TEDx Bloomington was in the works for a long time

The content and sense of community exceeded expectations. The interaction with the TEDx national organization, however, made for a bittersweet experience. Without question, I’ll attend any future TEDx events here, but I won’t be organizing one again until the rules better integrate with local communities.

The Good

You didn’t have to look very hard to see the immediate impact TEDx Bloomington had on our community. Although organizers were nervous about sales at the start of May, a surge in the final week got us to a break-even point and gave Buskirk-Chumley a lot of life in the process. The crowd was diverse, bringing together a number of niche groups in Bloomington that might not have been in the same room otherwise. Like the Combine before it, the lunch voucher program sent hundreds of people into downtown restaurants for a couple hours midday to make new connections and process the morning sessions. Online, our active Twitter community created a trending topic in #tedxbtown, equally alive with real-time commentary and the promise of turning these ideas into action.

From top to bottom, the lineup was brimming with interesting and engaging speakers, wonderfully curated by Luci McKean and Christian Long. One topic moved nicely into the next, bridged and augmented by the videos from other recent TED events. Sarah Smith-Robbins, aka @intellagirl, was tremendous as the day-long host for the four sessions. She was everything one would hope for from a host: poignant, funny, articulate. One of the reasons the day seemed so effortless was the quality of Sarah’s transitions.

Spontaneous dance at the Buskirk-Chumley (video: Bob Molnar)

The talks with the greatest personal impact came in the “Learning” session. Most notable: Gever Tulley, author of 50 Dangerous Things, shared a philosophy of education that made my wife cry. The holistic arc Tulley described—exploring a broad topic, proposing and iterating a project, sharing the results, and reflecting on the process—would be ideal if it could be found in the public school across the street. This kind of educational opportunity is rare in Bloomington, unfortunately, and my family doesn’t possess the means to seek out a place like Brightworks.

TEDx didn’t let the talks live long on UStream, but high quality final cuts of all the talks will be uploaded to a YouTube channel by mid-June. That’s where you can find Steve Volan’s talk about living with Aspergers, one of a handful of strong candidates to be promoted to the rest of the world by the TED channel this summer. Ultimately, this is the biggest benefit the TED brand provides: the ability to showcase local minds on an international stage.

For me, spending all of those months in regular meetings gave me a wonderful perk: Most of the members of the local team of organizers are new additions to my life. I love listening to Kalynn Brower talk, because everything she says has an underlying energy that is infectious. Maarten Bout is certain to cross my path again and again, as his interests in parenting, theatre, and now the Combine overlap with mine. I got to spend some time with Gail Hale in her wonderful studio space, too. It is a sure thing that she’ll find me volunteering to help build the whatsits and whodads that comprise her sets for events like Lotus. Deeper roots in Bloomington is a great ROI for a year’s worth of work.

The Bad

My interest in TEDx Bloomington was to celebrate local community. That celebration began by helping co-curator Christian Long understand how the local tech scene had improved over the past several years*. I was delighted by how he embraced local organizers and our role in launching such a great event.

The other part of my mission was to find ways to include a broad swath of Bloomington beyond what we could fit in a theatre. Here, confusion and hand-tying created barriers that kept these activities, “Wisdom of Play” (WoP), from becoming what was envisioned:

The Wisdom of Play is a suite of community engagement activities designed around the theme of our local TEDx event, scheduled May 14. During the month of May, we plan a variety of public activities that explore play, experimentation, insight, risk, adventure, wonder, perception, and curiosity.

From conception, these public projects were intended to supplement the topics of conversation on Saturday. We wanted WoP to spread the ideas embedded in the theme in advance of the talks, allowing more people to participate in the community-wide discussion with some hands-on play. In addition to the projects that preceded—but did not compete with—TEDx Bloomington, an unconference facilitated the day after the main event would allow people to process their experiences and turn ideas into action. In short, the purpose of WoP was to help spread the ideas worth spreading.

WoP produced a smaller impact than expected. Planning was delayed as we tried to sort out the relationship between these activities and the organizing entities around TEDx Bloomington. The late start made it difficult to fund and grow awareness. When organizing something for the first time, there is always room for improvement. However, many of the hurdles were the byproduct of an unwillingness by TEDx national to embrace other local events.

TEDx has many rules guiding what the license holder can and cannot do. A lot of attention is paid to controlling their logo and domain name, of course, but WoP relied on neither. The rules are largely motivated by one fundamental TED concept: The event is free from corporate bias. Ignoring the gray area created by the corporate origins of many ideas worth spreading, it is pretty easy to accept this as a noble goal that should be supported.

The problem: the rules also broadly exclude participation in and reciprocation of other events in the community. It is telling that “other conferences and seminars” are lumped in with weapons manufacturers, ammunition and cigarette companies, online gambling, and sex-related businesses as unacceptable content for the official website. Ultimately, what prevented that site from acknowledging WoP projects in any way was a co-events clause emphasizing that TEDx events are stand-alone and not to be combined with other things.

Admittedly, WoP was pushing the envelope (although, there was precedent for it). Any attempt to operate outside of the prescribed TEDx window brought self-inflicted pain. We anticipated a clear separation of funding and parallel tracks for organizing, but not what amounted to a gag order. The assumption was that TEDx saw itself as becoming part of the local community. From my unique perspective as coordinator of this suite of seven projects, it doesn’t appear the rules are interpreted that way.

When our first attempt at grassroots funding failed—Kickstarter is another odd thorn in the TEDx side, btw—WoP lost a couple projects and had to scale back a few others. Thanks to the generosity of a couple dozen people, who donated money and time to the effort, we still managed to play a week-long game, decorate some t-shirts, build an arcade, create a comic, and convince thirtysomething people to talk about what they can do with the wisdom they picked up this month. All of the projects were worthwhile endeavors that didn’t get the opportunity to demonstrate their full worth.

