Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers

There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF.

There has been some incredible discussion on the humanitarian tech and Geo lists in the past 24 hours around adapting/improving existing collaboration services to work with the tools in the field. Mikel Maron and I will be speaking about this at Where2.0 next week, and it looks like some exciting work will be happening there and at WhereCamp.

Eduardo Jezierski from InSTEDD is currently working to localize the Sahana Disaster Management System

Jonathan Thompson's organization, Humanlink, has been working on adapting technology for aid workers for some time. You can follow recent developments on the Aid Worker Daily blog.

It looks like the major relief worker websites are straining under load at the moment. Unfortunately most of the major news sites are linking directly to the sites causing the "disaster effect". I'm posting the recent situation reports below for those that are interested. I'm followed up with few of the major CDNs to see if they are willing to offer reverse-proxy services or mirrors. (Please contact me at jesse at oreilly dot com if your company is interested in helping.)

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roBlocks: Simple Blocks To Make Robots

roBlocks are small, computerized cubes that can be combined to make robots. They began as research project at Carnegie Mellon. They look like great fun for fooling around or teaching programming concepts.

The catalog page shows about twenty different blocks. Each of those blocks has a single purpose. There are four types of blocks: Sensors (light, sound), Actuators (movement), Operators (negative, min/max) and Utility (power). When put together they can be made to perform complex actions.

The creators provide an example of roBlock's interactions in their paper "The Robot is the Program: Interacting with roBlocks":

It is easy to understand the basic idea of roBlocks by considering a simple light seeking robot made of two roBlocks: a light sensor block placed atop a tread block. The sensor measures the ambient light level and produces a number. The tread block gets that number from the light sensor block that sits on it, and runs its motor with a speed that corresponds to the magnitude of that number. To make the robot avoid light, take the two blocks apart and insert a red Inverse block between them. This operator block takes the number produced by the light sensor block, inverts it and transmits it to the tread block at the bottom. The new three-block robot moves away from a light source just as the previous robot moved toward it. This sort of modularity is possible because each of the blocks operates independently without knowing its place within the construction.

The creators are going to be commercializing them later this year. To see the prototypes in action check out this video. or play with their online simulator . No word on whether or not they will open source the hardware.

The world of programmable hardware is expanding. Between roBlocks, IPRE (the open-source robot-kit that was at ETech), BugLabs (the programmable, open-source gadgets -- Radar post) , and Lego MINDSTORMS NXT there is starting to be something for every sophistication level and wallet-size.

Baseball Simulations

How likely are the world records we hold dear? Should they have happened? Should they been set by the people who did them? There's an New York Times Opinion piece written by some researchers who examined Joe DiMaggio's 56 game hitting streak to determine how likely it was to happen again. Turns out it's very likely.

In the 10, 000 simulations the researchers ran on the entire history of baseball:

More than half the time, or in 5,295 baseball universes, the record for the longest hitting streak exceeded 53 games. Two-thirds of the time, the best streak was between 50 and 64 games.

In other words, streaks of 56 games or longer are not at all an unusual occurrence. Forty-two percent of the simulated baseball histories have a streak of DiMaggio’s length or longer. You shouldn’t be too surprised that someone, at some time in the history of the game, accomplished what DiMaggio did.

The real surprise is when the record was set. Our analysis reveals that 1941 was one of the least likely seasons for such an epic streak to occur.

In the rest of the article they discuss the other people more likely (based on the simulations) to have made the streak.

(via slashdot)

How Technology Almost Lost the War, but Should Do Better

It was cool that ETech ventured into unexpected territory this year with Noah Shachtman's presentation on technology’s failure in Iraq. The talk was derived from his provocatively titled Wired article "How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks are Social - not Electronic". In it he takes shots at the military’s infatuation with the bright shiny objects that support the big fight while missing the day-to-day realities of counter insurgency operations; a reality that revolves around people.

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that using technology to win the big fight gives one the luxury of discussing failures in the subsequent counter insurgency phase, Shachtman argues that the military's “Network-Centric” technology is the wrong tool for the counter insurgency job. Systems like Command Post of the Future (CPOF) are cool, but in this phase of conflict, they are like bringing an iPhone to a knife fight.

