advocacy

People are making the Internet of things

It’s 2013. Where’s my flying car that folds into a briefcase?

A lot of folks feel this way, and some critical things have changed and frankly grown inexpensive enough that folks are making what they want on their own. Of course, that’s not the only factor. Another is the power of social effects as so many folks have a mobile device within three feet 24 hours a day (I don’t, but hey, whatever works for you). In the example below Nathan took an inexpensive microwave and added the sorts of features I’d think any microwave in 2013 would have. Even just setting the clock from the Internet on startup would be a huge improvement, never mind a simpler interface, and some kind of app that would make more complex cooking simpler. (I’m going to add right now that I think microwave cooking is a bad idea. Ping me if you care to hear more about that.)

For the less technical, the Raspberry Pi Nathan used is computer on a board. It cost $25. So it’s not like the larger manufacturers couldn’t include it for very little additional cost. And if the scanner were common the “microwave” food database would crowd source to useful levels in no time at all, and the food conglomerates would be happy to start including their stuff only requiring adjustments by the people.

Crowd funding sites like Kickstarter are filled with examples of watches, belts, tokens that help find other items, and all sorts of “I’m tired of waiting for the BigCo’s to make this” projects. This has been common in the software world. Something didn’t do what you want? Write the answer! Now this is becoming common with hardware.

I find this so exciting because I felt that the place where software is at its best is where it “disappears” into hardware. That the “thing” has great support in the back from a world of connectivity and processing power is great, but at its best… not evident. There’s a lot of products to improve, and since the BigCo’s are far better at copying than they are at innovating, folks like Nathan will either show them the way, or in many cases, become the competition.

Have a look:

Vitra | Diogene: A cabin designed by Renzo Piano and RPBW for Vitra

Vitra | Diogene: A cabin designed by Renzo Piano and RPBW for Vitra:

Diogene is not an emergency accommodation, but a voluntary place of retreat. It is supposed to function in various climate conditions, independent of the existing infrastructure, i.e. as a self-sufficient system. The required water is collected by the house itself, cleaned and reused. The house supplies its own power and the necessary platform is minimized. We live in an age in which the demand for sustainability forces us to minimize our ecological footprint. This postulate is paired with the desire to concentrate and reduce the direct living environment to the truly essential things. Diogene might remind one of Henry D. Thoreau, who wrote the following in his book “Walden/Life in the Woods” in 1854: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” It is no coincidence that Piano also regards his project as “quite romantic” and emphasizes the aspect of “spiritual silence” which it conveys: “Diogene provides you with what you really need and no more.”

As architectural references, Renzo Piano lists the “Cabanon”, which Le Corbusier constructed at the beginning of the 1950s in Cap-Martin in the Côte d’Azur, the prefabricated house structures of Charlotte Perriand, and the Nakagin Capsule Tower, which Kisho Kurokawa erected in Tokyo in 1972. The late 1960s and early 1970s in London were very formative years for Piano: In the interview, he mentions one particularly important influence during this era as being Cedric Price with his “Fun Palace” and the hippie movement.

[The little house. sigh.]

NewImage

Lockdown

Lockdown:

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.

That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

Well, fuck them, and fuck that.

We need to keep pushing forward without them, and do what we’ve always done before: route around the obstructions and maintain what’s great about the web. Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability, and web property ownership.

[Right on.]

Source: Marco.org

A customer experience issue you can’t avoid any longer: the PXA

A customer experience issue you can’t avoid any longer: the PXA:

Any product that shares data needs will engage this issue sooner or later. And it may seem like a lot to handle, for the executives and product managers involved. But times have changed. It’s no longer enough, as in years past, to have the lawyers draft up a privacy policy to slap onto the homepage. Users want control of their data, and if they can’t get it from your product, they’ll move on to a competitor.

[We pay a ton of attention to this issue. Still working at it.]

Source: Creative Good » Blog – Article Feed

David Berreby – The obesity era

David Berreby – The obesity era:

Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of nine per cent per decade. Lab mice gained about 11 per cent per decade. Chimps, for some reason, are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35 per cent per decade. Allison, who had been hearing about an unexplained rise in the average weight of lab animals, was nonetheless surprised by the consistency across so many species. ‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.