The TEDx rules demand that “[y]our event must maintain the spirit of TED itself: cross-disciplinary, focused on the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world.” WoP shared that vision, with the added motivation of cultivating an engaged, playful and reflective audience for the Bloomington talks. The question isn’t whether TEDx was right to disassociate from these community projects, but why they would want to do so.

Next Year

The response to TEDx Bloomington has been overwhelmingly positive. Those who attended will likely rave about the on-site experience when tickets are available next year, and those who cannot go may again benefit from the high production value of the streaming video. The national speakers liked being here, as I’m certain you will see in the testimonials that will surface in the coming months. With a DVD to share, it will be much easier to explain and thus recruit sponsorship dollars in 2012. I’ll be shocked if the Buskirk-Chumley doesn’t sell out. In other words, there is no good reason not to expect another successful iteration of TEDx Bloomington in the future.

My added hope is that the quality of our event lends a voice to a conversation with TEDx national about developing new interpretations of their rules, to allow for mutually beneficial events to co-exist alongside the main talks. If they truly believe in their mission—ideas worth spreading—then it would help to acknowledge that doing so is a process that extends in both directions away from the stage with that familiar big red logo.

That is what is happening with Spain’s lawsuit against Google, which is claiming that individuals have a “right to forget” in ordering the search engine to remove links to embarrassing content for 90 people. Google refused that request in January and is now in a Spanish court.

The Right to Forget

Last fall, the European Union introduced legislation to protect Internet users by requiring an opt-in to permit companies to use their data. Some believe the U.S. should follow suit.

On the Pro side of this debate is the control individual’s would have over their digital footprint. The concerns are much greater for data volunteered under one context (e.g., registering to play a game) but re-sold to different contexts (e.g., mailing lists to spammers). In the case of the Google suit, however, Spain wants the online equivalent of being able to remove articles from printed newspapers. There is a big distinction to be made—and I hope that any policy-making decisions do understand this difference—between someone providing private data that is used in an unauthorized way and data generated because the world was paying attention to something you did in public.

Google is most concerned over what selective revisionist history would do to the quality of their search product, but I would argue the larger issue of historical context trumps both the technical concerns of an IT company and any embarrassment an individual has over matters of public record. As Dan Rowinski of R/W/W explains:

For instance, a lot of American history scholars use old broadsides, pamphlets, published letters and news articles to decipher and uncover pertinent historical data that helps us better understand our history. In the current era of technology the equivalent of such data are searchable news records, blog posts, tweets and more. In many ways, Google is the first line of historical preservation.

Rowinski goes on to point out that the online historical can be skewed by technology, too, citing the use of SEO tactics during the 2010 midterm elections to bring embarrassing articles of opponents into prominence during searches.

Idea for Google: Reveal, Don’t Retract

It would seem that the ideal solution is not censoring the public record, nor is it ignoring the concerns of those affected by outdated information. The best way to preserve history is to offer multiple views.

Add a "Counterpoint" icon to show a complementary content

In the past, Google has experimented with Digg-like voting mechanisms that would allow collective user input to adjust the weights on items in search results. What if search results had an easy way for a user to search for refuting articles from a single item? The doctor whose old malpractice suit ranks high on search results for his practice could easily find updated articles that reveal he was acquitted. If enough people perform these searches, perhaps that could trigger dual items showing up together.

The other big need to protect information longevity is what I expect to be a growing trend toward personal reflection. By the time we start to see most social media adopters with 2-3 years of content under their belt, there will certainly be a suite of tools like MemoLane that highlight one’s personal history and encourage reflection. Knowing where you have been makes it much easier to figure out where you are going. While this is often content curated directly by the individual, there is enough public sharing that attempts to pull a given piece of information back out of cyberspace would be a logistical impossibility.

Supporting any policy that allows the selected censorship of public record creates an impractical and damaging mindset that you can correct past mistakes through deletion, rather than improve the quality of what you do in the first place.

In a paper published in PNAS, scientists from Oxford University, UC Santa Barbara, and UNC Chapel Hill reported on new computational techniques that allowed them to associate brain activity—specifically, the different combinations of 112 regions of the brain firing at the same time—with one’s speed in learning something new.

The experiment was conducted with 18 volunteers each instructed to push a series of buttons as quickly as possible. What the researches discovered after analyzing the brain images is that those with brains that rapidly changed the regions that were jointly active (“swapped partners”) were more likely to quickly learn new sequences in later sessions. Computational methods were developed to analyze the “multilayer networks” in aggregate, treating the brain like a social network—each region plays the part of a person. This process dealt with an extremely large dataset and took 10,000 days of computing time to complete. This was the reason the initial sample size was so small, but the researchers are now working on both extending the pool and refining their tools.

Learning is not just a function of biochemical mechanics. Another recent study—this one by collaborators from Columbia University, Washington University, and Northwestern University—shows that psychological belief about learning itself will affect how willing a person is to engage and master new concepts, leading to different impressions of their own learning.

This second study centered around two theories of learning. Entity theorists believe each person’s intelligence potential is fixed, and no additional effort can change that. These people will disengage when a challenge exceeds their threshold. Incremental theorists, on the other hand, believe intelligence can change. More time invested in learning yields better results.

In their experiment, the researchers gave subjects foreign words to learn. Everyone did better recalling the easy word pairs (e.g., Polisi-Police) than the difficult ones (e.g., Pembalut-Bandage), but entity theorists—the ones who were more confident when spending less time studying—had a more accurate perception of this effect than incrementalists—those whose confidence increased with study time. Incremental theorists tended to be overconfident about the difficult pairs and under-confident about the easy ones.

I’m not a brain scientist, but it would seem that these two distinct theories might also impact the value of knowing one’s brain flexibility. From an entity theorist perspective, perhaps your brain can only ever become so flexible, and speed of learning might correlate to one’s threshold for pursuing new challenges. An incrementalist would see flexibility as something that could be exercised into more adaptive learning behavior.

Mark Fuller was #54 on Fast Company's most creative people list

WET (Water Entertainment Technologies) is not a typical web design firm. They specialize in fountains and architectural art involving water. Fuller’s first water works was the “Leapfrog” fountain at EPCOT, a particular favorite of my sons when we went to Florida a couple years ago. Formed in 1983, WET Design has done a number of impressive water installations, including the Bellagio (1998), the Olympic Cauldron (2002), and the Dubai Fountain at the Burj (2009).

One of the things Fuller pushes for at WET is an organizational commitment to life-long learning. A full-time curriculum director manages courses in three classrooms. One of those courses teaches how to do improvisation. Although it took a while for the employees to get used to it, the improv course now has a waiting list.

The value improv brings to an organization is that it creates a workforce of listeners. As Fuller describes it in the interview:

You’re in an emotionally naked environment. It’s like we’re all the same. We all can look stupid. And it’s an amazing bonding thing, plus it’s building all these communication skills. You’re sort of in this gray space of uncertainty. Most of us don’t like to be uncertain — you know, most of us like to be thinking what we’re going to say next. You get your mind into a space where you say, “I’m really enjoying that I don’t know what he’s going to ask me next, and I’m going to be open and listening and come back.”

We’ve got graphic designers, illustrators, optical engineers, Ph.D. chemists, special effects people, landscape designers, textile designers. You get all these different disciplines that typically you would never find under one roof — even making a movie — and so you have to constantly be finding these ways to have people connect.

With improv, it is important to have good partners, people who are equally committed to the success of the interaction and the development of the tacit knowledge that makes communication easier.

The most important ingredient you can bring to effective improv is commitment. The adrenaline that comes with putting yourself in a situation where you don’t know what is coming helps sharpen senses, but that fear can also prompt a self-defense instinct to distance one’s self from the experience. If that happens, not only will you leave your partners hanging, but what you say becomes less convincing. The mindset you must take into improv is “Yes, and”—in other words, validate what you just heard and try to contribute something useful to improve the sense in the situation.

It is easy to imagine how these skills can be useful during brainstorming sessions, as well as transactions between different departments in an organization.

The courses are just one part of Fuller’s intentional crafting of a company culture. There is a lot of work posted on walls (to share ownership and invite early feedback), low tolerance for blame, an immersion program (to give people job experience in other parts of the company), and hiring interviews that look closely at hobbies.

Future Timeline (xkcd)

I am curious why it takes Jesus a full 14 years to convert everyone on the planet to Christianity after returning in 2018.

TED 2012 is crowdsourcing its innovation

Last Friday, TED announced they will accepting audition videos that could lead to a main stage appearance in 2012:

We’re holding this audition to give a chance to the undiscovered talent we know is out there—and especially talent that can help us continue to reinvent the ancient art of the spoken word. At TED2012, our whole theme will be devoted to this. We’re calling it “Full Spectrum”—the rich use of technologies, formats and styles to make an impact on an audience. And that’s what we’ll be looking for in this audition.

The public audition will be held on May 24 in New York. There will be a live audience of TED-sters looking for some crowd-sourced innovation in how to deliver interesting material. The best talks likely will wind up online, and a handful might also get an invitation to California next February.

TED has a few specific requests. They are hoping for some human guinea pigs to test ideas like:

• a talk accompanied by an imaginative soundtrack
• clever ‘choreography’ between a speaker’s words and what we see on-screen
• improv or audience interaction
• intense campfire-style storytelling
• a remarkable new invention

They are also expecting a few new innovations that they can add to the list, which is where the public search for stage talent doubles as a crowdsourcing project.

To be considered for the New York audition, you have to show your worth online first by making a one-minute video by April 25. The short video—which needs to land on YouTube or Vimeo, thus adding “free marketing” to the benefits of the public audition process—should describe both the proposed content and the technique for delivery. Sixty seconds isn’t a long time, so polish is not one of the evaluated criteria; the goal is to communicate your vision. There is also an entry form asking you to justify your choices with the “Full Spectrum” theme for TED 2012.

Winners of the initial online round will be contacted by May 9. If invited to New York, you have to pay your way there for the May 24 presentations, which will be 3-6 minutes each. That may keep the demographics from including economically challenged folks.

Dave Meslin calls himself a community choreographer, a term I find as endearing as his notion about the dynamics of political disengagement. He identifies seven barriers that make it difficult to participate in local politics, including:

• City Hall—An example of “intentional exclusion” is the overly verbose legalspeak in documents that make it difficult and uninspiring to take action. Meslin drives home his point by showing a retail ad with the same treatment.
• Public Space—We sell it to those with the most resources, rather than reserving it for the most important issues
• The Media—With movies, plays and other forms of entertainment, articles often include easy-to-find information about how to take action (e.g., a time, place and location of a show). In political coverage, there is no such follow-up opportunity.
• Heroes—A quick rundown on popular movies shows a pattern of heroes being chosen. This creates a myth about leadership that discourages the uninvited dreamer. In reality, being heroic is a collective effort that is voluntary and imperfect.

He wants to redefine our notion of voter apathy as this complex web of barriers. By doing so, we can more easily identify and dismantle those obstacles.
redefine apathy as complex web of barriers

Meslin’s talk is a reflection of his practice, which includes a number of creative ideas to combat political apathy. He has run a candidate version of American Idol to pare down a field of politicians to support, and his Better Ballots coalition is a citizen movement that focuses on problems with elections (low turnout, low turnover, lack of diversity, and lack of fairness).

Related: David Bismark has an idea for secure electronic voting that is verifiable and transparent.

James M. Titus isn't human, but he played one on Twitter

Organized by the Boston-based Web Ecology Project, the experiment called for three teams to program social-bots Twitter accounts that coule mimic human conversation. They selected 500 real users (I presume they had a way of confirming that), most of which shared an affinity for cats. Accounts like @JamesMTitus relied on a database of generic responses, focusing on the most responsive people in the target community. In the second week, additional bots were added to allow teams to try to thwart the efforts of other bots to be perceived as human.