I can’t disagree, but I think the reasons are as much about a monoculture focused too long on the Fulda Gap as they are about technology's bells and whistles. But that’s a conversation for another day (and venue). An interesting question might be the one he doesn’t ask, what kinds of technology might help now in the midst of a counterinsurgency and how can we get them faster?

Released just before Shachtman’s talk, MIT’s Technology Review magazine covered DARPA’s Tactical Ground Reporting System (sorry, registration required), or TIGRnet.  Where CPOF was designed for commanders fighting conventional battles, TIGRnet is for the patrolling sergeant and lieutenant fighting in a counter insurgency. While CPOF supports conventional ideas of command and control, TIGRnet gives troops on the ground new tools to share information horizontally (which might make it an accidentally subversive culture virus).

TIGRnet is interesting because it was built from scratch for the counter insurgency environment. This is no small thing in a one-size-fits all Army. However, it’s disappointing because it has been so long in the making.

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Radar Roundup: Brains

Today's topic is: our brains, understanding how they work, and living with the consequences of that knowledge.

• Brain Enhancement: Right or Wrong? (NYT): amazing gray areas we're getting into. Is it okay for a scientist to take brain-enhancing drugs? Compare with Wired News's write-up of Quinn Norton's ETech talk on the subject of how new bio technology will make us confront difficult questions around what it means to be human.
• How To Think (Ed Boyden's blog): Ten rules that were originally to be the basis for a class that taught MIT students how to think. Sample: "1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative."
• Notes on “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely (Toby Segaran's blog): fascinating list of ways in which we are irrational. The book looks interesting for its exposure of just these various ways in which we don't do the "right thing".
• Brain Rules: web site for the book by John Medina. Interesting book that tries to help people understand their brains and use them better. Ultimately it's frustrating: too much anecdote, not enough science for me. I came away feeling it would be a good 50 pager. I see a lot of people doing the "use your brain better" thing, possibly inspired by the $110M brain training software market (Nintendo is $80M of it). See gbrainy for an open source version. Vaughn Bell over at the Mind Hacks blog points to research that says the software doesn't work, and along the way coins the killer phrase "the four dopamen of the neurocalypse".
• Why we're powerless to resist grazing on endless web data (WSJ): "coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom." Push the lever, rat, and get your next damn blog post to read.
• Pricing and the brain (Economist): high-priced goods are perceived as better than low-priced, even to the point where high-priced placebos are more effective than lower-priced. Nobody's yet answered the question of what this means for open source/free software, other than to point out that it's a good reason for "free" to mean "freedom" and not simply "price".

From ETech to Where 2.0: Disaster Tech and Activist Mapping

At ETech last week, Ethan Zuckerman spoke about the use of web technologies in repressive regimes. It was great -- one person even told that it was the best session he'd ever seen. I recommend reading Ethan's write-up of his talk.

He began with the hypothesis:

Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists. If there's no porn, the tool doesn't work. If there are no activists, it doesn't work well.

The title of the talk was "The Cute Cat Theory of Activism". The more people use a service to post about cats the harder it is to shutdown entirely. So instead the authorities end up playing whack-a-mole. Ethan's slide shows how some of the more popular services can be used:

Ethan told us real stories of Google Maps being used to track secret prisons and jets and of Twitter being used to organize protests.

At Where 2.0, we will be joined by Erik Hersman (AKA Hash). Erik founded the activist mapping site Ushahidi (trying to keep Kenya's election safe). During his closing keynote, Enemies Around Every Corner: Mapping in an Activist World, he's going to talk about the use of maps to report incidents and keep elections free. He's going to explain the importance of clean data when people's live are at stake and he's going to share some success and failure stories with us.

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@ETech: Matt Webb's Tour of a Fictional Solar System

We began ETech with a series of Ignite talks. As usual Matt Webb weaved together beautiful images, kinetic energy and keen insights. Enjoy the talk.

Why I Love Hackers

TechWeb TV posted a short video from my opening keynote at ETech. Nominally this year's version of my O'Reilly Radar talk, which focuses on emerging trends that we're watching, the talk was wrapped in a larger theme, namely, why I love hackers, the edges they explore, and why hackers and alpha geeks, not entrepreneurs, are the first step in technology innovation. The video contains a short segment from the opening of the talk, and the closing.

I hope to have the video of the entire talk available soon.

