Archive for the 'Computing' Category

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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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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Passing On Your Cloud

Published by Jarred on March 11, 2009 in Computing, Data Portability and Legal Issues. 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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It’s Not About the Technology, and This Isn’t the Jetsons

Published by Taylor on March 3, 2009 in Computing, Culture and Gadgets. Comments

Let me paint a picture for you that, despite the snark, is not an exaggeration:

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At a conference I attended recently, a speaker made the legitimate and important point that technology–particularly broadband–should be included in our definition of “infrastructure.”  In order to illustrate this point, and the potential economic boom that virtual commuting represents for rural communities, we watched a video…featuring a family that was unrecognizable to even the most tech savvy people in the room.

Look, it’s Dad on his Bluetooth headset in the kitchen.  Mixing fruit salad as he talks to his colleagues in NY or Atlanta.  It’s a snow day, but instead of sledding or starting a snowball fight, little Johnny and Susie are downloading their assignments from the web, listening to 7th grade history lectures on podcasts, and exercising on the treadmill.  They’re even (gasp!) attending class in a virtual world reminiscent of Second Life.  All the while Dad is locked in his office working remotely while Mom places inventory orders for her small business.

Here’s my issue.  Nobody–and I mean nobody–loses sleep over the question of what their children will do if they can’t access their school work on a snow day. Likewise, though many of us imagine working primarily from a home office some day, that vision maintains some semblance of connection to our current lived experience: leaving the house, interacting offline with friends and peers, and (you guessed it) PLAYING OUTSIDE IN THE SNOW.

People see this sort of technologically-dominated futurecasting and become overwhelmed by the disconnect, seemingly caused (worsened?) by technology, between their lives and this vision!  Because when the focal point is the shiny gadget and the slick interface, we’re not solving problems anymore.

Technology is more integrated into our lives now than we could have ever realistically imagined 20 years ago.  Yet, instead of recognizing how current and emerging technologies can help us accomplish great things, we’re  still wasting energy trying to figure out why our lives don’t resemble EPCOT and the Jetsons.

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Kiva.org Matures Into The First True Social Giving Platform

Published by Jarred on February 4, 2009 in Computing, Microfinance and Web 2.0. Comments

Yesterday, Kiva.org (which we profiled here) announced that it was creating a developer community and releasing a set of APIs.  With this bold stroke, Kiva transforms itself from microfinacing product to microfinancing platform.  This is very exiting, and I’m going to do my best to tell you why without losing you over too many technical details.

You may have heard Taylor or me mention the term “API” in the past, but I don’t think we’ve done a very good job of explaining what it means.  An API (which stands for Application Programming Interface) is essentially a set of computer commands and protocols that allows one piece of software to request information from another.  In short, the API is the language of software: the requesting software calls for information, and the source software delivers it.  Each program has its own “dialect” that the requesting software must employ in order to get the information it needs; when a company “releases” an API, then, it is essentially publishing the dictionary and grammar guide for that program’s language.

For example, if you are using a Windows PC, every program running on your computer right now — from AIM to Chrome to iTunes to MSWord — is making use of the Windows API to access resources from Windows XP or Vista.  Web applications often release APIs as well: Google and Facebook have APIs that allow developers to call for information from their services — whether it be search results, map tiles, or your social graph — and employ it in their own web applications (see my post on mashups).  By releasing numerous and robust APIs, companies essentially turn what were once simple products into foundations that can be built upon by those willing to learn and use the language.  The product evolves into what is called a “platform.”

Transitioning from web product to web platform is a sign of not only a product’s success and confidence, but also its maturity.  The release of an API shows that the service itself is structured and strong enough to handle not only its own traffic, but also an unknowable number of outside requests.  It carries a guarantee of a certain level of reliability of the service, as well — that it will suffer minimal downtime and will return clean data for every request.  But perhaps most importantly, the movement from product to platform signals an realization by the company that its mission can not be achieved in its own walled garden.  Whether your goal is to connect the world together like Facebook, or to organize the world’s information like Google: if your ambitions are lofty, then you have to open up yours doors so that others can leverage your resources for unique and innovative applications.

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