It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence: records show those creatures gained weight over decades without any significant change in their diet or activities. Obviously, if animals are getting heavier along with us, it can’t just be that they’re eating more Snickers bars and driving to work most days. On the contrary, the trend suggests some widely shared cause, beyond the control of individuals, which is contributing to obesity across many species.

[Reductionism seems ill equipped to make sense of this system.]

Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’

Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’ – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education:

One such harm, for example, which I call aggregation, emerges from the fusion of small bits of seemingly innocuous data. When combined, the information becomes much more telling. By joining pieces of information we might not take pains to guard, the government can glean information about us that we might indeed wish to conceal. For example, suppose you bought a book about cancer. This purchase isn’t very revealing on its own, for it indicates just an interest in the disease. Suppose you bought a wig. The purchase of a wig, by itself, could be for a number of reasons. But combine those two pieces of information, and now the inference can be made that you have cancer and are undergoing chemotherapy. That might be a fact you wouldn’t mind sharing, but you’d certainly want to have the choice.

[A great read an why we’re about to make a huge mistake in the US. Reductionism fails again on this issue. Looked at as a whole, it is frightening.]

Verizon and the N.S.A.: The Problem with Metadata : The New Yorker

Verizon and the N.S.A.: The Problem with Metadata : The New Yorker:

But with each technological breakthrough comes a break-in to realms previously thought private. “It’s really valuable for law enforcement, but we have to update the wiretap laws,” Landau said.

It was exactly these concerns that motivated the mathematician William Binney, a former N.S.A. official who spoke to me for the Drake story, to retire rather than keep working for an agency he suspected had begun to violate Americans’ fundamental privacy rights. After 9/11, Binney told me, as I reported in the piece, General Michael Hayden, who was then director of the N.S.A., “reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

Binney, who considered himself a conservative, feared that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program was so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.”

As he told me at the time, wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, but data mining is an automated process, which means that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, the government could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he said. “It’s exactly what the Founding Fathers never wanted.”

[And hasn’t the attitude in Washington about this been entirely clear? I always worry when someone tells me something is “for my own good.”]

Lance 3.0: Lay down your cudgels, please | Cycling in the South Bay

Lance 3.0: Lay down your cudgels, please | Cycling in the South Bay:

If you hate Lance because he “ruined the sport,” maybe it’s time YOU moved on. The pro sport is rotten. If you follow it and still bury your head in the jocks of its stars, there’s a problem all right, and the problem is with you. If you can watch Nibali repeatedly hit the gas in the snow at the end of the most grueling stage of the most grueling stage race while his competition is rolling over and dying on the slopes, you’re the one who needs to analyze my modification of this old saw: “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me over and over and over, and I’m a f***ing moron who enjoys being fooled.”

[Well said.]

Wikipedia Corruption

Wikipedia Corruption:

Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon, unmasks a blatantly corrupt Wikipedia editor:

The mind boggles. After years of styling himself as someone who specializes in scrubbing Wikipedia pages clean of “conflicts of interest,” Qworty/Young admitted to editing “the Wikipedia articles of writers with whom I have feuded.” How can Wikipedia possibly allow this man to keep his editing privileges? And how are we, the general public, supposed to trust Wikipedia, when Qworty’s record shows how easy it is to work out personal grudges and real-world vendettas in this great online encyclopedia for years without anyone taking action?

[Troubling.]

Source: Daring Fireball

At WordPress, Happiness is Automattic | Unencumbered by Facts

At WordPress, Happiness is Automattic | Unencumbered by Facts:

Now that I have worked on this team for a while, I have come to realize it is anything but silly or cute; in fact, it’s quite brilliant. The impact of having this title is subtle but powerful. The Happiness Engineers truly do an incredible job helping WordPress users with every problem they report, even ones not related to WordPress. There is an infectious helpfulness that permeates the interaction between team members that can best be described as the exact opposite of the “not my problem” attitude. Your problem is their problem and they want to help resolve it.

[—]

Source: