Four short links: 8 Apr 2009

Bias, RFCs, virus batteries, and a glimpse at life beyond record labels (the last item features profanity, beware):

1. Bias We Can Believe In (Mind Hacks) -- Vaughn asks the tricky question about the current enthusiasm for Behavioural Economics in government: where are the sceptical voices? As he points out, It's perhaps no accident that almost all the articles cite a 2001 study that found that simply making the US's 401(k) retirement savings scheme opt-out instead of opt-in vastly increased participation simply because it's a hassle to change and employees perceive the 'default' as investment advice. But it's probably true to say that this example has been so widely repeated but it's one of the minority of behavioural economics studies that have looked at the relation between the existence of a cognitive bias and real-world economic data from the population. And it's notable that behavioural economists who specialise in making this link, a field they call behavioural macroeconomics, seem absent from the Obama inner circle.
2. How The Internet Got Its Rules (NYTimes) -- about the first RFCs, which became IETF. The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard. (via Glynn Moody)
3. Viruses Could Power Devices (Science News) -- Ions and electrons can move through smaller particles more quickly. But fabricating nano-sized particles of iron phosphate is a difficult and expensive process, the researchers say. So Belcher’s team let the virus do the work. By manipulating a gene of the M13 virus to make the viruses coat themselves in iron phosphate, the researchers created very small iron phosphate particles. (via BoingBoing)
4. Amanda Palmer's Label-Dropping Game -- interesting email from Amanda Palmer to her fans about trying to get dropped from her label. i had to EXPLAIN to the so-called "head of digital media" of roadrunner australia WHAT TWITTER WAS. and his brush-off that "it hasn’t caught on here yet" was ABSURD because the next day i twittered that i was doing an impromptu gathering in a public park and 12 hours later, 150 underage fans - who couldn’t attend the show - showed up to get their records signed. no manager knew! i didn’t even warn or tell her! no agents! no security! no venue! we were in a fucking public park! life is becoming awesome. and then the times they are a-changing fucking dramatically, when pong-twittering with trent reznor means way more to your fan-base/business than whether or not the record is in fucking stores (and in my case, it ain’t in fucking stores).

PhoneGap, the Mobile Platform Democratizer

Phonegap is an opensource development framework for mobile platforms. It allows developers to build native apps in HTML and JavaScript. Currently PhoneGap works for the iPhone and Android, but Blackberry and other OSs are on the way. You can get PhoneGap from Github or Google Code.

There are eighteen iPhone apps listed on the PhoneGap site. Though the apps are created with web technologies PhoneGap provides access to the phone's client APIs and run in Objective-C. I tested both Roadtrippr and the fun Blok-Buster Lite. As promised the apps are able to use my phone's location, accelerometer and multi-touch controls. Though the functionality was there both apps seemed a bit flat. This could have been related to their design, but I suspect that it is a PhoneGap issue.

Nitobi, the Vancouver-based company behind Phonegap, intends to make money via future services. Developers will be able to upload their HTML and JavaScript and get back a URL for a tested, compiled app for each platform. Nitobi won the People's Choice award last week at the Web 2.0 Expo SF during our Launchpad event where they launched a desktop emulator for their supported patforms. Both Techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb covered the event.

PhoneGap still has a ways to go before it is the one framework to rule them all. Their Roadmap is below and they would be thrilled if any of you wanted to assist them. In the feature-platform matrix below green means done, yellow means in-progress and red means not currently possible (they'll have to update the redblock in the Copy/Paste column of the iPhone for when 3.0 comes out).

Though the Palm Pre isn't listed it is definitely on Nitobi's mind, but don't expect them to support regular mobiles or even earlier smart phones. Only the latest generation of smartphones will be targeted.

There's a gold-rush happening right now in mobile marketplaces. However not everyone is able to participate and not all platforms are receiving equal attention. PhoneGap has the potential to be a great democratizer. It lowers the bar for developers to create powerful applications out of very familiar web technologies. It also enables sites to support versions of their apps for mobile platforms other than the iPhone. If you don't have an iPhone (or even if you do) you should be cheering this project along.

You ain't gonna need what?

One of the defining characteristics of the Rails movement has been its willingness to throw out the rules by which software developers and consultants have typically worked. Those rules typically produce big, overblown projects laden with features that no one ever uses--but which sounded good during the project specification phase. Build the simplest thing that could possibly work, and add features from there; say "You ain't gonna need it" when partway into the project, stakeholders come along with strange requirements based on what they think they might want.

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It's Really Just a Series of Tubes

Molly Wright Steenson hit the Ignite jackpot at Etech this year with her explanation of the steam powered network of pneumatic tubes of the 1800s. If you're someone that, like me, has a somewhat obsessive relationship with Internet Infrastructure, you must watch this talk.

Four short links: 7 Apr 2009

Maps, meaning, makers, and orphaned works:

1. Lens Tools and Fisheye Map Browsing -- a summary of magnification in maps through history, culminating in use of the fisheye/lens as a way to explore layers and data in thematic maps. (via Titine's delicious stream)
2. Socially Relevant Computing -- frustrated by the meaningless examples and work in computer science classes, Mike Buckley started sending students into the real world and building projects for handicapped people, firefighters, children, etc. Read their SIGCSE paper (PDF) for more. (via Andy Oram)
3. Maker Faire Africa -- I wish I could go!
4. Google Book Search Lawsuit Settlement Analysis -- finally a simple statement of why many folks aren't happy with the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement: Thanks to the magic of the class action mechanism, the settlement will confer on Google a kind of legal immunity that cannot be obtained at any price through a purely private negotiation. It confers on Google immunity not only against suits brought by the actual members of the organizations that sued Google, but also against suits brought by anyone who doesn’t explicitly opt out. That means that Google will be free to mine the vast body of orphan works without fear of liability. Any competitor that wants to get the same legal immunity Google is getting will have to take the same steps Google did: start scanning books without the publishers’ and authors’ permission, get sued by authors and publishers as a class, and then negotiate a settlement. The problem is that they’ll have no guarantee that the authors and publishers will play along. (via Glynn Moody)

W. David Stephenson on the Federal CIO: Vivek Kundra

Stephenson’s Introduction

I'm David Stephenson from Stephenson Strategies in Boston. I'm an eGov and Enterprise 2.0 strategist and theorist.

Tim O'Brien: Tell me what that means what do you do for your client? I'm assuming your client would be government.

David Stephenson: My particular emphasis is on empowering the general public to really become no longer just passive recipients of government services, but instead active co-creators and I've done this particularly in the past in the field of homeland security and emergency communications. Now that has led me into the broader field. Vivek Kundra and I have done a lot of talking about it and we've been working on a book together. It’s unclear at this point whether he will be able to continue with that book, called "democratizing data". [The book] talks about making organizations, whether government agencies or businesses to be data centric using metadata. And then being able to supply that to all of your workforce, to do public feeds, the data to help build faith in government through transparency and even the most astonishing thing when he did it in District of Columbia with their Apps for Democracy contest where you actually take those data feeds and do mash ups and create real services.

Stephenson on Vivek Kundra (Federal CIO)

TO: You mentioned Vivek Kundra. He was just appointed as the Federal CIO. He's going to be working within the OMB (Office of Management and Budget). Could you tell me a little bit about the work you've done with him?

DS: Well, I was brought in one with very limited aspect, after they had already established a very admirable record in terms of transparency and innovation, that was basically to do a blueprint for how to transform the existing programs to make the District the model of governmental transparency in the world, basically. And that is the kind of guy Vivek Kundra is. He just doesn't settle for second best. He really wants to try to make sure that everything they're doing is state of the art and pushing the envelope.

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Ignite Seattle Returns! Submit a Talk

After a year-long hiatus Ignite Seattle is returning to a bigger and better venue. We'll feature 16 speakers doing great 5 minute talks and geek contest to kick off the night. Ignite Seattle 6 will take place on 4/29. Doors will open at 7PM and talk will start at 8:30PM. We are very grateful to be getting sponsorship from Google and Biznik.

After a long search Ignite will be at the King Cat Theatre in Downtown Seattle. It's a great space that has a bar, 700+ theatre-style seats and a great stage. This venue will allow everyone to have a seat and should provide us a good home for some time.

As always we are searching for talks. As always each speaker gets just 20 slides that autoadvance every 15 seconds for a total of 5 minutes. We are looking for talks that geeks would love. This can be how-to's, historical deepdives, a technical explanation, or just a great story. If you want to speak submit your talk by 4/16.

If you're not familiar with Ignite you can check out some videos from the Ignite Show.