Although the Evil applications are readily apparent—in February, Anonymous hackers revealed government interest in infiltrating online groups—Tim Hwang also sees the potential for great good. A new version of this social experiment called “The Narrows” will attempt to construct a community where one does not yet exist, leading to the hope of using bots as connective mechanisms to help shape large online communities.

This immediately reminded me of a couple other projects related to fakery on Twitter.

Truthy

Truthy (@ truthyatindiana) is an Indiana University research project about detecting astroturfing and other misinformation around political topics. While it takes a little practice to understand the meaning of the network visuals—the site now offers a nice visual guide that explains some of the common patterns, with specific examples—the work has produced some new insights about political use of Twitter, as well as statistically confirming other assumptions.

One of the most relevant to my perpetually delayed dissertation is the analysis of the #gop hashtag, which clearly shows a polarized group.

Truthy mapped the network of activity around #gop on Twitter

An example of a grassroots meme, the #gop hashtag is widely used on Twitter, but in two very distinct ways. One cluster reflects use by conservatives, and the other contains liberal critics. People will retweet others in the same community. When they do mention those in the other community, it is typically expressed as a disagreement. This might support known patterns within political forums online, where members engage with opposing views while reinforcing information flow from their peers.

Cyc AI

The other is Cyc (@cyc_ai), a non-profit organization to manage and grow an ontology of general knowledge that can allow computers to reason like humans. The Cyc systems leverage natural language interface, detailed background information, and deep inference to create conversational knowledge. Cycorp and Cleveland Clinic Foundation built the Semantic Research Assistant (SRA) to answer clinicians’ ad-hoc queries. Cyc, which began back in 1984, is using Twitter to help train it’s information. Recently, the tactics have changed to use a variety of inquisitive wordings to prompt confirmation of data.

Cyc is using Twitter to help train its algorithms

The Twitter account claims to allow you to send a direct message and get an answer, but that hasn’t worked for me yet. The Cyc project isn’t without criticism, not the least of which is scalability and responsiveness to cultural shifts in meaning.

The Periodic Table of Little 500

Larry is a senior majoring in journalism and fine art who has a visual column in the IDS. In the past, he has drawn art depicting the changes on campus over four years and the hairstyles of IU presidents. Larry is also a coordinator of the Wisdom of Play’s Human Puzzle project.

Unlike some tables, this one doesn’t try to re-categorize all of the aspects of Little 5. Instead, the actual periodic table is replaced with names more appropriate to the week. There are some who would argue this meme should die: There are so many periodic tables, there is a periodic table of periodic tables. I’m a sucker for collections, however, and it is fun to look at all of the IU and Bloomington culture—past and present—retold in this form.

The Geek Zodiac

The Geek Zodiac was created by James Wright and Josh Eckert, posted to Geek Tyrant last week.

I’m a spy. Amy is an astronaut. Archie is a time traveler (lucky!), and Matilda is a wizard. Carter will be most happy to know that he is officially undead.

The Wisdom of Play is a suite of community engagement activities taking place in May 2011. These projects are designed around the theme being used by our TEDx event and include geocaching, storytelling, art and an alternate reality game. We are trying to raise at least $2000 to cover the material costs using Kickstarter, a grass-roots micro-donation campaign site being used to fund interesting creative projects all over the world.

Our campaign will only last through the end of April, so we need to reach our goal by then or—under Kickstarter rules—cancel the project. More likely, it will mean scaling back many of the planned aspects of most of these activities, but some may be in jeopardy without some financial support.

There are some interesting rewards we have come up with to thank our backers for their financial contributions. These include:

• At least $29—A DVD documenting all of the projects and their outcomes.
• At least $59—A shirt from one of the Human Puzzles
• At least $99—A framed section of the story from Our Infinite Canvas
• At least $129—Personal branding for you or your organization in six projects
• At least $199—One of the toy boxes used in our geocaching game

There is also a single super-backer opportunity for $500 that will get all of those rewards plus the ability to influence where three of our projects will be located.

Ideally, this fundraising would have taken place in February, but circumstances didn’t work out to allow that to happen. We have a campaign now, through the end of this month. Less than $100 a day from the community will get us to our goal. More than that, and maybe we can get a blimp.

Check out the new video on our Kickstarter page and consider giving something to the cause.

The Raptor Resource Project is a non-profit established in 1988. RRP specializes in the preservation of falcons, eagles, ospreys, hawks, and owls by strengthening breeding raptor populations through the creation and maintenance of nests. RRP pointed a video camera at the top of an 80-foot tree near a Midwest fish hatchery to follow the progress of the new eagles as they entered the world. Infrared light, not visible to the eagles, provided a round-the-clock vigil in which the whole world could participate.

An international audience watched three eagles hatch

The video stream of the eagles has received over 32 million views. The first of the three eggs was laid on February 23. At any moment, up to 150,000 people checked in to see the eggs as they hatched, one by one, during the first week of April.

The eagle couple are getting to be old pros at this process of hatching and fledging a fresh batch of eaglets. The male and female have been together for four years, successfully contributing to continued population growth of the species with 11 offspring. Eagles left the endangered list in the 1990s, after pesticides threatened their survival.

There is a certain allure of being able to observe wildlife in this way. I can recall spending quite a bit of time during late night work sessions watching the ecosystem awake in Botswana near Pete’s Pond, which has since been taken offline. In general, we aren’t fans of zoos due to the inherent problems of captivity, even with the good ones. Webcams, though, are less invasive and allow the observation without disrupting their natural activities.

