Category: Uncategorized

Information overload is an old story, but there’s plenty of good information out there and you still need a way to get at it and share it. The real question, the operational question, is what do you do every single day? What do you do after the novelty of this or that site has worn off? What do you persist in doing despite the sensation of information overload? After all, that feeling is never going to go away. Whether you’re swimming or drowning, you still need the water.

Do you check Facebook every day? I never got in the habit.
Do you use Twitter? I read Twitter regularly, but I don’t tweet very often. Twitter is one of best channels I have for discovering unexpected new stuff. At work I use a Twitter-like enterprise knockoff called Yammer.
Do you use a feed reader? I use Google Reader every day, but that’s pretty old-school at this point. I think feed readers are a dying breed. I’m worried that Google is going to shut down Google Reader.
Do you check individual blogs or news sites directly? I mostly use Google Reader instead, but with all the craziness in the news this year, I’ve been visiting CNN and NYTimes.com a lot.
I try to visit my Instapaper site regularly, because I’m always pushing stuff there with the magic “Read It Later” button. Instapaper is a kind of larder or anteroom where information that has already passed the audition is waiting to be consumed. The problem is that it tends to pile up.

I still like to blog, but there are so many ways to share information now that it makes you think a little more carefully about what and why you’re writing. Blogging feels like overkill for simple link sharing. That’s where Tumblr comes in. Tumblr (which was originally created by the same guy who does Instapaper) didn’t impress me when I first came across it, but they’ve done a very good job simplifying its usage model, and now I use it for storing links after I’ve verified that they’re good and worth keeping and distributing. So if you’re interested in seeing my cast off links that don’t merit a complete blog post, here’s where you go: Rambles Backyard.

Footnote: I was just downstairs reading Flipboard on the iPad, and I came across an item saying that Marco Arment, the Instapaper developer, is going to add blogging support to Instapaper. I tagged the article “Read Later”, came upstairs, opened Instapaper, and pasted the item here: Instapaper May Add Blogging Support. The ecosystem gets more tangled every day.

My wife and I went to see Wretches and Jabberers the other day. Haven’t seen it? No? I’m not surprised. It’s a small independent film about two autistic men. It’s not on Netflix and it certainly hasn’t had very widespread distribution. But it’s a great movie, and more uplifting than you might suspect. The film drives home the point that the interior world of these men is rich and articulate. At the same time, it demonstrates how hard it is to turn off our judgments on their odd and alienating behavior.

Here’s the trailer.

I recommend reading something from Tracy’s blog, which he maintains on the movie site. If you’re like me, you’ll have a hard time believing those words came from the shambling, spastic man in the movie. But they did. It’s humbling to see how much we rely on appearance to form our opinions.

I was going to write more about the movie, but my wife Wendy wrote an extensive review, so I’m including it here.

Continue reading “Wretches and Jabberers”

This is what it looks like to enter a Space Shuttle engine compartment. The pictures are great, but I really want to know what they’re talking about in there.

“When’s the last time you changed your oil?”
“A little duct tape and some aluminum foil and we’ll have you back on the road. You have any gum?”
“These damned squirrels have built another nest in here.”
“This baby’s got a lot of miles on it. Have you considered buying Russian?”
“Oh… there’s my gum.”

What do you think he’s saying?

A few weeks ago I wrote about how happy I am with Rhapsody, the subscription-based music service. For a cost per month of less than a music CD (what’s that?) I can listen to just about anything I can think of. At that cost, I lose any motivation to steal music. Whether or not you can sustain a music industry with those fees is a different matter, but I don’t mind paying Rhapsody’s fee. Put another way, Rhapsody has undercut the hidden costs of stealing music, which is a personality-dependent amalgam of nuisance and guilt.

I tried the Netflix streaming movie option too, but I was unimpressed with their selection. I’m not much of a movie person, but I reasoned that they would have all the old movies ready for me, and there are plenty of interesting old movies that I want to see. But sadly, even the old movies are largely missing from the streaming catalog, so I let the membership slip. But my Rhapsody experience taught me that it’s just a matter of building up a comprehensive enough catalog.

Some people are plenty happy with Netflix streaming already. Here, for example, is ReadWriteWeb’s Mike Melanson: How Netflix Stole my Eyepatch & I Stopped Stealing Movies. The commentary on ReadWriteWeb pointed me to a short piece at TorrentFreak that starts like this:

Something’s not right in the United States. Increasingly people start to pay for Netflix subscriptions so they can stream movies on demand.

In the States Netflix nearly doubled the number of new subscribers in the first quarter of 2010, from 1.7 to 3.3 million. … It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that Netflix’ popularity has a negative effect on the movie piracy rates in the US.