If you were thinking of going to the Techflash Live event that same night do not worry about a potential conflict. We've coordinated with them and you'll have plenty of time to walk the two blocks between the events. Ben Huh, Chief Cheezburger of Pet Holdings will be speaking.

RSVP on Upcoming. RSVP on Facebook.

Four short links: 6 Apr 2009

Baby nerds, evil URL shorteners, reasoned discussion, and the Government straps its Web 2.0 on:

1. Books for Wee Nerds -- Forget Pat the Bunny -- your baby wants to Pat Schrodinger's Kitty! Help baby search for subatomic particles and explore the universe. (via Tim's tweets)
2. On URL Shorteners -- Joshua Schachter and Maciej Ceglowski on the downsides of URL shortening services like bit.ly et al.
3. Mending The Bitter Absence of Reasoned Technical Discussion (Alex Payne) -- We’ve come to accept that trying to have a reasonable discussion on the Internet is like insert any number of increasingly offensive metaphors here. Usenet, IRC, forums, blogs, and now media like Twitter have all been black-marked as houses unfit for reason to dwell within. And so we roll our eyes, sigh, and quietly accept the idiocy, the opportunism, and the utter disrespect for our peers and ourselves that is technical discussion on the Internet. This need not be the case. It is possible to have a reasoned technical discussion on the Internet. People do it every day, particularly in smaller online communities where social norms are easier to enforce. We can do it. (via SarahM
4. GSA signs agreements with Web 2.0 providers -- Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, and blip.tv get agreements that make it legal for federal agencies to use those tools. Followup to my earlier cite of roadblocks to Web 2.0 tools for government use. (via Fiona's delicious links)

The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory

Guest blogger John Geraci has spent the last six years making life in cities better with the use of web technologies. His latest project, DIYcity.org, has web developers and urban planners all over the world teaming up to create open source tools for residents of cities everywhere. Prior to DIYcity, Geraci co-founded the hyperlocal news network Outside.in.

Back in January, the city of Los Angeles announced a gap of $433 million for their 2009 budget. Instead of just cutting services however, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took the unusual step of posting a survey online for residents of the city to fill out. For each category of city service, the survey asked residents, "what program would you reduce to help balance the budget?", followed by an itemized list of services they could choose from.

It was in one sense a remarkable sign of the new openness and desire for participation sweeping government all over the U.S.

In another sense though it begged a larger question: if you're going to involve city residents in these issues, why stop at asking people which services they would like to cut? Why not go a bit further and ask them for input on how to keep these services, while making them leaner, more efficient, and smarter? And why not then ask for their help in making those changes happen?

These are questions cities everywhere should be asking today, as they find themselves faced with the challenge of gigantic budget shortfalls brought on by the recession. The conversation about the future of our cities should involve the people living in those cities. But it should not be about which services to eliminate, it should be about how to reinvent these services as modern, efficient things, how to make them work at a fraction of their current cost, and, while we're at it, how to make them better than they are now.

Why? Because cities don't have the money to improve, or even sustain these services on their own. Because people have good ideas, often more innovative than the ones coming from the cities themselves. And because increasingly, people have the means to actually build and implement these services - not as centralized, closed, top-down systems we think of as public services today, but as distributed, participatory web-based systems built using data open to all.

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Savory: Native Kindle epub and PDF Converter

In an editorial for Forbes, Tim called for the the opening of the Kindle, else it will slowly turn obsolete. Since I love my Kindle, I am happy that my friend, Jesse Vincent, a long time open source contributor and OSCON speaker, is trying to open the Kindle. (You might remember him as the guy who discovered Amazon's USB-network easter-egg in the Kindle 2 last month.)

He is developing Savory, the first native Kindle application. Savory is an open source epub and PDF converter that actually runs natively on the Kindle. While it doesn't add anything that you couldn't do from a desktop, it streamlines the process, allowing you copy epubs and PDFs to your Kindle over USB or download them from the web, and immediately read them offline. (O'Reilly provides bookworm, which converts DRM free epubs to HTML and lets you read them through the Kindle's web browser, as well as DRM-free .mobi formatted versions of much of O'Reilly's catalog at O'Reilly Ebook Bundles.) Here's Jesse on why he created Savory:

I'm in love with my Kindle. I've been reading ebooks on screens of various sorts for many years, but the Kindle2 is the first device that I actually enjoy reading as much as I enjoy reading paper books. I've tried other ebook readers, but for a variety of reasons, they just don't work for me. My goal is to make it easier for readers to read more free content on the Kindle.