Honoring a half-century of manned space flight

Despite the Cold War bias, Gagarin remains one of the most popular figures in the space saga. His short flight gave the U.S.S.R. another early advantage over the U.S. space program and had him ranked #6—tied with Captain Kirk of Star Trek—in a 2010 Space Foundation survey as the most popular space hero. Gagarin is now the namesake for a superjet and the latest Soyuz capsule, which will rendezvous with the International Space Station tomorrow after a two-day journey.

Next Tuesday is Yuri’s Night (not Yuri’s Day, which is something else), a world party for space. Conceived in 2001, this is a space geek celebration of Gagarin’s journey, as well as the first Space Shuttle flight on the same date in 1981. I’m sure something special is planned for this special anniversary year, which will also see the end of the Shuttle program.

The project—which surveyed about 300,000 students, 43,000 parents, 35,000 teachers, 2000 librarians and 3500 administrators—asked communities from 6500 private and public schools last fall about technology use in education. The researchers were interested both in how the tech is currently being used and how parents and students want it to be used. The results point to a big gap between adoption of technology and willingness of administrations to use it in schools.

The key findings include:

• Parents have shifted significantly in favor of online textbooks, moving from just 21 percent to two-thirds in just two years. Only one-third of high school students report they are currently using an online textbook, however.
• About two-thirds of parents said they like the idea and would purchase a mobile device for their child to use for schoolwork, if the school allowed it.
• Just over half of middle and high school students reported that the biggest obstacle they face are school policies restricting the use of cell phones, smart phones or MP3 players. 71 percent of high school students said the best way schools can help is to facilitate greater access to the digital content currently blocked by filters and firewalls.
• Nearly 30 percent of high school students have experienced some type of online learning.

The most telling indicator of the gap, though, is generational. While most high school teachers (74%), principals (72%), and parents (62%) thought their school was doing a good job using technology to enhance learning, only 47% of high school students agreed.

The information is placed on a map inside the application—which at present is available on Linux and Windows (Mac OSX is coming)—to provide context for a person’s online activity. The data is drawn from social networking services Twitter and Foursquare (through information announced on Twitter), as well as a dozen image hosting services, including Flickr, Twitpic, yFrog and moby. The application was actually released almost two months ago, but it has taken this long to get on the radar of tech blogs.

Creepy is a geolocation data aggregator making a point

Like PleaseRobMe and ICanStalkYou before it, Creepy exists to make a statement about sharing location intentionally and through EXIF data. Developer Yiannis Kakavas says this isn’t a tool for stalkers; it’s for self-awareness:

Just to be clear, the intention behind creating creepy was not to help stalkers or promote/endorse stalking. It was to show exactly how easy it is to aggregate geolocation information and make you think twice next time you opt-in for geolocation features in twitter, or hitting “allow” in the “this application wants to use your current location” dialog on your iphone.

Source: Creepy FAQ

Kakavas is a graduate student at Department of Computer and Systems Sciences studying security. In his blog, Kakavas links to instructions on how to disable location reporting in smartphones and on Twitter.

Is Sharing Location a Bad Thing?

Mike Melanson of Read/Write/Web acknowledged that location sharing isn’t for everyone, but it does have benefits that outweigh the risks for those who do:

I share my location all the time and for a number of reasons. It enables random and serendipitous connections to occur. I can look back and have all sorts of contextual information as I weave my way through the world. I can plug it all in to services like MemoLane and get a time-ordered snapshot of my own life, as I share it online. And in turn, it gets fed through algorithms and stuffed into features like Foursquare’s latest recommendation service, which looks at where I’ve been and suggests where I may want to go next. And that’s just the first step for what can be done with all of this location information.

Melanson also argues that public location sharing makes it easier to evaluate new places, like coffee shops, based on in-the-moment popularity as well as customer reactions. These tidbits of shared information aggregate in our brains as well, motivating us into relationships with our community.

My own response to location has been mixed. When Twitter initially added support for geolocating individual tweets, I figured I wouldn’t activate that. While I haven’t experienced any direct benefit from finally doing so, my motivation to change my mind was the hope that localized trends—things being mentioned in Bloomington, Indiana—would benefit from myself and others flipping that switch.

Similarly, I signed up for Foursquare and Gowalla before I had a smartphone, which made participation from a clamshell cell phone extremely difficult. I stopped trying after Jim Bumgardner posted this great blog on becoming Mayor of the North Pole, due to the unreliability of the data that undercut the game driving the interaction on those sites. I picked it up again, though, after my wife bought me an iPhone and the barriers to participation were lowered. I do make a conscious decision not to link Foursquare to Twitter, though, but because I think it’s tacky and noisy, not insecure to do so.

Just like the dystopian cries that television makes us violent and the internet makes us lonely, critics of location sharing presume that sharing where you are creates a culture of stalkers.

The definition of stalking varies from state to state but most would agree it is a willful, malicious, and repeated following and harassing of another person that threatens his or her safety. According to a 1998 survey by National Violence Against Women, 8% of women and 2% of men reported stalking incidents. Less than half of those include threats of violence, and most are motivated by anger. Most importantly, most stalking occurs between people who know each other, not strangers. Women, in particular, are most likely to be stalked by a former partner in an intimate relationship.

More recent data claims 3.4 million Americans have been stalked. That’s a lot, but just 1% of the population. Stalking can be a serious disruption and can become a life-threatening situation for some, but there isn’t evidence that it is any more likely to occur now than it did prior to the Internet Age.

The flipside to the unwanted access to your location data is that the record is also available to people you do want to have it. This includes law enforcement officials, should stalking actually occur, who can use the digital footprint as evidence. It would make sense, too, that those who would opt to use information available to Creepy would also be sharing that information online. Having your friends know where you are can be a huge benefit, as well, and you are significantly more likely to have friends than stalkers.

Creepy may prove to be an interesting reflective tool, both in the way Kakavas intended—to get people to be intentional about their decision to share location information—and in taking a look at where you’ve been. I still contend that the next important wave of online tools will be ones that allow for personal and communal reflection. All this data we are assembling over time is going to reveal interesting things about ourselves in ways we just can’t see with our daily lenses on. That won’t happen without being willing to put yourself into the world and let your activities leave a mark.

