Links:

• Network Neutrality: Save The Internet, U.S. Court Curbs FCC Authority on Web Traffic, Wired’s coverage, the End-to-End Principle.
• iPad: iPad, Nine Banned iPhone Apps, iPad censors SPERM, But Will It Blend?

Network Neutrality

Is your ISP allowed to mess with your Internet traffic? We pay them to connect to the Internet, but in America they want to do more. They want the ability to treat some traffic different from others. For example, to say to Google and Microsoft “who will pay me to make their web traffic go faster to our customers?”

Now, that runs contrary to what we expect. We expect best efforts unprioritised service, where our ISP delivers everything as fast as they can. The only way they could make Google’s traffic faster is if they made everyone else’s go slower. It’s a form of extortion.

This also breaks an important principle of the Internet, called the “end-to-end principle”. The intelligent decision-making cleverness in the Internet always sits on the ends of the Internet and the center of the Internet is a “dumb pipe”. It just delivers stuff. So the same dumb pipe does the same dumb things regardless of whether you send email to Radio New Zealand, if you visit the Radio New Zealand web site, or if you have a Skype call with someone at Radio New Zealand.

Think for a second of what it would be like to have all the smarts in the network. Only the companies who run the network could innovate. That means we’d have had to wait for Telecom or Orcon to develop the web or Skype. Or, more likely, for someone else to develop it and then slowly and expensively sell it to the telecommunications companies who’d then badly and expensively sell it to us.

Fortunately that’s not how it worked. The clever folks who built Skype (a Swede and a Dane) were able to do so without having to talk to the telecommunications companies. Because, really, do you think a phone company would ever have developed something that let you talk long-distance for free? The Skype folks only had to get Skype running on two computers, both of which they controlled, and never had to speak to the Swedish or Danish equivalent of Telecom.

Naturally, the ISPs around the world don’t like this, particularly in America. They don’t like being sidelined while other people (Skype, Google, etc.) make lots of the money. So they came up with an idea for a shakedown: let’s make the buggers pay! It’s basic extortion tactics: we’ll make your traffic go slow unless you pay up. It almost sounds right, until you realise that they want to charge BOTH sides of everything you do on the Internet. So when I’m in Colorado, I pay my Colorado ISP to connect to the Internet. Google’s paid their ISP to connect to the Internet. But my ISP wants Google to pay it as well! It’s like the post office charging the sender AND recipient of the letter.

There are other bad scenarios possible, too, laid out in the Wired article I linked to:
A broadband company could, for instance, ink a deal with Microsoft to transfer all attempts to reach Google.com to Bing.com. The only recourse a user would have, under the ruling, would be to switch to a different provider — assuming, of course, they had an alternative to switch to.

Companies can also now prohibit you from using a wireless router you bought at the store, forcing you to use one they rent out — just as they do with cable boxes. They could also decide to charge you a fee every time you upgrade your computer, or even block you from using certain models, just as the nation’s mobile phone carriers do today.

When computer companies got wind of this, they and user associations started a campaign for “network neutrality” — the idea that ISPs should stick to moving my Internet traffic around as fast as they can and not shake down the people I connect to.

There’s a US Government Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, which was established to control radio stations. They’ve extended their control to TV as well: it’s the FCC that fines TV companies when they air “wardrobe malfunctions” or swear words on free-to-air TV. They presumed they had the right to regulate the Internet, too, and laid down some basic “thou shalt not” rules for the US companies that provide Internet access. These rules were challenged by a US ISP, Comcast, which said basically “no, you don’t have the right to regulate Internet access”. A US court just ruled that the FCC didn’t make a good case that it could.

What does that mean for us in NZ? Nothing immediately, as we have our own regulatory agency (the Commerce Commission) but you can bet your last cent that our ISPs are watching with interest what happens in America. The possibility of double-charging will be very interesting to them. So we Internet folks are closely watching the US to see what’ll happen.

What will happen? At the moment the FCC is figuring out how to proceed–the court didn’t say “you can’t regulate”, just “you didn’t make a good argument that you can” and it hinted at some lines of reasoning that might be better. The best option is for the US Congress (the US equivalent of Parliament) to give the agency the right to regulate Internet access. The worst is for the FCC to classify the Internet as a “telecommunications service”. At the moment it’s an “information service” which puts it into the private market and out of the reach of the regulators.

