we can all travel a bit more efficiently.

We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

In fact, you are not immune to advertising, you just have a different taste for it than you used to and than your parents did. And it shouldn't surprise you that a good deal of advertising actually works.

Despite all the press, you still watch TV commercials, and we can measure the impact. Despite all the press, you still listen to radio, and we can measure the impact. Despite all the doom-saying press at the turn of the millennium, you still click on banners, and we can not only measure that, but we can measure the impact of just SHOWING the banner regardless of whether or not you click on it. You even click on spam. What the hell are we supposed to do with that message?

Of course, when you speak, we listen. We try to make commercials more entertaining so that you'll watch them because they have more value to you that way. We roll our ads into content like video games because that's what you're doing these days. And we fund lots of your favorite activities on your block, in your city, and around the world because we go where you are and we want to not just participate in the things you do, but help make them available to you in the first place.

We admit it: we want you to like us. We'll figure out how to make this relationship work for both of us, but don't deny our effect on you. We're willing to give for what we get, and whether or not you want to admit it, you are too.

If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

We're finding that all we have to do to get you to talk is to ask. And when we do ask we get far more information than we're able to handle right now. Technology is great, but not all of the pieces are there yet.

We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we'd be willing to pay for. Got a minute?

Darned tootin'! But don't be surprised that if we discontinue the things you say you will pay for but aren't actually willing to when we make it. And expect that once we've done that a time or two and gotten burned at it, we'll approach with a bit more caution.

You're too busy "doing business" to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Maybe.

Was your email in ALL CAPS? Were you coherent? Was it something that we could actually help you with? Were you telling us how our CEO should be fired because he drives an SUV?

We suck at email response. There, we admit it.

But part of what makes that hard is that so often we have no idea what it is you are saying, or, when we do, there's really nothing we can do about it. An email is not at all like a telephone conversation. When we send you a response, and you send us a response, we can't guarantee that the same person will respond next time. This means that each new person that touches it has to figure out what's going on, and misunderstandings of what has already transpired are very likely.

It's a problem we know about and are working on. Meanwhile, if you wouldn't mind formulating your email like you might any other conversation (with all the annoying nouns, verbs, and adjectives), we'd appreciate it.

You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.

If you don't pay, we'll pay attention.

We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party.

We're all for partying. Just as soon as we finish this pile of work over here.

Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's not the only thing on your mind.

What else should we be focusing on? If you believe that some of us are active, generous givers to their communities, ask yourself why that is. Sure, you like them better for it, but doesn't it smell like MARKETING to you? And even if it does, do you really care?

Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?

Companies are money making institutions. If you want good conversation, join a salon. Any other conversation you are going to have with a company is about money, whether you realize it or not.

Your product broke. Why? We'd like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We'd like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she's not in?

Will you be asking your questions individually? Should the CEO set aside 50 million 1 hour meetings? If you want to tell the CEO something, organize. Good companies will help.

We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

Sure, when you have something specific to say.

Most companies have far fewer customers than one article in the WSJ will put them in touch with.

We know some people from your company. They're pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you're hiding? Can they come out and play?

Sure. Just don't get pissed when they have to come in and do their homework.

When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd be among the people we'd turn to.

Excellent. Glad to see you're organizing (can we help with that?). What can we do for you?

When we're not busy being your "target market," many of us are your people. We'd rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing's job.

Will you forgive us if we have the occasional worker who is excellent at his job but may have impulse control issues when speaking on our behalf? If you don't believe he's "speaking on our behalf", and if we, in fact, deny that from the get go, will that matter if he pisses you off?

We'd like it if you got what's going on here. That'd be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we're holding our breath.

We'd like to get it too. We're making efforts, and we're studying. Those of us that have to move fast will, the rest of us will try to make sure we don't screw things up first.

We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?

Indeed. And if change is needed, we'll make it. If it's not, don't be surprised if we don't change. You are our primary interest, but sometimes we are still trying to figure things out, and sometimes we know more about you than you do.

We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.

If being fun to play with is a path to success, you can bet business will be fun to play with.

Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we've been seeing.

Trade shows are mostly by us and for us, and, for the most part, we find them boring too.

As for the corporate web site, if you tell us what you want, we'll build it if we can. These things cost us money and we want to make sure we invest it where it will make you the happiest.

Our allegiance is to ourselves-our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that have no part in this world, also have no future.

We understand where your allegiance is. This is why we try to create content that you will tell your friends about. This is why we offer you incentives to talk about things that aren't inherently interesting on their own with your friends. This is why we create exclusivity by only allowing other people to join when they are invited by existing members.

You, as a gateway to your personal network of friends, acquaintances, and sparring partners, are one of our greatest assets. Expect to be treated as such.

Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can't they hear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.

If you don't think companies are spending billions of dollars on this problem, you are not paying attention. This is practically the only problem companies have EVER paid attention to. But unlike Y2K, this is a conversation, and conversations are fluid, and evolving, and require investment in the right places over time.

We're both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they're really just an annoyance. We know they're coming down. We're going to work from both sides to take them down.

Meanwhile, we will be tearing down the walls to getting to know you better and have one-to-one conversations. This will involve knowing your date of birth, your gender, and other information you are concerned about but give us anyway for the chance at a 10% off coupon.

We're removing the barriers to our information flow both internally and with our corporate partners. We're working hard to protect your anonymity, but don't get freaked that it's not just barriers to OUR information that are being torn down.

To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.

Welcome to OUR party. We expect that you'll form your own companies to meet your perceived needs. Those of us that are big or fast enough will adapt and assimilate.

We think that you'll discover that there are, in fact, some rules.

And if you bypass them? Well, we anticipate attending your seminar at the next trade show.

We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

We don't think you are who you think you are.

Personal Rapid Transit Revisited

2005-05-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

Recently I received a comment on my post regarding Personal Rapid Transit, back in October.

The anonymous poster, who appears to have been from an organization called SoundPRT, which appears to be an advocacy group for bringing a PRT system to the Seattle area.

The commenter addressed some thoughts I had (all relatively minor) about the SkyWeb PRT system. The comments sparked a renewed interest in me and I spent a couple hours digging around to find out more about the broader range of PRT solutions and criticisms leveraged against it.

What follows is, in the tradition of the original article I posted, a mostly wandering discussion of random shiny things that caught my eye as I was cruising the various sites, as well as responses to the points the commenter made. Let's start with the latter.

Call and Response
In my original post, I had yammered on about how it would seem like making each vehicle stopped at a station wait for the first vehicle in the station queue to depart might be irritating. To address this, I proposed a Y-shaped section of track for each berth. To which the commenter said:

It is not anticipated that individual delays will be a problem. First, most stations will have multiple bays. Second, boarding is made as simple and fast as possible--payment and route selection occurs before boarding, and the design must make ADA/wheelchair access as easy as it is for the fully-able-bodied.

My response:
The waiting issue I mentioned was not necessarily a result of limited berths. Rather it was my thinking that people who are boarding in the first berth may take an inordinate amount of time boarding for reasons entirely unrelated to system design. People holding a vehicle so that another member of their party could board; because they have many things to load into the vehicle; or because they are taking a while to get situated. In a linear station design, all vehicles behind the one in question would be required to wait until that vehicle was completely boarded. This is more likely to be an irritation rather than a real inconvenience, but it's worth considering that the impact of such a scenario may be greater in systems where station access is non-sequential as people expect their travel experience to be unrelated to that of other people traveling simultaneously.

Likely, developing a solution for such an irritant is over-engineering. Most solutions would require slightly larger stations to accommodate and likely increase the boarding/deboarding process as an individual vehicle takes itself offline in a station, however having both the station offline from the main guideway, and each birth offline from the station guideway might be worth looking at in certain station configurations.

Although, having given it a bit more thought, I could envision an alternative to the Y approach I mentioned in the original article that would have less of an impact on vehicle "docking" times (though would probably have the same relative impact on station sizes). Consider a station guideway that departs from the main guideway. In the station, there would be a main guideway and individual berth guideways leading off of it. The berth guideways could intersect each other (with the outbound guideway intersecting the inbound guideway of the next berth) and the central system could manage vehicles through these intersections. This would mean that individual vehicles would not have to make sharp turns (as in the Y configuration), would not have to back up (again, as in the Y configuration), and each berth could have as long a deboarding/boarding time as needed without interrupting the flow of other vehicles through the station. An added benefit might be the ability to store two (or more) vehicles in each berthing track when demand is low, providing additional vehicle storage to the system.

Next, I wondered aloud about what happens when an individual PRT vehicle broke down on the guideway.

To which the commenter said:
This is pretty much spot-on. In addition, under the Skyweb system a breakdown is pushed to the repair center by the next vehicle. Generally, Skyweb is designed with few moving parts to break, as well as redundancy throughout, making the odds of unplanned stoppage literally astronomically low.

My response:
In the scenario where an individual vehicle becomes non-functional, it makes sense that another vehicle can come along and push the disabled vehicle. But in a system where guideway switching is dependent on the individual vehicle and is not a component of the guideway itself, how does one ensure that the vehicle can be pushed to a suitable destination if the switching mechanism is disabled? Also, what happens when a vehicle is disabled due to a problem directly relating to it's ability to move (e.g. one or more wheels jam)? In such a case, it would seem that PRT critics would have a valid point about debarking in emergencies. This problem would seem to be compounded if the traveler were disabled, insomuch as one could not simply deploy a cherry picker to recover the occupants.

I went on to puzzle on whether or not long lines might form behind a station, eventually backing up on to the main guideway.

To which the commenter said:
Actually, there are primarily three factors: the demand for each station in terms of arrivals AND departures, the number of berths per station, and the size of each "loop" or circuit of elevated track.
Demand: PRT spreads-out demand per station by having many small stations close together (ideally 1/2 mile apart).
Berths: Most stations will have 3 berths. In busy places (downtowns, stadiums, airports, intermodal transit stations) stations would be scaled-up by adding more berths (major station cost is the elevator and trip selection "ATM", marginal cost of each additional berth is relatively low).
Loop size: In the rare (see Demand) event of a station and its approach siding being full, a car can be "waved off" and directed to go around the local loop and re-approach. The ideal size of a loop is 1/2 mile on a side for a total of two miles; traveling this at 40 mph takes only 3 minutes.

My response:
The impact of the unidirectional nature of the guideway might be interesting to understand more. It would seem that, for some station-to-station trips, the trip length might be significantly longer than one might expect when the trip needs to be routed through a series of one way guidelines (I'm assuming here that there would typically only be one guideway per street (or equivalent) and that the illustrations showing stations as being single direction only are correct). I'm sure this is something that is minimized during initial planning stages, but this, among other things, makes me want to sit at a simulator with someone who knows all about this and see different scenarios play out.

Would this, then, mean that, in a scenario where an approaching vehicle has to be "waved off" that the trips might be significantly longer than traversing a 2 mile square? Also interesting to know is how likely it would be to achieve a regular 1/2 mile per side loop. What are the system performance impacts if the per-side lengths expand beyond that, and what is the likely upper-threshold over which performance becomes unacceptable (I'm guessing that this is heavily dependent on the particular installation. More reason to sit in from of a model simulator.

I pondered the question of whether PRT would eventually be outmoded by computer controlled cars.

To which the commenter said:
It depends what effect you think Time might have on PRT's effectiveness. Urban densification and suburban expansion are not a problem for PRT, as the system scales-up well.

My response:
Yeah, I must have been high or something when I wrote this. Even though I have visions of computer controlled cars dropping you off at work and then driving themselves home or some such, the only near-term way automated cars would compete with pretty much any transit system, would be for long-haul scenarios where individual cars could travel as fleets (though I'd be interested in hearing why I might have been more right than I expected ;).

I said I thought it'd be cool if you could access the Internet from your laptop while in the car.

To which the commenter said:

No reason a community couldn't specify this as an amenity.

My response:
Yep, again...high. Looks like some metropolitan wireless schemes may well fill in this need, though I'm not counting on them quite yet. And if they fail, perhaps the cellular network will soon be good enough to fit the bill. In any case, it'd be nice to have in the PRT vehicles, but certainly no point of emphasis for them.

At some point I used the phrase "Doesn't meet commuter throughput claims".

To which the commenter said:
How? Remember, station demand is distributed/spread-out. In addition, routing is spread-out too. The "mesh" configuration of the network means there is more than one way to get from A to B, especially if they are far apart. If one PRT track can handle 7200 vehicles per hour (30 mph, 22 ft headway), imagine what multiple parallel tracks can carry.

My response:
And again...high. I'm not even sure what I meant here (I didn't think anyone would be looking ;). I'm pretty sure I meant it would be a problem IF throughput claims couldn't be met, but your guess is as good as mine at this point.

No Call, Just Response
Now, more ramblings on PRT and the like in no particular order:

PRT as a Complementary Mode
Most places I visited seemed to indicate that PRT was not necessarily direct competition to light rail (et al). Rather it was a supplement. While I can see this for certain applications, like the one I mentioned in my original post about going from Vancouver to Portland, I do wonder what the designers see the specific limits of PRT as being, and where it makes sense to employ other modes of transportation. Specifically, I'd be interested in seeing some cost scenarios (or technical scenarios) where PRT would break down. I think this kind of information helps to provide much needed context to the discussions I see about PRT and other forms of transportation (such as the fascinating PRTDebate page).

A PRT Wiki
I ran across a fledgling wiki site for PRT that was useful as a jumping off point to other PRT info.

Problems of Placement
In terms of getting PRT guideway everywhere it would need to be, no doubt the challenges of getting the guideway approved in enough neighborhoods to grant the 1/2 mile-per-station distance is non-trivial. Much like other forms of public transportation, and, indeed, many other public works projects, people may be in favor of the idea while not wanting it to run by their homes. Unlike busses or light rail, however, PRT will have to fight this battle in many more neighborhoods if the penetration targets are to be achieved.

It seems likely that individual stations would have a relatively small footprint, however providing access to this station (stairs and elevators; the latter required for ADA compliance) might be non-trivial in all the locations where a station would be required.

It would be interesting if a PRT service could replace existing utility poles so that they served a dual purpose: carrying the existing utility infrastructure, as well as the PRT guideway. My guess is that this would help lessen certain arguments about invading infrastructure and would mean that no additional right of way need be granted. Even better, perhaps, if the utility lines could be tucked into the guideway in some way to lessen the negative impact of existing infrastructure. In fact, it appears that UniModal is proposing exactly that .

Stopping the Train (and the PRT)
Arguments about the stopping distance of a PRT seem a bit odd in certain respects, especially when compared to light rail. Assuming the worst case scenario of a vehicle collision with an unexpected, ungiving object, it would seem that a fair comparison would be to compare the effects of a PRT system versus a light rail system encountering the same object, and run the comparison at different passenger loading levels. At first blush, one would assume that in a properly functioning PRT system (and this may be where the failure lies), that the impact vehicle, and perhaps a vehicle or two behind it would be involved, accounting for injuries to 12-16 people (fully loaded). Under the same circumstances, one would think that a fully loaded light rail car (or coupled cars) would sustain injuries to on the order of 50 individuals in such a collision (100 if coupled) as later portions of the rail car cannot brake to avoid collisions with the earlier portion of the car.

Getting it On (and Off)
It seems that discussions of passenger load times are primarily oriented around total time to load N passengers. It would be more interesting to see what the average wait time of individual passengers would be given normal passenger arrival patterns. I would guess this would lean towards PRT. The inter-vehicle wait time should also be thrown into the mix (and, no doubt, there are studies of this). I presume that in an optimal PRT system, the inter-vehicle wait time would be substantially smaller than the inter-vehicle wait time in an optimal LRT system, adding further disparity to each mode's average passenger wait time. Again, I'd love to see some simulations of both modes to see how things work out.

UniModal
The commenter mentioned a system by UniModal. Here are my comments about that:
The UniModal system seems like it's still in the initial stages of design (unlike some of the other PRT systems which seem well conceived at a fairly detailed level), an idea further reinforced by the large number of "coming soon" pages where vital information should be and a copyright date the belies the "soon" portion of that statement. And, c'mon, their Kiddie Train example is filled with holes and serves primarily as flame bait for proponents of alternate transportation modes.

As mentioned, it is not currently ADA compliant (both in the stairway access that is displayed in their pictures, and, presumably, in the nature of their two-seat cars where riders are seated one behind the other), the kludgy drop off and pick up system notwithstanding.

Similarly, in all of the images on their site (e.g.) the cars are shown waiting in queue for riders, but I imagine this would be problematic if an arriving rider ends up at the end of the queue. If there were not enough new passengers, all queued vehicles would have to be sent elsewhere. Other systems appear to have this handled a bit more elegantly by having stations with multiple berths allowing some cars to be stored while still providing room for arriving passengers to depart. There is, however, a strong attractiveness in the simplicity and small scale of the UniModal station design.

The UniModal model appears to be a two station approach with a disembarking station and a separate boarding station.

Feeding the Beast
I thought that the point the UniModal site made about feeder services not being accounted for in light rail travel was interesting. Probably only some of the trips on such systems could be added to the cost of light rail given that at least some of such ridership may start and end their trips on such a system. Nonetheless, to the extent that all such feeder traffic would be accounted for on a PRT system, it should be included as part of the comparative costs.

The End...Or IS it?
Anyway, that's enough rambling for now. Comments are welcome, but they may spin me into hours of research so use them wisely (that is, make sure you have plenty of popcorn to watch me spin).

Thanks mysterious commenter!

The RobCast: Thoughts of Future Trends 2

2005-05-18T16:18:00.000-07:00

Ok, I start this entry, which is a continuation of "The RobCast: Thoughts on Future Trends" (go figure) stating that this is the second of two entries on this topic. I was wrong. I didn't get anywhere near the end, so this is the second in at least 3 entries discussing an article in The Futurist magazine entitled "Trends Shaping the Future: Technological, Workplace, Management, and Institutional Trends" by Marvin J. Cetron and Owen Davies.

Topics covered this time include:

Funding education?

School days lengthened?

Increased job specialization

Fast growth in low-skill jobs? (there's an odd skip here as my iPod decided it was bored and stopped recording)

Retirees as school mentors

The RobCast: Thoughts on Future Trends

2005-05-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a multipart podcast. I'm reading an article about future trends in The Futurist magazine (May-June, 2005 edition), and found myself wanting to comment on it and so decided to capture my thoughts with my iPod.

The article is entitled "Trends Shaping the Future: Technological, Workplace, Management, and Institutional Trends" by Marvin J. Cetron and Owen Davies.

Topics I discuss in this installment include:

General service robots in the home by 2010?

Travelling at 7,000 MPH for everyone?

High-speed rail travel for 100 mile trips in the US?

Trucks exiled to car-free lanes on the freeway?

Companies that specialize in knocking off products?

Medical costs going down?

The RobCast Parade of Ideas: PodFilter

2005-05-04T08:27:00.000-07:00

Finally a new podcast! This one recorded on my iPod, so quality is not spectacular, but hopefully the idea is interesting enough.

Basically it's a different approach to bringing efficiencies to podcasting than what Adam Curry and Ron Blum recently discussed in their "strategycast".

Check it out and let me know what you think.

(BTW, this recorded in .WAV format, and due to the low sampling rate, it's not very big, so I'm leaving it in that format rather than re-compressing it. Let me know if this doesn't work for you for some reason.)

The RobCast Parade of Ideas: The Living Room

2005-03-04T20:29:00.000-08:00

This (~5m, ~2.6MB) is an installment of the Parade of Ideas Series on The RobCast

I have some ideas in my head that I can't do anything with, and so I thought I would toss them into a podcast and make room for new ideas.

I don't claim that all, or even most, of these ideas are good, but hopefully one will occasionally be interesting to someone if for nothing else than to spark new ideas of their own.

You are free to use these ideas as you see fit

While I may not have patented, or otherwise protected any of these ideas, that does not mean that they are protection free.