Neuroscience and Epistemology at ETech

At ETech, I had a fascinating conversation with Marie Bjerede, VP and General Manager of Qualcomm's Portland Design Center. She was telling me how the threads we'd brought together at ETech had validated her own thinking and helped her bring together her private passions and her professional life. I asked her to write up our conversation, and she agreed. Here's what Marie wrote (links are mine):

For years, I’ve been secretly (almost shamefully) allowing my hobby to seep into my work. I’m a high-tech executive for a living. I get paid to be rational, logical, objective, and analytical. And I get paid to produce results. But, being blessed with a team with the relentless habit of constantly producing results, I’ve had the luxury of tinkering. Not the metrics-driven six-sigma efficiency-oriented tinkering that a hard-headed technical leader can point to with pride. No, my tinkering is based in my hobby: epistemology (the branch of philosophy that asks the question, “What is knowledge?” “How do we know?”)

Over the past decade, an increasing number of popular books have been published that address classic questions in epistemology by drawing on recent research in neuroscience and results based on brain imaging. From Daniel Goleman’s work in emotional and social intelligence leading to his writings on research with the Dalai Lama and the Mind and Life Institute, to Gerald Edelman’s mind-blowing denunciation of mind-body duality via neural darwinism, to Antonio Damasio’s explication of the physical origins and building blocks of feeling and emotion, a picture has begun to emerge. A picture of minds that are entailed by their biology: brains that can act either as massively parallel processors that identify patterns and signal the pattern-matching results with emotions or as serial processors where any given set of inputs will lead, through inductive and deductive reasoning, to logical conclusions. Intuition and gut feelings come from one kind of thought, reason from another. Together, they balance each other and fill in each other’s blind spots.

So how does the balance of intuitive and logical thinkers affect a team’s results? Does it affect the balance between creativity and efficiency? What about individual and collective emotional and social intelligence? Are there brain states that enhance or degrade effectiveness, and if so, can they be learned (or unlearned)? How do beings with 4 billion of years of evolutionary selection for multi-modal communication fare in a digital, pure-verbal environment? How do physical spaces affect team results? These are the kinds of questions that have driven my compulsive tinkering. I’ve taken to referring to it as “applied epistemology” and considering myself a lay practitioner. One whose predilections, of necessity, are not discussed in tough-minded company.

Then, this Tuesday I was blown away. First, I got to see Elizabeth Churchill’s surprising and insightful presentation on socially oriented experience. Not only did she use Damasio’s work to lay a foundation for her explanations, she began with Descartes and worked her way there! Shortly thereafter I was fortunate enough to see Nicole Lazzaro’s very thoughtful treatment of the emotions and mental states that drive satisfying gaming experiences - again, including Damasio in the foundation as well as a shout-out to Paul Ekman’s work on universal emotions. That evening, I had the opportunity to hear first hand from John McCarthy himself how philosophy was foundational to his work in Artificial Intelligence, a theme which he elaborated on in his challenging Wednesday morning keynote (liberally referencing John Searle’s speech act theory.) Finally, there was Kathy Sierra’s delightfully provocative treatise on what neuroscience has to tell us about expertise, focus, and practice. Such a diverse set of insights that, to me, all look like varied applications of modern epistemology!!

So. Much gratitude for the useful brain states this emergent pattern has evoked. Epistemology is coming out of the closet for me!

Marie's comments were music to my ears. A lot of what we try to do at ETech (as well as at other conferences and gatherings) is to bring together people who are connected in ways that are not obvious. We see an idea bubbling up, and try to build a program that helps other people to see the same trends that we do.

In the case of the connections between neuroscience, epistemology and computers, we've been noodling on this for a while. The success of Mind Hacks in 2004 showed us just how much people are fascinated with neuroscience; Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users helped us to see how it impacts product design and professional learning; we started seeing how game designers are the new rock stars of the computer industry, because they understand the role of emotion in application design.

Even further out, through our foo camp process (which could be summarized as "interesting people will lead you to interesting topics"), we found ourselves surprised by the number of people who are interested in "hacking their own brains." (See Ed Boyden and Ramez Naam for two examples.) But this idea is hitting the mainstream. Timo Hannay pointed us to a recent poll in Nature about the legitimacy of using drugs to boost brain power.