Why can’t we just let the market decide? The consumer is the one who would have to change ISPs if the market were to speak about this, but remember that it’s not the consumer that’s being shaken down–it’s the Google or Microsoft or Radio New Zealand. It’s also not clear that a new neutral ISP could be competitive, as the gouging ISPs are all integrated Internet-voice-cable TV companies with huge scale letting them offer lower prices.

So I’ll be watching this one and hoping NZ telcos don’t decide to be “world leaders” in interfering with their customers’ service.

iPad, Apple, and Trading Power for Convenience

Apple released its latest shiny this week, the iPad. It’s a bigger iPhone, nine inches by seven — a bit smaller than A4 in size but larger than a paperback. Light, with Wifi and mobile Internet, GPS, accelerometer and all manner of other goodness. No keyboard, it’s a touch-sensitive screen so if you want to type something then it shows you a picture of a keyboard and you type onto the picture. Yes, it’s weird, but it has worked on the iPhone and it apparently works better on the iPad. Prices start at USD500, and darn near everyone who has one is raving about it. Not for sale yet in New Zealand officially, but you can already pick them up on TradeMe.

But that’s the problem with Apple gear, isn’t it? There’s a set of people, a cult if you will, who love everything Apple and who will queue to buy the first of whatever new gadget they make. And make no bones about it, Apple make good products–they control every aspect and make sure it’s beautiful, elegant, functional, and desirable. But there’s a difference between good and good for you, and I’d like to talk about that for a bit.

Apple has a control complex. They’re not fond of the idea that someone else makes money off their computer hardware and software, and so they want to “clip the ticket” as much as possible. Think of the difference between the iPad and a MacBook computer.

On my Macbook, I can install any software I want. If someone writes software for the Mac, they put it up on their web site. I download and install it, a simple process, and then I can run it.

On an iPad or iPhone, I don’t have that freedom. Apple have the machine locked down. The only way you can get a program on an iPad or iPhone is if you buy it through the Apple “app” store. (app is short for “application”, a geeky word for “program”). If I write a program and want to sell it it you, you can’t get it unless you buy it through Apple’s store. If Apple won’t let you buy a program, you can’t get it on your iPad or iPhone.

But why would Apple do that? After all, they make money every time I buy a program! But there are all sorts of programs that Apple won’t allow. They’re very keen to maintain their devices as “family-friendly”, so anything to do with sex or profanity is in an “adult” section of the store. That’s okay, but sometimes they go a little far–the word “sperm” was censored in a description of a Moby Dick ebook app, which was apparently about the hunt for an s-star-star-star-m whale.

More seriously, Apple’s store won’t carry any apps that duplicate functionality in the device. Want a different web browser? Tough. Want Google Voice services instead of your phone’s built-in calling and texting? Want someone else’s maps? Tough. Want a BitTorrent app? Tough. Want something overtly political and partisan? Tough. I’ve linked to a site that lists a bunch of apps you’ll never see on the iPhone.

Apple’s approval process is also in-depth and comes with no guarantees of timeframe. So if I write a program that you download, then I discover a bug and fix it, it could be weeks before that fixed version is on the site for you to download. In the meantime, you’re cursing me for not fixing your program.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same scenario we talked about with network neutrality. One company wants to sit in the middle and be a gatekeeper. In the case of ISPs, they have your connection to the Internet and want to tell you what you can and can’t do with it. In the case of Apple, they have the device and they want to tell you what you can and can’t run on it. The only difference is that there’s a strongly competitive market for smartphones and handheld gadget, and no government regulator.

How’s this going to play out? In the short term, the iPad and iPhone will be successful. But in the long term, there’ll be competitive devices that aren’t locked down the way they are. They might be based on Google’s “Android” technology, it might be something else, but my money is always on fast-breeding innovative mammals when the option is slow-moving pea-brained dinosaurs.

I’ve also linked to a clip of a man from an industrial blender company answering the question “will it blend?”. It’s the only possible antidote to all the sickly iPad cooing that’s over the Internet at the moment. Enjoy!

Links

The Code Book, Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese, and Facebook on Track for $1B Revenue This Year.

Cryptography

I’ve read this fabulous book on cryptography by Simon Singh, “The Code Book”. It’s easy to read and full of the little anecdotes and trivia nuggets that I love.