I love the hand-wringing spin he puts on it. Piracy is being wiped out in America unless we work together to do something about it! What’s really going on is that Netflix found the money floor, the price that beats free. Stealing movies is even more of a pain than stealing music. Which is to say, not that much, but enough to justify a few bucks every month. Once your music and movies are online, you can say goodbye to that wretched experience of finding the jewel box you were looking for, opening it up, and only then discovering the #$% box is empty. Agggghhh!

Every startup has a frequently told founder’s story. Ebay’s (apocryphal) story is about the founder helping his girlfriend with her Pez Dispenser collection. PatientsLikeMe’s story is about the founders watching their brother die. Ben and Jamie Heywood’s brother Stephen had ALS, the debilitating disease forever associated with Lou Gehrig. As they worked to improve his condition, they realized that data sharing among the community of sufferers could be a powerful medical tool. They founded PatientsLikeMe as a site where people come together online not just for the moral support of sharing their stories, but for the concrete medical value of aggregating data that official medical channels don’t have the resources or inclination to gather.

It’s a great concept, managed very well. I’ve always thought of the web as a tool for finding “people like me,” people who’ve encountered and solved my problems before me. Think about your own experience. When you’re looking to resolve some technical problem, what kind of site is most likely to be the one that helps? How often is it the official support site for a big company? I’ve found it’s almost always a fellow sufferer who makes the biggest difference. It’s the same way with medical conditions. Who is the most likely person to give you straight and credible answers about living with your disease? Somebody else with the same disease. Your doctor wants to help, and that is of course where your medical advice starts, but ultimately he’s not facing the same situation you are.

If you want to learn more about the site, I highly recommend Jon Udell’s conversation with Jamie Heywood or the TEDMED talk embedded below.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Can this really make the kind of difference that a proper medical study can? Nature Biotechnology just published a paper from PatientsLikeMe that mined their community of ALS patients to refute a dubious claim that lithium was slowing the disease. It’s an important result, and will certainly be the first of many insights that can be made more quickly and more cheaply by working directly with data volunteered by the patients themselves.

Much is made these days about beautiful data visualization and how subtle but sophisticated presentation can bring important details to the fore. But I think the best visualization always comes down to having the best seats. If you’re in the right place when the poop goes down, you’ve got all the visualization you need.

For instance, here is some wind speed data from a buoy floating in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, this is NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center Station 42001. The subtitle to this picture is: See if you can guess when the hurricane went by.

What correlation do you notice between wind speed and atmospheric pressure? If I told you that Hurricane Rita came visiting during the reporting period, could you make a guess as to when? Can you suggest a scenario that might account for the following notes from this station’s website?

Station 42001 went adrift on 09/23/2005 and the last report from its moored position (listed above) was at 0230 GMT.

The best data visualization is often determined by collecting the right data at the right time. Which brings me to a little visualization I saw on Ben Hyde’s site. The question: does the meal schedule affect a judge’s decisions?

Once again, the important thing was to find the right vantage point. Once you decide to correlate food breaks with favorable parole decisions, the visualization speaks for itself. It’s one little jagged line, but it’s very eloquent. When do you want to appear in court?

Mmmm. Donuts.

Culture advances by composting the layer just below it. That which seemed rare and rich yesterday becomes the steaming rot for tomorrow’s sprouts. Kutiman is an Israeli musician who had the brilliant idea of using various “found” YouTube videos as the raw material for his own compositions. He’s sequencing and channeling dozens of people. I wrote about him once before. I still go back and listen to the Mother of All Funk Chords every now and then… it’s one of my favorite things on the web. More recently I came across this new Kutiman release, My Favorite Color.

It’s wonderful to think of these people collaborating in absentia through Kutiman’s deft touch. There’s something transparent and guileless about the resulting music. It made me think of Pomplamoose, a duo that Greg turned me on to. Their specialty is something they call a “video song,” a sort of intentional version of Kutiman’s mixes. In a video song, you see the anatomy of the song laid bare. As band member Jack Conte puts it (this is from the Wikipedia article)

1. What you see is what you hear. (No lip-syncing for instruments or voice)
2. If you hear it, at some point you see it. (No hidden sounds)

Slick MTV-style music videos are, of course, altogether different. They superimpose a highly-produced video stream on a highly-produced audio stream, although these two bear almost no relation to each other. Where music videos obfuscate with sound and fury, video songs reveal the essential whatness of the music. It’s another example of technology reclaiming the human aspect that was lost in an earlier, poorer use of technology. As Aristotle might remind us, don’t put the spectacle before the action. Pomplamoose is all about the action. When you think to yourself “By god, it sounds like he’s playing a toy piano,” you soon will see that by god he is.

Here, toy piano and all, is Pomplamoose covering Michael Jackson’s Beat It.

This is what a bubble looks like.

They’re generally not that hard to spot. I remember various prescient hand-wringing articles about the tech stock bubble and the housing price bubble. The problem is people don’t see the bubble all at the same time right up until the moment that it suddenly pops. At that moment we can genuinely claim to be surprised and not surprised at the same time.

