Author Archive for Jarred

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An Update from Jrod

Published by Jarred on July 19, 2009 in Tropophilia. View Comments

Hey folks.  It’s been exactly three month since I last wrote a post for Tropophilia.  Trust me, it hurts me as much as it hurts you.  I’ve been busy with moving from Mountain View to San Francisco, as well as throwing a bachelor party and being the best man for our very own Mr. and Mrs. Ansley.  (Congrats to the happy couple, currently on their honeymoon!)

The biggest trouble I’ve had is finding topics that I’m both passionate enough to write about, but also am “allowed” to address.  Google has few rules about employee blogging (it’s actually a highly encouraged practice), but obviously there are limits to what I should and should not touch.  Writing about competitors, or businesses that are suffering because of the rise of the web, or even about Google’s own moves, would probably not be in my or Google’s interest.  Since this is pretty much everything I used to write about, you can understand I’m having a little blogger’s block recently.

The most frustrating part is not that I can’t chronicle the news items themselves, but that, as a result, I can’t vent my enthusiasm for the subject matter.  One big reason I wanted to start Tropophilia was to release some intellectual energy about this new digital era.  While my job gives me the daily opportunity to think about and work on these issues, there’s just something different about sitting down at the keyboard and crafting my own subjective analysis.  I really miss that feeling.

All of this is to say that I’m going to resolve myself to finding those stories I can write about, and reengaging myself with this blog in short order.  There will probably be more “pointing to / this is interesting” posts  than “analysis” ones.  I’m also hoping to start teasing out some of the legal questions surrounding new technologies and companies, in addition to talking about their cultural impact.  I hope that you’ll continue to find it interesting, and even if you don’t, that you’ll at least be able to see the enthusiasm behind it.

Good talk, see you out there.

The Science of Political Science

Published by Jarred on April 19, 2009 in Education, Politics and Science. View Comments

Back in January, I got into a debate with some work colleagues over the status of political science as a “true” scientific discipline.  Though I think one or two were playing devil’s advocate, the consensus seemed to be that political science was not worthy of the second half of its name.  I argued (and do believe), however, that it is indeed a valid science.

To be honest, I can’t remember my friends’ specific arguments (we may or may not have been sitting in a hot tub in the mountains and a few drinks in — thus making the debate fairly comical to begin with).  I’ll be sure to let them know I’ve blogged about it so they can correct, clarify, or elaborate on their arguments in the comments.  As I remember it, though, their main contention was that because political science is the study of human behavior, and because observations of human behavior cannot reliably be generalized and retested to form a consistent theory or law, the study of politics cannot be classified as a science in the same vein as physics, chemistry, or the other “natural” sciences.  It’s simply too flaky.

At Davidson (where Taylor and I went for undergrad and both majored in political science), there is a huge division among the department faculty on this point.  Currently, every political science major is required to take “Methods and Statistics in Political Science,” a course that is almost uniformly dreaded.  “I’m majoring in a social science precisely because I suck at math”, they complain.  “When will I ever use this again?”  The science and math wannabes that we are, Taylor and I loved it, and ended up working with our professor one summer on a quantitative study of how congressmen shape their political messaging.

The fear of the course stems mostly from a failure by the faculty to execute any kind of positive PR, because really, it’s not that bad and not that hard.  Anyone who is smart enough to get into Davidson can handle it.  The first half of the course doesn’t deal with a single number, formula, or regression model, but rather shows how to take a question of politics and attack it using the scientific method.  Delineate the specific question, form a hypothesis, decide what the variables are, and propose a way to run an experiment.  Not hard, right?  The second half is certainly more difficult because it delves into the quantitative realm using computer-aided regressions; but really, it’s nothing impossible and the professors are not only ready, but eager to help them understand and succeed.

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Geocultural Sensitivity and The Art of Video Games

Published by Jarred on March 25, 2009 in Art, Business and Culture. View Comments

This post is out there a bit, but humor me.

An interesting man named Tom Edwards stopped by Google today to give a talk about “Geocultural Intelligence and Global Business”.  A geographer and designer by training, he spent thirteen years at Microsoft as a Geopolitical Strategist, vetting products before they launched to be sure that they would not raise any ill feelings — or outright outrage — among foreign governments or other constituencies.  He’s since gone on to found Englobe, a consultancy that expands his work to a broader platform.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a few examples that he shared with us.  Did you know, for example, that Windows 95 was temporarily prevented from being sold in India because the borders of the Kashmir region were not drawn to the government’s liking in the time zone settings (yes, that tiny 1.5×4″ map!)?  Or that several video games have been recalled from, delayed, or outright canceled in some countries because their soundtracks included chanted prayers from the Qu’ran, or because they featured radioactive two-headed Brahman cows that were… edible during gameplay?  Or that Turkey blocks a majority of YouTube traffic in its borders because of videos critical of Ataturk?

At Englobe, Tom’s adapted the idea of “geopolitical” to “geocultural“, and for good reason.  Samuel Huntington proposed back in the 1990s that the powderkegs of the post-Cold War era would not explode primarily over traditional political or military disputes, but rather over cultural and religious conflicts.  It’s certainly hard to argue that this hypothesis is not well on its way to proving true.  This shifting dynamic is not limited to the realm of geopolitics, however.  In the business world, too, we increasingly see the importance of national boundaries fading as so many diverse markets begin to merge into a truly global one.  While governments will still often be the official agents for expressing concern or taking action regarding geocultural issues, the issue goes much beyond the political realm.

