Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons

The first session I attended today was John Wilbanks' "Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons" presentation. John talked about the process of establishing the Science Commons and how creating a science oriented commons presented unique challenges. John first pointed out that Metcalfe's Law works for both networked computers and documents. But, he went on to extend the law to more general data as well -- something I've believed in and espoused for a number of years now.

(continue reading)

Etech liveblogging: Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People (Tony Jebara)

(Tony is from Sense Networks, and also a prof at Columbia University in comp sci)

Starting out with what we have now:

Online data isn't disconnected documents, but a network, with links between docs and the key information is the links. Folks like Google have obviously exploited that network technology. Online social networks, networks of people, the relationships being the important part. - looking at Facebook, but also affinity networks like Amazon recommendations.

The issue is using some real world activity to build networks. What can you tell about a place by what it's connected to? They're using mobile location data passively - but it's messy and hard by comparison to online data. Should Facebook be able to build my friend network by seeing our phones cluster? (That will put a damper on my extramarital affairs.)

We already have smarts in online data: collaborative filtering, marketing, advertising, search, social recommendation - the next step is pulling that out of location data.

They've been collecting location data from taxis, blackberries and iphones

An example of what can be found:

In SF - commuting into the financial district for work. When people come into work correlated with the Dow Jones, when the stock market started going down people rolled into work later.

How much are people in SF going out at night? How late are people staying out? Night life goes way down with the economic downturn, in fact gps is down over 30% in general in San Francisco now.

The app: citysense.com: Where is everyone? How is sf right now? They can show you a heat map of iphone or blackberry to get a feeling how active the world out there is-
this brings the ability one has in a small community to tell if something is going on to a scaled up urban area. Go towards the red dots!

You can search for bars and restaurants in ranked order in how active they are. They have a buddy finder: kind of like a Google latitude.

In the next step, citysense 2.0 they are color coding the dots to find people like you. Each color represents a different 'tribe' - orange is the young edgies, light blue the business traveller, for instance. The citysense app determines what crowd you're in - this is the 'secret sauce' - tehy'ree going to try and build a social network out of the location data. It's honest in a way Facebook isn't, because you co-locate with your friends. Both actual colocation and behavioral colocation- if you go to the same kind of place at the same kind of time, that's a semantic relaitonship.

They start by building a network of places- like google meta data but for physical locations. For every possible place or street corner they're looking to find is place a similar to place b? Some of this can be got from gov databases, and some from flow analysis. Similar to page rank... if people come to a place from similar types of origins, then leave to similar places later, they can extract that as meta data about the place. eg bankers leave the Financial District, go to an Italian restaurant then go to a similar neighborhood for the night.

They color code bars by the similar inflow and outflow, so they make them semantically adjacent. They are working with an advertising company to change how they target their beer ads.

Then to the poeple: they translate the gps trails of users into flows. As in, what are the odds of finding person of demographic 2 in commercial sector 3, which is fine dining, at 6pm on saturdays: 52%

Measure them not where they live, but where they hang out on average as a probability. They then toss out the actual location data and only keep the matrix. The matrix light up quickly because we all follow very normal weekly routines. (The Dopplr crowd must look super strange to them)

They have 4 million users - with semantic data relationships being the social network.

They identify tribes based on advertising applications:
young and edgy: poor, more ethnically diverse
weekend mole- out occasionally on weekdays, Latino, middle income neighborhood
mature homebody - rarely goes out

This is to help companies better target their ads.

They've had to do interesting re-calibrations recently. Usually the season requires re-calibration, but the economy has caused massive changes.

They're interested in the next network: it's not the online network, it's the offline world.

At Risk: Universal Online Access to All Knowledge

I’ve been following Brewster Kahle and Robert Darnton, a University Professor and director of Harvard’s Library, recently, and they’re concerned over the settlement of the lawsuit between Google and the authors and publishers, over the scanning and use of books in Google Book Search. In my experience, Brewster is extraordinarily thoughtful and takes a long view. Early in my career, I was a librarian. I love books. So while I’m not a lawyer and I find this settlement confusing, I’m writing about it because I think it merits awareness and a serious discussion.

The key issues appear to be whether the business model created by the settlement will lock up content that essentially belongs to the public domain (per Brewster) and whether the publishers’ and authors’ creation of a Google monopoly for books will harm access to knowledge in the future (per Darnton). Below, I’m relying on their words to explain this further.