Here’s another graph. This one is about college costs. You look at it and you say, “Man, that just can’t continue.” College costs are growing out of all proportion to income growth and cost-of-living increases.

It well and truly cannot continue growing at this pace, because like all exponential growth, it would eventually blot out the sun. Of course, going to college is a great thing. But sooner or later you just can’t pay for it. The rumblings of discontent are starting to show up in popular media. Here’s the anonymous Professor X writing for the Atlantic: An Anti-College Backlash?

Colleges are stuck in a textbook innovator’s dilemma in the sense that they are still making good money catering to a high-paying market. But because they won’t, or are structurally incapable of cutting prices, disruptive forces will eventually gut them from below. And those disruptive forces are almost certain to take the form of online education of one kind or another. That’s the theme of this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education: Disrupting College. It in turn points to an analysis written by Mr. Innovator’s Dilemma himself, Clayton Christensen. And finally, here’s a short piece written about Scott McNealy’s investment in open source education. McNealy can always be counted on for a good sound bite: “Universities will be forced to decide what they are. You know, are they going to be football teams with libraries attached? That’s what a lot of them are now.”

It’s hard to say when, but change is on the way. All I know for certain is I would be nervous to be on a university’s payroll at this moment.

First the hummingbird. Built by AeroVironment, this is one of those projects where the guy from DARPA says, “Here’s a giant pile of money. When I come back next year I want you to blow my mind. You understand me? BLOW MY MIND.” Putting a little bird face on it was gilding the lily in my opinion, but I won’t hold it against them. Consider: on that tiny mechanical bird they managed to stow away a control system, battery power for eight minutes’ flight, a real-time video transmitter, a copy of Reader’s Digest (May 2010), a bag of Skittles, an extra pair of underwear, a tumbler of ice, and a half-full bottle of gin. I don’t know what the DARPA guy said, but it blew my mind. Curiously, the AeroVironment guys have also built a flying model of the largest animal that ever flew. I’m speaking of course of the venerable Quetzalcoatlus northropi.

Next are the ping-pong playing quadrocopters. These machines are so impressive that the videos are starting to look boring. But the flying they’re doing is really phenomenal.

Best for last. People have been trying to build machines that fly like birds since well before Leonardo da Vinci. Everyone failed miserably. We only started to succeed with our flying machines when we realized that they don’t have to look like birds. We had to give up on that dream, because we’re just not that good, okay? Not until now, anyway. For the first time in history humans have finally succeeded in making something that really seems to fly like a bird.

This fine work is from Festo in Germany: behold the SmartBird. I wonder if it’s any good at Jeopardy?

Have you heard about Khan Academy yet? The brainchild of former hedge fund analyst Salman Khan, it’s an educational site that’s got people buzzing. For all the fuss, there are really only a few new ideas here. But they are very well executed and they point the way ahead for education of all kinds, not just in-school situations.

Here’s a TED video about the topic that you can watch if you want to, but the big idea is this:

1. Use videos and screencasts to time-shift the lecture out of the classroom (sometimes called the Fisch Flip).
2. Use the newly available classroom time to maximize collaborative and teacher-assisted time spent solving problems.
3. Use game-based techniques to motivate and track progress on problem-solving.

Video lectures have been available for some time. In fact, this once rare and expensive service is now cheap. They’re all over the place. What do you do with all this freakin’ video content? What was missing was a comprehensive framework to fit these videos into, and that’s what Khan has been able to demonstrate convincingly.

Flipping lecture time and homework time is one of those ideas that’s ripe; once you hear it, it seems obvious. But it also fits a theme that we see again and again with technology. The initial wave of enthusiasm is for the technology itself: Teacherless schools! Robot instructors! Computer-centric training! But once that rather colorless vision fades, the real power of technology is seen to be humanizing. In this case, it lets us make much better use of the teacher’s time. Rather than mass-producing the children and squashing them all into the same seats for the same amount of time, the computer can handle the management complexity of letting kids advance at different rates. The Kansas State anthropologist Michael Wesch has done a good job documenting the disconnect between old styles of learning and the current digital connected world.

Khan’s approach seems to work best for math. This, not surprisingly, is where his curriculum is most fully developed. The central organizing diagram for his math curriculum is the so-called Knowledge Map. Anybody who’s played a turn-based strategy game will recognize this Tech Tree approach to subject matter. Here’s one that I wasted spent many hours on: Alpha Centauri.

The math knowledge map is quite similar, only instead of “Neural Grafting” and “Silksteel Alloys” it has things like “Multiplying Decimals.”

I’ve started to work through this knowledge tree with my 7-year-old daughter, and I can vouch for the fact that the system works. She likes it. I like it. It’s free. Try it!