Author Archive for Jarred

Ideas About Ideas

Published by Jarred on December 20, 2009 in Advertising, Books, Business, Computing, Consumer Behavior, Copyright, Culture, Design, Environment, Google, Health, Legal Issues, Lifestyle, News, Politics, Privacy, Science, Social Networks, Space and Web 2.0. Comments

The New York Times recently issued the ninth edition of its annual Ideas feature for its magazine. I’ve read through most of the entries and found several really fascinating; others were also interesting but neglected to surface other important angles. I thought I’d use this space to highlight both, seeing as Tropophilia is all about ideas that may bring about change in our world.

The Advertisement That Watches You - I’ll leave the details of this particular implementation to the article, but the essence of the technology is a billboard with a built-in camera that, through facial recognition technology, can tell when anyone within a certain radius of the advertisement is looking at it. This one, interestingly, changes to its main message when people are not looking. You can imagine, however, how this technology might develop over time: electronic ads could be powered off until it new there were passersby actually looking at the space. Facial recognition could also be used to power an impressions-based ads payment system, much like exists on the web: advertisers would only have to pay per “view” or elapsed “eyeball time” on the ad. Of course, such commercial use of facial recognition technology also raises enormous privacy concerns (How long are camera images kept? Would the technology eventually be used to identify people and serve ads based on their personal interests, or even the clothes they were wearing or the book they are reading at that moment?). It will be interesting to see how this area grows, if at all.

Bicycle Highways - I thought this was a cool idea, but I’m not sure I see it gaining widespread adoption outside of cities that have significant numbers of bike commuters. What I think is really clever is the possibilities raised with GPS and RFID technology that would allow for bikers to create on-the-fly pelotons, which in turn would be able to gain privileges for traffic lights and such: a mix between EZPass and carpool lanes. Throw in a custom social network for the city so you could plan your departures in order to meet up with a regular riding group, and this could be really great for those cities with big biking cultures.

The Counterfeit Self - I think this research has implications for the Web. There has long been a debate about authentication online: when writing a blog, posting comments, or joining a social network, is it “better” for users to have the ability to remain anonymous or pseudonymous, or should they be encouraged or required to use their real identity (obfuscated to whatever degree they prefer). Many argue that encouraging or requiring authentication would, for example, solve the problem evidence by the (often hateful and troll-like) comments of any given YouTube video. Opponents summon the right to free dom of speech as a defense of anonymous use of the web. Some governments, like South Korea, actually require what is referred to as “real name verification” for websites in their jurisdiction that surpass a certain threshold of users; users are required to authenticate against a national registry before they can interact with the site. Considering the idea of how behavior is influenced by fake identity could offer a fresh perspective in this debate.

Good Enough is the New Great - One aspect that this idea doesn’t cover (and I can’t remember anymore if the Wired article does or not) is information. Just as consumers are turning to cheap cameras, low-fi music files, and YouTube videos, they are also turning to Twitter for their information fixes. Many argue that in moving from mainstream to social media as our main source of information, we make a similar sacrifice of quality for convenience. I think that may be true in the short-term, but I’m hopeful that just like companies are starting to fit better and better sensors into those tiny Flip cameras, so will Twitter eventually recapture some of the fidelity of the “news” that it carries.

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In Science, FAIL = WIN

Published by Jarred on October 27, 2009 in Energy and Science. Comments

Science Win In April, I wrote about a little debat e some coworkers and I were having about whether politics could be studied scientifically, and whether that approach was valid (I said it could be, and that it was one among many valid approaches). One argument tendered in opposition was that we simply don’t have enough information to even make a successful politico-scientific model, let alone to test whether it works or not. Any attempt to construct such a model, or to delineate variables and units of measurement, would be in vain.

I think that is incorrect, because in science, the cool thing is that fail = win. What I mean is that science is all about testing something, getting results, and developing a conclusion based on those results. If your model sucks and your experiment fails as a result, you’ve learned something. You rebuild, you try something else, and you chalk your first try up on the list of things that don’t work. Launch and iterate, my friends. It’s the Google way, and we’ve done alright so far.

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Google Reader Gets Magical

Published by Jarred on October 23, 2009 in Google, News and Web 2.0. Comments

I try not to spend too much time pimping Google’s products in this space, but let’s face it: we make really cool stuff, and whether I work for the company or not, I absolutely adore most of our products. Fact is, our engineers and product teams cook up tools that are really useful for those who are ready to embrace the digital future. Google Reader is one of those tools, and the team has just released a set of features that have got me plain jazzed.

Google Reader is a tool for pulling interesting content to a central inbox via “feeds.” Almost every website on the web that publishes regular updates also sends out a feed that can be subscribed to via various tools. As a result, instead of clicking through a long list of bookmarked sites to see if there’s something new to read, you can just subscribe to that site’s feed and all the new content will build up in your inbox. (If you want to subscribe to Tropophilia’s feed, click here.)

