Hydra as telepresence tool

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At Etcon. Three tracks of talks (I was watching Tom Coates: more later). Via Wifi/Rendevous, was able to use Hydra to see who is taking notes of other talks in other rooms.

There are a couple of other pieces of software available to have a social discussion online while in the conference spaces (confab, intro, and an IRC channel to name a few) but the unintended consquences of Hydra in a wifi’d-conference situation compared to them is that you can tell who’s actually listening to the person on stage – and their level of investment in listening/annotating, rather than who’s talking, snarking and joking with each other (not to say this is a bad thing.)

Stephen Johnson wrote about how a parallel wifi-world can suck the laughter out of the real-world discussion. I’m starting to think that a “too-parallel”/non-real-world meshed communications environment can suck too much of the attention out of a room too. I’ve only used Confab, so I can’t talk about the experience of using Intro, and it is enmeshed with the real-world, but it’s bound tightly to the hotel map, to the geography of the space, rather than to the subject-matter of what’s being discussed in the space.

The Hydra model points to an “augmented-reality” conference experience, where the task-oriented nature of the tool keeps those it gathers together immersed in the real-world.

Diff, pt2

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Last night attended the Social Software BOF, where talk of the philosophy, implications, social-science, human-centred side of the field or practice was dismissed in favour of the “meat”: protocols, standards, technology.

The rage has subsided, kinda. Alan Kay’s humane, humanist view of innovation and technological exploration has cheered me up no-end.

Clay is about to speak on the subject of “a group being it’s own worst enemy”… in the meantime here’s Will Davies on the trivial problem of human nature and societal implications of social-software which, as I’ve now been informed by last night, needs no attention by those working on emerging technologies.

A sweeping generalisation, but it seems the discussion in the field in the UK seems to be much more driven by the social sciences and concerns of human(e) and inclusive design; even by the technologists.

What about the Omega Man (and woman…)

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At Etcon. At “O’reilly Radar” session. Getting annoyed. Tim O’Reilly saying that watching the alphageeks is how to predict the future and create better things. Alphageeks as the bellweather for progress. Tech-trends are the leading, driving force of society. The Morlocks lead the Eloi. Trickle-down technological determinism. What about the Omega people, those who couldn’t care less about technology in and of it’s own sake. Could studying their needs and and inclusively designing products, services and strategies be a Better Way [tm]

Diff.

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I’m in Santa Clara at ETCON. Last year, I travelled down from San Francisco on the CalTrain, through a landscape I was not familiar with the reality of, but had visted a thousand times in movies and on the television: American Suburbia.

This year is a little different, as I have a hire car. A four-wheeled symphony in biege, it’s transformed my view of the burbscape.

Last year, I was stuck in the hotel, and at the mercy of those who could give me a ride in their cars. This year, I am the master of my own velocity. I can go where I want, when I want.

My when’s been screwed-up by the jetlag, and my where by the burbscape. There’s no centre to the sprawl. The “cities” of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale and San Jose spread their edges into each other, seen from the freeway. Signage is the only declaration of division; the only tell-tale of the territory.

“There’s no there, there” as Gertrude Stein said. No sense of place or centre. Impossible to find, impossible to feel. Reyner Banham christened this “autopia” in “Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies”. Built around the car, and the freedom of movement that promises. Radically decentralising and dehumanising the intersitial space and arteries of the city.

I’d read his and other accounts of this ecology, this mental and physical landscape, but to experience it is disturbing. Driving to the hotel yesterday, it finally came home to me exactly how radical the Segway Human Transporter is within this context. It always seemed kind of cool to me, but being a european city dweller, used to the walkable city; and moreover – a visitor to walkable American cities, such as NYC and SF; it was a revelation.

Coindentally, outside our room this morning lay USAToday, with a cover splash on the design of American cities being bad for people’s health and lifestyle:

“Why don’t Americans walk anywhere?

Old answer: They’re lazy.

New answer: They can’t.

There is no sidewalk outside the front door, school is 5 miles away, and there’s a six-lane highway between home and the supermarket.

Many experts on public health say the way neighborhoods are built is to blame for Americans’ physical inactivity — and the resulting epidemic of obesity. “

and further on in the article:

“Why you can’t walk there from here:

* Spread-out neighborhoods. Bigger houses on bigger lots mean neighborhoods stretch beyond walking distance for doing errands.

* Zoning. Residential neighborhoods are far from jobs and shopping centers, even schools.

* Reign of cars. Roads are built big and busy. Intersections and crosswalks are rare. Shopping centers and office parks are set in the middle of big parking lots, all of which have become dangerous places to walk. In many cul-de-sac suburbs and along shopping strips, sidewalks don’t exist.

Suddenly, the crowded city looks healthy.”

» USAToday: The way cities and suburbs are developed could be bad for your health by Martha T. Moore

More Martin on search

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Martin’s blog is becoming a great clearing house for links and smart commentary on search engines and findability:

“…a quote that i think should send chills down the spine of anyone running a web service that claims to care about their users and who thinks technology can solve search:

“Spending hours pouring over thousands of search queries, one can hear the pained voices of customers who are desperately looking for help. The…search engine, with its simple word spotting routines, can not come close to providing the expert support that a good clerk or call center representative can.”


» Currybet.net: the pained voices of customers who are desperately looking for help

“Faster than the speed of anyone”

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From his mailing-list, “bad signal”, Warren Ellis on creativity and recombinance:

“I still get asked with appalling regularity “where my ideas come from.”

Here’s the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information. Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.

Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 3 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you’ve got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you’ve got what’s called “an idea”.

And for that brief moment where it’s all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can’t be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein’s brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.

And… how it makes you feel:

“It’s ten past two in the morning, and I’m completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it’s the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare.

Faster than the speed of anyone.

That’s how it works.”

» Warren Ellis: Bad Signal

May the road rise with you

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Mentioned Le Parkour as evidence of superhumanity before, and now Mr. Ellis has woven it into the awesome Global Frequency. Dan Hill and Chris Heathcote discuss it here.

In Dan’s post he goes on to mention “The Green Wave”, an almost mythic urban phenomenon, where one catches a wave of green (go) lights at traffic signals driving through central london.

I remember once in the middle of the night in San Francisco, being taken up to the top of a three-stepped hill (near the Mint?) by my friend Nicole, then a designer for WiReD. She waited at the lights, engine revving until the it hit green.

She hit the gas, and we barrelled down the hill… reaching the next set of lights just as it hit green – they were on one of the steps and we got a little air under us… Faster, and down the next set of lights, still on red…

Still on red…

Still on red…

They turned green the instant we passed them, almost as if in doing so we had activated them – and flew…

There I was, fingernails dug into the dashboard, grinning with fear and realization that I was in a thousand films at once. Films that had been born out of a location scout or director knowing that San Francisco allowed you to do this there, if you just let the city play with you hard enough.

Off to SF/Santa Clara tomorrow for O’Reilly EtCon, to meet up with the British Geek Expeditionary Force.

Hopefully see you there.

Wormsphere

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From an interview with E.O.Wilson, author of Consilience:

“Nematode worms, he says, account for four of every five animals living on Earth – and are so abundant that if the planet’s surface vanished, its “ghostly outline” could still be made out in the biomass of nematodes, almost all of species unknown.”

Fantastic.

» Harvard Magazine: E.O. Wilson: “Of Ants and Earth”
[via Aula]

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UPDATE: The “wormsphere” quote seems to be originally by N.A. Cobb in 1915. It’s a little longer, and if anything, a little more poetic:

“In short, if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.”