But hey, if you read Steve Levy's profile of me in Wired a few years ago, or John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said, you'd realize that these connections between the science of mind and computer science are deeply rooted. As we pursue the idea of collective intelligence (which as I've often noted is the very heart of Web 2.0), we also go deeper into the question of just what intelligence is. We're all closet epistemologists at O'Reilly... :-)

(I can't resist a plug for Steve Talbott's two books, The Future Does Not Compute, which I published in 1995, and Devices of the Soul, which I published last year. Steve asks what parts of our humanity we are leaving out in our pursuit of technology -- are we creating machines like us, or are we making ourselves more like them? Unlike Steve, I believe in the possibilities of machine intelligence, and but he provides an insightful and necessary challenge to assumptions about the benefits of technology.)

ETech 2008 Coverage Roundup

Here's some of the coverage of our Emerging Technology Conference that's come across my desk since I got home and have had a chance to catch up on what people had to say. Ryan Singel at Wired News gets a shout-out for consistently excellent coverage:

Lessig Calls on Geeks to Code the Money Out of Politics
Wired News Thu, 06 Mar 2008
In a presentation at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, Stanford law professor Larry Lessig calls on geeks to figure out ways of getting the corruption out of politics.

Drugs, Body Modifications May Create Second Enlightenment
Wired News Thu, 06 Mar 2008
Speaking at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, writer Quinn Norton described future societal changes that may come about as the result of mind-enhancing drugs and other body modifications -- just as the introduction of coffee helped stimulate the Enlightenment in 17th-century England.

Google plays down Android incompatibility concerns
InfoWorld Thu, 06 Mar 2008
Google's Android team isn't worried about wireless carriers building Android distributions that are incompatible with one another, Google developer Dan Morrill said Wednesday at the O'Reilly ETech conference on emerging technology in San Diego. He also said security problems on Android-powered smartphones will be minor compared to the potential benefits.

DIY Robotics: The Rise of Open Source Hardware
Wired News Wed, 05 Mar 2008
A new wave of open source hardware is coming, and was on display at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego this week.

Hacker Shows How Your TV, Front Door, and Iphone are Vulnerable
Wired News, March 05, 2008
Your credit card, the lock on your front door, your cell phone's voicemail, your hotel television, and your web browser are all not as secure as you think.

ETech Yearbook 2008: Meet the Faces of Innovation
Wired News Wed, 06 Mar 2008
Check out the human side of emerging technology as we make tech celebs mug for the camera at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Smaller Footprint
Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Wednesday, Mar 5, 2008
Sebastopol publisher gathers scientists to share green ideas.

ETech: What Happens When Countries Censor All of Web 2.0?
Wired News, March 04, 2008
It's not the governments who censor keywords that worries Ethan Zuckerman, whose job it is to help dissidents around the world. He fears that governments will simply decide to go after the Web 2.0 tools that activists are using to publish.

Google lets us look into its search and translation technology
Heise Online, March 05, 2008
Yesterday, Google's director of research Peter Norvig let visitors at the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego look into the technology that his firm uses in search and translation functions. As Norvig put it, a lot of the time Google does not rely on complex models and theories, but simply on large amounts of data.

Google Prediction Market Datamining Shows Meatspace Matters
Wired News, March 04, 2008
For the past two and half years, Google employees have bet on internal company projects -- a tool known as a prediction market -, providing plenty of data for the company to mine to figure out how information flows internally. The result is surprisingly ironic for the internet giant. Physical proximity trumps all other factors in determining how people bet.

Open source robot: your next personal assistant
Network World , 03/06/2008
Imagine a robot that hands you a beer and then cleans your kitchen and living room. That's what a start-up called Willow Garage in Menlo Park, Calif., is busy developing.

New Yahoo service shares users' locations with online services
BetaNews, March 6, 2008
Fire Eagle is Yahoo's location-aware middleware, which ultimately lets users share their locations with online services, so those sites and applications can deliver results relevant to where they are. Ten thousand invitation codes were sent out yesterday, in addition to the literal golden tickets given out to those present at Etech in San Diego. Yahoo hopes to entice developers to integrate Fire Eagle into their services to help make location-specific data readily accessible.