It is certainly possible that someone else has had the same idea and has protected it.

The Living Room concept

Starting with something relatively simple to get a sense for how this might work
It's very short

Clock radio
Motion detector
Sound-activated Microphone
Internal storage

Device would sit in a room and would record small audio clips (30 seconds or less), whenever there was sound occurring during a poll period.

Polling periods could be set, but might default to once every five to 10 minutes

Collects sounds only in small bites to save on storage and limit the risk of embarrassing playback

One minute after detecting motion, it listens for silence and plays clips from what it's heard

If it continues detecting motion and not sound, it will continue to periodically play clips

The room is talking back to you, telling you what it has remembered

All this would sit in a clock radio form factor

Additional features
controllable Hours of activity
External USB connector for more storage/data download

The RobCast: Announcements

2005-02-28T19:55:00.000-08:00

This podcast (2m 15s, ~1MB) is just a couple of quick announcements on the status of some of the podcasts I'm doing, and was as much an excuse to test out some new gear as anything else.

I hope you'll find the new gear a significant improvement. Now, to work on the content ;)

SexGeeks: Sex Drives, Pedophilia in the Catholic Church, and Polyamory

2005-02-13T10:07:00.000-08:00

Here's the newest SexGeeks show (1h 5m, 31MB).

This will be the last one posted to this blog, as we've set up a new blog just for SexGeeks. If you want to catch future shows, then subscribe from the new site so you don't miss anything.

Last week we talked about Good Vibrations, a store in San Francisco, for a little while, but forgot to leave a pointer to their web site. You can find it at: http://www.goodvibes.com.

Amy Gahran gave us a nice entry in her "Women in Podcasting" list (in case you are wondering, Lindsay is female ;).

This week, we talked about how the stereotype of the horny male may not be valid for most men after their 20's.

We also touch again briefly on sexuality in different cultures. We'd love to hear more people's experience with sex and sexuality in different places in the world.

Lindsay wondered aloud why pedophilia appears to be so prominent in the Catholic church, so Rob takes a stab at a possible explanation.

At the suggestion of a listener, we take a first stab at talking about polyamory. We were referred to the LovingMore site as a resource. Rob points out that an interesting analogy for polyamory might be the Creative Commons licensing, and suggests we all get cards indicating what the rules of our committed relationships are. Don't know how feasible that is, but interesting to think about anyway.

Finally, we put a call out for reviews of any interesting sex gadgets you might have run across. If you've had any experience (positive or negative) with the gadget in question, all the better. Lindsay's especially interested in a gadget the simulates cunnilingus. In an upcoming show, we'll talk about different gadgets we've run across, and would love to hear about things we might have missed.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for things to talk about, please feel free to send us an email, or leave a comment at the SexGeeks blog.

SexGeeks: Good Vibrations, The L-Word, and Finding Love on Amazon.com

2005-02-01T22:54:00.000-08:00

Lindsay and I are geeks about sex the same way other people are geeks about technology.

In this series we will be talking about all aspects of sex and relationships.

In this installment (51 mins, 24MB) we talk about:
Why Good Vibrations is a wonderful place
Expectations of personal sexuality in different cultures
The L-Word
Finding love on Amazon.com

We'd love to hear your feedback. You can either leave it here, or send an email to sexgeeks@gmail.com.

Podcast: Sex, Capitalism, and the Perfect Album

2005-01-30T19:58:00.000-08:00

Here's a longer podcast I did with my friend Tony (hi Tony!). It's fairly long (1 hr 15 mins, 35.5MB), so be warned. Also, we were trying (yet again) to get Skype up and running as a way to do remote podcasts, and due to many reasons the sound is pretty crappy (I've done what little I could to clean it up). There is a lot of crackling as we were too loud. I appologize in advance.

Here are some of the topics we touched on:

searching for porn

setting up a blog on blogspot.com

bluefish and privacy

advertising and capitalism

making personal connections via the Internet

perfect albums

rob's complicated music listening process

collaborative filtering

the podcasting network walk idea

is podcasting revolutionary?

sex and the internet

let's do this again!

Amazon.com Yellow Pages

2005-01-27T12:20:00.000-08:00

I haven't quite figured how yet, but I think the step that Amazon took to get photographs of locations listed in its Yellow Pages will be revolutionary for location-based services.

One thing that would be interesting (if not revolutionary) would be if the Amazon images could be added to Mapquest so that each time you had to make a turn, the Mapquest map contained an image of the intersection (or other feature) in question so that you knew what to look at.

Anyway, it's definitely worth checking out.

Thanks Ben!

Amazon.com Yellow Pages

Investibles: Are collectibles reasonable investments?

2005-01-26T13:05:00.000-08:00

Here's the second installment of Investibles with Matt Schiffman.

This time we talk a little bit about specific markets (like fine art, or comics) that have shown a history of postitive return on investment.

We also touch briefly (to be explored in future installments) about specific risks involved in investing in collectibles.

Podcasting and the Challenge of Content

2005-01-22T14:25:00.000-08:00

On a podcast/post I did in response to a podcast I heard on Openpodcast.org, I received a comment from kinrowan. I thought I'd post my response in a new thread so the discussion didn't get buried.

Hi Kinrowan,

I definitely believe that review sites like yours (why did you choose not to make a podcast of your reviews?) will be a valuable resource in the early stage of podcasting, but I think that podcast reviewing is going to face some non-trivial challenges as podcasting becomes more pervasive.

Challenges for Podcast Reviewers
Acting on Review Podcasts
Part of the allure of listening to podcasts, I would argue, has to do with their portability and on-demand nature. So the challenge with a podcast review podcast is how I, as a listener, am going to be able to act upon your advice while I'm away from my computer. If you say I should listen to a particular podcast, or even several podcasts, how do I remember that long enough to add it to my list of feeds (of course I have a suggestion about that ;).

For non-podcast podcast review sites (such as podcastreviews.net), this is less of a problem, however they may suffer from a lack of listener penetration given that they don't take advantage of a few of the benefits that makes podcast listening particularly alluring (portability, and not having to look at the content to consume it being the most obvious).

The Explosion of Content
It seems extremely likely that the amount of podcast content will explode to a size akin to where blogging is now. This means millions of podcast sources.

I'd guess that there are something like 200 major movies produced each year. Probably about the same number of new TV shows. There are probably a few thousand CDs released with reasonably wide distribution, and maybe double that in books (I'm sure these are all wrong, but hopefully the orders of magnitude are at least in the ballpark).

Right now, there are, what, 2000 podcast feeds? Next year at this time, we can expect something like 50,000 or more. How does one stay in front of that number? Obviously, there will be room for many sources of podcast reviews, but if there are tens of thousands of podcasts, and dozens of podcast review podcasts, and maybe even several podcast review review podcasts, how does one navigate through this space? Certainly we can rely on those we come into contact with to help filter what we listen to, but what concerns me is that this will lead us back to a version of the broadcast model where only those podcasts with enough mass appeal will spread virally, and podcasts that would be of the most interest to you as an individual may never find you.

How do you choose which podcasts to review? I suspect you probably can't listen to every podcast that springs up these days already, especially if you base your reviews on more than one post in a podcast. Perhaps you choose them based on the ones that sound interesting in their descriptions. Perhaps based on ones you have heard referenced in other podcasts. Perhaps ones that have been referred to you by friends, family, and your listener base. Probably some combination of all of these. But as the amount of content continues to explode, these methods would seem to become less and less useful as the content that arrives at you through these filters becomes overwhelming again.

Even now, I've noticed that your queue of podcasts to review contains podcasts I haven't heard any activity on for at least a month.

An Individual Podcast May Change Over Time
How do you handle the fact that pretty much any aspect of a particular podcast might change qualitatively as the podcast matures, or even from post to post? TV critics revisit shows they have previously reviewed (assuming, of course, that the show survives long enough), to see if it is still up to snuff (or as bad as it once was). If you intend to do this, your workload would increase even more, especially since, unlike in the TV industry, podcasters who create bad content don't have any financial pressures to quit producing content, meaning that the volume of surviving podcasts won't necessarily be culled over time like bad TV shows are.

Reviews May Have a Niche Audience
To remain relevant, it would seem that review sites might soon have to become an ecosystem of very specialized participants. This probably more closely matches the reviewing community of music or books than it does TV or movies. A reviewer might have to pick an especially small genre of podcasts to review (e.g. Southwest Missouri Agriculture News) and foster a loyal listenership, while other reviewers will have to become metareviewers at various levels, choosing to review only the best (and/or worst) podcasts reviewed by a niche reviewer for a wider audience and cover more subjects (e.g. Midwest Agriculture News).

Subscriptions as a Reflection of Me
Podcasting (and microcasting in general) is about getting you the content that YOU are most interested in. Much like movie reviewers, people who want to hear podcast reviews will want to find someone whose tastes match theirs, which, of course, brings up the question of how to find the right review podcast.

A Podcast as a Series of Shows?
Because anyone who wants to can produce a podcast an virtually no cost (beyond owning a computer, of course) it may not be fair to characterize podcasts as entertaining (as you mentioned), per se, in ways that blogs are not. Certainly some podcasts are entertainment oriented (such as the Radio adventures of Dr. Floyd), but others are not (e.g. Texas A&M System Agriculture Program News). We are so early in the medium that it may not be fair to characterize podcasts generally as "shows". For example, there seem to be a large number of people podcasting their music, one track per post, with no talking. Does this really qualify as entertainment as we are used to experiencing it through other mediums?

An interesting questions about the life of different podcasts come to mind. For example, if I put out an album's worth of my music in a podcast and then stop, is that worthy of a review?

I can envision certain kinds of podcasts where it would make sense to review individual postings and not the entire podcast itself. How do you stay on top of that?

None of this is to say that there won't be a place for review sites, but it would seem that they are unlikely to become they way that most people come into contact with a podcast (or specific post)

How Do We Prevent Individual Podcasts From Being Lost in the Shuffle?

Text searching is fairly useless on podcasts as it currently stands, and even if it was not, text searching assumes you know what it is you are looking for. The podcasts that you might find the most interesting might be things you never think to go looking for.

It's probably true that not all podcasts will NEED to be reviewed by someone, but it should be the case that all podcasts can have the hope of reaching interested people even without an enormous marketing effort.

I see podcasting's future as being (among other things) analogous to creating your own radio station that has exactly the kinds of content you want in it in exactly the way you want to listen to it [more detail]. Ideally, then, there should be a way for you to find exactly the content you want, and I'm guessing that review podcasts are going to be a sweet spot for only a minority of podcast listeners (though at this point I see them as terribly valuable).

Imagine an RSS feed that you subscribe to through a service. As you listen to individual posts on your iPod, you rate how much you like the content using the 1 to 5 star system supported by the iPod and iTunes. A plug in for iTunes looks for new ratings (perhaps only on specific playlists) and reports any ratings you have provided back to the service. Based on your ratings, and the ratings of others, the service adds and removes content from your RSS feed. This content may be complete feeds of certain podcasts, and only selected posts of others. It might even delete posts from your hard drive automatically if you gave the post a low rating.

In this way, your iPod becomes a radio station geared towards you specifically (or, more probably, towards a small group of people who share very similar interests to you).

If this service had your ratings in it, then it might allow you to browse categories of podcasts on the service's web site and as you looked at different available feeds it could give you the odds that you are going to like the feed.

Granted this is an Apple-technology-based solution. I don't know if other MP3 players have rating systems, and I feel fairly confident that ratings are not part of the standard MP3 ID3 tags (pity), but it wouldn't necessarily be difficult to modify existing software and firmware to allow for ratings, and the iPod/iTunes combo would probably account for a large percentage of the listening audience anyway.

If podcasting really does become custom content, then Adam Curry's penchant for short podcasts will probably be reinforced in the market as people steer away from long shows with a variety of content, to collections of shorter shows that match a listener's tastes more accurately. I expect, frankly, that this will be a relatively minor trend as people will still enjoy shows architected by a specific individual (e.g. Howard Stern).

Anyway, enough of my rambling for the moment.

Thoughts?

Podcast: Investing in Collectibles

2005-01-19T16:25:00.000-08:00

Here's a podcast (4.82MB, 10m 32s) of a project I'm putting together with Matt Schiffman, collectibles dealer extrodinaire. The idea is to put together a series of podcasts delving deep into why and how you could invest in collectibles, much like you'd invest in stocks.

This is not a get rich quick scheme, but a way for those who have an interest in collectibles to learn to invest wisely, and maybe to lure in those people who don't have a current interest in collectibles.

If this project moves forward it will have it's own feed, but since this was as much a test run as anything, I thought I'd throw it up here for comments. If you have a topic you'd like to hear discussed, feel free to post it here.

No Mystery Sweepstakes for Coke?

2005-01-19T16:13:00.000-08:00

I just glanced at the bottle of Coke on my desk and noticed the words "you won a FREE 1 liter!". Of course, these were under the words "Look under the cap to see if" written in smaller type.

Of course, this is what Coke wants you to see, but it made me wonder: do they even need to hide the answer at all? What would happen if Coke just put "this bottle wins a free liter", and "this bottle is not a winner" on their bottles?

Sure, those who wanted to cheat the system would, but those who don't care about the promotion would just ignore it. People for whom promotions are important get more out of them, the rest, who don't care, don't care. Better use of promotional dollars it would seem.

My guess on why they are unlikely to do this is probably because they expect a certain number of winners will get into the hands of those people who don't care. Those people are less likely to redeem their prize, while still reinforcing their brand affinity.

Thoughts?

Barry Schwartz on ITConversations

2005-01-11T07:53:00.000-08:00

Just thought I'd point you towards Barry Schwartz's "Less is More" presentation as given at Pop!Tech 2004, made available by ITConversations.

I just got finished listening to the podcast and found the presentation delightful (sadly, I did not find a link to the document he presented; much of the presentation references it, but mostly to the amusement of the audience). Basically he describes how having more choice leads to lower overall satisfaction.

Interestingly, in line with my earlier entry in response to Scott Fletcher's podcast, the issues raised by Schwartz I think are very solvable by technology, which gives me great optimism that we will be able to offer a wide variety of anything you can name, but largely mitigate the downside of potentially having to make all of these decisions.

Hopefully I'll get a chance in the next day or so to write up more detailed comments on where I think Schwartz is exactly right with some of my own thinking and observations that support his thinking, where I think more study is probably warranted, and how technology might begin to solve the issues raised by Schwartz to make having a large amount of options not quite so punishing to choose between. (Of course, if history serves, by virtue of having said that I hope to post more details later, I have now guaranteed that it won't happen. ;)

Accelerating Change 2004 Podcasts

2005-01-09T18:06:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned the Accelerating Change 2004 conference a couple of times here before. I enjoyed it tremendously, and would strongly encourage anyone who likes pondering a wide variety of technology-related topics to attend.

I've discovered that ITConversations is creating podcasts of the various speakers at AC 2004. Yay!

I've just finished listening to Jim Spohrer's presentation on Service as a Science, which I didn't get a chance to attend while I was there. I found it wonderfully thought-provoking, and keeping with what we're discovering at the company I'm working with. I'd love to hear more from his group as they dig deeper into it.

Perhaps the most interesting stats were the fact that IBM is a 50% services organization, and that GE is a 70% service business!

Also on ITConversations' coverage of AC 2004 are presentations from Helen Greiner of iRobot (makers of the Roomba automatic vacuum cleaner), author David Brin, Gee Rittenhouse from Lucent Technologies (I think this is the presentation I was at when Spohrer was presenting in a different room).

I'm looking forward to hearing again presentations by Maxis founder Will Wright, and PayPal founder Peter Thiel specifically (though I think I left with the DVD of both of their presentations) and of course all of the presentations I wasn't able to attend.

If this sort of thing might interest you, I encourage you to check them out.

The RobCast: A Response to Scott Fletcher

2005-01-09T14:25:00.000-08:00

This podcast touches on some points brought up by a podcast by Scott Fletcher that I found on OpenPodcast.org.

I'm currently reworking my audio transcription setup, so instead of the usual bad transcription, here are the notes that I made (and then strayed almost entirely from) for the podcast.

Show Notes
Sunday, January 9, 2005
The RobCast
An audio supplement to my blog at theroblog.blogspot.com

Scott Fletcher (diagonaluniverse.com)
"Podcasting will make us like the French"

Yes, Podcasting is the new Word (or Aldus Pagemaker if you're talking about publishing)

Podcasting is the enabling technology. It's not about "improving the selection or the quality of the content" per se. Arguably it improves the selection over traditional radio, and even satellite radio, but this technology is only in its infancy; less than 6 months old!

Certainly, as the amount of content explodes, we will need ways of filtering through all of the stuff that is uninteresting, offensive, or just plain bad; this applies to the Internet as a whole (and Internet publishing is probably a better metaphor than paper publishing).

"Broadcasters" as Fletcher defines them, are exaclty that: People who communicate to a large audience. All forms of commercial radio rely on mass adoption to pay for the costs of distributing the content (owning radio stations and transmitters, or satellites). To reach a mass audience, a "broadcaster" needs to have qualities that are appreciated by some large segment of the population. This often starts with a "broadcast" quality voice, which Fletcher himself has in spades. From there, the requirements drop off rather quickly. Ability to read copy in an interesting manner is definitely up there. The ability to make statements that a large number of listeners can support (or love to hate) is as well. The ability to prod callers and guests into saying things people find interesting probably rounds out the top of the list.

Notice that none of this means that a broadcaster must have a high degree of intelligence or subtlety (though a good deal of broadcasters do). To reach a mass audience, you often need to appeal to those things that reach the largest audience, and those things are frequently not those parts of humanity we like to show off.

This is nothing against broadcasters in general, it is rather a reflection of the state of the industry. "Broadcasting" requires equipment large enough to reach the masses. This equipment is expensive, therefore as many people as possible must become listeners to pay for it.

Podcasting, or, more generally, microcasting, is a different phenomena altogether. The production of the content is cheap. The distribution is also cheap. This means that in order to pay for it, you have to reach relatively few people; in fact, it's cheap enough that content producers may have no particular interest in getting financial remuneration at all. Currently to produce my iPod content I use a computer I already had for other reasons, Audacity to record and process the audio, a headset that came free with another piece of software I own (IBM's ViaVoice, if you're wondering), Blogger to host my blog, FeedBurner to create the RSS feed, and Liberated Syndication to host my podcast mp3s. Total upfront cost to me: $5 (for 100MB a month file storage on Liberated Syndication (libsyn.com).

Much like having a web page, and almost exactly like having a blog, I don't have to have any particular capability as a content creator in terms of format, style, or content, in order to produce something anyone can consume.

The import of podcasting is its ground-leveling nature. Sure, a bunch of people are going to create a bunch of crappy content, but if that crappy content is liked by even a couple of responsive listeners, then it has often paid for itself.

I think it's not very useful to lament the quality and glut of content on its own. Much like the Internet, the web, and blogging, we probably won't really see how podcasting will transform media (though many of us are happy to guess), but like all of those other things, it most likely will.

It's not "everybody must hear what I have to say" necessarily, rather it's "somebody might be interested in what I have to say". This is not broadcasting. It's microcasting.

A quick point: Fletcher says that "if everyone is delivering a message, no one will have time to listen." This is true in the sense that if there is that much content out there in the world, no one will be able to listen to it all. But this is an engineering problem, not the limits of the system. Nothing precludes those of use who talk from also being people who do. Fletcher seems to believe we will be either talking constantly, or not talking at all. Of course he's a talker, and I'd suspect he's a shining example of a doer as well.

I have no doubt that podcasting will be a transformative medium. What may reduce it's impact, however, would be a glut of content that cannot be reasonably sorted through, much like the Internet itself. There are a couple thousand podcasts out there right now. That sounds like a lot, but it's still a manageable amount to be filtered through. As the number of podcasts reaches tens of thousands, listening to them all quickly becomes not an option.