Savory is based on the open source project Calibre -- a python application that lets you convert between multiple ebook formats. The implementation is a background daemon that uses inotify to immediately convert the file to the mobi format. To get a performance boost, it uses unladen-swallow -- Google's optimized version of Python. I find it exciting that this paves the way for 3rd party applications on the Kindle.

While I wish that Amazon would follow Apple's path and make the Kindle DRM free, it is worthwhile to note that Savory itself does not deal with DRM at all.
Jesse says:

No. Savory does not include support for ebooks protected by DRM. DRM is an incredibly "hot" topic in the ebook world right now. There are varying opinions on its efficacy. My opinions on the matter aren't relevant, except to say that I am not touching the topic with a 10 foot pole. It will not convert DRM-protected ebooks into a format the Kindle will read. It will not add or remove DRM from any ebook.

Personally, I've been using Calibre to create and convert a daily operations report for all of Wikia -- and I look forward to be able to download the report from the web and just read it.

More information can be found on Jesse's blog, with the code available at savory.googlecode.com.

Four short links: 3 Apr 2009

Servers, artifacts, browsers, and embedded Python:

1. Google's Data Centers -- Silicon Valley's version of a celebrity nookie video, where we get to answer the question, "are they really as good as we imagine?" Everyone's raving about each server having its own 12v battery. My eye was caught by the way the speaker attributed the efficiency to metrics: "Early on, there was an emphasis on the dollar per (search) query," Hoelzle said. "We were forced to focus. Revenue per query is very low."
2. Future Artifacts from Umeå Institute of Design. Tongue-in-cheek "products" as speaker gifts, very nice. My favourite is the Criminal Love Implant: A team of Swedish scientists built these to combat the emotional tranqulizers we are injected with in our youth to dampen the unpredictability of love. Nothing says I love you like a crime of passion. (via timo's delicious stream)
3. PlainView -- a chromeless web browser for presentations, built on WebKit, for OS X. (via joshua's delicious stream)
4. Python on Tiny Embedded Wireless Devices with Synapse SNAP (PDF) -- slides from a talk at PyCon about running Python on tiny embedded platforms. Lust. The embedded devices contain a Python bytecode interpreter. You blast your code down to them over the wireless mesh network the devices themselves are realizing via a special USB dongle connected to your computer. From your Python code running on a device you can make unicast or multicast XML-RPC calls to the other devices running on the network. (via Hacker News via joshua's delicious stream)

Where 2.0 Preview: Eric Gunderson of Development Seed on the Promise of Open Data

When we think about how government uses geographic information, we tend to think about USGS maps or census data, very centralized and preplanned projects meant to produce a very specific set of products. But Development Seed believes that there is a lot more that could be done if these types of data could be mashed up easily with each other as well as with alternate sources such as social networks. Eric Gunderson, President of Development Seed, will be speaking at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in June, and he recently took some time to speak to us about the potential benefits that open access to government data brings.

James Turner: Can you start by talking a bit about Development Seed and how you came to be involved with it?

EG: We're a strategy organization in Washington, D.C., and what sets us apart from a lot of other strategy organizations in town is the fact that we do a lot of the building. And we build [it] all on open source tools. We particularly work with international development organizations, and the knowledge silos there are pretty fierce. For the last couple of years, we've worked on a lot of projects where you have really good data and bad technology's slowing it down. So we work on a host of projects whether they're internal internets or external mapping sites.

JT: If we focus, first of all, on our government, what are the problems with how the government manages data today?

EG: Right. Well, first, a lot of times it's not even released. I mean people aren't putting it out there in any kind of way where we can access it. But even when it is, for example, like a mandate by an agency to report on food prices or a certain statistic, sometimes it's baked into PDFs. And it's put out in a way that you can't really do much with it, you know, interact with it, parse it out, discover what's there. So that said, that's starting to change. I mean there's been some folks that are saying, "Wait a minute. We've already collected this data, and if we spend a little extra time packaging it, we can put it out there. And it will essentially have a whole new lifecycle and start adding value back to the community--the tax payers that paid for it."

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Recent Posts

• Four short links: 2 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 2, 2009
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