The book opens with the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. It’s a great story for illustrating the value and dangers of cryptography. Mary, as I’m sure you know, was sister to Queen Elizabeth and probably had the better claim to the throne. She misjudged the politics and showed up in England to get away from tetchy Scottish locals, only to be thrown in the Tower to keep her from making a play for the English throne.

While in the tower (or “whilst” as the Brits say) she entered into a conspiracy with plotters outside. This is in the days of Catholic vs Protestant and conspirators were plotting with Mary even as she was in captivity.

Not being stupid, they had invented a code to hide what they wrote and hid the messages in a barrel and smuggled them into and out of the country house where Mary was now being kept. So when Elizabeth’s aide, Walsingham, brought Mary to charge for treason, Mary felt safe.

He starts with this story because it shows all the important bits of cryptography. First, you’ve got “steganography”–the art of hiding messages. Smuggling them in via a barrel bung just one way–Ancient Greeks wrote their message on wood and then covered it in wax so that it looked like a smooth wax tablet. This is how Xenophon in Greece was able to get advance knowledge of an attack from Xerxes in Persia, according to Herodotus, and thus foil it.

Then you’ve got the code itself. He takes you through the different types of codes, beginning with jumbling up letters of the alphabet so every “a” becomes a “g”, and so on. This was the type of code that Mary had used, though she’d been a little more sophisticated and some words had become symbols, so “mine” was a kind of double S logo, and “in” became an italic “x”.

Codes revolve around a system and a shared secret. The system here is “replace letters and some words with other symbols”. The shared secret is exactly which letters and words get replaced by others–does an “a” become a “g” or a “q”?

And you’ve also got the codebreakers. Codebreakers are rarely portrayed as heroic, alas, because it takes far more time to break a code than it does to create it. So the poor codebreaker is often like Walsingham’s codebreaker, Thomas Phelippes, who is described as “a man of low stature, slender every way, dark yellow haired on the head, and clear yellow bearded, eaten in the face with smallpox, of short sight, thirty years of age by appearance”. He was a linguist who could speak French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and German.

The techniques of the codebreaker remain the same. You can either exploit the fact that often a code leaves information that helps you break it, or simply to use some other means to learn more about the cipher and so make your decoding problem easier.

For example, in a later story Singh tell us about the Enigma machines of World War Two. The French Secret Service bribed the disgruntled brother of the head of the German Signal Corps to get the schematics for the machine. This told you how the machine worked, but the machine had settings — to decode messages the Allies still needed to know which settings were being used. The Poles figured it out first–the cipher wasn’t perfect and the Germans reused the settings all day, which gave you a lot of messages that were encrypted the same way. The Poles were breaking Enigma-encrypted messages until 1939 when the Germans changed the crypto system and made it stronger.

Then it was the Brits turn. At a place called Bletchley Park, which you can visit today as a museum, began applying themselves to the new Enigma. Thanks to the Poles they had the basic approach, but the German changes made it harder to crack. Fortunately the Brits had many more people working on it than the Poles did, so were able to read the encrypted German communications.

This is another technique we see today: “brute force”. When your mathematical analysis reduces the number of possibilities to a manageable number, you simply try each one. The more people you have working on this stage, each person trying one possibility, the more quickly you can break it. This is why the invention of computers has changed cryptography — computers can try the many different possibilities much faster than a person can, so we now don’t need as much mathematical insight to reduce a complex code to the point where you can just brute force the possibilities.

Anyway, back to Mary. Mary had received messages about a conspiracy, and they’d been intercepted and decoded. But Walsingham, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary, really didn’t like Mary. He didn’t just want to deny her liberty, he wanted to get her red-handed plotting. So he waited, and eventually Mary acknowledged and endorsed the plot. He then had his cryptographer insert a PS onto the bottom of an outgoing Mary message, in code, asking to know the names of the conspirators and when the reply came, he had them arrested.

How’d it end? The conspirators were all “cut down, their privities were cut off, bowelled alive and seeing, and quartered”. Mary was beheaded. Score one for the Protestants over the Catholics. Never mind denying your atheist bus slogans, the 16th century knew how to deal with religious dissent.

So, good book, and it talks about a lot more: Navajo code talkers, and the “public key cryptography” that computers use today. But the basic systems of secrets, codes, interceptions, and breakers is largely unchanged today even though it’s all happening with computers and the code systems themselves are much more complex.

