Small Streams

Look at Me Looking

I'm reading Stewart Brand's The Media Lab, a great antidote to lots of current futurology numbers. I didn't make it through Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near mostly because it seemed so breathless and made me feel as if I had no control of my life. Reading the nearly twenty year old The Media Lab makes me think that technologists' prose always has a certain breathless quality and in the end what seemed like a revolution at the time is merely an accretion.

I'm currently reading the "Eyes as Output" chapter, which mostly covers the work of Richard Bolt, who has been doing work with human interfaces. Brand describes his work in using eyetracking as a form of feedback:

Bolt turned to his desktop PC to show a demo he was working on. The screen filled with: a living room wall in color, a fireplace with brass andirons, a mantel with brass candlesticks and a ships model, and two pictures on the wall. Two programs would function with this display, Bolt said, "looker" and "show-er." "Looker" is the trace of the viewer's point-of-regard as it dashes around examining different parts of the screen's image. "Show-er" will be the computer's verbal response to what "looker" is doing, explaining "it's a Monet" if the viewer concentrates on the left picture, continuing with further explanation, perhaps, if the viewer lingers on the picture, moving on to other topics if the viewer keeps looking around.

Reading that passage and other information on Bolt makes me think of two lazyweb requests.

Lazy Web Request #1
A mathematical formula for adapting tag clouds with user interests. Meaning the user has a tag cloud of his own and if he has a big interest in cantaloupe and a small interest in broccoli, the tag cloud he's viewing will grow the cantaloupe tag and shrink the broccoli tag. This one's probably out there already.

Lazy Web Request #2
A cheap eyetracker and "show-er" software to view flickr badges. Imagine sifting through 100s of images to find particular images and get information on what you want to learn.

Here's another link from Poynter Online I found on eyetracking.

Abrupt, senseless ending followed by tags.

Technorati Tags: eyetracker, MediaLab, interface, lazyweb

Peter Leo v. Bottled Water

Esteemed Post-Gazette columnist, writing coach, and all-around genial guy Peter Leo gets a bee in his bonnet about bottled water. I really haven't read a scathing Peter Leo column, but this one is close as they come.

Water is heavy. Moving large quantities of it, for example, 8,000 miles from Fiji to New York, requires burning massive quantities of fossil fuels that emit pollutants. Tap water, by contrast, is distributed through an energy efficient infrastructure. A British study calculated that transporting bottled water in the U.K. generated carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to the annual energy consumption of 6,000 homes.

Peter Leo usually likes to poke fun, but in this article there's a kind of enough-is-enough feel to his essay that you not only want to stop buying bottled water, you want to start snatching it from other people's hands, and making sure to replace it with a cool glass of regular.

Technorati Tags: eutechnics, consumerism, communities and technology

Saviors or Mad Scientists

I think the general public has become inured to, perhaps bored of, genetic engineering. Maybe we're thinking that we've been doing genetic engineering for years, still don't see the apocalypse on the horizon, so it must not be affecting us.

Reading Guns, Germs, and Steel makes me think maybe we've done enough technologically in the past 10,000 years to become agents, if not masters, of cataclysmic change: agriculture changing the ecology of whole continents, dense living patterns creating petri dish conditions for new diseases, patterns of hierarchy and bureaucracy wiping out populations and languages, and so on. So perhaps the apocalypse has been upon us anyway.

I was reading Technology Review again this morning and found something else to give me pause. A rather upbeat article on genetic engineering and ethanol production.

Two things: One, the scale of the undertaking. Just one ethanol plant will take 300 million dollars. This is no boy scout project to be sure; and two, the cavalier language used to describe the process of genetic engineering.

The ideal organism would do it all -- break down cellulose like a bacterium, ferment sugar like a yeast, tolerate high concentrations of ethanol, and devote most of its metabolic resources to producing just ethanol. There are two strategies for creating such an all-purpose bug. One is to modify an existing microbe by adding desired genetic pathways from other organisms and "knocking out" undesirable ones; the other is to start with the clean slate of a stripped-down synthetic cell and build a custom genome almost from scratch.

O.k., I'm kind of good with the first part of the description, which sounds like optimum beer-making to me. But taking the conceptual leap from tinkering with genes to inventing new life forms definitely gives me pause. I can almost imagine a Cat's Cradle story emerging from this: Instead of having an ice-nine that converts all water to ice at room temperature, you have yeast-nine that converts all sugars to really good beer.

Here's to your health!

Technorati Tags: eutechnics, biofuels, genetic engineering

Something Scale-y

A great example of what scale means in this morning's Technology Review:

There is a low-tech way to sequester carbon dioxide: don't dig up so much coal and oil in the first place. Princeton University's Carbon Mitigation Initiative concludes that using the most efficient building technologies for commercial and residential buildings could avert as much carbon dioxide as is produced by 800 one-gigawatt coal power plants. Doubling automotive efficiency -- possible with existing technology -- would achieve the same. Do both and you've canceled out the emissions of 1,600 coal power plants -- more than all the coal plants proposed globally today.