Violet Blue at ETech
Ethan Zuckerman, March 6, 2008
I’d expected Violet Blue’s talk at ETech to be packed. After all, she’s a sex blogger, a professional sex educator, a columnist for the SF Chronicle, and her talk was on the topic of “Sexual Identity Online”. Perhaps it says something about the ETech crowd that competing talks on database structures were as well attended.

@ETech: Wednesday Morning Keynotes

Another day, another set of expansive keynotes.

John McCarthy, father of LISP, a giant in artificial intelligence, gave a sit-down high-level talk about Elephant 2000, a proposed programming language intended for transaction processing and electronic data interchange. He described Elephant in terms of its ability to capture "speech acts," which I'll define roughly as words that lead to actions. (One of McCarthy's examples: "I now pronounce you man and wife.") McCarthy said these words "create obligations." They're promises, questions, requests, etc. As anyone who has read the code to programs I've written (many of which include the words "hello" and "world" in the title) will know that I'm no expert. If anyone in the ETech audience can do an ace job of explaining the most provocative line in McCarthy's talk, "ascribing beliefs to thermostats is like adding 0 and 1 to the number system," I'll send you a free O'Reilly book of my choice.

Steve Cousins of Willow Garage proposed an open source platform for personal robots. Those personal robots would perform useful activities, and he showed some very enjoyable film clips of humanoid robots performing basic tasks such as picking up a living room. And Willow Garage is balancing its philosophical and business imperatives:The company is privately funded and "focused on impact before the return of capital...The goal is to produce 10 robots and make them available to researchers so we can all be on a common platform."

Kathy Sierra, who ran an inspiring storyboarding tutorial on Monday, told us how to kick ass. Her talk was not merely a paean to mastery, but also a brisk walk through recent neuroscience to "show that the difference between world-class and average is not about natural talent." The research, she said, reveals "that most common thread separating world-class and average is the ability to put in the time, to focus, concentrate, and practice." Expertise, she noted, is not so much about what you know, but what you do. She showed how mirror neurons let us run similations of another persons bran inside our brain -- but she emphasized that the quality of simulation depends on experience. There's still only one way to get to Carnegie Hall.

(Then Tom Coates spoke about fire eagle. My post about that is here.)

Finally, Peter Semmelhack, CEO and founder of Bug Labs, talked about community electronics, a term intended to turn the tradition term "consumer electronics" on its head. He posited a long tail of gadgets. Today, there are relatively few devices, marketed to millions. In the future, he's hoping for millions of devices targeted for the few. To develop these niche devices and custom gadgets, Bug is building a hardware innovation platform that goes from idea through functional spec, all the way to manufacturing. It's not the only way, Semmelhack noted, but it's the way Bug is trying to make it happen.

And now to the breakout sessions: Why are there always two I want to go to scheduled at the same time?

@ETech: fire eagle Launches

Most of the Yahoo news these days is about its possible absorption by Microsoft, but there are still new projects coming out of the company. Right now Tom Coates is onstage at ETech, launching fire eagle, an open location information-brokering service. You can share your location online with sundry sites and services. It's liberal with what it takes in, but precise in what it puts out. There are plenty of controls put in, both for developers and real people using the services. Right now there are many services trying to capture location, but really nothing that ties together the applications that capture location information with applications that use location information. This does that. You can find fire eagle here. If you're not at ETech, Tom will be talking at Where 2.0 in May.

You can read Brady Forrest's previous coverage of rire eagle on Radar and our resident geo wiz will post further thoughts on this shortly. He can't now -- as the program chair of ETech, Brady is onstage right now, too.

Recent Posts

• @ETech: Tuesday Morning Keynotes | by Jimmy Guterman on March 4, 2008
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• Botanicalls Twitter DIY | by Brady Forrest on February 26, 2008
• DIY Multitouch with the Wiimote | by Jesse Robbins on February 25, 2008
• Ignite ETech Talks | by Brady Forrest on February 21, 2008
• Multitouch and Minority Report | by Nat Torkington on February 21, 2008
• Gaming Platforms: Zune, Wii, Nokia, Xbox Live, DS Lite | by Brady Forrest on February 21, 2008
• The Dangers of Predicting the Future | by Jimmy Guterman on February 20, 2008
• BugLabs: OS Hardware For Location Apps | by Brady Forrest on February 15, 2008