China

There’s really only one security system on the web. When you go to a website whose address starts with “https” and not “http”, you’re gong to a secure site. The communication between you and the server is encrypted and the identity of the other party is verified. This solves the Mary Queen of Scots problems where someone was listening in and even pretending to be one of the people communicating.

The site I linked to talks about the step where your browser verifies the identity of the other party. For example, I go visit ASB’s web site to do my Internet banking. My browser wants to be sure it’s talking to ASB and not to dirtyhacker.com who has rerouted traffic from ASB to their site.

To do this, ASB gives my browser a “digital certificate” signed by someone my browser trusts. There aren’t many places that browsers trust. The link today talks about how Mozilla is trying to decide whether to trust China’s official signing authority.

This is important because if China’s official signing authority becomes a puppet of the government, then dissidents might think they were communicating secretly and privately with a website when in fact all their communications could be overheard and decoded by the government.

It’s tricky politically, of course, because it’s not fashionable to stand up and say “the Chinese government can’t be trusted”. I’ll let you know how it comes out.

Facebook

And finally, Facebook. Facebook’s revenue has doubled every year since 2007: $150M then, $300M in 2008, $700M in 2009, and they’re on track to break $1B in 2010.

What’s interesting is where they make their money. It’s almost all coming from advertising. They know about what you like, so they can show you ads that you’re likely to like, so advertisers are happy and pay more for the advertising space. It’s Google’s idea but more personal–until recently, Google had no way for you to tell them how old you are, where you live, what interests you have, and so on. Despite that, of course, they’re still making a billion dollars every quarter, so it’s not too shabby.

People spend an hour a day on Facebook on average, which is much more than the 15m on average that people spend on TradeMe. Of course, if TradeMe could get you laid, maybe their average visit length would go up …

Today’s connecting them: life (Mary’s loss thereof), liberty (Chinese loss there off), and the pursuit of happiness (and Facebook’s monetisation thereof).

Computer Engineer Barbie, Digital Books and Your Rights, and A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook. The author of the latter writes the excellent Mind Hacks blog.

Links: FriendFeed acquired by Facebook (BusinessWeek), SpringSource acquired by VMWare (InfoWorld), Poison for Venture Capital (NY Times), the Scratch visual programming language.

FriendFeed and Facebook

Facebook’s the biggest social network: more than 250m active users, with >120M logging on every day. They get a billion photos each month. It’s huge. But a person might belong to plenty of other social networks: Twitter, MySpace, they might have their own blog or two, they put photos on Flickr, …. It’s very easy to have a decentralised identity these days: my Internet presence isn’t just what I post on nathan.torkington.com, there’s much more.

Friendfeed was an aggregator–it gave you one page to track all the things your friends do on many different sites. It looked a bit like the Facebook event stream, and so one of the rumours that went around after the acquisition was “Facebook bought it because they do a better job of presenting information to the user”. To get to the bottom of that, you should know why companies buy other companies.

There are four reasons: technology, HR, customers, and optics. A technology acquisition is where the company being bought has something new and hot, and the acquiring company wants it. Google often buys companies for their technology–they just bought one that does better video encoding over the web, which can save them millions in bandwidth bills because of all the traffic that YouTube does. An HR acquisition is where the company being bought has good people but no good technology. Buying for customers means you want to sell your technology into a new market and the company you’re buying has connections in that market. Optics is a fancy way of saying “we sold it so nobody feels bad about the company closing”.

Friendfeed was an HR acquisition. We know this because (a) they said so, and (b) the team is being split up. If the technology were good, they’d keep the team together working on the technology. So don’t expect Facebook to start looking like Friendfeed any time soon.

This acquisition is notable because FriendFeed was started by a big-name crew of former Google employees. They made Google maps hackable, they built GMail, they …. Google didn’t want to see them leave, but they were determined to set out on their own. Now they’ve been bought by Facebook, the company that Google worries more about than they worry about Microsoft. It shows that brilliance isn’t enough to create great products and make lots of money.

SpringSource and VMWare

Imagine you’re a website developer. You need to test your website on three or four versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox, several versions of Windows and Mac. Do you have one computer for each possible combination? No, you make your computer pretend to be a computer running Windows 95, or Mac OS 10.1, and the most popular software to do this is VMWare. It lets you run one or more “virtual” computers in your one real computer.