Like many others, our thoughts turned quickly to helping. Thanks to the costs of higher education, we’re not in a particularly good place to give money at the moment, but it didn’t stop me from adding a little bit of info to the GeekDad list of ways to give to Japan. Technology, the speed of information, and the largeness of human hearts and wallets conspire more and more to make it easy to reach out in this way and feel a little less helpless.

Today, I read an interesting take on this reaction to global tragedy from Felix Simon of Reuters. The piece is a couple weeks old now, so I can imagine the reaction people would have reading his “Don’t Donate Money to Japan” headline just three days after the devastation. Actually, I don’t have to imagine because I can read the reaction in the comments, which seem to alternate between “Mr. Salmon, have some compassion!” and “Hey, commenter, you are missing the point!”

Simon makes an interesting case:

We went through this after the Haiti earthquake, and all of the arguments which applied there apply to Japan as well. Earmarking funds is a really good way of hobbling relief organizations and ensuring that they have to leave large piles of money unspent in one place while facing urgent needs in other places. And as Matthew Bishop and Michael Green said last year, we are all better at responding to human suffering caused by dramatic, telegenic emergencies than to the much greater loss of life from ongoing hunger, disease and conflict. That often results in a mess of uncoordinated NGOs parachuting in to emergency areas with lots of good intentions, where a strategic official sector response would be much more effective. Meanwhile, the smaller and less visible emergencies where NGOs can do the most good are left unfunded.

He goes on to argue that Japan’s wealth makes it possible for them to pay for the repair. Like the U.S.—and unlike many other nations—they have the financial capacity to raise their own money.

The sensationalism of the headline aside, Simon’s most compelling point is that we should be motivated by the big headlines to give, and give generously, to organizations that will get the money to areas that need it most. Specifically, he praises Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the medical humanitarian organization working to assist people whose daily survival is threatened.

While the point is well taken, I think there is something to be said for any behavior that looks outward and reminds us that we share the world. All of this interconnectedness through social media and prosumer content makes the world small. It is natural for news of tragedy to become a shared experience, one that prompts us to act. Small changes—like looking to Al Jazeera for international news, or thinking to donate to MSF next time—will eventually get us to a place where we can understand what it takes to survive another day on this planet in countries that don’t make the news.

Phillips—whose work includes the Institute for Human Continuity (IHC), an extension of the 2012 movie about global cataclysm—talked about things to consider when creating alternate reality games and transmedia campaigns. In her solo talk, “Hoax or Transmedia? The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction,” she gave examples from The Onion, Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, lonelygirl15, Martin Aggett, Zona Incerta, Toyota Matrix, Dell, Shelby Logan, and The Haunted Apiary to illustrate the risks and consequences that come with ultrarealism.

Narrowing her definition of transmedia, Phillips focused on pervasive fiction—stories that use the real world as a platform and make fiction almost indistinguishable from what is really happening in the world. This is the wheelhouse of Improv Everywhere and Andy Kaufman, but organized around marketing campaigns or participatory immersion games.

Andy Kaufman would have played well on the Internet

Phillips’ IHC campaign rubbed NASA the wrong way. After thousand of people called to verify that the world was going to end—including teenagers who preferred to commit suicide than endure the End of Days—the Astrobiology Institute denounced Sony as unethical. “It is easy to be condemned by the Vatican,” she notes, “but it takes a certain special something to be condemned by NASA.”

She also recalls the die-hard gamers from The Beast, an ARG for the movie AI that ended in August 2001. The “Cloudmakers,” which numbered in the thousands, reacted to the 9/11 bombings by considering reuniting to take on actual terrorists, something Phillips doesn’t condone. “This is the thing that has made me uneasy about pervasive fiction ever since,” she says.

Being able to separate fiction from reality is a cognitive milestone most people will hit by the time they are five, says Phillips, but transmedia experiences today can make things difficult. The Landover Baptist Church is fake but plausible. Gene Ray’s Time Cube is crazy but real. “The Internet is not optimized to help us distinguish what is true from what is fictional.”

On ARGnet, Brandie Minchew’s analysis of the talk is well worth a read. She highlights a few key themes from Phillips’ talk, which I’ll paraphrase as:

1. The reality-fictional threshold flips on a dime. You can go too far with the deception.
2. Anonymity isn’t really an incentive to participate. “Rabbit holes,” mysterious entrances into the game world, can risk players not caring, or lumping you with people with whom you don’t want to be associated.
3. Context is important. Hoaxes can become frauds or attacks if the right people don’t know it’s a game, or can’t see all of the game. (“Puppet-based transmedia is ethically safe. Ish.”)
4. Imagine the worst thing that can happen when you put the game in the world. Plan for that.
5. Games will be commandeered, and boundaries broken. Designers should consider building a kill-switch.
6. Create worlds that are so amazing that people don’t care if they are real or not.

With SociaLens entering this arena over the next two months, these are some things to keep in mind as we play our own games with reality.

BTW, Phillips has a nice blog about this domain, Deus Ex Machinatio. She writes about games, storytelling, digital culture, and gender issues.

The four MLB players keeping me young

• OF Matt Stairs—currently a pinch hitter for the Washington Nationals
• IF Omar Vizquel—a backup shortstop for the Chicago White Sox
• RP Tim Wakefield—a knuckleballer and bullpen pitcher for the Boston Red Sox
• SP Jamie Moyer—most recently a Phillies pitcher who had Tommy John surgery and hopes to come back with the Seattle Mariners in 2012

As long as Jamie Moyer hasn’t given up, I’ll feel like baseball is a game played by peers. His surgery last year—cutting short a pretty nice season for an old man—didn’t deter him, and unlike Hoffman, Moyer won’t retire. There’s also some hope that another Satchel Paige will come along.