Though it got off to a rocky start, Reader has been incrementally socializing and personalizing itself over the past two years. First it let you share items publicly; later, those shared items became directly available to your contacts who also use Reader. Recently, the team introduced the ability to “like” an item in addition to sharing it, and it also created a section of “recommended” feeds based on your reading, sharing, and liking history (although it was a little hard to find). It has also given users new ways to share with the “send to” feature that lets you post to Twitter and other third party sites.

At first, it was confusing as to why there was both a “like” and a “share” feature, with many people not understanding when they would do one without doing the other. This week, the Reader team cleared that up by delivering the punch line:

You can now sort any feed (including the comprehensive feed) by “magic.” The sorting is based on what Reader has determined you’re interested in, as reflected by your reading/liking/sharing history.
The “recommended feeds” feature now has prime real estate in the main sidebar in a new “Explore” section.
There is a new “popular items” feed (also sortable by your personalized “magic”) that shows you what items have been popular across the web recently.

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Rebooting Justice

Published by Jarred on October 17, 2009 in Legal Issues. Comments

Yesterday, I had an envelope in the mail from my dad. I opened it up to find a photocopy of the “Opening Statement” of the Summer 2009 issue of Litigation, the official journal of that section of the American Bar Association. The Litigation Section’s chair, Lorna G. Schofield, dedicated her essay to an observation of how, like so many industries, the legal profession is being challenged by the rapid innovation of the information age.

As a future lawyer (side note: I sent 12 of 15 law school applications last weekend!), it reassures me that at least the ABA’s leadership has recognized that lawyers, firms, and their clients need to adapt in order to survive. But I found it even more encouraging that Schofield highlighted the need for the entire justice system — especially the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which were last updated in 1938 — to be refreshed for the present times. I’d like to highlight a couple of her points and add my own thoughts as well.

The first area that Schofield specifically targets is the billable hour. The billable hour system rewards firms and attorneys for the time spent working on a project. While the rate can vary depending on the type of work performed, the rates typically do not reflect the value added by the work performed. And it doesn’t even really make logical sense, as Evan Chesler noted in Forbes back in January: “If you are successful and win a case early on, you put yourself out of work. If you get bogged down in a land war in Asia, you make more money. That is frankly nuts.” He went on to propose a system more similar to how a construction contractor operates:

For reasonable periods of time during the life of a lawsuit, say three months at a time, I should do what [a contractor] does: identify the client’s objectives, measure, calculate, build in a contingency and come back with a price. Once the price has been agreed upon, the billable hour should be irrelevant. The client will no longer be surprised by a whopper bill and met by the standard (albeit true) explanation that “litigation is unpredictable.”

Whether this is the approach that wins the day is up for question but, as Schofield concludes, “sooner or later, something has to give.”

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From The Archives: reCAPTCHA and Spare Cycles

Published by Jarred on September 16, 2009 in Computing, Google and Web 2.0. Comments

This morning, Google announced that it will be acquiring reCAPTCHA, a company devoted to putting the few seconds you spend solving CAPTCHAs – those funny puzzles you fill out on Ticketmaster and other sites to verify that you’re human – into good use. As announced, Google will integrate reCAPTCHA’s technology into its own spam and fraud countermeasures, and will use the human output of those puzzles to advance its Book Search and Newspaper Archive scanning efforts.

One of my first posts on Tropophilia profiled the founder of reCAPTCHA, Luis von Ahn, and his efforts to harness otherwise-wasted human effort. Given today’s announcement, I thought it made sense to repost it in order to put into context this acquisition and the “spare cycles” philosophy that it engenders.

Disclosure: I am an employee of Google. I was not an employee at the time this post was originally published. All views expressed in this post are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of Google.

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“Spare Cycles: Distributing Computing Among Machines and Minds” - published January 19, 2008.

A few weeks ago I read an article in The Economist about distributed computing, defined by Wikipedia as “a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program are run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network.” Basically what you do is download a program that, when you’re not around, uses your computer’s processor (which would otherwise be mostly idle) to crunch data sent to it from a central server. Your computer joins thousands of others crunching data at any one time, forming a giant networked supercomputer with each unit working on a different piece of the puzzle.

What’s the puzzle? It can be anything, or at least anything that requires a whole lot of computer power to figure out. Some puzzles are humanitarian in nature; for example, the World Community Grid (sponsored by IBM) currently has projects tackling cancer, AIDS, and Dengue fever research, as well as African climate change. Others are more geeky (or, should we say, scientific), like the SETI@home project which is searching for extraterrestrial intelligence by analyzing radio telescope data.

So the bottom line is this: while one way to save the planet and contribute to science is through the donation of time and money, another way is through the donation of your computer’s processing power. Why let your computer idly sit while you’re at work or school all day — occasionally using a small processor burst to throw the next picture from your hard drive onto your screensaver, which no one but your dog is watching — when you can have it use its full capacity to solve some of the world’s toughest problems?

The buzz word for this phenomenon is “donating spare cycles.” Basically, a cycle is the process your computer goes through to retrieve a command from its memory and execute that command. It’s how your computer works and, in a way, it’s how our minds work too. A human cycle, then, would be the process our brain goes through to retrieve and process information from our memory. But do humans have spare cycles to donate? You bet.

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