This is hugely popular with “cloud computing”, where a company runs a big data center full of real computers. They rent you just enough computer to get your job done, and they handle all the hard bits of backup, keeping the site airconditioned, swapping out broken hardware, etc. They use VMWare and software like it so give you a virtual computer that’s “just enough” of the physical computer for your needs. That way they can rent the same physical computer to several customers, each getting just enough compute for their needs.

VMWare just bought SpringSource, who made tools that make it easier to write big programs in Java. Lots of people used SpringSource. This was definitely a technology acquisition, because VMWare wants to own as much of the software bits of cloud computing as possible. So they bought the leading Java tools company, they’ll make sure it works VERY well on their cloud virtualisation software, and now there’s ANOTHER reason to use VMWare when you shop for or set up a cloud … you get more pieces of the puzzle, and they all work well together.

MONEY MONEY MONEY

So you might think that this means it’s all good and there’s lots of money floating around in Silicon Valley and the VCs are all happy as Larry. You’d be wrong. The piece in the New York Times that I’ve put in the links refutes this nicely.

If you’re a VC, you put money in when a company is small so that it can become big and you make lots of money when it sells. Venture-funded companies often go through several “rounds” named after letters: you get the A round from the first set of investors, then a few years later you com e back and say “we’ve grown nicely, please pony up to get us to the next stage” and those same investors and maybe new ones will kick in more money in your B round, and so it goes until you’re bought by another company or you IPO.

At each round there’s a “valuation” — the rather arbitrary amount of money that the company is worth. It’s arbitrary because often they don’t have any sales. You’re forced to come up with a number so you can decide how many shares the new investors get. There’s an art to it, some rough guides (number of users, even if they’re not paying; size of the market), but there’s one thing you don’t want to see happening … and it’s been happening.

Valuations have been going down.

A “down round” is where a company comes back for a B round and the market says “yeah, actually, last round you were smoking crack and thought it was a $10M company. Now we look at it and we think it’s only a $5M company”. The investor that kicked in $1M in the last round got 10% of the shares (1M invested, 10M company worth), The same investor coming into THIS round gets 20% of the shares (1M invested, company only worth 5M). AND if the company sells for its valuation, the early round investor has LOST money.

This is, as the article says, poison — VCs take risks, but nobody wants to put money in if the investments are losing money.

As if that’s not bad enough, nobody’s cashing out — there aren’t IPOs, there are few and far between big sales. This is the VC version of the liquidity problem hitting the global markets: you need to be able to sell the company you’ve invested in, so you can get money back to return profits to your own investors and then to start the next round of investments. If nobody buys your company, and you can’t IPO, you’re stuck with your money locked into a company where, to be honest, it’s doing you no good.

In short, still grim times in Silicon Valley.

Kids Programming

For the last two years I’ve been using a system called Scratch to teach 7 and 8 year old kids to program. It’s ridiculously easy and fun. It’s free, developed out of MIT and it really is programming, it’s not a sham.

Scratch is visual: you don’t type in programs, you assemble them from little blocks. You can’t write something the computer can’t run: if two blocks aren’t meant to go together, their shape is such that they can’t be forced to go together. Compare this to typing programs in, which kids are slow at and hate, where a single typo can make your program unusable and the error messages are rarely useful.

You see a stage on which there’s a cat. The cat’s a “sprite”, a character, and characters can have costumes. You assemble scripts that make the characters do things: move, talk, change colour, lay down tracks, react to the mouse or keyboard. You can record and play your own sounds, draw your own characters, set up lots of characters interacting, and even write games.

Kids love it. Boys on the whole want to write games, and there are a lot of sample games that come with Scratch so they can see how to do it. Girls on the whole more interested in getting a lot of characters interacting and telling stories.

I teach classes in the same way: show them two or three simple scripts that make the cat walk back and forth across the screen, or change direction to chase the mouse, and then make it say “got it” when it catches the mouse. Then they’ve seen decisions, how to repeat things, how to get positions and other values, and that’s the basis of many of the programs.

Try it. If you’ve got kids and have wondered “what’s the best way to get them doing something more with the computer than just looking at YouTube”, show them Scratch.