Certainly, podcast review sites will spring up (I've already heard one podcast review podcast), but if podcasting reaches anywhere near the popularity of blogging, even that will become a difficult proposition. What this will mean is that we'll start to hear about podcasting either by randomly running into them, or ones that are passed along from friends, or other podcasts that interest us. The result of this very well may be the broadcasting infrastructure all over again (albeit with some important changes).

To cut through all of this content, we need at least two complementary technology approaches: 1) Automatic transcription of podcast content; and, 2) Collaborative filtering applied to podcasting. The first technology will improve the chances that we can stumble upon podcasts of interest to us. The second allows us to become a giant filter of all the podcasts out there to recommend to us the ones we are most likely to find interesting.

Adam Curry has just made a change to his show that proves my point about exploration (in fact, I wish he would have waited until I was able to get this podcast recorded before changing his format so that I would seem less like a follower). His last show took him out onto the streets of Miami where he talked as he walked and recorded the sounds and people he heard and talked to along the way. This may not be entirely new, but it is new enough, and now easy enough to do that people might explore all kinds of variations on this theme. People might record their entire vacation, describing what they see, or just letting you listen; potentially appealing to the escapist traveler, or the voyeur crowd, or any number of small sets of people that "broadcast" could not hope to support.

After I introduced one of my co-workers to podcasting, he mentioned that it would now be possible to do podcasts totally drunk or high. This may or may not result in interesting content, but now anyone who wants to explore this, can; and it may result in something that large numbers of people are interested in, or it may result in something we can call art, or it may result in something we can call crap, and we may all disagree on which it is.

A good analogy might be paints. At some point, paints became available to the masses. I have no doubt that many people took up painting and much bad work ensued. But I think it is a long way from there to saying that painting should always be left in the hands of those who we might pick to best use it. I have little doubt that some wonderful painters would never have sprung up if paint wasn't readily accessible.

In music, the evolution of popular music often depends of what was being experimented with years before. Because someone was experimenting with some tape in their basement and handed out hand made copies, someone else gets an idea to build upon it. And someone else gets an idea from THAT person's work. I guess the point is that the best uses of media come from a boot-strapping process whereby a bunch of crap is produced, it gets weeded through for the more interesting stuff, and MORE crap is produced with hopefully less crap in the next generation, and more content is produced with increasingly less crap, and so on. The best ideas emerge, but the crap remains the fodder for future great ideas.

If I remember who you are, do I violate your privacy?

2005-01-06T15:41:00.000-08:00

Student Ian Curry has created a system called bluefish whereby everyone who has a bluetooth device that walks into range of the system gets their photo taken by a webcam, and gathers whatever information it can from the bluetooth device (presumably information primarily consisting of what services are offered on the phone).

When a person passes the system a second time, the photo that was initially taken is sent to the bluetooth device (if it's capable of receiving unsolicited files).

This raises the obvious question of the security of the bluetooth device (can people interact with the services on the device without authorization?). But Mr. Curry goes on to state that it brings up issues related to privacy, and I wanted to explore (tease, really) the idea a little.

What other identifiers do we carry around with us that might be as useful as bluetooth in terms of identifying us against our knowledge?

Cell phone radiation signatures?
Face?
Walking patterns?
Voice patterns?
RFID cards?

Certainly these are not all as easy to use as a bluetooth signature (in fact, none of them, with the exception of RFID are, and RFID may be too rare to be interesting at this point), but they will likely be soon enough.

What exactly are the "very real privacy concerns" that this raises? Perhaps we'll discover that the problems aren't as deep as we feel they might be, or perhaps they are worth the tradeoff we get from the enabling technology (equally likely, so that people don't think I'm that much of a zealot, we may discover it is not worth the tradeoff).

Is this significantly different from an ad server that knows everywhere you go online? Certainly it feels like it is, but why, exactly?

We're very used to feeling violated by technology these days (perhaps even trained to do it by major media), but I wonder if this is something to feel violated about at all.

What do you think?

Via Smart Mobs

Podcast: A bit of Poetry

2005-01-05T19:09:00.000-08:00

Here's a podcast (~3 min, 1.7MB) I just did where I read a short piece I wrote some time back.

Podcast: Transcribing You Podcast

2005-01-04T21:35:00.000-08:00

Here's today's podcast (~14 minutes, ~6.5Mb)

This one is about my belief that people should use voice recognition software to transcribe their podcasts.

I'm including my show notes as they may be more informative this time than usual, but they're pretty crude. The transcription (which is horrible this time, no doubt because the universe has a sense of humor) is below the notes.

Show Notes
January 4, 2005
The RobCast
what is quickly becoming a frequent supplement to and likely replacement for the RoBlog
theroblog.blogspot.com
theroblog@thenetatwork.com

It is time to start automatically transcribing your podcasts.
Yes it sucks but you should do it anyway

why?
capturing knowledge is the first step in building on it

this is what has made the Internet so great; it's a knowledge capture mechanism
people can go and find information out there in the world in ways never before possible, and build upon that information

but the internet is still heavily text based, meaning that your audio content is locked inside of its file. transcribing your content helps people use search engines to find you

podcasting has the right kind of visibility to spur development in voice to text, which I believe will be transformative in other ways

won't people just consume the text version?
let's start by asking what would be so bad if they did
It would be fairly equivalent to blogging, which most podcasters were probably already doing anyway

now it seems likely that people are interested in podcasting (especially receiving podcasts) because they like the SPOKEN version better. They like the personal dynamic as well as the portability.

And for all the reasons that portable podcasts are useful (so you can consume content when your eyes are otherwise occupied) it will continue to be

I strongly believe that adam curry is wrong to get hung up on the fact that people who have access to his show notes. People like you for your personality Adam, and reading your podcast is just not the same experience.

Making your content easier to access will bring more, not fewer listeners

What if I don't do, as Dave Winer calls it, the "soliloquy" format?
may be best for rambloggers like me who just talk and less good for those that integrate other things into their podcast

If you can isolate your voice track from the rest, however, you can transcribe just that portion.

It would be nice if there was a service that allowed you to upload your podcasts and get back a transcription, but there would likely be challenges learning and updating your voice model (though if you used something like Flash Communication server, you this could probably be made much easier)

Please send me your comments

IBM ViaVoice's Garbled Transcription
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Paper of Sumter verse is a web sites that single maybe the wisdom and attention to the right to read it and to inspire me to fly into a new sense a little research store all the other papers out there and let U.S. allow a rally
Breaks are not ever having to open a box, not ever having to call people often use all come on my own accent and install has to do that and yet the Internet is knowledge captured alive stock will have a good way is of some seven under terrible and and and but a good way to and
From all deals while Hamas and do harm people consult and tell was in the constancy of your child her without listing and currently the status transcription software support reducing my blog hunt is pretty crappy yes zoea run my blog is true IBM's ViaVoice high interest in your but bles goes in the last two or more on Michael blog Director to enterprises but the animals are McNutt debt been working in trainable boy small-market since Rollins stock of its San better room and has an integral small all runs this podcast is a transcript as a student on with this progress will swell junta it delayed ask you do it to start my what what I stated you is your upon pastor stood be running even even though the heat is still a level is it fairly decent job all some of the stuff is capture him but more importantly the local had more people are that etiquette against domestic debt people in what they're in Masada an analyst at existing interesting Dominica can't hawk now you get a certain kinds of podcasting uh uh uh uh uh uh uh it podcast that but or example include lots of music written and that is is a this is probably less it useful an idea for you-But you if your capture in tobacco latter on to capture some were allowed to roam you're Oistrakh secure voice protractile dollar audio to detract in the still isolate and an expert to weapons and McCarty come as zero hot area director tackling it least briefly, awhile but people like Anchorage to have concerns about ahoy Howell people might consider in the tax written there shall his and his ultimate reason the and Dr. Alta his concern data shown analysts have to consume the attached versions show and a rapidly to listen to the real version National were assigned there not interested in yet Hungarians actually candy know how to treat you but you actually somebody just horrible color you block grant their affair and much like John you blah but the great benefits are real looks from also can't pot test new you have an audio have the transcription of there is indeed podcast and R Carroll cry rings of speakers rhetorical peloria Iraq via some people were saying interesting he does taxables medicines awhile but um yeah but at a deep emerald is a minister at the agreement all I have sent this tell him throw the idea of her aunt seen people harrying back stocks can't if you have sought to please go ahead and leave them your mind Larnaca Hamas and a level of postal company and sent the company's fiscal Hollis Atherton Arab as Le blogged at theroblog dot Blogspot dot com stock recently me e-mail at the raw blogged and Annette and Oregon can't yet estimate theroblog at

Podcast: Solving the Show Notes Problem

2005-01-03T21:06:00.000-08:00

Here's my second podcast (15 minutes, ~7MB)

This podcast discusses an idea I have that might make show notes more useful for podcasters. I describe (poorly) a potential application that would allow mobile podcast listeners to request particular show notes via their mobile phones using SMS.

Here's the garbled transcript, provided by IBM's ViaVoice:
It's January 3, 2005 and listen to the robcast the robcast is an occasional supplement to and potential replacements for the raw blogged my regular blog @ ve Rob blogged dot Blogspot dot COM that Steve er zero P L O G dot Blogspot dot COM six is that you have any French indeed leading any comments about this uh podcast please to reduce cellular on the blogged entry accounting this article or is podcast or pun duty only at the door Rob blogged at the net at work not, deaths and the Rob blogged at T H E N E T A T W O R K dock, has to be pretty quick entry because EDS status settlement of the first of inspiration, or redress are out there because of to is to do is in about it but hopefully and dress of of taking too was a of a quick note to us that there of to of like a last podcast and recorded this essentially north through my iPod and recording this one directly into my computer we will see a sign that makes a civilian defense it probably will thief island lacks a certain amount of the season and portability of the iPod and and they switch to this uh this of the design is a charge of worked well so descriptive entry is about to S M S and podcasting addresses the of short messaging service I believe is what it stands for essentially it's the ability to text message through your piece their reinvestment and in give jurors thinking Baden's youth as the masses interested me for quite some time because I think it is really in dicty the of the the the the missing portion we're talking about an hour for example marketing online, or even it would require error a response of Mr. you might normally do via computer and of so much of much of what we do is mobile of we're we're about about what we exposed to things that debt is its its best in and we have no way of some ofs the we haven't come up with some way ofs allowing us to engage further is something that we sent interesting or of about of without having to go back to say f to Fuertes cells of so if this is specifically for a talk about podcast officials of General cigar are pre useful as a supplement the supplemental information for podcast and the loss is not this year's second television accretive some of those as such having the support to podcast and enlisted to a bunch of hot castors the it it sounds like shows tend to include proposals include via URL links to some articles that were mentioned in degrees to download the service in will bull extra bits of content of that there is not possible aura in the of the problem is that to the rebels hold interesting part about podcasting to begin with is the idea the you can't take a essentially this upon Internet experience this this online media and you can ticket with an sh lawyers who do your grocery shopping in unison today's corner Reuter to Excel to service its characters are beholden to zero doctor Wilson is a curious taken his lovely media with in some respects it's delicious and those are not a disservice or use the services because John's and on it if hyperbolic but the really it did its and less useful in Manila and increase local law backed the surprise entry into it and since they never looked at I think it's probably a slight the Canara least at Shearson and because such a run into a song people show notes as I subscribe to respond is there's no easy way to and during that in the uh podcasting Harris as readers but that more Latimer test in the those people mention that the Indians in your alluringly to something annually about
In a car wash and workers and the night that its zero what I do want is some and dozens of show moves don't relieve the city that slow downs and zero other proposal for an on-line service and and that essentially allows you creators show of shows is is a worry are built in this or displays his triumphs whistled lookism-go some place I did that tonight I commence my shows by a single camera type the title of additional monotype and the constancy and there may not be your own in the not include your all this and a do that and then to analyze data all in there and done everything arranged well want to on his it stays the on this web applications website and one legged back to his eighth lists of the notes with a list of the titles of the notes and perhaps to be lethal an analyst of the tunnels and roads and associated constant ID number of safety note ideas you well that goes with each of the of so ofs then when I I can use this page has I'm actually doing 9 podcast 2 to gunna preference to have my notes and as a goal on a night when I'm on to refer you to something Honda this House are blog or me because they view digest add an additional nine automation and blog your eyes just type in the zeroth saw the police doesn't fit in with via Swiss as with the show was persevered real-time this show um then that you can read through those the state House to consent case time and you can slide this URL business and these three financial notice 4216 up end death what when I went to the Solicitor this to and during a course your podcast for a to be near the end of uh I expect you tell me a is phone number the Aiken has a message to end of I would become vice my cellphone which I have to assemble some I wouldn't attack in a similar ruling course I like to show beyond the dollar since nine and then that I would type accounts and IBM release and united stand on my song and moral lasted be done in essence of what would happen meet music's stands when Joe its you and S M S process in service sooner rather couple some of their and debt announcing on talk to them and passenger services turn out to be absent critiques the U.S. tour on the the message to sign a server associated with the somber alleges give it an offense and to bring about some numbers um there he exists * allows you to creekside digit phone numbers and the purpose of the text messaging they've been trying to get so you can do given us at amount universally across all phone carriers sent this in IDs a dozen always work ofs as our only five digits after 20,000 uses some rounds of resources and and the possession and so many of these artists launce the visitors a shortcut to us in the anonymous buyer tenses in number because um be hard for people are remembering can get some sort of vanity Merck's flight the plus and souls of in Britain on a crucial task of the service of back and did the messages shows you the form an earlier given it some routes that message to the appropriateness transfer and and and and your server reduce the high person's phone number that that sent you a message and they get the haulms be no idea it is a and file where the notes IDs could include deep to be for the entire show of so if you use your other options wells under the new server to says okay this here's the person's phone number here is the IDs it nears the show ideas to warrant um hum look to see is our behalf and yellow dresses those in the number of the Madonna of Hamas and back a message sense if I'm the person who set trends are request from Agamas summer storms as as in your e-mail address or a continuous on all the replied that in my e-mail address and send it this time to an and an e-mail address will restore its highest number until such time as sites designed changes are glial together and this this service why Lindsay's you by e-mail that particular show amount of so you'll it and you're probably automatically bundles in is like what show data was in what so ofs Peugeot was and who did it in what a show title was won may be generally well as a bounce whether you entered into your Shona Manager application Venus and then it which sit is shipped off to to the recipients of events if I hear is of particular legal matchup tonight to ask the House Un-American tie against an increase our gross or example and decrees on a non-religion cullis but podcast notes number of and then type in his bid because of constant and I wanted sense a little shot in my e-mail box and its German bass in the computer on and yo < happens in the vicinity of an industry to the Urals to additional blog in your also larger our article or bonds and the reason you're also else up and deported to use that money back to my desk, or my Computer those things those in July decided were interesting fight and I captured at I was out in the steel as I was out be you'll like this is all about um I would have all this is always interesting stuff back here to to settle a strike in go get this Sal-n back in place and a half minutes and exit to activity section download the files I conclude in uniform of articles is this new way of some delivery and added value at St. John's sense to me to your listeners challenging things you can do it matter sublicense from the one used by you can't allow older users based on EDS's from from email is to have a single click to allow people to subscribe to hide your podcast for example sonority horror I in a unanimous occasion if you have refused to hear during notifications or e-mail newsletter the youths come seeking union to ask those people who have an additional interest in your contents on not not any kind of mean-spirited and around and and a stamp marking sort of way of but dead people who are generally interested genuinely interested in your cylinder Constantine can subscribe to this jury more modest Boston Edison's is a it in potentially determine his release be alerted likes when here in the area that you're in their career whenever issued want to capture their e-mail address for maybe 20¢ out Christmas e-mail's a Hans Smits of whatever where that happens to be of also discussion luncheonette the it that when I look into S and services for other applications under a small cost to believed both receive and stands on the back and sides and not from the consumer side you reduce whenever costs you incur would be in to Mr. with your cellphone plan the end the you to initially cover that by sponsor and you're you were females sponsor so that the year you could partner with a member makes sense treated to possibly result of your carrier unless at and so that the messages could say and perhaps if you're the person who designed to actually made this service into reality on businesses in a disservice of cells that sells the gas um but potentially to do it as as a user of the services well so whoever sponsors a show or maybe some of his sponsors if specifically You're notifications will analyst you get an agent to information and a U.S. of persons receiving content of and that this shows some of these accounts and to your question and underneath interest on my arrival absence or tax matter some sort of sinister bass 0 uraeus service then cinched useful to the consumer if the blood and services useful for them as as a producer of consent and that the up the people who are acting as a year earlier to connect to the of the mission of content of to consumers from the producer of also get something on the Web also a of I S zero step yet in in that sell well a very the very large net seller loses to the metals like to trade on this is the idea not to hope be some you'll the assessment the 16 ministers so that if you listen to this uh podcasting this is actually useful idea on and but added that day asked to more willing to do some linguists East you do, who love to hear about it I knew you in your interest in getting started with it around your eye of an accomplice of the consent some of us reason winsome one of the abortions and phone numbers as to the and get in contact to um but dead just does least be required Grammy skills of patients are are beyond the end of lease of this in and slice whenever solar no use use its use Release one is interested in how coursers us and to your do with this concept and uncertainties in yet in email at of the Rob blogged at the network doctor of were visit my blog at the RoBlog dot Blogspot dot, since her adult couple of articles of on my blog for related to asbestos and acquisition as messages for marketing in general and at least one resident mischievousness and stunts on my blog if I know I a so I actually if the minister did touched this last week his son article related to how surrealistic star in store sells organs from homes now housed in a an idea the concurrence is a horse race in the months wore on the House Waterston near the end of the idea I believe this so that U.S. investors number with it with the House a regular property more of but a description of what is of what the is stored on what moral summation of the House if I install new novel is I hope you enjoyed this to Ms. podcast

Self-Documenting Life (Images)

2005-01-02T22:25:00.000-08:00

My First Podcast

This post is my first shot at podcasting. If it works well enough, expect to see more of these in the future.

This particular post is the second part in my Self-Documenting Life series, and deals with how I went about capturing images of my daily life.

The images at right are some of the ones that I've captured so far, and should link to my Flickr archive of images I took throughout the day a week or so back.

What follows is the transcript of the podcast as performed by IBM's ViaVoice software. Obviously I have a long ways to go to get the transcription up to readable quality.