Last week Brewster posted “It’s All About the Orphans” (https://www.opencontentalliance.org/2009/02/23/its-all-about-the-orphans/) on the blog of the Open Content Alliance, focusing on the plight of “orphan works” - that vast number of books that are still under copyright but whose authors can no longer be found:

"After digesting the proposed Google Book Settlement, it becomes clear that the dizzyingly complex agreement is, in essence, an elaborate scheme for the exploitation of orphan works… The upshot, if the Settlement is approved, would be legal protection for Google, and only for Google, to scan and provide digital access to the orphan works. Presto! … So, should the Settlement be approved, Google will be handed exclusive access to the orphans, and the public loses out… I, personally, am amazed at this creative use of class action law. The three parties have managed to skirt copyright law, bypass legislative efforts, and feather their own nests - all through the clever use of law intended to remedy harms. This Settlement, if approved by the judge, will accomplish things appropriate to a legislative body not to private corporate boardrooms. Let’s live under the rule of law, as arduous as that might be, and free the orphans, legitimately, not for one corporation but for all of us."

And in “Google & the Future of Books” (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281), an article that Darnton published in The New York Review of Books last month, the focus is slightly different but the upshot is the same:

"After reading the settlement and letting its terms sink in—no easy task, as it runs to 134 pages and 15 appendices of legalese - one is likely to be dumbfounded: here is a proposal that could result in the world's largest library… Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world's largest book business - not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon… The class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition… We are allowing a question of public policy - the control of access to information - to be determined by private lawsuit… As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly - a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information… The settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company… This is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever."

A lot seems to be at stake and the court may approve the settlement in June! I don't care if the settlement means that Google will get even richer (disclosure: I’m a Google shareholder). The question is: to what extent will WE become poorer?

Four short links: 11 Mar 2009

Four ETech-related links, from your humble author who is following the action from afar:

1. Criminals Are "Targeting Basic Blocks of the Internet" (Guardian) -- writeup of Alex Stamos's talk. "Basic infrastructure failure is what we're going to see over the next few years," he said. "The most interesting research is either taking things that we thought were unexploitable and exploiting them, and also the breaking of the basic building blocks of the internet from the 1970s and 1980s." For another "we're all so boned" moment on Internet security, read Peter Gutmann's overview of the commercial malware industry.
2. Phil Gyford's ETech 09 Posts -- Phil takes notes and attends a lot of the sessions I'd have wanted to be in, like Tim's "Work on Stuff that Matters".
3. Mary Lou Jepsen's Talk (Guardian) -- interesting bit for me was a low powered television set that can display high definition video but can run without being plugged in. "We've had a lot of pull," she said. "People want TV even if they don't have power… an HDTV that's under 10W and can be human-powered. We've figured out a way to do that." Not that I'm in love with television, but the technology that gets mass-produced for cud-chewing couch-butts gets cheaper for the likes of you and me. See her new company, Pixel Qi.
4. ETech on Hashtags -- see the latest tweets tagged with "#etech". E.g., @fortunebird's Rebecca Allegar: Don't predict the future, design it., and @Technomadia's We just controlled a chocolate lab live via iPhone. Now.. we eat more chocolate! I like this presentation lots!

Two Thousand People Singing Daisy Bell Together via Mech Turk

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

Have you ever heard two thousand people sing and harmonize together? Bicycle Built For Two Thousand splices together over two thousand audio samples to sing the public domain song Daisy Bell, the song sung by HAL at the end of 2001. It is being launched today at ETech. You can watch a demo of the application above.

The crowdsourced song is made from 12 audio and 6 keyboard tracks. On the site you can listen to all of the tracks together, each one individually or the synth version of the song. Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey used Mechanical Turk to capture the samples. Each turker was played a single syllable or note from the synth version and asked to replicate it. People from 71 countries were each paid 6 cents to record their voice. The resulting audio samples were merged together and are now playable through the site.

This is the third Mechanical Turk art project that Aaron Koblin has created. The Sheep Market combined 10,000 sheep drawn by Turkers into a digital art app (Radar post). He also used the work of Turkers to create Ten Thousand Cents, a crowdsourced drawing of the US one-hundred dollar bill. Aaron, a Googler, also did the laser visualizations for the Radiohead video House of Cards.

Etech session liveblogging: Mr Hacker Goes to Washington (Greg Elin of Sunlight Foundation)

(Came in a few minutes late)

Greg was a firehose, forgive my errors and omissions.

DC is like a university with a really massive ROTC program. If the internet is ethernet, congress is token ring. One person speaks at a time, for instance. Once Greg saw more than 10 minutes for a roll call vote--no electronic anything. Congress paper based--so it's not exactly version managable the way people want to stick bills in Subversion, that kind of thing.

Important to realize that Legal code != Software code
Legal is intentionally fuzzy rather than rigorously logical--it's good that way.

It's really not like what programmers are used to. One of the bills going through the Senate during the banking crisis changed a medical benefits bill, turned it into the Emergency Economic Stabilization bill. It would be like a quick patch of your word processor that turned it into a database.