Below are my notes. I will update this post with links to audio when Radio New Zealand post it. Correction on the air I said the hormonal trader paper was published in PLoS but it was actually in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Links

1. Theodore Gray author of Mad Science
2. Hormonal Traders
3. Google Translate
4. PlosOne – Public Library of Science
5. Universal Scaling Laws in Biology — my hero’s paper
6. 23 And Me – personal genomics company

Science Foo Camp

Weekend, at Google, ~150 people, no schedule. Food and drink laid on. Mixture of people: astronomers, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, bloggers, journalists, psychologists, economists. “real invisibility cloak”. Nobel prize winners. Nature, O’Reilly, Google sponsors.

Data-driven Science

Overarching theme is nominally “data-driven science”, idea that from lots of data you can use computers to find patterns and thus discover new scientific properties and laws. Biologists do this all the time. They’d be stuffed without computers. Not to write their reports, but to analyse their data: you copy a piece of DNA into a squillion copies, split a those into millions of random chunks, wash the chunks over a grid each bit of which sticks to a different known segment of DNA, so then by looking at what stuck you can figure out what bits are in there and then the algorithm reassembles the bits into a coherent whole. It’s been this way for ages, and it’s time-consuming and painful.

Astronomy works the same way: humans don’t look at every inch of the sky now. Instead, algorithms scour the huge amounts of information to find patterns and surprises.

Science, of course, hasn’t quite caught up. This inverts the way science works. Used to “hypothesis driven science”. This is “data driven science”. “He writes software” is the kiss of death in science. As one attendee said, “half my graduates can’t decide on any one day whether they’re computer scientists or astronomers”.

Obviously useful to Google: they specialise in doing clever things with lots of data. Google Translate, for example, translates between a dozen or so languages. They didn’t build syntax models and teach it the rules of grammar for English, French, Spanish, etc. Instead, they set their software loose on documents with paired texts in the languages and built up the models and conversions. The result is something that won a Defence Department contest for translating between English and Chinese and Arabic.

Hormonal Traders

There were a few economists present. One, John Coates from Cambridge, studied the hormone levels in traders. The hormones are cortisol and testosterone. Testosterone, released when they make a profit, increased by 74% during a 6-day winning streak. Cortisol, associated with the volatility of the market, went through even more extreme swings. if testosterone persists, it might explain some of the bull market foolishness: while prices go up, you experience testosterone, which makes you take risks even as the market tanks. 260 traders, 4 female in trading floor; sample size = 17 representative of whole.

(show a man a picture of attractive woman and he makes poor decisions)

Personal Genomics

Ability to make sense of your own genome. USD$399 to 23andme.com gets you swab, mail back and they analyse your genome. Looking for SNPs — points where your genome differs in important ways from ‘the average’. Get a report with everything from “greater risk of breast cancer” to “caffeine has less of an effect to you” and ancestry (“you have Namibian DNA!”). They also conduct research …. ask questions and hope that when they know your DNA they can make connections between your answers and your DNA. Founder = google founder’s wife.

Open Publishing

Nature Magazine was a sponsor. Nature makes lots of $ charging research institutions for subscriptions to their journals. However, science depends on reach. Publishing going through a rough time, as are newspapers. Public Library of Science … open access peer-reviewed journals. Nature working on online videos, wikis, classrooms, and more trying to make sure they’re part of the future and not left in the past.

Open notebooks an interesting part of this: reproducability important in science. Papers publish findings, but rarely all the data. But can’t reproduce the analysis of the data or find competing explanations without access to the data. Fear of being scooped in further research. Scientists are people too. Increasing movement, analogous to open source, to release the data for scientific experiments in science. Then … how to preserve it, license it, attribute it, etc.

Mad Science

Theodore Gray. Made icecream with liquid nitrogen. Has a book of “fun things that you probably shouldn’t do”. graysci.com. The book is fun of great stuff: “white sun” from phosphorous, exploding soap bubbles (hydrogen gas), making a levitating magnet, and more. Explains the science (writes for Popular Science), great photos, fantastic coffeetable book.

My Hero

Geoffrey West wrote a great paper relating lifespan, heart rate, and mass of the organism in a rule that holds across six orders of magnitude: from mitochrondria through to elephants. All comes down to the physics of pushing liquid through capillaries. He figured this out, wrote it up, and blew my mind when I read the paper a decade ago. I was tickled to meet him.

Below are my notes. I prepare a small essay on the subjects I’m talking about because it helps me get my thoughts straight. We often deviate from the topic of my notes (as we did today with the long sidetrack into artificial intelligence). I look at my notes as where the conversation starts, not where it stops.