TRANSCRIPTION
The listing to broadcast audio supplements soon as possible replacements for my regular blocks which a sound that of the raw blogged thought what spot talks Kolffs today all be up by cashing in a true sense witches of abusing by iPod to be to record this some of pot cast and the the inn as such will be of limited to the of bits of that debt allows in the regular iPod operating system I take a look it then the pods Alum product for Lenox Becker and will have a working for a fourth generation iPod to live music and also using the bulking universal microphones adaptor which if you read any of my previous blogged and you probably haven't I am still no and I suggest I selected that essentially but Griffin's I talked on to to technical issues with the I talked today Hannah and I'll be talking about a is something that I've previously can't capture by blogged the self documenting life of the previous version of my blogged was about to of how I hate use my iPod for capturing conversations that I have a regular life of the setup that using and how well performs why that's potentially interesting this time of will be doing the same thing I except wheat instead of talking about audio will talk be talking about images on with the uh the audio portion of my steps and then recording the my iPod using exactly the same set up that I would using for a up transcribing conversations that have of all will come out of this is that not only will I have it pot test with and listen to that also has been automatically generated transcription of and now that's in go a can of of farther off of a not quite in the realm of from the real world quite yet because um my a current transcriptions s success rate is about 40 of 50% so I use IBM's ViaVoice take the lead in the wave file that's generated for my iPod of and then run transcription against using a voice markets boy's model that I used that the recorded using my iPod I like to set it's about 47 percent success rate amusing thing of course it is that when you recording and and you and go back and have it transcribes things of IBM Software I'm guessing from probably nobody's commercial software is set up to really handle the account conversational type speech of similarly it's not set up to handle a lot of background noise like you might get in real conversation, it doesn't handle your stammering which you hardly notice probably that I did have a lever well it doesn't handle if you slur words together or speak rapidly but he does try a tribe of to transcribing everything so it tries to transcribe Loy's it and here's the background might be other people talking in Ithaca under capture and faintly so let end up happening is you get this long string of the um attempted transcription that since the of ViaVoice uses in the context to try and figure out what you're what words you're using it to pieces when you have said to can predict we will beat St. within a few words but if you read the transcription of something he said it turned out that is pretty amusing because the go from having a discussion about what's for dinner in the uh uh in the transcription to suddenly that talking about very specific details of the Middle East when really you were just to go positing or it in quite figure out the words and on and so it picks it tries to guess those words and in search whole other conversation in any case on this time I'll be talking about alike said the image portion of self myself document in my project of this the image portion of at this point, Mr. Bacchus a second I have a Nokia 3650 cellphone and I really perched it because I did have to capabilities it had a really nice big screen on it of and it had the camera on and that it will have any idea what I reduce those things I want to fiddle around with glue to since the how well were not well it worked because it fit in with some of the thing that I am I imagine will be needing in the near future of and in fact some things better target come true of but turned up the phone also has the city and 60 operating system on it which of well it's not as not Windows or even when necks on it stiffer from a lot of phone switch don't have any operating system to speak of their least one that is generally available for applications to be built on by the public of and I didn't think of it the time is really interesting um but since it's been nice to half of the occasional applications Aiken down on my phone to do things gains in be popular the orderly downloaded in in those found there's like for example in Game Boy emulators it to download gave away a the ROMs essentially in on your of your phone in a complete game Boy games of the my success of recently since I've been thinking a lot about how old computing mobility cameras and that sort of thing will affect our lives and not be interesting to go ahead and trying to some of the things that kind thinking they're probably going to happen anywhere, and I'd like to have the technology and steadily up the skills to do those kinds of things um hmm mal-least take a stab at something the approximate how I think technologies are renewable. The near future and explore many what the Dodgers are Y Y might not be interesting at and then what debt what other issues like sociological so when that in mind I decided to turn mind cell phone into a an automatic recording camera, the IDA is essentially that I would have some piece of software set up on my camera that would periodically take pictures I and that treaty to be specified. Data or it could be just whenever the camera things that significant amounts of detail of you or does really matter to me on it and to that effect I downloaded a couple of applications of for my 3650 phone 22 trying to accomplish that the two applications I have had the success and all with the time downloaded number that of were in use by by Tegea and spy by I'll and on the new spy application both of these are essentially supply applications as they say in there and which I on are supposed to allow you to set of sums for alarm of based on what kind of motion will support a motion that happens when the camera and so you directly in the in a nice world set this up at my your front door and then that as you work out to a camera would detectives only light came in through the front door in case and that perhaps it is open and send you a photograph of perhaps a burglar trying getting your house now ahead of the it's any surprise to anyone that would what probably generates the sales for these are dirty old man who won a put their camera somewhere and take photos of an unsuspecting women on and of course lots to be continuing and a continuing we more the importance privacy issue Korea touch on each year on the case the espy application that will take will once the was the son of it will take a photo and have opportunity not an option any number of things in excess messages are written an MMS messages including the photo of but it also just say the photo to you our camera a larger phone and then in that some amount of time interval the use that to reactivate the war the and so I use that that set up to have the phone take a picture essentially been in since since the high image by application is a really very good detecting what is real change and on and what on the interesting change for like a better word on in essentially meant that every time it activated the alarm take uh picture react to it in orbit take a picture, and then wait some of time and I said that for 65 seconds because there was for some reason the and and Van Ness we set the alarm and so would that it amounted to taking a picture and upper had some success in the early going with this and the good thing is you could of the 16 Meg and/or modified car but the 16 Meg of memory in addition to regular and the so I could specify that extra egad their memory card and of and that it worked reasonably well and of endeavor it took the pictures back when workers were extremely well it took pictures all the time every 60 seconds of end up the problem with image spine particular area that uh uh uh it kept crash in in effect of it went from crashing every couple hours, and were unusable and all of I paid for the version of image by because the demo version was of I couldn't set up and away you could access the controls to set up and whether the and so now I'm in the process of the other application and I tried was called spying by island of and this application of moral lasted the same thing you did have a kind of interval which it would reset your award it to stick picture become a lot some things changed since it took a few seconds it is taking pictures I would say every time the good thing is seen to be pretty stable application in the end of is able to download a demo version and given a shot the downside is that the you could specify which major media to store your images to some the phones built in memory of the could specify where and so it the its best it saved its images into a specific directory that turns out I couldn't figure how to get that from my computer of which were ultimately on the other problem was that the once it reached a hundred images it crashed en up with a confined any way of having it take the first file name would be called image 71 become a call image 01 02 03 and to adopt some 99 and then the next image it would try and take presumably 100 crested public because did so to that to date and have had the large amounts success of this by giving sh by working often on an for a full day on Aum and the cooks and added taking pictures every 60 seconds I'm and then not I took those pictures and I uploaded them to my flicker count my blogged entry the if it the transcription of this idea works well of then I'll put that Lincoln mayor of but the blocking to the companies this will have an image is sample images that came from that day of a taking a and then links back to my flicker count will of the entire of images of what the things that I tried to do with this of was that what I started downloading these photos of my phone true blue to was on grains and in some sort of date order which than but once it was the images got copied from my phone on to the computer in the apparently random order come to the computer assigned the the date and time but that image was copy that is the the time it was written to the computer as book to create and modify day, so I action was using another application to rename all these files that can cross by the date and time so that the eye to sort of some other application Iraq with them to either the pilot of labor by the modified or creation David Conn, but the sense the copying the process predicates for all intents and purposes the phones creation in modified date of the image then I am but a force led lost it a bit of utility with the so hopefully I'll and this in mind my ideal world what I would like is at a working application for my phone the ticket picture every 60 seconds or some time interval that I testified on not as interested in ones that detect changes on screen and then right Aetna and Cigna image but if you seven interval timer that one to use the current date and time the phone as the file met at 8 that would put ultimately the most useful way of getting salt and work so what I've done and of this is an astute will bit more background on this this that one day where I was able to take a lot of pictures is I just hung the phone around my neck and a strong some yo-yo string of era it for my phone and wrapped around my neck in and the to wander around most people thought of course that does to an act of just one of my phone here, of all those interesting to find that almost to a person of people would say no be really funny it gets you could get that thing to record images are record video as runaround year-end and data so I would debt let people who mention that no law was in fact doing that very fanning the and the new peak have taken aback because suddenly on what was amusing and interesting idea was some sort of invasion of their pricier this perceive but suddenly they win for thinking he that can funny in Cowell to where those photos going and who's seen the up so one of the issues that no doubt in this is this is fairly obvious to rewrite have to deal with in general is that the world according to an and done some interest on my block of related to that and I was that the accelerating that change conference in that Stanford a zero-month crackdown was a Sept. Oct. some or and then on and there's some discussion about privacy issues and technology and there's no doubt a thing that that both the surveillance cameras cell phone cameras leave more more kinds of sensory recording devices from some of that right after can reconsider what it means to have privacy and the trade-off of having access to information and that is gathered to the sense sensors and other people happy access to that same information anyway I've got a few entries about privacy and that sort of thing on my block indefinitely in a future pot test all probably addresses for more formally of that at this the funny thing was is that that and this is where the things that then I hope to actually keep this but is that I captured a lot of notice that I never would've captured of the law and so on for example and captured some I I went to pick my daughter did her day care right sat down and played with the kids and well they're reading books and one, and that's a couple key pictures of my daughter and a couple other kids all play around there, and went to my dog and that at some pictures of that, having the enormous number of pictures of my computer which is worse in the vast majority of my day it interesting photos of where I went to lunch her to have lunch with a mom some played a few photos of me eating food which is the and not from straight on the problems that had personally with it with this process is that up could really find a good length to hold the camera at a where it wasn't affected by of the convex abdomen and a hat of which even by and large taking pictures up words which is fine when you're talking to somebody directly of more often than not means you get a lot of photos of of the use of force and not Aiken of Lord the phone down and quite a bit, so that it was looking more and on but that that would have to lower it for up or both Mosul I've got would've gotten the been torso shots of people were of the head shots of so of the experiment around with a uh different angles on the phone and ways of achieving those angle there haven't found anything satisfactory at the form factor my phone is public part of the problem my wife had a data put phone clamshells type of for phone and data and the incidence is still smaller it probably would be less affected by the issues I am so that that that can of what I've done and will bit about the whites interesting but that " the reason this start doing this wises some ways it what is as real interest income manyfold and all try to touch on them on and so much is said to her like remember all of them have some notes here and talk from of but that their their approach and not all lead to 0 08 are back in touch on a couple what that is taking pictures with image spot which is the one that was able to take most pictures of course the day it was taking photos of once every 65 seconds that end would amount to about 64 megaphone rose a dead so his seventh technical known on on how much data it was captain of user 640 by 480 I would say at best photos on and so they're they're definitely not high resonance and ultimately of the debt it was in some respects it a surprise and how little space a bomb that 64 Meg was feel pretty much from when I when I woke up and was dressed up to when I was going to sleep of the so eager to capture some of the amount of information are pre small car and preshrinking get 64 my character in the 16 the courtroom from of which will allow me just capture drop the course of their legal in the just download of I have to say that in this is probably no surprise to most people or can perform and that the image is not spectacular of if there will low light a law or any real amount of motion you do a lot of border of what Paul R A and so a good deal of the photos and have really glories most of with Deion really in can use of so when I would also like an ideal world this is a camera that I'm was less sensitive to low like the if it was sensitive to low light would probably at have faster shutter speed because the problem I ran into more than it being in low light procuring which when you're in the Northwest High in the winter there's certainly plenty of was that that the
Photos were well I was a motion for a year while I was not this fairly walking but the you know to have bobbing back-and-forth for talking and the leaders of such but so some sort of faster shutter speed would probably do a world of good that you be nice to find some way to make that happen along with Kevin better low light quality that know how we would do that on another camera can experts are distorting and attempt to to think about how we would do that the death if somebody has a of a line on a good camera phone that does well low light and especially motion and you should hear about it especially if it says something with either of the smart phone of ours, the Nokia said in an operating system or a store some other operating system that would that would be it be interesting to the next next step of this process so where I see this as going and of in terms of just Kenneth of data is that caravan using a single camera and and taking about one picture of the next generation of this process Raleigh BS-ing 0 camera taking one picture second or the a single camera taking one picture minute with higher resolution of item in our rich use or the other right probably choose the more often than not then the higher resolution because. Resolution is not as critical of some because we're not doing any post processing it's mostly just for the ability to look of I would I would be fine with the current resolution but I think that that so the next seven progress should be in volume of information and captures so currently might my phone and will and in fact capture video and the deal of the camera unable font will capture video of but it will capture video of giggle in cash microphone only captures on and I'm sure that I could find a different order application allow mature or of the amounts of video but it quickly ran of space of for some proposals about of etiquette Hamas he was a Samsung is going to be releasing the first the first cell phone with a a and once again to like having the iPod style hard drives of attached to or cellphone 3 have died tens of get some data and dicing recall letter at a recent for Media jukebox players and have zero hundred giggling and then we could really talk seriously about capturing video think I did a calculation 0 about a year ago or so that you can of oil low resolution of not not quite 24 frames per second of would take something like a one essay he to hundred the year to capture all of video of your entire day everyday if war in zero your entire waking time on and here again its low blow resolutions zoa but still it's it's a it's achievable about inflation with the current the current generation released the coming generation and from there from a single camera range at 30 frames per second on will probably move something that has multiple cameras or one single three and 60 degree camera capturing day that at 30 frames per second for use of the entire 360 view or upon so what is interesting when a white why bother even during a so I have a blogged entry that I've done previously in of that was oriented around virtual presence and edited that background of Thanksgiving of and basically what I meant by that was the ability to have somebody tagalong with you got and get some idea of the experienced leader having a discount hang out the way that people normally handouts of the Eddy was that U.S. as a friend of mine would be able to tap into my video stream and up by the stream would be 360 for all intents and purposes either done by one single friends 60 degree capturing camera or by multiple cameras probably had mounted a mom and honestly in the near term that look pretty stupid but an innocent passion must be sacrificed for the sake of the sake of technological change and what you're connected to my stock might of the deal of point in of a as a side note are the reason I was thinking about this kind of application was because of various um mobile phone manufacturers Orangemen my phone manufacturers this fairly But-mobile phone carriers of the been talking about bandwidths in years to come up around three turns 60 megabits per cent, and of course in Japan I think they're trying have 10 gigabit per section per second into the house of via fiber so as the what would you do with all this and what up to zero is fine things to do with the bend with is not is not a problem is a at I think fewer people these days say well gosh where we never going to do with that amount processing power band with we've learned and by been bludgeoned every every time we get new bursts of hard drive spacer processing power were band with that weak we can definitely consume it such a thing about what we how we would be consuming and future and this large amount of video coming at you from out from one person to another person to my good fit for the so far have up in some either with using water multiple cameras recording freelance 60 degrees around me for around for all of and to, and I was to send that to you and tickle of ban would of the what to do with that is that if if you were if you're getting my video stream it applies in image processing and set and based on amended data of you could look around the scene independent from how I was looking around since the news in its processing and he could look left well as looking right thumb and either your image processing coupled with my meditative it told you told you howl I was moving up and down and left to right or possibly post reprocessed on my side Ellison's a less likely will hold your view for you steady as I blogged up and down with collected rent so you're going to cure with in a tree behind me and he said they'd look at history behind you and I turned around your image processing software would keep your view on that tree in add that I moved around look get so if you in the freezing multiple cameras I have a couple careless with cutbacks market size of and fried as I switched from as as you were to switch from being on my back inside cameras to side of the cameras in front of the campus your imaging process and image processing software would handle that seamlessly on and at the same time handle was bobbing up and down roof my head orientation terms of looking different things which would allow you to really lead experience when I was doing etiquette more realistic way you be able look Ramstein that what everyone on similarly if if there were microphones tracking where is your orientation wasn't the new stereo procreant audio based on an orientation you could listen to things as well as the hear the of the know what the ambient sounds were close allows you have a virtual tell presence of virtual well where or virtual presence still presents the latest dance meaningful effect in when it's a that nearly tangible sleek have a conversation invite one or more friends and have a conversation I am sharing obviously a as I walk down the street on people people to tap friend of mine who buy a lot could happen the minute stream my audience in we could talk directly with talk of raw walking and the allow for think a more natural interaction of sunlight current cell phones e-mail's and on and instant text messages with the is really to communicate to get across the and it would transform this tell presence in to relieve the idea of being there having a simultaneous experience I'm and not necessarily be required to communicate so there could be long pauses as there might normally be is your strolling down a bit of the conversation when it made sense the rock and occupied and as along so I'm but that's one thing I think that the is interesting will be interesting output of our really can meaningful to share on another day so that is easy to do this I'm obviously of mention this in my audio portion ve itself our committee live by the people it your life so you could say steamy you could say well what it what it had to say whether it is here who just said that on or hunt was I looking at earlier,
I know saying something to somebody by care or who remember when I was talking of get a chance to have searched for your life and your people like your than that is to begin to be very useful if your personal up like my life tends to be right something to be bad for people like me and when we spin back he said you said there's no I said that um well as a stroll back and are seldom wrong so I tried to tell my wife of an interesting couple of one other thing that touched on before was that the if if we if you're able to do some processing on this on the stuff your sins of you get up of some competing the with few minutes robusta nothing to do is processing your post losses in real time it it it it matters in the fact in the tenant impact of the effect on the effect itself of you could have it do things like the record and of recognize people by facial expression of by Gates about how they walk on it could have text written text recognition in real time optical character recognition of so some get talked about previously it when we talk about confirmation swarming but the others this site out there of that allows you to note to the drought to find out what gas prices are in your area both high and low based on the fact that people as they see these cash prizes they drive by with me to their computers the type commands a well on the corner of 34¢ in the this gas station had this price Hi Ed and his price for these various so those kinds of applications can be enable automatic you say Aum still whenever I pass this gas station of look up look over here which is rarely the Finance figure out what the prices and then up give that information over here similarly I'm for personal use on you can do things like track automobile license plates on which sound can more nefarious than I think it probably would be similarly with um but just to see whose cars nearby and whether not seen this car before using sperm or if it's a card your friend is and so whether you're wondering by order in know you can conceive that that's their car as they're driving by the way for what ever but I I think having that information on it does open the door of course for things like police officers wanting access to this big network of things to identify license plates increases to find out how to track stolen vehicles in a row criminals of various sorts suspected people wanted people and and I understand there's a can of Big Brother and aspect to this I'm and I have some proposals for how the deal have a can take the Big Brother out of that um but again subject for different then again blocks of this before of the what enables a low of a touch of one last thing so the Alaskan into thinking that the exit of about one some family knows that if you're able to always record your account world around you if you always have a live streamed then it may have an interesting impact and to personal person to person " criminal activity to lock down 911 and 91 could see what I emcee in than in in that in the case of where to place emergency than that they can get capture video of who is sailing the and how critical it is where to at and of course if they capture the video on their and progress of what happens to me they will have potentially some evidence that on hot that they can use to capture this personal the help Capt. this person on all so um if you were at able to say roll back the last 30 seconds and called 91 an idyllic scene unfolding of the event of and if people were capturing the stuff law and and and you had the ability to convict 911 it um and then send informational long of a it can have an interesting impact on on on person to person crime probably your people would figure out a way to be more on misleads the old or ski masks that I just did just another tool in in enabling your own protection so who would enable all this stuff is not just that the active of what it enables the stuff is amended data that go along with that so this is this is the critical point on and as much as identically care for Gordon Mills presentation of Microsoft's my life its technology, at the the accelerating change Conference on to was right about the fact that mitigated is all important and and the debt then is that a lot of meditated is easy to capture for example most things captured in, right so if you are if you only know the canton and are able to search your audio and or video record of your personal and on your personal self documenting life media is still unable to do lot of old useful things you can say what was I doing X time on me know what I say I am taking transcriber audio than you could say well what time did I say this and and that's where things that need time on which were already used to operating as a primary tracking system for October were for a live at and the disease is easy to track of it is excellent at a Dedekind's Inc. in that respect um your location either buying the things it right that easily yourself on to the nose which tower your nearby in which what those towers where those towers go in the world they're physically located on or GPS um which would know where you were going home for girls with nine head yourself with the city would have a continuous in three space tracking of where you were physically going um of toil around with the idea after playing with the GPS over over the winter holiday of debt with up at the GPS for myself and just having always on recording the information become of and then adding into this mess today a stream and developing of and the bond fell to 19 like cream content for not not trading technologies handle latches of something that I should be doing but the night and had to Baltica and put the skills and corporations to make that happen but time we can integrate this GPS stream of which tracks not only on what action my accordance Iraq if you have a also track your orientation that is what we're facing north northeast of um and your elevation so on there's a whole bunch of men a day and that that exists right now for example that the major to can be amended data exist knowledge is not been incorporated is the audio for example lock on on the images for example myself of and to the GPS and or sell a of so those those are all things mechanics estimate that already exists to read there's they're already out there talking transcribe my audio and tell which direction I was facing an actor potentially time stamp for all these um so some other things you could potentially do um so I bought some some while back you could fax to of having this discussion of again that via and the accelerating change conference in view of that was, and potentially an important event for me to because I it was could be on talk to people really smart people who were who were thinking along the same lines as I was of some disagreed which all the more useful on any case the we talk about the possibility of tracking who was nearby U.S. F men a day, and I thought well you can produce at the blue to the sprawly the easiest way during the and you probably have to set something up says okay, I will look to service and win the right person comes along like trust and when the tellable and well I just read in net new site is in this issue is a couple of that up at the good folks at MIT on Aum is specifically made an eagle and San dependent on have created an application based on the Isle of another application called context of which is designed Bayern home me get of essentially the it keeps track of of what blue to chips used in counter I and I presume that you still have to do the manual steps of setting who and who's associated but it does mean that it automatically it be used to blue to that work which is to say a discount to its request to see his nearby it captures the ideas of who those people of whose nearby on it and with that in place to capture who was with the that interesting because that helped the cipher on a silicon said yo if you're looking at person if you're looking in particular direction, and you took a photo you would know potentially that some some subset of people are nearby it could've been in that picture so you can of level of picture with the location by GPS signal location orientation date and time the end people there, and and and that hasn't interesting implications on and on top of this you have other that a data things like body sensors my heart rate monitor body chemical monitors on small this concrete this big Ministry met at 0 talk about on low and put it and thinking get out of all this stuff and I always manage data including the audio the video on a location is in infrastructure have amended data infrastructure 99 necessarily an imminent problem the best meaning of that term of up is not necessarily a structure of the constructor for an infrastructure the decree the decreed in the for step in building on knowledge which is capturing all insured your providing aid big stream that information about your daily Le which you can herself mind of man and the number of applications can common and any number of smart people can approach will from different ways and build upon the fact that there's all this data hear much like we built upon the Internet um to do new and revolutionary things that's why Colin infrastructures because and it have in this are round creates huge opportunity for people to build on this in a transformer it was a thick puree capturing the data as as I'm trying to do is not necessarily that transformed it because the promise that right now can all talk to each other the even when it does all talk to each other will have you'll be able small a small set of ought the admittedly still interesting things to do um but it won't be until somebody comes along on what people always do it take technology and think about and the way it has really ever been thought about before and transformed this this informations that into something truly excelled the art was read in New Scientist for example talked-about the devil to predict what you're doing by whose nearby, men and where you are at high and then taking some sort of action so that that's interesting definitely on and but you can also data mine all this other information in capturing and figure out what your preferences longer tendencies on the you can do some interesting things as well like you can give some of this information of other people and might do that because you want to on to merge with their data streams for example of talk about in my on in the audio of the portion about transcription on self documenting what's the fun documenting my text, not many everything nice and transcribing the I can send that he knew you can send me yours and the interweaving them I will have a description I'll have I will have a record of what now if we could for example we didn't time with the words and unsettled of the what he can do it year we've time with each word to say okay will hears the words I said hears the words they sat on in the weave them based on the time on amine interweave all the other method of the text in terms of each word each individual word is stake with with meta data that adds to the strange new text becomes the the data at similarly to give image processing market simple for about facial recognition or OCR our game identification humps in terms of like walking in the other thing as more and more benefits to Billy up this huge amount and the guinea blocked and that I firmly believe in able interesting things to one of the IDs for for audio for simple is of real-time translation the Universal translator as seen on stark um because it on record when I say and I'm sending me to any of you speak a different language than I do what I need your text be part of that today is which language in speaking on Aiken said that off to third-party service to say okay here is the text and I got to the this back to me in English I can get back in English I can either have it read to me by synthetic voice in real time sailor their real time, or potentially I can have your or a key to have your voice model and Maya in Mike mobile computing probably not Honda but up more likely I can give you give me access to voice model so I keep all the text of the translated back your voice model and you can send me back the audio of house you would've said this so so it would he would sound like your voice and might even be your speaking patterns on but Keller suggested table by the fact that capture text and transcribing real time and then of course in the table past of the other person I am so will just those sorts of them in the and the Saudis will largely technology involved here but would enable up the really interesting possibility of Universal translator content and much as one of the things that I could think about up I could think of him off the top my head so all this is to say that I think this kind of technology capturing all the information about your wife is important that can always put my finger on why and I think the reason is that I can do some things which leads me to believe that they're bigger and better things are will probably never think about other people will so just enabling the stuff which the any moment of it is a think fairly straightforward will allow us to create some really interesting opportunities I think at this point, and since I'm already over the amount, plus my life I would take I will go ahead and cut this off, please do let me know if you like this on this block by awareness of pot to ask why a leading a message to comment on by blogged at the raw blogged data blood spot on, of or seen the email Act of at of the Rob blogged at the net at work not, and its Chi-Chi's an ET 8 T W O R K I a little note to thank you think it's horrible and pleased to of we'll have some constructive criticism for some beach and the constructive criticism on the actual concepts rather than just name-calling and all talking at the keep