Thanks to segregation, which confined most of the pitcher’s stellar career to statistical obscurity in the Negro Leagues, Paige didn’t make his major league debut until age 42, with the Cleveland Indians in 1948. Even with the late start, Paige played 17 more years before retiring as the oldest player of all time (59 years 2 months 18 days), in 1965.

The youngest professional baseball player ever was Frank Chapman, who played for Philadelphia of the American Association in July 1887, at the age of fourteen (14 years 7 months 28 days). Many historians don’t count that, though, and instead look at Joe Nuxhall‘s 1944 debut with the Cincinnati Reds (15 years 10 months 11 days) as the low-water mark for age of a major leaguer. In my lifetime, it was Ken Griffey, Jr. who started making me feel old when he opened with the Seattle Mariners for the 1989 season.

It is currently a race to see whether someone younger than my son Carter (currently 11 years 1 month 27 days) will be in the league before there is no one older than I am (currently 42 years 10 months 11 days). I’m not sure which I’m rooting for: for baseball to span two generations at the same time, or to close out my era of baseball before my son starts his.

Which would you want?

60+ is an iPhone app to improve conscious living

The Earth Hour movement is leveraging the iPhone to get at least some of those billion to carry conscious living beyond 9:30p tonight, when the hour of sacrificing electricity for 60 minutes is over. The “60+” app treats sustainable actions like FourSquare treats locations, allowing you to check-in when you accomplish one of their 25 suggested environment-saving behaviors:

• Choose sustainable seafood
• Decline a shark-fin soup at dinner
• Set the air-con at 24 C or higher
• Sun-dry your clothes instead of using an electric dryer
• Use natural lighting wherever possible
• Use a fan instead of air-conditioning
• Go vegetarian for a day
• Remove electrical appliances from the socket when not in use
• Turn off your lights for 1 minute
• Turn your lights off for Earth Hour
• Take part in the Earth Hour 2011 Candle Walk
• Take a picture of yourself in the dark and upload it as your Facebook profile
• Recycle 1 can
• Donate your old clothes to charity
• Bring your own chopsticks
• Recycle Paper
• Buy locally produced fruits and veggies
• Ride a bike to work
• Organise a carpool or taxi-sharing system
• Wash your dishes by hand
• Fix leaky taps
• Install low-flow showerheads
• Collect rainwater to water your plants
• Take shorter showers
• Use the half-flush on your toilet

In addition, there are dozens of tips given for how you can further change behavior to save resources.

The application is quite beautiful to look at, with a recycled cardboard theme and nifty icons. It integrates with Facebook, although I was surprised none of my friends there had this app. The app keeps a running total of actions performed since February 3, which as I type is only at 12,823. Even so, I find the information contained in this app useful both as a reminder and as a teaching aid.

Our Earth Hour will be tested: My eldest is having a friend over to watch a movie. I don’t know what the timing is, but it may be a hard sell to unplug under those circumstances. I’m hoping Carter finds some ways for us to survive those sixty minutes and help me appease my conscience for a little while. I will be using 60+ beyond today’s symbolic campaign.

There’s a new iPhone application that may finally bring me on board with listmaking. Yesterday, DropList was released to the App Store with the promise of “fast and easy” task list creation. The selling point for me, though, was the integration with Dropbox.

Droplist magically creates to-do lists from copied text

With Droplist, you can type, or copy-and-paste text from anywhere on the iPhone and magically get a checkable list. Once the list exists, the interaction is well done, too. Swiping your finger and tapping gets rid of a task, and it is easy to toggle to a title or task if the app makes a mistake interpreting your pasted text. Everything is stored as plaintext files, keeping the app lightweight.

The killer feature for Droplist is that it leverages Dropbox, the file sharing platform that has proven to be a godsend for collaboration. It has replaced email attachments and Google docs for most of my group projects, including the things my wife occasionally wants me to print out on campus. I have moved many of my desktop files there so they are available on all of my machines. Adding to-do lists—particularly ones I can share with my family—could be a practical benefit.

That scenario was the motivation for the app. Developer Drew McKinney, a recent alum of the HCI/d program at Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing, got an email from his girlfriend containing a grocery list. “I couldn’t find a single to-do list app that would simply let me paste in the content from
email as a list and go from there,” McKinney recalls. “I kept thinking, ‘Why isn’t this as easy as scratch paper?’”

McKinney says the integration with Dropbox was a breeze because they tailored their API for mobile use. They provide a simple SDK and sample code. Other apps, like Frenzy, are leveraging the private and localized file sharing capabilities of Dropbox, too. “I have two other projects in the mix that allow the user to grab files from Dropbox to enrich an experience,” hints McKinney.

The app currently costs a buck, but there will be a free version in a few weeks with iAds and a task limit (15 max per list). Other changes are already in the works, based on early feedback. “I’d like to make checking off list items more fulfilling,” says McKinney, citing EpicWin as a good albeit grandiose example of rewards.

Drew is currently the Mobile Lead at Cook Medical, helping sales reps improve their work experience in the field. His startup company, Bloomingsoft, creates user-focused software for mobile devices. Droplist is the company’s third iPhone application in the last several months, the others being Driving Buddy and Corporate Slang.

Well, modern gamer fans can play that game, too. Here’s an interpretation of a traditional Mario Bros. adventure from a first-person perspective:

It took over 60 hours to render this into a 88-second video. 3dsMax, FumeFX, and After Effects were used to make this interpretation of a familiar game. Well done!

Thanks to Thalith Nasir for the twip (tweet tip).