Links

• http://robotic.media.mit.edu/projects/robots/leonardo/overview/overview.html
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilmDN2e_Flc
• http://onyas.org.nz/
• http://it.usaspending.gov/
• http://opengovt.org.nz/

EMOTIONAL ROBOTS

Ok, so first thing first: there are plenty of robots around us already. I’m not talking about Jim from Accounting whose only conversational gambit is marginal tax rates, but wires and metal machines. They make our cars, they pack our coffee beans, they sort our kiwifruit. But those are industrial robots. There are also military robots, blowing up roadside bombs and flying scout planes, but I’m not going to talk about them. I’ll talk about the softer, gentler, side of robots.

As is often the case, MIT are to blame. They have a Personal Robots group working on making robots that can interact with us as people, rather than just vacuum our carpets and blow up our bombs. Here are a couple of the cooler projects.

Leonardo looks like a Ewok from Star Wars: furry, pointed ears, big wide eyes. Leonardo was built by the Stan Winston studio. Stan Winston is famous for the creatures and make-up effects in Terminator, Predator, Batman, and other big Hollywood movies. Leonardo is a robotic toy, named after da Vinci of course, about 2.5 feet tall.

Brief diversion. A degree of freedom is something moving in one axis. Beckoning is one degree of freedom coming from a finger knuckle. Waggling your finger is a second degree, and comes from the joint where the finger attaches to the hand. Tapping your finger is a third degree of freedom, again coming from the joint with the hand.

Leonardo has 69 degrees of freedom, all provided by tiny motors. Most robot designers use degrees of freedom to tackle things like walking. 32 of Leonardo’s are in the face for lip curls, eyebrow waggles, forehead frowns, etc. There are something like 44 separate muscles that you generate facial expressions with, so Leonardo’s a long way along.

The goal is to make an *expressive* robot: something you can interact with beyond stilted voice synthesis (“I’M SORRY DAVE, I CAN’T DO THAT”). With Leonardo, and there are videos floating around the Internet–I’ve linked to one, you can forget that you’re looking at a robot. Briefly, of course, because the motors squeak and the movements are slower than a human’s, but that brief moment of “no wait, that’s not real” is priceless.

The project is based on social developmental psychology. Leonardo learns: in the video, a researcher shows an Elmo toy to Leonardo and gets excited. Leonardo gets excited back.

Researchers in computer graphics talk about something called the “uncanny valley”: you make crude computer graphics and everyone goes “oh, that’s computer generated”. But as it gets better and better, closer and closer to reality, there comes at point at which you can still tell it’s computer generated but it’s so close to real that it’s creepy. Presumably you can make it better and then nobody could tell it was fake. But between perfect and crude lies this “uncanny valley”. Leonardo is in that uncanny valley, if not there already.

Here’s something I found on a blog, someone less impressed with Leonardo:
“For some reason I can’t look at MIT’s Leonardo robot without an involuntary shudder – I think it’s the lifelike fur and the evil, calculating eyes. I still think it looks like an evil squirrel monster.”

If nothing else, though, watching the Leonardo video should convince you that we’re a long way from Terminator and the evil robot overlords walking among us.

Kiwi Web Awards

The Onyas launched last week (as in “good onya”). They’re awards for New Zealand web sites showing the best design, accessibility, usability, etc. This is brought to you by the people behind Webstock, the most awesomest web conference ever (in the words of many American visitors). Rather than the consumer-choice Netguide awards, which reflect popularity but not necessarily excellence, the Onyas are by the industry and for the industry.

It’s sponsored by New Zealand Post, Idealog magazine, and a Kiwi web design company, Shift. This is another sign that New Zealand’s web industry is growing up and getting a sense of identity. Now we just have to make hope the award winners don’t get jobs overseas!

Categories include best mobile, accessible, usable, innovation, and “most outstanding”. There’s only one New Zealander on the judging panel, the rest are from overseas. That means the candidates will be held to high international standards, and won’t be seen through jaded Kiwi eyes.

Transparency

The US Government’s CIO just launched the “IT Dashboard”. The government here spends US $80B a year on IT projects. I think this year’s budget for the New Zealand government had total government expenditure at NZ $75B. So that’s a lot of money the US government are spending. Now citizens can see which projects this money went to, whether they’re on or behind schedule, whether the CIO is happy with them, and the contractor getting the money.