Clearly, even partial deployment would yield enormous benefits. So what's the problem? "The classic reason why efficiency didn't fare well [is that] it took five guys in a corporate boardroom to spend a couple billion bucks to build a power plant that can power 250,000 homes," says Steve Selkowitz, who manages building-efficiency research programs at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA. "Getting 250,000 homeowners to each change 10 light bulbs and buy a more efficient refrigerator and air conditioner takes much more effort."

I've also been thinking about scale in regards to legalized gambling in Pennsylvania. Is it easier to have the number of casino licenses controlled by a few people in a board room rather than 10 million adults?

How about Pittsburgh downtown development? Should the decisions about the built environment be made by a few people in a board room? I've just seen the illustration of the new 23-story PNC Bank building-to-come. It looks impressive but a building of that scale will have its problems: shade, light reflection, wind effects, curb cuts, and loading docks. Perhaps, if the development was divvied up among a hundred developers and across 100 parcels, we would have different problems.

Pgh Developers Should Take a Hike

An ailanthus tree and a hiker in the Minersville Cemetery. (photo courtesy of Elizabeth Perry)

The wonderful people at Urban Hike organized a tour of the Upper Hill, Sugar Top, and Polish Hill. Liz, Piper, and I made the walk yesterday, a very hilly 5 miles. We saw lots of unknown treasures, secret paths, knotweed covered staircases, the Immaculate Heart of Mary Festival, the West Penn Skate Park, a wild raspberry (wine berry) patch, the insides of Pittsburgh Filmmakers, and an epiphanic amount of sunflowers planted in one man's yard in Polish Hill. Couple those delights with the civilized pace of the walk, and it makes me think that anyone who cares about a place should care about it as a pedestrian.

This past week, I went to see Dan Onorato give a talk for The League of Young Voters. I've also spent some time speculating with people about transportation and housing development in Allegheny County. Probably some great ideas. Perhaps a few clunkers. In any case some serious decisions will be made that will have an effect not only on the public coffers but on the commonwealth in general.

I believe any Pittsburgh developer who is bodily able, and is serious about development, should go on walks like those organized by Urban Hike. To understand a place is to understand it at close range, slow speed, and eventually through habits of mind and life.

And if the developers still make lousy decisions, they'll still feel great after an urban hike, a little tired, perhaps, but great.

Are You in Genius?

Just watched the first episode of Pittsburgh Genius, short chronicles of local innovators. I'm guessing from the schedule that most will be university-based scientists. PCTV will be airing the show, but there's also a quicktime version on the web.

In the first episode Dan Handley interviews and reports on the work of Dr. Howie Choset, a CMU robotics professor. Choset seems humble and circumspect, which seems fairly Pittsburgh.

The one time Choset boasts is when he describes Pittsburgh as a robotics capital. Choset believes this because the number of papers coming out of Pittsburgh equals the amount coming from Japan. I'm not sure of that definition. Scientific, verifiable, refereed papers are great, but where are the robots? Not just for the Robocons either. I want to see robot slugs cleaing out my bathtub, robot spider/sensors walking around Frick Park, and wheeled news kiosks guiding old people across downtown streets. I want to see quasi have a regular stand-up night club act.

Then again, it's probably best that more sober types like Choset are leading the robotics revolution.

Technorati Tags: Pittsburgh, robots

Convo Tracker

I wished I had gotten more done at BlogIn, but I got a start on working with WordPress.

I did find one way to stay more productive, or at least more busy.

Somehow the subject of commenting came up yesterday. I said without fear of challenge that I'm probably the most prolific commenter around Pittsburgh. Unfortunately it's not been fun tracking comments on a half dozen or so websites.

Wouldn't you know it fellow BlogIn attendee Christina created a program to help you track comment threads.

Convotracker works as an extension in Firefox, looks very Web 2.0, and is just the thing to have in case a flame war breaks out.

My Brain Hurts

Have spent most of the afternoon with a bunch of bloggers at BlogIn, a working session for Pittsburgh bloggers. Thanks to Cindy (seated, center) for honchoing, and getting me started on a Wordpress blog. Others attending were Liz (seated right) and from left to right Mark, Christina, me, Mike, Venky, and Sri .

Photographer: Sriram Bala

Another Day Another Function

After I said that I mostly ignored spreadsheet functions, I just found another one that I can use. I'm currently tallying zipcodes on a list, so I found out how nifty the "countif" function is.

No thanks to Irving Berlin, here's the formula: =COUNTIF(A1:A6;"Blessing")