iCODE deliveres real estate information to cellphones

2005-01-02T15:40:00.000-08:00

Again via Engadget, this time SMS-based acquisition. You SMS a code found of a property For Sale sign to a predefined number and get back more details on the house you are looking at.

This is similar to an earlier entry I posted relating to using SMS to subscribe to email newsletters, and nearly dead-on to a discussion I had with a friend a week or two ago about using SMS codes on outdoor advertising to get emails with more details on what you had just seen.

iCODE deliveres real estate information to cellphones - Engadget - www.engadget.com

LAPD tests facial recognition technology

2005-01-02T15:18:00.000-08:00

Engaget is reporting that the LAPD is testing facial recognition technology in the field. Too bad they don't cite their source and I'm too lazy to Google it.

One step closer to my earlier prediction about law enforcement.

LAPD tests facial recognition technology - Engadget - www.engadget.com

MISWEB: Message from the future

2004-12-23T16:05:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading an article on the MIS Magazine web site (based on a posting on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends) that gives some thoughts on the future from 5-25 years out. These always seem to get my juices flowing, and this time was no exception. Here are some of my thoughts on the article.

As I believe I've mentioned before, I think it's perhaps not a good idea to depend on people building a technology (especially the scientists and engineers that are solving the complex problems) to determine how the technology will be used in the future. This is especially true when we're talking about infrastructure technologies like nanotechnology. I think that these types of people are often too caught up in thinking about solving the challenges of the technology to spend much time thinking about how it will really be used. They are also, by the nature of working on the problem, more likely to be biased towards its importance (and often, a particular kind of importance) to be reliable. This often manifests itself in company PR statements claiming that a technology they are developing will revolutionize the way we do something but that something is either too narrow for a revolution to be interesting, or too broad for the technology to apply. So when I see statements like "Scientists portray a future in which...", assuming those scientists are the ones developing a technology, I tend to treat it with a grain of salt.

The author of the article, Helene Zampetakis, uses the term "disruptive technologies" a couple of times in a way that I think is just a bit off. Typically we think of disruptive technologies as ones that cause a paradigm shift making existing companies scramble or go out of business. While nanotech may well do this in some industries, saying that they will "disrupt the entire semiconductor fabrication industry" is an overstatement. As the existing major manufacturers of semiconductor electronics are likely to be the ones that will be creating nanotech electronics in the future, the disruption will really likely happen at the tool vendor level. The big guys will remain big and in charge, and most of us will probably not notice anything but the continued expression of Moore's Law. "Revolutionize" may be a better word, as few existing semiconductor companies are likely to have to scramble much more than they already are (and have been for quite a number of years).

In the section on quantum information processing (qip), Bob Hayward, vice-president and research fellow at Gartner is quoted as saying "It will give us an order-of-magnitude jump from the fastest computer of that time - it will not be an evolutionary increase." While he, no doubt, has access to much better information that I do, I do wonder that an order of magnitude increase from the fastest computers of the time (when quantum information processing comes online) will, in fact, be an evolutionary increase. I don't think anyone is saying that information processing ability follows a linear increase. To hear many tell it, we should see something significantly greater than that. I expect that qip will be used tentatively in the market at first while the bugs get flushed out, and by the time it has any real impact on the lives of regular people, we'll be able to point to some curve that more-or-less expected this kind of revolution; may, in fact, that a step-wise change was inevitable.

Zampetakis goes on to quote Hayward saying "As for security, whereas it takes a month for a supercomputer to crunch a DES encrypted code today, it would take just a couple seconds [using QIP]. But maybe we'll also get a corresponding advance in security algorithms." With the recent work done in quantum encryption (the subject of this month's Scientific American, coincidentally), it would seem that security, in the form of encryption, in any case, will still be strong enough to withstand the computing power of the foreseeable future. More interesting would have been a note about how qip will allow information on you from disparate sources to be correlated in real time, and how the vast sensor network will be able to track where you go and what you do (though this may not be as bad as it seems).

An interesting distinction that often gets overlooked when making predictions about the future is between when it will be possible to do something, and when doing that thing will be available enough to have any impact on our existence. For example, in the section on advanced materials, Zampetakis says: "Over the next five years, the development of nanoscaled sensors will allow intelligence to be built into many materials for multiple applications." This may be true, but (and this is highly dependent on the application) it is likely to be twice that amount of time before products incorporating this ability are directly interacting with or impacting regular people.

Dr. Peter Corke, autonomous systems team leader at CSIRO (I don't know what "CSIRO" is, and when I went back through the article looking for it, I couldn't find it, and I'm too lazy today to research it) is quoted as saying ""Robots will be fairly prevalent 10 years from now. We'll see them in offices and hospitals and shopping centres." I'm still doubtful on the regular integration of robots into daily life, but I do feel that they are probably coming SOMETIME soon, so 10 years is likely not that bad of an estimate. It's probably more accurate than other timeframes in this article.

Using robots to perform tasks like mail delivery and store re-stocking seems fairly unlikely to me in the near-ish term. Typically a technology like robotics encroaches into our daily life by taking over the excessively dangerous, costly, error prone, or tedious jobs from humans. Neither store shelf re-stocking, or mail delivery seems to fall into any of these categories with enough severity to warrant them taking human jobs. Further, both are significantly complicated in terms of object negotiation and barrier navigation that the technology will have to be pretty sophisticated (read: expensive) to do any good. More likely will be robots increased use in fire fighting, policing, mining (as mentioned in the article) and the like. No doubt there will be robots capable to doing most or all of the store re-stocking/mail delivery tasks in 10 or so years, but my belief is that they won't be deployed for those uses by that time. By the way, warehouse inventory re-stocking is a whole other matter than shelf re-stocking, and I expect we'll see widespread deployment of automation in that area (I'm guessing this already exists in non-trivial dollar amounts today).

I've mentioned NASA's efforts to help bring about a flying car in the past (although I can't for the life of me find the post...hmm...). Flying cars are one of those things we love to imagine, but I suspect we'd hate in practice. Even if we could conquer the noise, and the risk, we'd still be faced with an energy issue: It takes a heck of a lot of energy for an object to stay airborne. Probably about the time that we could have flying cars, the demand for them will be pretty low as virtual presence technologies increasingly mitigate the need for long-range travel (the most likely niche for flying cars), and automated ground travel (the self-driving car) and mobile connectivity mean that the time we spend in cars can be productive and entertaining for all.

The problem with allowing people to be further distanced from their places of work (the non-social problem, that is) is that if people migrate en-masse to wherever they like, congestion will become a critical issue where all of these commuters come together to land (given the urban airport scenario cited by the article), and then people will have to get from these urban airports to their places of work anyway. I have to admit that I'd LOVE a flying car, but I'm doubtful of it becoming practical enough to become anything but a toy for the rich. I suppose if it was fully automated, you might rent one for a family vacation, but the economics and convenience would have to work out pretty well even for that.

I've notices that this article uses "the next generation of" at least twice, implying that things like 3D holography are just around the corner. Most of these technologies are still several generations away from public consumption.

While we wait for 3D holograms to allow us a form of telepresence that allows us to walk around remote rooms (would we be walking around in specialized recording rooms in this scenario, or would a computer be adjusting where we are walking to make it look natural in the display environment so that when, for example, I walk around the desk in my office I don't appear to walk through a table in the remote location?), technology that allows us to meet in virtual space will likely become more commonplace, allowing us to interact more naturally an a wholly constructed environment than holography will allow for quite some time.

Five areas of business change are identified (rather awkwardly) at the end of the article, and I agree with every one of them. What we'll see, in my opinion, is the transformation of corporate IT from something that looks like the fleet department to something that looks more like the human resources department. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that we'll be seeing combined "Human and Information Resources" departments in the next decade or so as most of the "working" portion of IT becomes outsourced and the IT director becomes someone who manages contracts and regulations than software and computing infrastructures.

Something interesting occurred to me while reading this article. I get hung up thinking about the apparent paradox between things that seem unlikely today but happen anyway, and things that seem likely but don't. What occurred to me is that there is often a single breakthrough required for a technology to become mainstreamable, and that breakthrough is often not predictable. For example, holography is something that seems like it may yet take a while to produce even though it's been around for a while. At some point, some genius will re-envision some core component, and suddenly we'll all have 3D TVs. Perhaps a technology needs to mature enough (which, by the way, takes its own geniuses) so that a genius can study the system and make the requisite discovery. Food for thought.

PhysOrg: Just in time for New Year's: A proposal for a better calendar

2004-12-23T10:58:00.000-08:00

Professor Richard Conn Henry of Johns Hopkins University proposes a new calendar that retains 12 months, and seven day weeks, but that eliminates one-day leap years for 7 day "Newton weeks" that occur every 6 years or so.

Henry's calendar has the benefit of keeping events like holidays, on the same day of the week every year.

At the same time (so to speak) Henry advocates everyone moving to "Universal Time", presumably over the kind of relative time we now experience between timezones. In that way, if I'm in London, and you are in San Francisco, I can ask if you can attend a meeting at 4pm, and that time will mean the same thing to both of us (afternoon in London, early morning in SF) without requiring any translation.

While all of this is interesting, it strikes me as one of those things that will encounter huge amounts of social resistence. People's sense of time is much more personal than their sense of measurement, whose conversion we are still awaiting here in the US (in non-science segments).

Perhaps equally important is the large amount of software that encorporates time either for historical or predictive calculations. This would be an effort akin to the year 2000 bug if not handled correctly, and without impending doom as an incentive.

Henry is trying to get the world's calendar changed over by 2006, when the current Gregorian calendar and Henry's proposed calendar sync up (I noticed that the PhysOrg article doesn't mention any other calendars in current use - Chinese, for example).

I expect this will get a little bit of press but ultimately we'll chug along with our inefficient timekeeping systems.

PhysOrg: Just in time for New Year's: A proposal for a better calendar

Mappr! Where It's At.

2004-12-22T12:56:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update to my previous mention of Mappr.com. The link below is to the beta version of the tool. Something's lacking about the user experience (I can't quite put my finger on it) but cool nonetheless.

Mappr! Where It's At.

IFTF's Future Now: Flickr and "folksonomies"

2004-12-21T08:15:00.000-08:00

Just a bookmark of sorts that I left a comment on IFTF's Future Now blog relating to Flickr and what a fellow named Thomans Vander Wall calls "folksonomies".

IFTF's Future Now: Flickr and "folksonomies"

Self-Documenting Life (Transcription)

2004-12-19T22:11:00.000-08:00

I have an iPod
Last month I bought an iPod, but I didn't buy it for the usual reasons.

Yes, I am an avid music listener, and the ability to carry around my favorite tunes was definitely a plus. As was the ability to use the iPod as a hard drive so that I could tote around files that I need both at the office and at home.

But I didn't buy it for these reasons. I bought it to record what I say. All the time. And have it transcribed into text.

I've found that in describing the purpose of this project, people are either intuitively in favor of it, or don't understand it at all.

For those immediately interested, we talk animatedly about how interesting it is to do this kind of thing, and when I explain the things I think would be interesting outcomes of such a project, they are often completing my sentences for me.

For those for whom the project holds but perplexity, no amount of explanation convinces them otherwise, and, indeed, I'm often at a loss to explain why it seems so interesting.

If you fall into the former category of people, below is a bit more detail on what I'm actually doing, and then some idea of where it could go from here. For those in the latter, thanks for dropping by, but I'm not sure it'll get any more interesting from here.

The Setup
The basic idea of this project is to record only my part of any conversation on something with enough storage to contain an entire day or more worth of conversation so that I wouldn't have to regularly juggle media just when things were getting interesting.

After some digging, I found that the third and forth generation iPods have the ability to record audio suitable for voice (and not much more, no doubt due to piracy concerns, but perhaps owing to the processing power internal to the iPod as well).

To enable this, you need to buy a third party product that allows you to plug a microphone into it. There are two products, that I'm aware of, that support this: Griffin's iTalk, and Belkin's Universal Microphone Adapter.

I was initially intrigued with Griffin's product as it has a built-in microphone/speaker that lets you record ambient audio without an external microphone, and you could play back through the speaker so that others could here without needing to use headphones (Griffin has a similar product, the Voice Recorder, but it lacks the ability to plug in an external microphone).

As I don't have a large gadget budget, I decided that it would be best to try to borrow an iPod rather than buy one as I wasn't really interested in having a portable music device. It turns out this was harder than I had thought given the amount of press the iPod has gotten. I found a few people with iPods, but mostly older ones that don't support the recording of audio. What compatible ones I did find were formatted for Macs, and apparently you have to reformat them (thus wiping them clean of whatever was on them) to use them on a PC (seems darned inconvenient). I finally found someone who was willing to part with their Mac iPod for a week and allow me to reformat the drive, but at the last minute his broke.

Since, after making the arrangements to borrow an iPod, I had already ordered Griffin's iTalk, and since no other iPod appeared to be forthcoming, I sucked it up and purchased one new (the 20G version) from Best Buy.

I had some trouble buying it as Best Buy keep them behind the counter, and I couldn't get a sales person to help me get at them. I also ended up having to get into an argument with a gal at the register about why I didn't want the extended warranty (I had just said that I wasn't interested, and she pushed to ask why, and then tried to counter everything I said). This seemed like a bad idea as: 1) I don't like to be browbeaten (and I'm guessing most other customers don't either); 2) Her arguments were based on anecdotal evidence that, despite a large amount of research that has been done on the subject to the contrary, I was supposed to trust; and, 3) Part of her argument was that she saw a lot of iPods come back for repair, which doesn't exactly make Apple look good, and, if I were a less technically inclined customer, would have made me think twice about spending my hard-earned dollars on something that seems to break a lot.

Anyway, the iTalk arrived in short order and I plugged it in immediately. The audio that it took from it's built-in microphone was fine, but in uncontrolled situations I didn't expect it would work well enough to be transcribed. The speaker was also fine (despite much I had read about it being underpowered, but then I had low expectations, and no real need of it for this project).

The iTalk has a single jack on it that can be used for either a microphone, or for headphones, but not both simultaneously (again, this didn't matter much for me for this particular project; though for future projects of this type it would have).

I plugged one of several PC mics I have lying around in and started talking. The result? Nothing. It would say it was recording, but on the playback, nothing but silence. I tried a couple of other mics with the same result. Strangely, if I plugged in an earphone and it record, it would pick up my speech (though very poorly), but no microphone would work.

I went around and around with Griffin's technical support via email (their live support hours being inconveniently short each day, and the fact that Thanksgiving occurred in the middle of this not helping either) where they claimed I was using the wrong kind of mic (which sent me on a two day wild goose chase) before I finally sent it back and bought Belkin's product at a nearby Mac store (the only place in town that I could find that carried it).

The Universal Microphone Adapter worked immediately and well, and I don't have any complaints about it. It was nice to be able to plug in both the microphone and earphone portion of one of the dictation headsets I have around, at the very least because that means I don't have to have a wire dangling around, and also because my plan was to get a stereo dictation headset (like this one from Koss) which would allow me to go back and forth between listening to music and recording conversations without having to plug things in and unplug others.