It’s a great idea, and something the Obama administration is doing more of. They’ve opened up the stimulus package at recovery.gov, so you can see where around the country the money went. The recovery web site got a lot of flak for not being detailed enough (you can see which state got the money, but often not which programs they wasted it on). This IT dashboard is a lot more detailed.

New Zealand needs more of this. The UK Government is moving towards it. Australia launched a “Gov 2.0 Task Force” with money to spend making these transparency projects happen. New Zealand … not a whistle. I started opengovt.org.nz to house these kinds of projects built outside the government, but it’s slow going because we don’t release a lot of the relevant transparency information.

A Kiwi technologist, Glen Barnes, started a project on opengovt to build a list of open government data, but the truly interesting stuff either isn’t opened or isn’t gathered in the first place. For example, I’m pretty sure the NZ Govt doesn’t gather the IT project progress information that the US Govt does, so it’s not there in the first place to be opened. Lift your game, Enzed!

Here are my notes:

Online Dating Scams

NZ Herald story

What: Websites that let people post their details and look for matches to date. Biggest is match.com. Because it’s the web, members are not necessarily in the same country.

How: Man introduces self to woman, they become friends, speak on the phone, want to get together in person. He says he’ll make a trip. Excitement! Then catastrophe strikes–his passport is held by a Malaysian bureaucrats and he must pay $150 to get it back. Wire the money to Malaysia. Thanks! Oh no, more bribes needed. And on it goes, stringing you out.

Common? Very. High level of unreported cases, based on my anecdotal poll of friends. Embarrassed to admit it.

What you need to know: people suck. Also, don’t wire money to people. Just don’t.

Iranian Elections

Photos
Timeline
NY Mag piece

What: Iranian elections featured the hardline incumbent (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) vs the reform populist hoping to win on the youth vote Obama-style (Mir Hossein Mousavi). Text messages were shut down before the elections in the hope of preventing the youth from getting the word out. The elections results were within hours of polls closing, despite huge numbers of paper votes, and were a record landslide to the incumbent. Rioting broke out, then a huge hundreds of thousands of people silent protest march coordinated by Twitter.

How: This wasn’t mainstream news in the US but bloggers and Twitterers went nuts following this (it was like being caught up in it as it happened) and an ad hoc infrastructure grew up to translate, retweet, and generally amplify the messages of the discontented. There are people acting as news hubs, and a “hash tag” (#iranelection) that people mention in messages related to the election fallout. The government have tried to block Twitter but failed.

Why failed: Twitter has exposed their service through “APIs”, allowing anyone to write a program that can read and post to Twitter. So even though the government blocked the main Twitter site, there are hundreds of different web-based Twitter services that the government is having to find and block individually. Furthermore, through “open web proxies” (the same thing that lets teenagers bypass the school’s firewall and read Facebook from the library computers) the Iranians are leapfrogging the government’s efforts at censorship.

Thoughtful piece by New York Magazine talks about how mainstream media and Twitter were complementary: Twitter’s the firehose, while cable TV offers quality control and other filters. It’s great to finally have the choice.

That’s why celebrities use Twitter–sick of seeing their public image being women’s magazines photos of their fat arses with headlines like “ANGELINA GORGES AFTER PIE SHOP TANTRUM”, they’re taking advantage of the ability to communicate directly with their fans, without the filters and distortion of the middlemen.

The technology has also let the family of Chris Knox set up a web site where they can sidestep the shoddy reporting of the newspapers and communicate straight with friends and fans. Initial newspaper stories featured unnamed “friends” and too-grim reports. Now you can get the facts straight from the source.

The Chris Knox web site

I’m going to talk about a few groups and websites working on keeping the government honest and useful.

I’ll talk about:

• “Rouge Archivist” Carl Malamud and his website http://public.resource.org. He was featured in Wired recently.
• MySociety and their projects, particularly They Work For You which has a NZ version, Fix My Street and What Do They Know. TWFY aims to make parliamentary record more useful. FMS lets you report potholes, graffiti, etc. WDTK lets people who make Freedom of Information Act requests share what they learn.
• The Economist article about these transparency projects which specifically singles out the local government portal of Missouri and the crowdsourcing project which hopes to get volunteers reading the proposal and build a database of where the money goes. Even a simple picture helps citizens (and journalists) make sense of what’s going on.

The show aired Feb 12, 2009, and is available as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files.