(continue reading)

Ignite Show: Andrew Schneider, Experimental Performance Devices

This week's Ignite Show features Andrew Schneider, a performance artist, and his DIY experimental performance devices, but first a cupcake decorating contest. If you're at ETech this is a preview for his performance tonight with Zoë Keating before the ETech Fest. The cupcake decorating contest and Andrew's talk were filmed at Ignite NYC II.

The Ignite Show will feature a different speaker every Tuesday for free. It's available on YouTube (user: Ignite), on our Ignite site and via iTunes. It is being released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

ETech: Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?

The second session today I'd like to share with you was presented by a personal friend of mine, Jeremy Faludi. Jer started his session entitled "Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?" by pointing out that if we want to change the world, we ought to know what the most important issues are, right? Good thinking! And with so much news about how humans affect the planet its hard to accurately determine what really is important and what we can safely ignore. Jer set out to educate future green hackers about the most important things to focus on. Jer provided a vast amount of information that I can't hope to adequately convey in one blog post. He covered: Climate change, species extinction and habitat Loss, resource depletion, pollution and overpopulation. At the end of his presentation, Jer provided us with an overall list of priorities -- I'll focus on those and will try to augment that summary with points from his main sections.

(continue reading)

ETech: I Just Don't Trust You: How the Tech Community Can Reinvent Risk Ratings

My favorite conference of the year, ETech kicked off its general sessions today and its looking as stimulating as ever! While the topics covered by the conference have become less hard-core geeky, they have become more green and more broad. Sustainable topics, the environment and becoming better global citizens are just a few of the topics that have been struck this morning. ETech continues to make me think, which is the primary reason I keep coming back for more.

The first session I'd like to share with you was Toby Segaran and Jesper Anderson's "I Just Don't Trust You: How the Tech Community Can Reinvent Risk Ratings" presentation. Toby and Jesper posited that the system for rating credit instruments is horribly broken. Right before Lehman Brothers crashed, Moody's credit rating agency gave Lehman Brothers a AAA A2 credit rating. Moodys immediately down-rated Lehman Brothers after they crashed -- a little too late! Jesper and Toby outlined four reasons why the current system fails to do its job:

(continue reading)

Etech Session Liveblogging: Real Hackers Program DNA (Ginkgo Bioworks)

GB is "Making the process of engineering biology easier."

Synth bio is the idea that biology is a technology to engineer novel systems- say drugs, biofuels, other sexy sexy projects.

This is to be a flavor of what engineering biology is all about.

We will be installing a program into E coli to make it turn red, glow in the dark, or smell like bananas... We get to pick!

The DNA is stapled to the pages that describe them in the notebook.

Some of the tools of synth bio: biobricks, interchangeable components that can be strung together into programs. The parts registry lets you snap programs together.

iGem participants get a kit in the mail and pick out parts and mix and match them into new programs they want- much like the one we're holding. The Scottish team made and E coli that turned red in response to arsenic contamination.

Standardized interchangeable components are limited, but let a lot more people get involved and democratizes access to the tools. This is still biology- it can seem kind of scary- do you trust your neighbor to engineer biology?

Question from the audience: how do you prevent the terrorists from building smallpox?
Answer: You can't perfectly. "How do you prevent a car bomb from blowing up outside?" You don't, but you can limit it, and create a community that self polices.

Question from the audience: What about release? Would the arsenic detector be scattered on the ground?
Answer: We don't understand how manufactured organisms will interact with the environment. We work with safe organisms, and we don't release our stuff. These E coli are pretty innocuous, so we're going to wash our hands before lunch.

It's pretty unlikely that anyone is going to make anything in a lab that's dangerous right now, but we should think about that.

It's a bit legally gray, the guidelines everyone follows are only required for people receiving NIH funding, and there's some places with local laws (like Cambridge) ... There's no clear answer.

We're punching out our DNA and dropping it in cells. (Ben has returned our vial, #19 and #10 to ice, while the receptive cells take up our dna)

We're installing on a plasmid. "You're literally just mixing the plasmid DNA with the cells." These cells are competent, which means they can take up DNA easily. We cool the DNA, then do a heat shot- then shock it in a 42 degree water bath for 30 seconds, time it, put it back on ice for two minutes. We're disrupting the membrane of the cells and letting them recover. Then we're adding media, food for the cells. Then we're incubating them with our bodies. I'm going to keep mine in my armpit, I think.

Can't mix the three bit of dna, because they're the same plasmid - they are ampecillin resistance plasmid, so there's a space collision, things aren't likely to play well together.

DIYbio.org is a good place to learn about good lab practices.

I am now heading to lunch, incubating a tube of e coli in each armpit. (Will update with pictures after lunch)

Update: I've now transferred my E. coli to a petri dish and a vial, freeing my arms.

...and no, I was in a hurry, and I didn't wash my hands before lunch. Phear my bad lab skillz. (& Know your organisms.)