I have owned both Dragon's Naturally Speaking, and IBM's ViaVoice (both now owned or licensed by ScanSoft), but I couldn't find the install CD for one, and the version of the other didn't support file transcription, so I picked up IBM's ViaVoice 10 Advanced Edition predominately on its merits of being about $100 cheaper than the equivalent Dragon product.

I recorded one of the training readings you have to do to get speech-to-text software to get used to how you talk. I tried to read it as much as I could in the way I might talk to someone else, rather than the way I might read something, as that was how I expected most of my recordings would sound.

Getting the audio file to my PC with the transcription software had minor annoyances due to the fact that the iPod can only be synced to one iTunes at a time, so I had to get the file from the iPod (it copies down automatically when the iPod syncs) and copy it to another machine for transcribing.

ViaVoice complained about the low bitrate of my file, but dutifully accepted it anyway. I recorded two more training files to try and get its accuracy up. It did just fine with one, and appeared to do fine with the other until it reached the end and then decided all of the lines it said it had accepted were faulty.

That evening I recorded my first regular conversation and got about three hours worth of audio of just my side of the conversation.

I had expected that the transcription would be off more than normal since I wasn't in the best conditions, wasn't speaking particularly clearly, and wasn't dictating punctuation or line breaks. I had guessed I'd see transcription in the 70%+ range.

Nope. The first transcription was about 30-40% accurate. In fairness, when I'm having an animated conversation, the way I talk certainly isn't easy for software to transcribe. Also, ViaVoice steadfastly attempted to transcribe everything that was audible, so if I stammered, coughed, or corrected myself mid-word, it would try to assign a word to the sounds.

The nice thing is that if you're transcribing an audio file, you can watch the words pour out on the screen which is thrilling in it's own way, and it's faster than the conversation. My 3 hour recording took about 20 minutes or so to transcribe.

Here's a snippet of the conversation transcription for your amusement:

for the most hard those things don't necessarily add a whole lot of burden to those folks read before was the French ban the French ban I read Dryden freight your Ios ago from a year ago i.e. as the latter but that it is difficult to get a never-ending but it's not just eating

Since the software doesn't pay any heed to conversational breaks, and since I wasn't dictating punctuation, it becomes difficult to follow the conversation rather quickly as disparate ideas based on, for example, non-sequitors from other participants in the conversation, get all jammed together as an apparent train of thought. Further complicating matters is ViaVoice's attempt to bring in context to help figure out what words are. It turns out (not surprisingly) that the types of context you might have while doing a direct dictation, are rather different from the types of context you might have while conversing. This lead it to make the wrong choice of word based on context even when it apparently chose the individual word correctly based on speech-matching.

So I've been doing some training by making corrections to the text and introducing new words to the software's vocabulary (like "y'know"). This does appear to be improving the transcription accuracy, but at a maddeningly slow pace, made more frustrating by the fact that the application crashes or loses its place from time-to-time, including the only time I've seen it say that it was ready to update my voice model.

In any case, tests have only been conducted indoors and in fairly well controlled environments, and will probably continue as such until I can get a accuracy rate high enough to actually follow the conversation.

One final note on the setup: I was jonesing for a Jawbone headset as I think the technology they are using for filtering out background noise is pretty interesting (they sense the vibration in your jaw to determine when you are talking). Alas, they don't have a version that plugs into any old audio jack just yet (only special phone jacks). I've sent them an email asking when they might have a more general product, but haven't heard back from them (and, frankly, I don't expect to). This kind of technology will be absolutely critical for my project to work in the majority of live situations.

Where this takes us
So, why bother doing this at all?

I think we're on the cusp of some very interesting capabilities that will be brought about by having portable computing with relatively fast processing, large storage repositories, access to fast broad-area networking, and intuitive near-area networking. Here's where the iPod experiment fits in.

Probably the most obvious use is indicated by the title of this entry. If you can record everything you say, you have, in no trivial sense, provided some part of your story for others to see either now or in the future. I understand that this sentiment is probably shared by only a minority of people, but I would like my descendents to have some view of who I was and how I went about being me. It is a stab at a certain kind of immortality, I suppose, allowing a portion of my being to exist beyond my lifetime. Some people do it with written or photo journals. I'm far to lazy for that, so technology can provide a hand.

Of perhaps broader interest is the ability to Tivo your life. For example, if the iPod was able to record and play at the same time, and it always knew when you were talking, you could have the ability to skip backwards some amount of time and review something you had said, potentially putting an end to arguments that go something like this: "Well, you said I could go bar hopping with the boys," "I most certainly did not", "Remember, last week when I mentioned it?" "There's the couch, my friend, dream up another one." If you were going to do this kind of functionality, however, you might want to record more than just yourself, but recording your self is a good first step.

I have a certain fascination with building knowledge structures to expose the right ideas to the right people who can take the idea and build upon it (I'm starting to believe that humans' primary purpose is to create and maintain information; and not even on that abstract a level, but that's fodder for another entry). The Internet is an excellent example of how having a large group of people's information on pretty much everything allows us to spread knowledge and a very fast rate, and build upon that knowledge faster than we ever have built knowledge before (even normalized for the size of the global population). People who are interested in the Semantic Web are looking to make this system even more efficient and potentially bring another revolution in knowledge sharing (though I have quiet doubts at this point).

The first step in building on knowledge, however, is capturing it. I have a pretty poor memory, as do several of my friends. This means that we are often rediscovering our own theories years later, much to everyone's amusement. This stems in part from the fact that we don't take notes when we are having interesting conversations. Often it is not possible to take notes as we're driving around together, or talking on mobile phones. Having a transcription of everything we say may not prevent us from re-creating ideas, but it certainly can reduce the occurrence of it, and allows us to look back at things we've talked about as it was captured and build upon those ideas.

Perhaps it is ironic that I am interested in contributing to the very glut of information that I believe will increasingly make the Internet hard to search through for quite a while yet, but I already have this blog, so why not everything I say as well?

Ok, on to the less philosophical reasons this is interesting.

Imagine that I was able to get this process to work very efficiently, so that the transcription knew my voice model well enough to have an accuracy rate of more than 99%.

Suppose I was able to carry this complete system with me, and that it operated in real time (there is no reason the speech-to-text software can't do that as that's what it was originally built for, and it was built to run on much slower computers than I currently have).

Suddenly, you can perform searches on everything you said in real time, playing back the actual audio, or displaying the transcription, depending on what you need. Add in some other metadata like date and time, GPS coordinates, even which direction you are facing, and you can do searches like: "What was I saying last Tuesday when I was sitting at Starbucks?".

Now imagine that you attach a timestamp to every single transcribed word (I have to believe this is trivial now, but no one had a good use for it). You can then integrate other information, like pictures, documents, and the like into a single stream of information. You might reference this via your transcription stream with other information sources included right in the interface.

Now, if I had a conversation with you, and we were both recording our side of the conversation, I could send you my transcription, and you could send me your transcription, and we could integrate them to have the entire conversation as it was originally spoken.

If my system knew who you were, as the sender of the other half of the conversation, I now have new data I can search by.

If you and I were connected via some form of network, I could broadcast my transcription to you in real-time.

And if you didn't speak my language, you could automatically route my transcription through a translation service that fed you back a translated document pretty much in real time.

From this, you could have a text-to-speech application read the translation into your headphones in real time as I'm talking.

Perhaps you could even use my own voice model that I might choose to make available to you, so that the translation you are hearing of my words actually sounds like me as well. If my software is able to discern that I am yelling, or whispering, that data might also get passed along as part of the meta data stream to you, allowing for nuance.

Given this, there's no reason we have to be in the same location, or even connected via any voice application. I could just send you my transcriptions in real time and let your computer speak it to you and vise-versa, greatly reducing the amount of bandwidth required for electronic carrying of the conversation.

What becomes interesting here, is that we end up building an infrastructure from which new applications can be created to provide capabilities we never even thought about just by transforming a type of information we constantly put out (in fact, THE information we constantly put out) into something that can be manipulated, transmitted, and combined with other things in just the same way that the telephone, the highway, and the Internet have done. It probably wouldn't have quite the same transformative effect as the other things I just mentioned, but you have to admit, it's interesting.

Mappr

2004-12-19T13:15:00.000-08:00

Weeeee, a fun information swarming idea. Essentially, Mappr takes geographic information from photos saved on Flickr.com (which I use from time to time), and places the photos on a map of the US allowing you to virtually explore real space via OPP (other people's photos...has enough time passed for that reference to be cool yet, or is it still lame?).

It looks like it's not up and running quite yet, but if it can do what they say it can, or even some part of that, it should be a very interesting project.

I'd be interested to know, since they state they don't use GPS, what kind of location data they're using. Could be interesting for my Self-Documenting Life project that I'm currently running.

stamen: mappr: geo-location of tagged images on flickr.com

The Usability Explosion and the Heavy Approach to Technology Review

2004-12-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

Here's a comment I left at Future Now on a post having to do with the apparent explosion of usability books, and on how technology should be reviewed before being released:

My own guess as to why usability is getting such focus is basically twofold: 1) The maturation of the Web as a tool front end; and, 2) The increased speed at which different products that perform the same function, and new products that perform new functions, is getting to market.

In the halcyon days of the VCR, interfaces that came from an engineering group as the end point of function (as seen by them) had a relatively small social cost. New products simply took longer to get to market, and were expected to stay on the market longer. Relatedly, there were not many other product types that competed for basically the same functionality. Interfaces could be revved over time when it made economic sense, and when someone happened to improve on existing metaphors.

Since the web began to be used seriously by corporations as an interface to communicate with customers, and to have customers participate more directly in processes, it became critical that new users could understand how to use an interface in a relatively short period of time. This has meant that there was economic incentive for a class of workers to take up the study of interface design and usability. More people in this line of work increase the probability that more people will apply this outside their original domain.

At the same time, product developers have significantly less ability for function to win out over usability as products come to market quickly and often face competition from other products built for entirely different markets. Consumers need to "get it" faster to get at the underlying functionality in a way that is useful to them. Witness the explosion of the iPod whose success in no small part had to do with the introduction of an intuitive interface metaphor.

Finally, of course, is the increased complexity of the functionality introduced in modern devices. It is my belief that we will continue to see products evolve in a manner where pressing "Play" may be too much of an oversimplification to be useful as what new products do become more sophisticated, inter-related, and subtle.

On a different point, I'd like to disagree with the idea that we need to discuss the "ends [a technology] will serve is before we deploy it." Coming up with a reason for being for a technology before it is ever created is not just inefficient thinking, but I would argue, counter to human nature in ways that would be difficult to put the breaks on.

It has been my observation that often the most interesting uses of a technology are the ones that no one thought of until it was launched. The people building a technology are not always the best people (for good or ill) to determine what it can be best used for. Now since the web site said nothing about having the creators do the discussing necessarily, I should also say that it would be significantly difficult for a technology that is in some sort of review period to get the attention of the kinds of people that might extend it elegantly. It would be very difficult to review all proposed technologies to determine what interesting things you could do with it, and frequently it requires a period of people getting used to how a new technology works - what it's all about - before the really good ideas spring forth. Equally likely is that tranformative technologies need a period of maturation before they arrive at a point (either technically, or through adoption) that new ideas can take root.

This is not to say, however, that it's not worth talking about these things AS they are being deployed, and after, and the good thing is that people actually tend to do this. I think what would be most useful would be if we had a good methodology for picking out the valid arguments about a technology from the noise and allow that to feed back into the system, either voluntarily, or via regulation where appropriate.

I guess what I'm saying is that waiting to get all of your ducks in a row before releasing a technology doesn't feel right. Rather an iterative approach of some sort might fit the bill very well.

Local Economics

2004-12-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

On a related (to my previous entry) note, it is interesting the effect that RFID-enabled smart shelves could have on item pricing; better reflecting the supply and demand relationship of store inventory and/or sell rates. If you could do a search for products locally, and that inventory was updated in real time, then stores could practices supply and demand on a local level, raising the price on products no one currently has in stock, and lowering prices to be more competitive when other local stores DO have it in stock. Further, if pricing was handled in this manner, you might want potential customers to print out a page indicating what price they got through this system so that when the person came into the store they got this price (if it was within the expiration period of the offer), which would allow you to track leads and potentially ongoing customer information tracking.

Local Product Search

2004-12-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do a search for a product you want to buy and be told all of the stores within a certain radius that carry it? Why do you think there is no such thing (or, if there is, I haven’t been able to find it)? Is it primarily an issue with local inventory systems not being generally sophisticated enough to support this? Do you think major retailers like Office Depot and Best Buy might be able to do this, or are even they not prepared to make available local inventory.

IRV and the Washington Governor's Race

2004-11-28T09:19:00.000-08:00

A while back I posted an entry here about Instant Runoff Voting and how I was in favor of such a system.

After this year's Presidential election results were in, I took a spin through the numbers to see if, based on the current process of using an electoral college, any states would have had their results changed if there had not been any other (e.g. Nader or the Libertarian Party) candidates on the ballot. It turns out that, from the numbers I saw at the time (from USAToday.com, I don't have the link handy currently), if you counted all of the votes for alternative candidates for the underdog in each state, nothing would have changed.

In Washington state, however, a clear example of how IRV would be useful has unfolded.

In the race for governor in Washington, the two primary candidates - Christine Gregoire (D) and Dino Rossi (R) - have been within literally a dozen or so votes of each other. This has caused two machine recounts to occur and last I heard (and it's been a few days), much discussion about lawsuits and hand recounts with the threat of hanging and pregnant chads.

The major player in all this turns out to be the Libertarian candidate Ruth Bennett. In a race where nearly 3 million votes were cast, and the difference between the leading candidates is under 100 votes, the third candidate received a tide-turning 63,416 votes, according to the Washington Secretary of State website. Assuming that the people who voted for Bennett were not split down the middle, this represents a lot of weight for the candidate who Bennett's voters favor.

Unfortunately, in the current election structure, the leanings of these individuals towards one or other of the major contestants cannot be known, and there is a good possibility (given the dead-even nature of the race at this point) that Bennett's voters will get stuck with what they consider the least acceptable candidate for the job.

If Instant Runoff Voting had been used, then the Secretary of State, having established that no party had a clear majority, would have the ability to eliminate Bennett from the race (insomuch as she has the fewest votes), and take the next favored candidate for each of the people that voted for Bennett. Most likely this would have definitively decided the race, eliminating the need for lawsuits and discussions about how a hand recount would be detrimental to the health of the state (quite the contrary, in my opinion).

Agree? Disagree? Let me know!

Immersive Real-Time Virtual Presence

2004-11-26T15:06:00.000-08:00

A time is likely to come when you will be recording video of everything you see (in fact, it is likely to come fairly soon).

At some point it is likely that a high resolution camera, coupled with high-bandwidth, portable Internet connections, and the always-on nature of your video recording will allow one or more people, with your permission, to see everything that your camera sees.

Adding conference call-like features to this would allow you to converse with one or more people who are seeing what your are seeing in real time.

An external microphone will probably be part of this setup, allowing those people who are tagging along with you to hear everything you hear.

Eventually, along will come setups that allow you to capture a full 360 degrees of your horizontal view, and a great degree of your vertical view. (This may come either by using a camera that captures 360 degrees at once, several cameras that each capture a part of the scene, or other, as yet unimagined or exotic technologies.)

Add to this enough microphones to capture sound in every direction as well.

And finally add to this image processing technology (probably on the recipient's end) that allows people to look around at anything that you could see, without you having to look at it. For example, you could be looking the sidewalk in front of you while one person is looking down and to the side and another is looking behind you and up. As you move your head around, or as the cameras move up and down with your walking motion, the image processing software would take the associated metadata stream of acceleration data, and adjust your viewers viewpoints so they remained steady.

As I was walking down a street last night, I though of how nice it would be to have some of my friends virtually there with me; able to look around, and hear what was going on, and engage in chatter the way we might if we were all actually there.

This morning, it occurred to me that there are many interesting uses for this capability. Take, for example, a military scenario, where a person is physically in a battle field (or, similarly, a police officer responding to a crime in progress). When this person is entering a dangerous area, one or more remote soldiers could connect in to the feed and look around from various vantage points. One virtual soldier could be looking behind the real soldier, covering the rear, while another is scanning for waypoints, while the real soldier focuses on the ground, and navigating obstacles. The three could converse in real time about events as they unfold (this is much like Extreme Programming's pairing concept), leveraging the capability of a small team, without the risk of having all team members present. Furthermore, certain specialists could hop from person to person as various situations warrant it, providing their expert information to an individual soldier, and reporting back their observations from having been on board of many different soldiers over a critical period of time.

My feeling is that this is an example of the types of Internet technologies that will begin to bring us together again, after decades of technologies (including the Internet itself) have driven us ever more apart.

Thoughts?

Defense Tech: DALEY DOES DARPA ONE BETTER

2004-11-23T20:46:00.000-08:00

Just found this reference on Defense Tech from back in...uh...from...uh, well it seems Defense Tech doesn't put dates on its articles.

Anyway it talks about a plan that the Mayor of Chicago put together to connect 2000 existing video cameras (plus 250 new ones) into a system that can spot "suspicious activity", whatever that may be (the Defense Tech entry quotes heavily from the NY Times which indicates such activity might include wandering aimlessly in circles, or dropping of a package and leaving).

Though there are obvious privacy alarms that are no doubt going off, my question is: what would happen if this system was made publicly accessible? What could YOU do with feeds from 2000 cameras around the city? Would it at all stem the feeling of having the government watch over our shoulders?

Defense Tech: DALEY DOES DARPA ONE BETTER

Fortune.com - The Car of the Future Is Here

2004-11-22T09:04:00.000-08:00

Fortune.com predicts 11 technologies that will be available in the car of 2010. Here's my take ('cause I know you're wondering):

Next-Generation GPS - I think that car systems that use GPS, navigation software, and the Internet (or a dedicated system) to route you around traffic are likely by the predicted 2007 date. Less likely is the on-the-fly offering of discounts on gas when you're running low. I think it will take a few more years to shake out this idea from two points: having your car communicate to business nearby (non-trivial, and will probably be through a proprietary network to begin with), and preventing the perception of such offers as being in-car pop-up ads.

Self-Parking - Already available in the Japanese version of the Toyota Prius (as Fortune.com indicates), it would seem like this could be ready for launch by the predicted 2009 date in the US.

Electronic Stability Control - The predicted date for this is 2004. Somehow I don't see this as a reach.

Night Vision - I see some version of this system every year. I have to believe it will come about soon just by sheer manufacturer effort. The 2008 predicted date seems correct.

External Airbags - I'm sure this must be a problem, and perhaps it's as easy to solve as Fortune.com indicates, but for some reason, I feel this is farther out than the 2008 date. Also, the picture makes me giggle.

Cars by Wire - I've been intrigued by the idea of alternate driving interfaces since I was a little kid pretending I was driving in the back of the car with an Atari joystick. I wonder, however, if people's comfort level with the existing technology will be too high to replace in the near future. Likely it will be market at youth cars first. This kind of interface will be nice when cars can drive themselves; by eliminating the mechanical connections (notably the steering wheel connections), drivers will have more room to work or play while the car is driving. I think the 2012 availability date is not fair for an article that's supposed to be targeting 2010.

Pre-Collision Radar/Adaptive Cruise Control - As a person who recently mucked up the front of my car, I will be happy when my car can perform the simple act of beating me to the breaks when a collision is imminent. All the better if it prepares the vehicle for a crash. Given that we see this already on at least 3 luxury cars, I'm kind of surprised that the availability date is 2009, but it's probably more costly to implement than I expect (or, rather, the price fall-off over time isn't as fast as I'd expect).

Lane Departure Warning System - I just read a brief article on this in the last day or so. Seems interesting, but I expect this may be too complicated a problem to handle with just video processing alone. Add some GPS in there, and you're probably closer. 2009 is probably about right, if not a touch early.