I don’t want to rehash Tom’s talk or dive too deep into the details, but I wanted to toss out a thought, which I also posed to him in a question at the end of the talk.  To many people — and especially to developers themselves — video games are not just products.  To them (and me), video games are also an art.  Those who develop the elaborate narratives, painstakingly model the characters, precisely design the environments, labor over how the characters will move and how the user will interact with and feel a part of the virtual world they create — these people, to a certain extent, are artists.

Yes, video games form a mammoth entertainment industry.  But unlike musicians or writers or painters, video game developers can’t just set up a studio in their garage to achieve the pinnacle of their art.  They require complicated tools and training to reach the levels they want, and those things cost money.  Furthermore, the distribution of their work is tightly controlled by the console manufacturers, since video games require access to console APIs (remember this post?) to work at all.   Among the media of art, theirs is perhaps one of the most constrained in terms of access and resources.

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Passing On Your Cloud

Published by Jarred on March 11, 2009 in Computing, Data Portability and Legal Issues. View Comments

During my time at college, our small Davidson community (there are only around 1,700 students) was twice saddened by the death of fellow undergrads: Josiah Cameron (who would have been graduating this year) in April 2006, and then Jay Chitty (a fellow classmate of Taylor and myself) in December of the same year.  Like the rest of the college, I was sickened with grief — for their families, their friends, and for the sudden vanishing of such young and promising lives from the Earth.  But, when my shock had finally dissipated and I had come to terms with the reality of their passing, I had a fleeting (and admittedly somewhat morbid) thought.

What happens to your online presence when your physical one is no longer?  Intrigued, I visited their Facebook pages.  My mind was racing.  “What’s going to happen to all these wall comments that were accumulated over the years?  What about the comments people left for him on his Thanksgiving photos?  Who decides when it is time to close this account?  What’s the procedure?  Does it all just disappear?”

I’ll understand if you perceive these to be insensitive and petty questions in the face of such a tragic subject, and perhaps for the present times it is indeed a little irrelevant.  But if you are paying even the smallest bit of attention to what is happening in technology, you are certainly aware of two things.  First, more and more of your personal “effects” — e-mail, photos, documents, music — are being turned into 1′s and 0′s and kept online.  Second, the tiny actions we take online (like leaving comments or clicking the “like” button on a Facebook news feed item) are little pieces of a larger online narrative that, in a sense, journal our lives for us.  If determining the fate of this data once we’re gone is not a crucial question to address right now, it certainly will be in the next two to three years.

Take your personal e-mail, for example.  E-mail has succeeded letter writing as a principal form of communication among most people of my generation.  My grandmother has letters from my grandfather when he was fighting in Guam, and I wouldn’t doubt that my parents have a few keepers stashed in a shoebox somewhere.  But most of the written missives that are important to me are either archived somewhere in my Gmail account, or stashed in a folder of PDF’d e-mails that I saved from my old college e-mail account.

Touching emails from friends in far away places, notes of encouragement or praise from professors, love letters sent to old girlfriends, my first e-mail back from Google telling me they wanted to interview me… if I were to die today, what would be the fate of these messages?  Would they sit in my account for a year or two until it was deactivated due to inactivity, eventually deleted to make way for more messages among the living?  Would someone know to go into my computer and save that PDF file?  Would I have been prescient enough to stash my password somewhere for my survivors to find it, or to include instructions in a will or elsewhere detailing if (and unto whom) I wanted that data to be bequeathed?

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Changing Congress

Published by Jarred on March 4, 2009 in Politics. View Comments

Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to watch Lawrence Lessig give a presentation to Googlers about his new Change Congress movement.  Lessig is renowned for his unique presentation style (he probably uses every Keynote transition and effect there is), and it was indeed a very engaging experience.  I’m embedding the recording of that presentation at the end of this post — you should definitely check it out.

The Change Congress website describes the movement’s purpose thusly:

Right now, special interests have more influence over our political system than regular folks because of our broken campaign finance laws. These special interests pump millions of dollars into congressional campaigns each cycle, and as a result, they block real change on issue after issue.

Here at Change Congress, we believe that politicians should work for the people, not special interests. But it’s not enough to push politicians to stay out of the system of corruption—we have to reform the system itself. That’s why we support a hybrid of small-dollar donations and public financing, to keep big money out of politics.

Change Congress is supporting new legislation that will be introduced in the next few weeks to reform campaign finance laws:

Under this legislation, congressional candidates who raise a threshold number of small-dollar donations would qualify for a chunk of funding—several hundred thousand dollars. If they accept this funding, they can’t raise big-dollar donations. But they can raise contributions up to a certain amount (such as $100 or $250), which would be matched several times over by a central fund. This would create an incentive for politicians to opt into this system and run people-powered campaigns.

But while this bill shows more promise than ever of passing (President Obama is reportedly going to advocate for it), Lessig’s new organization is not just pushing legislation; it’s also trying to get people involved.  To kick off its campaign, Change Congress is organizing what it is calling a “donor strike”.  Essentially, it is asking supporters — that is, ordinary Joes and Sallys like you and me — to withhold contributions to politicians who do not explicitly support the hybrid model of campaign financing that Change Congress champions.

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