Four short links: 10 Mar 2009

1. Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation Sets Up Its Own BitTorrent Tracker -- the money shot is not that they're using the same code as Pirate Bay, it's "By using BitTorrent we can reach our audience with full quality media files. Experience from our early tests show that if we’re the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it.". Finally, a broadcaster realizing that they have to jump into the conversation with customers even though they don't know how it ends. (via BoingBoing)
2. Sita Sings The Blues Released -- release of the movie that was mired in copyright strife, now freed under Creative Commons Attribute And No Damn DRM licensing. It still is copyright-entangled: some of the songs in the movie are restricted and if you want to reuse the songs in your reuse of the movie then you'll have to wrangle with the copyright overlords.
3. Crisis of Credit Explained in Infographics -- a great 10m movie explaining the whole disaster from cash to crash, with an infographic-meets-Flash-game feel to it. This is the future of educational films. I've embedded it below. (via Flowing Data)
4. Cowpox Smallpox -- very clear essay from Maciej Ceglowski about how the economic dramas and the climate dramas challenge our democracy in the same way. You might know Maciej from Argentina on two steaks a day or Dabblers and Blowhards. Complexity as a result of feedback loops caught my eye, as that's part of the talk I gave at Webstock, "Better Stronger Failures": "Feedback loops in the financial world are even worse, since the entities being modeled are aware of their behavior - and aware of the models being used to study them. Investors form strategies based not just on market conditions, but on their perceptions of others' perceptions of market conditions, and so on in a hall of mirrors effect. Any algorithm that can reliably predict the behavior of a financial market will be used by participants in that market to earn money, altering the system in a way that leaves you right back where you started. In this sense our ability to model economics will always be worse than our understanding of the weather, since we don't have to worry about a raindrop anticipating that it will hit the ground before it even forms, and taking steps to change the outcome."

Four short links: 9 Mar 2009

Hardware, open source, and AI today:

1. Geek Tour China 2009 -- how did I miss this? Bunnie Huang has led a tour of China manufacturing for hardware hacking geeks. Read the blog posts from participants: here, here, here, here, and here. Just go ahead and add these bloggers to your feed reader: sweet sweet candy they post. My favourite: American Shanzai, asking where are the USA hackers like the Chinese who make working phones out of packets of cigarettes? But read the posts for giant single-digit LED clocks, markets of components from torn-down phones, and 280km of velcro/day machines.
2. Open Source Hardware Central Bank -- an interesting idea to fund the manufacture of larger runs than would be possible with self-funding, so as to achieve modest economies of scale. "Looking at Open Source Software, it's a thriving ecosystems of communities, projects, and contributors. There are a few companies, but they mostly offer "paid-for" services like consulting, tech support, or custom code/build-to-order functionality. I'd like the same for Open Source Hardware. I'd like the money problem to go away for small contributors like me and others. And I'd like to help guys like Chris and Mike and Mark and David and Jake build more cool stuff because it's fun."
3. Wolfram Alpha -- everyone is skeptical because it smells like AI windmill tilting mixed with "my pet algorithms are the keys to the secrets of the universe!", but it'll be interesting to see what it looks like when it launches in May. "But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated? [...] armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable. [...] I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work. Pulling all of this together to create a true computational knowledge engine is a very difficult task."
4. Open Source, Open Standards, and Reuse: Government Action Plan -- "So we consider that the time is now right to build on our record of fairness and achievement and to take further positive action to ensure that Open Source products are fully and fairly considered throughout government IT; to ensure that we specify our requirements and publish our data in terms of Open Standards; and that we seek the same degree of flexibility in our commercial relationships with proprietary software suppliers as are inherent in the open source world." Great news from the UK!

Recent Posts

• Perspectives on Open Data Workshop | by Nat Torkington on March 9, 2009
• Startup Marketing Isn't Rocket Science, So Don't Hire the Ph.D Too Soon | by Darren Barefoot on March 9, 2009
• Four short links: 6 Mar 2009 | by Nat Torkington on March 6, 2009
• Vivek Kundra: Federal CIO in His Own Words | by Tim O'Brien on March 5, 2009
• Four short links: 5 Mar 2009 | by Nat Torkington on March 5, 2009
• Facebook is Growing Fast in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East | by Ben Lorica on March 5, 2009
• Bulk Data Downloads: A Breakthrough in Government Transparency | by Tim O'Reilly on March 4, 2009
• Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden | by David Recordon on March 4, 2009
• Four short links: 4 Mar 2009 | by Nat Torkington on March 4, 2009
• Kindle Above the Level of a Single Device | by Marc Hedlund on March 3, 2009
• Marc Bohlen: Finding the Intersection of Art and Technology | by James Turner on March 3, 2009
• Four short links: 3 Mar 2009 | by Nat Torkington on March 3, 2009