Adaptive Headlights - Maybe. I'm not convinced it's a necessity, and therefore am skeptical that it will find its way into regular cars any time soon, but since Fortune.com indicates only that it is likely to be in luxury cars by 2009, I'd probably agree.

Blind-Spot Warning - One of several cameras that will begin appearing on regular cars in the next 10 years (a passing camera mounted, forward-facing, on the passenger mirror is another I expect to see), I think this technology has a good chance of making it by the predicted 2009 availability date.

Eye Monitoring for Drowsiness - This is another technology that seems to get a lot of attention lately (and another camera in the car). I know this is probably a big deal, but it will be interesting to see how well these systems will work in the long term, and if people are interested enough in them to pay extra. In luxury cars by 2009? Sure. In any car by 2015? Maybe not.

Ok, there you have my predictions of the predictions. Drop me a message in 6 years and let's see how well I did.

Fortune.com - The Car of the Future Is Here

Fact-Free Argumentation

2004-11-20T14:33:00.000-08:00

I ran across an op/ed piece by William F. Buckley, Jr., that discusses how liberal the nations' colleges are. Mr. Buckley makes the assumption that colleges are the churches of the liberals, and you must be one to get in (as a professor).

I can't speak to whether or not this is true, as I have never tried to become a professor at a college, but I've been wondering lately about the weird skew the cities in the US have towards being liberal, and the rural areas for being conservative. Are the cities liberal because people run into many different ideas and people all of the time, and this causes city dwellers to be more open minded (similarly, do rural people have much less exposure to people with differing viewpoints and are therefore less challenged on what they personally believe)? Or do people who are liberal have an affinity for the city and choose to move to it, leaving only the conservatives behind?

As much as the answer to this is not yet clear to me, it would seem that the same sort of cause and effect conundrum is at play in the nations colleges. Are college professors more liberal because they are exposed to more ideas, or, as Buckley suggests, because colleges actively choose only liberal professors?

Buckley provides some anecdotal evidence for the latter point, and this is what ultimately concerns me. Reading his piece, I felt like he was a conservative before I even knew where he was going with the piece. As such, it makes me feel like he already knew what he thought about the idea before he even looked into it. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy, of sorts.

I'm increasingly concerned about the effect of people with a pulpit (on any side of a discussion) who espouse a particular opinion without showing their work, and, worse, who actively ignore good solid evidence that contradicts their arguments (I am by no means implying that there is such evidence in Mr. Buckley's case).

I think it's finally time that we demand that people cite what information supports their conclusion in a way that allows it to be falsified. If it is falsified, we should demand that they stop using that information; go find new information, or change your argument. To do otherwise is to spend a lot of valuable energy going nowhere. If we're going to build a better world, we need to have a knowledge base that we can trust to build on top of, and pure opinions stated with the assumptive authority of fact are harmful to all of us in the long run.

At the very least, opposing sides can put more energy into finding new evidence for their opinions, or new opinions to support their general goals that are stronger and more valid that ones that are nullified, rather than just spouting them out as if they were true all along.

In an ideal world, sites equivalent to FactCheck.org, where non-biased criticism would be dished out to all comers, would flourish, and people would flock to them to find out what things are valid arguments, and which are not. Opponents could fight it out publicly on such sites to prove or disprove a claim; winner take all (for that claim).

Unfortunately, my feeling is that most people aren't interested in the validity of a point. Rather they are interested in if it supports their opinion or not. This doesn't mean that the country's falling apart, but it does mean that progress will be slow in coming until the population puts some value on accuracy and correctness.

Yahoo! News - DUMB BRIGHT GUYS

Gizmodo : Hitachi's Tabletop Display

2004-11-20T10:38:00.000-08:00

Ok, today I'm pretty much just reprinting everything from Gizmodo. It's probably just faster if you subscribe to them directly.

Anyway, Gizomodo has a report (via a link 4 times removed) about tabletop display from Hitachi that you can interact with directly. A nice idea for certain collaborative situations. Especially if you could interact with a remote one simultaneously.

Gizmodo : Hitachi's Tabletop Display

Ringbacks

2004-11-20T09:55:00.000-08:00

More from Gizmodo, ringback tones to be offered on a cell system near you.

In case you didn't know (I didn't) ringback tones are apparently custom ringtones you can select that people will hear when they call YOU.

I personally think it will be more interesting when a ringtone that you have selected plays on the phone of whomever you are calling. In that way, people will know it is you when you call, and you can standardize the ring tone that is you where ever you call (it will have to be overrideable, of course).

Now everyone will know that it is me when their phone starts belting out a heavy metal cover of "Teddybears' Picnic".

Epson's Electronic Ink RFID = 21st Century Price Tags

2004-11-20T09:38:00.000-08:00

Thank goodness for Gizmodo and its translation from Japanese, otherwise I'd never hear about interesting things like Epson's combination of digital paper with radio frequency ID (RFID) tags before it was already passe'.

The idea is to cut the cost of updating prices in a store. You can expect that this will help usher in a wave of real-time supply/demand pricing which, while in theory, could be good for shoppers who are looking for overstock items, probably won't be as good as it sounds when stores implement it with price floors, but no price ceilings.

Don't expect fixed pricing to go away any time soon, but real-time pricing changes should still be interesting to watch.

Gizmodo: Epson's Electronic Ink RFID = 21st Century Price Tags

ECG-Shirt

2004-11-15T09:22:00.000-08:00

Here's a shirt that records ECG data and transmits it to a bluetooth device (the article says to a cell phone, hopefully it can transmit to PDAs as well).

This is part of the first wave of ubiquitous, self-monitoring clothing. Unlike jackets with built-in MP3 players, clothes that have specialized monitoring capabilities, like temperature, heart rate, and perspiration levels (to name but a few) will actually be useful devices in the future. Like regular clothes, however, they will need to find a way to survive laundry day.

GEO-VIEW AG | ECG-Shirt

Via we make money not art and Gizmodo.

Oh. My. God.

2004-11-15T08:03:00.000-08:00

Frankly, I don't know what else to say. If you haven't already, check out Citroen's Dancing Robot commercial.

Prediction Thresholds

2004-11-14T14:40:00.000-08:00

It strikes me that there are thresholds of time over which various types of predictions of the future are valid. For example, the threshold for predictability of quantum events may be very small (if possible at all); which is to say that after some period of time from now, the ability to make a meaningful prediction has dropped to zero.

What is interesting about this is that this may be true for things higher up the abstract hierarchy (at some point I'll have to post something about Peter Thiel's (Co-Founder of PayPal) presentation at Accelerating Change 2004 and how that inspired a hierarchical model of reality for me, and what that means and why it's important). For example, the stock market might be predictable at a threshold of 10E6, economies at 10E8, and the like. It would be interesting if we could classify all of the types of things we would want to make predictions on the future about and see if there are categories we could group them into that have the same predictability time threshold. Further, it would be interesting to see what the relationship is of those things with short predictability thresholds, and those things with longer predictability thresholds.

Thoughts?

The Evolution of an Idea

2004-11-12T13:49:00.000-08:00

Tell me if this rings true:

For infrastructure-type innovations, there is a general unveiling process that seems to happen. Early on, the knowledge of the new innovation is held by a small few. At some point the concept is sufficiently baked to be taken up by the general public and a period of rapid expansion in exposure to the idea follows. Ideas are thrown around about all of the different ways that the new idea can be applied. These ideas swing far and wide and help serve as a sounding board for all of the conceivable applications for the idea. At some point the buzz factor dies off as no products hit the market. Some relatively long period of time later, products using the idea start emerging but with much less hype due to the hangover from the initial round of discussion. The breadth that the released products cover is significantly reduced from the speculative phase as most of the ideas are untenable for reasons relating to actual economics/interest.

This would explain why futurists tend to make predictions about how we will all be living in plastic homes with rocket cars powered by atomic energy and equipped with laser cannons. So much buzz is generated in the speculative phase that it seems that surely a good percentage of what is being discussed must come into being.

If this is true, then it will help in the making of predictions about the future to be able to identify ideas that are in this stage and find ways to put a limit on what may actually be a result of such an idea.

Pretty Purple Map

2004-11-10T19:33:00.000-08:00

According to the Geomblog, this map is everywhere, but I just ran across it and think it's pretty cool, so I'm posting it too!

It sort of helps answer my wonderings about whether we're a nation of two polar opposites, or grouped right around the dividing line.

UPDATE: I originally (mere moments ago) forgot to attribute the map included here to Robert Vanderbei of Princeton University. I also failed to point out that the reason I was looking at Geomblog was because of their cool maps that show counties with their area proportional to, as near as I can tell, their population (I'm still reading that page so I haven't quite figured it out yet). SHAME ON ME!

A link to li'l ole me?

2004-11-10T19:18:00.000-08:00

WOW! Someone linked to me! Crazy! I'm quite honored.

And here I thought I was talking to myself.

Of course the entry that links to me is better written than my original article.

I find it interesting that the author of this entry feels that all of the cameras watching you day-to-day "violate our private space by recording our every move without our knowledge and really without our informed consent."

As I've mentioned before, and had the wonderful opportunity to discuss at the recent Accelerating Change 2004 conference, what we mean by "privacy" is increasingly something we will have to re-think as more and more sensors are watching what we do.

It's interesting, I think, to ponder what the difference is between having a live camera tracking you, and having a person do it directly. Certainly we don't think that if we are walking down the street it is a violation of our privacy if people watch us. Further, I would suspect if we found a person following us around, we'd be threatened, and creeped out about it, but would we really think they violated our privacy?

People already take our image with them in their brain, and subject it to whatever tortures they would like. What is it, EXACTLY, that makes us feel violated when someone does this to a recording medium other than a brain? Is it the possibility that they will share video of us picking our nose? Or that they will manipulate the video to show us doing something even worse?

What do we really have to hide that, when we're in public (it's a whole different ballgame when we're in private spaces, but one we'll have to struggle with as well), we feel weird about being recorded?

At the Accelerating Change conference, I got to hear a gentleman (Andreas Olligschlaeger, I think, but I'm not entirely sure) give a presentation about the difficulties that law enforcement has in integrating the massive amounts of disparate data that it collects. Afterwards, I was walking by the podium as he was talking to some people who had more questions for him, when I heard him say, "What people don't realize is that they have already given their privacy away to private industry." To which I felt compelled to point out that the risks are pretty low if private industry has my data; all the better to give me the right pop-up at the right time. But the risks are greater with government where you can really get into trouble, and we don't trust our government.

My point being that I sympathize with those who feel like being recorded, and perhaps digitally followed, is discomforting. At the same time, what are we REALLY afraid of? So what if the government can know where you are at all times? I'd love to hear what anyone has to say on this. In my mind, the jury's still out and we have some self-reflection to do as individuals and as a society, and we probably ought to do it soon. In 5 years or so, we'll all be recording everything we hear (if not see) all the time anyway, and I'm guessing the issues will be at least as severe as when the government can track us wherever we go.

Jack (author of the entry that linked to me), if you ever come back, let me know what scares you most about being watched. Let's have a conversation and see if maybe you can show me something that will validate my paranoia, or perhaps we'll discover that our notions of privacy will have to change to allow for the fact that little brothers will be everywhere.

IN3 Network: Tech Policy

Light transmitting concrete

2004-11-05T08:34:00.000-08:00

Ok, this is pretty freaking cool: Concrete that passes light through it. For people who are addicted to natural light (unlike myself), this could add a little ray of sunshine on an otherwise stuck-in-the-office kind of day.

I wonder about painting it, however. My first thought was that you could just add pigment into the concrete mix, but that doesn't help you if you decide that you can't stand the cafe-o-lait color you originally picked, and now want to trade out for mocha cappuccino.

Also worth noting is that the light is probably bi-directional, which may be less of a problem during the day, but at night means that people walking by outside can see you instead of the other way around. Of course, a popular existing technology with many of the same features (called a "window") has this same problem, so maybe it's not such a big deal.

we make money not art: Light transmitting concrete

TIME Magazine: Visions of Tomorrow

2004-11-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

Here's a feature from Time magazine about visions of what lies ahead for us in various categories that people like to think about, including sports, medicine, and, of course, gadgets.

I haven't read it yet, but if it's anything like they've done in the past, it's probably worth at least a skim.

TIME Magazine: Visions of Tomorrow

Competitive Humanoid Projects in the World

2004-11-04T11:53:00.000-08:00

A nice summary of various humanoid robot projects from around the world (as long as by "world" you mean the eastern hemisphere and Canada; surely there is at least one such project in the US?).

From the Kibertron project site, which purports to have another such project in the works.

I only skimmed the rest of the site, but given that all of the photos are renderings, I'm guessing that this is either a purely theoretical project (or possibly a hoax), or is in the extreme early stages, as I'd expect to see at least a real photo of a dismembered arm or some such on the site somewhere.

:: KIBERTRON :: Competitive Humanoid Projects in the World ::

NYX Wearable Displays

2004-11-03T16:03:00.000-08:00

Finally, a coat that allows me to fulfill my lifelong dream of putting my Meyers-Briggs type (INTP) on my back so that everyone can flock to me to tell me how interesting it must be to be me.

What?!?

Why are you laughing?

I suppose you'll use this coat with a built-in display to show everyone your Star Wars name. As if THAT wasn't 5-minutes-ago.

Anyway, it's pretty cool, though low-res. Requires a Palm with software, and no indication on price or how many times it can go through the wash (maybe just once?). The coat has a display on the front and back, and from the video clip, it looks like they use the same text.

Josh Rubin: Cool Hunting: NYX Wearable Displays

IRV

2004-11-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

Hi there! I'm trying a little experiment on loose social networks by placing a URL (to some ranting I wrote about Instant Runoff Voting) into the status message of my instant messenger. You can help the experiment by leaving a comment with how you found this site if you didn't click on the link in my IM directly. Thanks!

Elections, Party of Two Please. Elections, Party of Two.
From time to time I hear people complaining about our two party political system and how we only have a choice between two people that suck, just in different ways (the most recent episode of South Park expressed exactly this sentiment).

I appreciate this sentiment even if I believe that there are perfectly valid reasons that this might be the case (subject for another entry), and got to wondering why it is that alternative political parties seem to be making very little headway.

The most obvious answer is that they don't represent the majority of American's viewpoints, but the recent attempts by the Democrats to keep Ralph Nader off of the ballot in many states has driven home the idea that something more is at play here. If one party feels like it must drive off a party more-or-less ideologically similar to itself for fear of the other party "spoiling" the election, perhaps the system needs a good looking at.

The other day, it struck me what one of the biggest obstacles was to the emergence of serious independent parties was: the voting process.

As it currently stands, if you want to show your support for a candidate for public office that does not come from the Republican or Democratic party, you are forced to make a choice: vote for the person you believe to be the best choice, and possibly get saddled with the person who you believe to be the worst choice; or vote for the least objectionable candidate that you think can actually win.

This kind of a system forces a wide-spread mediocrity to arise whereby people continually make choices based on who COULD win rather than who SHOULD win. And since a good many people would rather ensure that the candidate that they find most objectionable does not win, the only time one can make a statement by casting a vote is when the most objectionable candidate does not appear to have any chance at all to win.

Fortunately there is a solution - actually there are several of them.

Because the 2000 election had such obvious and serious errors in it, there was much talk about alternative voting processes. It was at that time that I learned about Instant Runoff Voting (IRV).

The basic idea of IRV is that you rank all of the candidate for a position from most favorable to least favorable, based purely on who you would think would do the best job. The person you placed highest on your list gets your vote, and all votes are added up this way.

If one candidate emerges with a simple majority, that candidate wins.

If the results of the election do not produce a candidate with a simple majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated from the list. Everyone who voted for that candidate as most preferred now has their second highest vote counted instead of their first, and these votes are added to the rest of the votes already counted. This process continues until one candidate emerges with a simple majority of all votes.

So if you had voted for Michael Badnarik from the Libertarian party first, independent candidate Ralph Nader second, Democrat John Kerry third, and George Bush last, the vote might go like this:

No candidate wins a simple majority after the first round. Michael Badnarik, receiving the fewest votes, is eliminated from the list. Since you ranked him highest on your list, but he is no longer a valid candidate, your next highest vote is counted; the vote for Ralph Nader. For those people that cast their highest vote for one of the remaining candidates, nothing changes; their vote still goes to the first person on their list.

Let's say that still no candidate has a simple majority, and Nader has the fewest votes. Nader is then removed from the list. Since your top two candidates are no longer valid choices, your vote is now cast for your third choice: John Kerry.

Now assume that Kerry, based on the fact that people who voted for either Badnarik or Nader prefer Kerry to Bush, has a simple majority. In this way, the voting process goes down your list from most preferred to least preferred, leaving you with, perhaps not your favorite candidate, but at least not trading your desire to support a minor party candidate into indirect support for your LEAST favorable candidate.

Great, but why do I care?
But if you are a member of one of these parties, here's what's REALLY important: The true number of people who support your party can be known. People can cast their vote for you knowing full well that if you aren't elected they could still get a result they felt good about. It means that people won't cast a vote for who CAN win, but who SHOULD win. It means that the true strength of your support can be made visible and not hidden behind safety votes. It might make the press and the major parties stand up and take notice at just how many people endorse your ideas. Of course it could also reveal that your base was really just a bunch of radical crazies who really didn't care if the devil himself was elected, by golly they were going to vote for you (meaning that IRV didn't increase the number of people that voted for you), but that's the chance you take.

It is for this reason that I feel like everyone who wants serious a serious change in the leadership of the US should support a system like IRV (there are other similar alternatives, though I prefer IRV to them), ESPECIALLY any alternative party offering up a candidate for office.

Bring out all the crazies, the far right and the far left. Now we can have a truly varied political dialog as everyone can get their share of votes without the whole system devolving into chaos.

For more information about IRV, check out this site: http://www.instantrunoff.com/

Scientific American had an article a while back about alternative voting strategies that's worth checking out even though it downplays IRV (unfairly in my opinion) in favor of another strategy.

Think I'm full of it? See a glaring mistake in my argument? Don't think I can explain my way out of a paper bag? Leave a comment!

Nanobot Shampoo

2004-10-27T19:54:00.000-07:00

A while back I had a truly useful idea for nanotech: Create a shampoo filled with nanobots that would keep your hair the same length as it was when you first applied the shampoo.

The basic idea is that the nanobots would climb to the top of an individual hair, then measure the distance to its root. It would then measure the distance back up to the top, and if the hair had grown, would cut it back to the originally measured length. Lather, rinse, repeat (actually, the lather and rinse portion would be optional).

For added interest, imagine that you could deactivate them all remotely, or remotely program a haircut in. You tell it what you want, and it cuts those hairs that are too long, and waits for the rest to grow. Heck, you could even create a transition plan that makes sure you don't look too much like a freak (unless that was your goal) in the transition period. Of course managing a haircut would require each nanobot to know which hair it was on so it could be cut appropriately, and each nanobot would have to report its position back to the controller so that the controller would know how many hairs to model and where.

Interesting concept nonetheless, eh? Since the Patent Office just started issuing patents for nanotech, maybe I should hop on this right away! Anyone want to help front the legal cost in order to get a strangle hold on the hair products market? Sassoon, I'm looking at you (ok, maybe I'm looking at Selsun Blue, now stop snickering)!

Allerca | The Hypo-Allergenic Cat

2004-10-27T19:21:00.000-07:00

You can now pre-order (for $3500, and for delivery in 2007) a genetically engineered hypo-allergenic cat for those people (like myself) who are allergic to cats and want (unlike myself) to have a cuddly ball of warmth and love that pees in your shoes when its mad (I have a daughter for this purpose already).

Now if they could only engineer commitment-free women for my friends who are allergic to the commitment-filled type (actually, that wouldn't be that high on my list of things I'd have done if women could be genetically modified to spec, but this one sounds the least creepy).