The beautiful artwork by artist Adam Long are like postcards from the past, commemorating some of the notable events that have led to our present social networking culture. These include:

• The Notificator, a message vending machine at British railway stations
• CompuServe, the first computer time sharing service
• CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), a computerized answering system born in the Chicago Blizzard of 1978. It survives today as chinet.
• The invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee
• Q-Link, the predecessor to America Online, that connected Commodore computers together (see the 1986 promotional video).
• The 2003 launch of social network systems on the Web, notably Friendster, MySpace, and LinkedIn
• Tim O’Reilly’s FOO Camp, a hand-picked curation of interesting people coming together for a conference with no set agenda
• The launch of Facebook, which in 6 years would eventually get to 500 million users in July 2010
• Dell Hell, the name given to Dell’s poor customer service
• The launch of Twitter, which just celebrated it’s 5th birthday, and its coming out party at SxSW in 2007.
• A Burger King employee takes a bath in a BK sink, demonstrating to businesses that there is no controlling a brand anymore.
• The Sacha Baron Cohen movie Bruno met an early death. Twitter buzz is credited. Twitter is also assigned importance in international politics, with the U.S. State Department urging the service to postpone a scheduled maintenance to keep Iranian protestors tweeting.
• The “United Breaks Guitars” trilogy chronicles the poor customer service of United Airlines. Later, Southwest gets a tweetful from filmmaker Kevin Smith, who was deemed “too fat to fly.”
• NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer tweets from space
• Japan’s win over Denmark in the 2010 World Cup sets a record with 3283 tweets per second (tps)
• Charlie Sheen sets a record as the fastest Twitter account to reach 1 million followers.
• Rebecca Black’s video, “Friday,” is at the moment is approaching 38 million views (the artwork pegged it at 18 million) despite being widely panned

The Command Center opened last month with Tim O’Reilly, Brian Solis and others speaking on social media. PeopleBrowsr recently released ReSearch.ly, allowing access to 1,000 days of Twitter data and creating a focus on collective memory.

Kevin Spacey is slated to star in a political thriller, “House of Cards,” based on a novel about the dark side of British politics. According to Ted Sarandos at Netflix:

We’ve committed to at least 26 episodes of the serialized drama, which is based on a BBC mini-series from the 1990s that’s been a favorite of Netflix members. Originally written as a novel by former UK Conservative Party Chief of Staff Michael Dobbs, “House of Cards,” explores the ruthless underside of British politics at the end of the Thatcher era. Reset against the backdrop of modern-day U.S. electoral politics, this new one-hour drama follows Spacey as an ambitious politician with his eye on the top job.

The executive producer of the series will be David Fincher, fresh off his Oscar nomination for The Social Network. The episodes are slated to “air” in 2012 for customers in U.S. and Canada.

This is a big move for the disruptive media company. Having already successfully migrated from physical DVD rentals to online streaming of movies, the acquisition of an original TV series—technically, Netflix is only agreeing to license the show before it is successfully produced—shifts the perception of the company from a conduit to a source of entertainment. “House of Cards” presumably won’t be available in a movie theatre or via DVR (unless your device is integrated with a working Netflix account). To watch this content, you have to join their club.

Netflix beat out HBO and AMC for the rights to the show. Television industry executives are raising eyebrows, as it is unusual to order an entire season of a show without a pilot episode in the can. Company executives are soft-pedaling the risks. Even with great people involved, though, there is no guarantee of success.

As Fast Company‘s Austin Carr writes:

Remember Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? The much-hyped NBC series in many ways boasted the same “perfect storm” of talent as House of Cards. The show starred Friends’ Matthew Perry, The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford, Amanda Peet, and was helmed by mythical wordsmith Aaron Sorkin. NBC, so confident in the series’ potential, ordered up (only) 22 episodes before a pilot was even shot. Sound familiar?

After a strong start, however, Studio 60′s ratings dropped off a cliff, and the network cancelled the show after only one season. Netflix is on the hook for two (short) seasons of the show, minimum, whether or not it tanks.

VP Steve Swasey said evidence for the decision to bid came from their existing data. “A lot of this comes from our algorithmically driven software recommendations,” Swasey told Fast Company. “We know what our members like and watch.” Citing other serialized one-hour drama like Heroes, Lost, and Dexter, Sarandos said that this project “represents a manageable risk” and could lead to additional original programming in the future.

Netflix enjoys a 61% share of the U.S. market for digital movies streamed into the home or downloaded over the Internet. A wide margin separates them from #2 Comcast (8% of the market). There are currently 20 million subscribers to the service.

Ever since Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released, “Abe Froman” has been the most commonly used alias for when men want to anonymously check into motels.

It’s not true, but it feels true. That plausibility is what makes Daily Urban Legend a fun blog to inject into my regular Snackr news feeds. It tests my information fluency with regularity.

DUL is the work of Maggie Serota, who tries to make up a new fake fact each day to share with friends. Serota—a Brooklyn writer who has contributed to publications like The Onion A.V. Club, Radar, and NY Press—started this project as a Twitter hashtag (#UrbanLegendIJustMadeUp) but turned it into a Tumbler blog so she can include pictures.

Daily Urban Legend makes up new "facts" to share with friends

In addition to the Froman fiction, here are a few of my other favorites:

• Walt Disney was not cryogenically frozen after his death, but his cremated ashes are used nightly in the fireworks displays at Disneyland.
• The U.S. birthrate jumped about 16 percent in 1995 to reach a decade long high, just 9 months after Boyz II Men released their hit single “On Bended Knee.”
• Back in the 80’s, some cocaine shipments were smuggled into the country inside the sneaker phones given away with Sports Illustrated subscriptions.
• The only way Prince will communicate with others when it is not in person is via fax machine.
• 86% of all emergency room trips for children under the age of 10 are the result of swallowed board game pieces.
• By the year 2026, there will be more fictional lawyers practicing law on television than lawyers practicing law in real life. In related news: 43% of the defendants who choose to represent themselves in a court of law feel qualified to do so after watching the DVD set of the entire L.A. Law series.
• 2 pledges at a University of Florida frat party died after smoking soiled cat litter out of a bong during a hazing ritual.

Look it up.