Allerca | The Hypo-Allergenic Cat

Electric currents boost brain power

2004-10-27T07:54:00.000-07:00

Finally that stockpile of hats I own with battery powered fans in them has a use. The fact that they short out after 5 minutes is now a feature, not a bug.

news @ nature.com�-�Electric currents boost brain powerbreaking science news headlines

SkyWeb Express Personal Rapid Transit

2004-10-23T21:15:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting things I've seen in a while is Taxi2000's SkyWeb Express concept. The basic idea is that instead of busses or commuter trains, there are little single to triple passenger vehicles that run on an elevated track (track is a bad description of it, they call it a Guideway, but once you see it, you'll understand what it is).

You get in and tell the vehicle which stop you want, and it leaves the station and goes directly to your destination station without stopping at any other station. To stop at a station, the vehicle essentially pulls off of the main line, and since only those vehicles stopping at a station have to pull over, everyone else continues right along.

Frankly, I'm surprised this hasn't come into existence yet. Apparently it's been around in some form since at least the '60s.

Below is the link to the videos section where the most bang for the buck can be had. It is worth exploring the rest of the site as well, as the writing is clear and the site structure makes for sensible, easy reading.

SkyWeb Express Personal Rapid Transit - A revolution in urban transportation: SkyWeb Express & PRT Videos

Below is some spewed notes I took as I wandered through the site. You may see these more in future entries. I'll try to keep the interesting (and coherent) things above any links to a site, and my ramblings below it so you can ignore them if you like.

Nice attempt to tackle some of the major complaints about mass transit:

Sharing/Privacy
Time Flexibility

Destination Flexibility

Directness

More stations (location flexibility) doesn't mean slower commute (more stops for the system)

What if someone in the car ahead of you in the station is taking a long time or breaks down in the station?
There could be docking bays where a car separates from the main station track into a Y shaped section. For example, they come in on the right leg of the Y, and pull into the base. People get off in one direction and board from the opposite side. Once the new passengers are aboard, the door closes, and the car essentially drives in reverse down the left leg of the Y, rejoining traffic. The portion of the car above the rail could rotate during merge so passengers are always facing front. This assumes that the car's motor can travel equally well both forward and backward. If this was not the case, but the car could still travel backwards to some degree, you could eliminate the left leg of the Y and have the car reverse back down the right leg of the Y (the central system slowing or stopping oncoming cars as necessary) and then go forward again on the main line. In either case, people that take a long time to load (elderly or handicapped, people carrying bags or packages, or the like) will not adversely effect the ability of other passengers to arrive and depart.

What if the car in front of you breaks down both in the station or on the track?
For people not already on the same segment of track, cars could be routed around the breakdown (assuming there are other routes to all destinations). Similarly (again, assuming alternate routes to all destinations), cars behind the breakdown might be backed up and switched to another section of track. If the system is centrally controlled, oncoming traffic could be slowed or halted to allow for a back-up entry.

Could long lines leading into a station lead to backups on the main track?
Seems like you'd just try to plan for as long a queuing line as is needed.

Could be a nice near-term solution for mass transit. Would computer controlled cars compete in the longer term?

Would be nice to have some sort of wireless networking capability for business travelers.

Much more likely to impact the urban structure than the Segway

Why do you have to type in a destination number? Would be nice to have alternatives, like a web service :) that you can interact with where you tell it your destination and it figures out the number. Even better, if your hand-held guidance system could tell you: left, right, 100m, left, up the stairs, get in a car. And then communicate with the transportation system behind the scenes, all the better. At the very least, the ticket might have the destination encoded in it so you never need to know it explicitly.

So, what are the downsides of the system?

Startup cost - Startup costs are an issue for all infrastructures. Skyweb claims to have a lower startup cost than other large transportation infrastructures (e.g. Light Rail)

Operational cost

Doesn't meet commuter throughput claims

Realestate for stations

Why do they not talk about longer-haul trips? At 40MPH, trips of many miles are possible (e.g. Vancouver, WA to downtown PDX), yet they talk only of downtown and feeder coverage.

Bridgestone Invents new ultra-thin Displays

2004-10-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

More craziness from a tire manufacturer. This time from Bridgestone who's getting into the monitor business. Very thin (.25 millimeter) monitors.

Apparently the future of the tire market isn't looking so good.

I4U News - Bridgestone Invents new ultra-thin Displays

Scientists gingerly tap into brain's power

2004-10-19T13:22:00.000-07:00

A company called Cyberkinetics has placed an implant into a quadriplegic's brain and has gotten him to control a cursor with a good degree of success (70%) in a game of Pong.

While this is certainly interesting in-and-of itself, what is equally interesting is the fact that this happens by doing complex analysis of 100 neurons in near-real-time. Assuming, as stated in the article, that more neurons means more accuracy, but more computation power required, it shows that by the time we're supposed to have computers with the same computing capacity as the brain (around 2020 by some estimates), we may just get to the point where we have enough computational power to create a reasonably sophisticated brain-computer interface.

Note that doing anything more complicated than moving a cursor around the screen (such as generalized communications) will probably require many orders of magnitude more processing and understanding than is currently available.

Also nice to see my alma mater getting a brief mention near the bottom.

Yahoo! News - Scientists gingerly tap into brain's power

Michelin puts it all on the road

2004-10-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

Tire maker Michelin unveils a pair of concept cars that have the suspension entirely contained within the cars wheels. One of the concepts also puts motors in the wheels as well.

Michelin pushes tech envelope - 10/19/04

Consumer RAID?

2004-10-15T13:11:00.000-07:00

This may already be out there, but if it does, I haven't run across it yet.

Last night I was thinking that we needed a new hard drive at home for our pictures and home movies. I was thinking of getting a hundred Gig or two, but was concerned that if we just used one drive for everything (as we currently do) then we leave ourselves open for having one disaster wiping out all of our history.

Of course we could archive to CD or DVD, but the regular maintenance is more work than I care to do over the long run.

Then it occurred to me that what is needed is a consumer oriented RAID device. With simple mirroring, all of your data would be backed up constantly. If one drive went out, you could replace it without losing everything, and without having to copy things around.

It wouldn't have to be a high-performance setup, or, for me anyway, necessarily a high capacity set up, so the cost of this security of mind would be a bit of extra hardware and another drive. Probably less that $100 all in for a new-to-market product.

Seems like a good idea for all the reasons it's a good idea in server environments; especially when home computers have moved to being a media hub for the house and are always on.

Thoughts?

Update: Here's an article from earlier this month from the Register talking about pretty much the same thing. Apparently it's in the air.

2154: The Future of Time Design Competition

2004-10-13T09:07:00.000-07:00

Core77 and Timex sponsored a design competition to see what the future of timekeeping might be 150 years from now.

There are some very wonderful and insightful designs, but I couldn't help but wonder if they were too near-sighted. Most seem possible within half that time.

Also, while elegance, simplicity, and cool will no doubt keep time pieces around in some form or another I wonder if the progress towards heads up displays, and augmented reality might obviate the need for a separate piece altogether, with time information just being part of what is always available to you.

Finally, I feel like pretty much all of the concepts ignore the personal systems you might have in place. Aside from already providing you the time as mentioned above, these systems will likely centrally coordinate other devices (including nano-devices, should they exist) so that there would be no need for ways of "setting" the time on a device (many of the time pieces were temporary and would need initial setting) as many of the entries went out of their way to describe how to do.

All in all, these entries provide a nice way of thinking differently about basic concepts.

Core77 and Timex present 2154: The Future of Time Design Competition

Gizmodo : Sony VAIO Type X "Super TiVo" Launches

2004-10-10T15:21:00.000-07:00

Ooo, pretty. And it purports to launch with one terabyte of hard drive space. That's 1,000 GB.

Gizmodo : Sony VAIO Type X "Super TiVo" Launches

AI vs Chess

2004-10-09T19:20:00.000-07:00

The last one from Moravec's paper, this is to support his argument that researchers have been stuck with a particular amount of processing power from the 60s through the 90s when that processing power finally fell into the consumer arena. Only then, he claims did researches begin to have access to any growth at all in processing power (he cites a number of reasons for this that I won't repeat here).

He has also charted one of the few places he claims that AI has still had access to high-end processing power: chess.

Processing Power Curve

2004-10-09T19:17:00.000-07:00

Here's the second image from Moravec's paper. This one appears to be the basis for (or at least is extremely similar to) a graph is a paper on accelerating change by Ray Kurzweil (which I'll be posting a full comment on, and on the idea of accelerating change in general, sometime soon).

This graph shows how processing power has increased over the last century, and where various milestones are relative to the assumed capabilities of various life forms. Of particular interest in the extrapolations as calculated from various points in history. This graph (which is also a log graph) appears to be showing that our ability to create more processing power is a double exponential, indicating that not only are we creating exponentially more processing power, but that the time between leaps in power is shrinking.

All Things Great and Small

2004-10-09T19:12:00.000-07:00

Here's the first of three images from Moravec's paper. This one shows, on a log graph, the approximated processing capabilities on one axis of various living and non-living things, and their approximated storage capability on the other axis.

When will computer hardware match the human brain?

2004-10-09T14:55:00.000-07:00

I ran across Hans Moravec's paper about when computer hardware may match the processing power of the human brain. It is written in a nicely understandable format and well worth a look.

It predicts that, by 2020, personal computers costing about $1000 should have the processing power equivalent of the human brain.

He goes on to argue that computing power is the primary limitation being experienced by AI researchers today.

I have no doubt that more computing power leads to better AI, but I am deeply skeptical that this is the primary limiting function. My guess is that the methodology for creating human-like thinking is the primary bottleneck at this point, and merely the fact of having a computer of equivalent power will by no means guarantee human-like thinking (and, for the record, I don't believe that Moravec is asserting this particular relation).

What is worth thinking more deeply about is the time beyond when, assuming that Moravec's calculations are valid, a $1000 personal computer has the power of the human brain.

As I stated, I think more than computing power is required, but I would say that vast amounts of computing power allow us to do things terribly less efficiently than they might have evolved and still get to the same solution. Said another way, once we have computing power several orders of magnitude greater than humans, we can use programs that may simulate brain functions very inefficiently, but due to the much greater power at their command, still approximate human thought.

Another interesting way to think about this is that a few years after the computing power of the brain is readily available for consumption by Windows 2018, the same computing power will be available in a much smaller package. Therefore, if Moore's Law continues apace (and, though I have my reservations, there seems to be plenty of possibilities to keep it going for 20 more years) we will have surpassed evolution's ability to manufacture a general purpose thinking device efficiently. Certainly there are a number of reasons why evolution isn't particularly concerned with more power and smaller space, but it's an interesting thing to think of nonetheless.

Extended further, at some point, an area smaller than that of one of the keys I'm typing on now will contain more intelligence than all of existing humanity. It is when we start thinking about these kinds of extrapolations that my doubts on the continuation of Moore's Law grow very deep indeed.

Two additional things of interest. First, there are a couple of neat graphs included in Moravec's paper. I have added them to my Flickr account, and will link them in here as soon as I get a chance.

Second is that the Comments on the paper are an interesting read in their own right. I was surprised to find Robin Hanson commenting here only because I'd just been reading some of his work about betting on science as I had come around to a similar conclusion relating to the future (more later).

When will computer hardware match the human brain? by Hans Moravec

Kurzweil's "Age of Intelligent Machines"

2004-10-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

Originally released in 1987, Ray Kruzweil explores the cutting edge of machine intelligence, and the problems it was being used to solve. Funny thing is, if you replace the old computer dispays, and expired companies (Wang) with fresh ones, this video would seem just as future leaning as I'm sure it did back then. Where are our doctor expert systems? Our high-tech assistance for disabled people? Our ubiquitous speech recognition and learning computers?

Back in 1987, there was a sense of being almost there...and it is still with us today.

Higher Purpose: Space Elevator

2004-10-04T20:03:00.000-07:00

Here's an article on space elevators on Futurist.com.

I have been somewhat skeptical of the idea of a space elevator - for some reason it just doesn't ring true. In this article, I think the official death knell has been sounded by the sureity of the following quote:

"Futurist.com friend and writer David Brin was recently quoted as saying that our grandchildren will certainly ride elevators to space..."

A corollary to any law of predicting the future is that as soon as a supposed expert claims that an exotic vision will positively come to fruition, that idea is positively dead.

Higher Purpose: Space Elevator

iSee

2004-10-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

MIT's Technology Review mailing had this quick article about iSee (click on the button next to the questionmark), a project by the Institue for Applied Autonomy. iSee is a map of Manhattan, with all known surveillance cameras mapped on it. If you click on the map, you can set start and end points, and iSee will provide you with a path to take to avoid these cameras.

iSee purports to be a project that enables the discussion about how surveillance networks are being grown and used, and who owns them.

While I think this might be a fine discussion for conversation, I'm guessing that most of us have come to grips with the idea that we will end up on someone's surveillance camera a few or more times a day. The big question, and perhaps the one that the Institute of Applied Autonomy is interested in talking about, is what happens if/when these cameras get all connected together along with technology that can identify you as you go from one camera to the next.

All this being said, my personal interest is in what happens when we are all enabled with cameras all the time. Then you will pretty much not be able to go anywhere without being recorded, and projects like iSee will be useless. As I've mentioned before, certain government agencies will have valid reasons (at least on the surface of it) to want to tap your personal data stream. So the conversation I'd rather have, is about how we might deal with this proactively.

Technology Review: 77 Mass Ave.

Human Power Harvesting

2004-10-03T15:28:00.001-07:00

Speaking of harvesting power from a shoe, I've just run across another interesting project at the National University of Singapore, human power harvesting. Included are a couple of shoe-based power harvesting options, one using piezoelectricity, and the other using mechanical power capturing (spring charging and release).

Also there is a device that captures vibrational movement and turns that into power as well.

Finally, there is a description of a Personal Area Network (PAN) whereby, presumedly, multiple on-person devices could communicate with each other using skin contact for message transmission. In the examples shown on the site, they use the PAN only for person-to-person communications (i.e. exchanging information on a handshake). This kind of thing has been in the news recently and I think Microsoft has patented something very much like this.

One thing that occurred to me while reading the PAN section is that you could provide a combination biometric/digital key for unlocking a door or a computer by pressing your thumbprint on a pad that scanned the image of your thumb for a match, and at the same time received an encrypted key from you through the PAN. Only when both were correct and in sync would access be provided.

If I haven't already mentioned it, all of the cool stuff from the University of Singapore comes from their Mixed Reality Lab, and a link to the current projects can be found here.

MXR Lab_research_HE

Human Pacman

2004-10-02T16:36:00.000-07:00

From the Universiy of Singapore's Mixed Reality lab comes Human Pacman.

This is very similar to regular Pacman, except that the players don portable computers and run through an Augmented Reality space.

Very much worth checking out. If you're going to look at the video section, the video entitled Human Pacman - Introduction, is probably the only one worth checking out.

MXR Lab_research_HP

MXR Lab_research_3dLive

2004-10-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

More great Augmented Reality video. Check out the video labeled CSCW3DLive on the page linked below. It's large, but worth it. Especially interesting, I think, is the live interaction between two remote people where a 3D view of the remote person is provided in real time, allowing you to move around and have the scene change accordingly.

Much like the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Projectors I mentioned previously, a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Cameras placed all around a conference room might allow a more intuitive interaction between remote conferencers as this technology matures.

MXR Lab_research_3dLive

The DaVinci Institute - Smart Shoes

2004-10-02T14:20:00.000-07:00

Another article from Thomas Frey of the daVinci institute. This one talks about the future technology of the shoe. (It's interesting to note, by the way, that the adidas T-Mac 4 has a "foot gripping" technology very similar to that mentioned by Frey.)

Frey's ideas are interesting, and I have no doubt that some of them will come into being fairly soon (though tread-changing soles may be a ways off yet).

I'd like to add that shoes of the future will probably communicate with whatever portable computing device you are wearing to provide information on steps taken, forces experienced including your weight and the weight of anything you may be carrying, and other useful bits of information. Blood pressure, pulse (and to a lesser extent, persipration) might be better suited to other garments like undershirts.

An obvious, much-discussed technology of the future for shoes is power generation. As we pound out our steps daily, it would be nice to capture that power and feed it into other systems that we carry around with us (whatever they may be).

The DaVinci Institute - Smart Shoes

The DaVinci Institute - Interview with Gavalord

2004-10-02T14:06:00.000-07:00

The DaVinci Institute has an interview with someone calling himself Gavalord. It's a good deal of crazy talk (communicating with the past - not that it definitely can't be done, but if it can, my guess is that it will be extremely hard to perform any successful experiments on it, much less the kinds of communication mentioned in this article), and fairy tales (I don't think this Gavalord person has done any of the things he says he's done), but it's interesting to see others thinking about the ability to reveal the past, like I have mentioned previously (note that this interview preceeds my thinking by a few years).

A couple things of note. First, the downside of using this technology could very well kill it outright. People are already protective of their privacy. They will not want the ability for someone to come along and discover everything they have said and done. This paranoia will kick in long before it is discovered that the weird, freaky, kinky things that people are interested in protecting are extremely common among human beings (something that will become common knowledge 20 or more years from know due to other events such as the pervasiveness of micro-survalliance technology).

The second note is that Gavalord indicates that, in the near future, the ability to coax out the last hour or so of a person's interactions from the walls, and other objects (such as clothes) around the person, will be the limit. I'm guessing that before this kind of technology is ever available even in proto-type, the fact that we are always recording eachother, coupled with advanced search capabilities developed for this recording, will mean that we have gotten to this point, effectively, in an entirely different, more straightforward way. This does not mean that the technology for peering into the past will not be developed due to lack of application, just that the particular application (law enforcement) mentioned by Gravalord is unlikely.

The DaVinci Institute - Interview with Gavalord

Space Elevator Video

2004-10-02T13:16:00.001-07:00

Ok, this video is a little cheesy, but it's informative and short and should give you the general idea of what the space elevator (mentioned in a previous entry) is all about.

Space Elevator Video (WMV format)

Infomediation

2004-10-02T13:16:00.000-07:00

Another quickie.

A friend of mine has proposed allowing web surfers to get paid for ads they see. An idea that was wide spread a few years ago, but is actually possible both technically, and from the point of view of a financial model today (I can provide more details if anyone is interested).

I was thinking about the fact that certain institutions would love to have some aggregate information about you and the various populations that you belong to, but that you probably can't trust these organizations directly. It occurred to me that if an organization could be constructed that was trusted by the population at large, you could release information about yourself (this information would preferably be auto-collected and updated, potentially by a different system I have in mind) in a way that was scrubbed for any personally identifiable information.

Then, when other organizations want particular profiles of a population, they could pay the trusted entity for this information, and the trusted entity might (depending on the type of use that was being made of your information - e.g. for university medical research vs. for refining marketing models) pay you a small amount when your information is used.

This would allow, for example, a good idea of how many people who were very obese (as calculated by some component of height and weight, and maybe bodyfat) with Adult Onset Diabetes that live in a particular zipcode, or how many single women between 21 and 40 recently purchased a DVD player on the East Coast.

Augmented Reality and Location-Based Services

2004-10-02T13:11:00.000-07:00

Quick thought.

Local camera reads an AR marker which encodes an IP address. Contact a designated webservice at that IP address (probably encoded in the marker as well) to return the VR model (if any), object type (from a standard heirarchy of types), it's geocode, and it's methods and properties.

Local computing displays the model, and is responsible for updating it's display model and state changes.

This ties in objects (e.g. road signage) that can't have an IP address, or that are variable in space with no computing power to be interacted with as if you used a location based service to look it up.

Interesting possibilities abound, such as getting more information from road signs indicating food (e.g. getting geocoordinates for all restaraunts) to allowing a car to be interacted with without having to communicate with it directly.