via:

Steely Dan

[ed. Guitars: Denny Dias, Walter Becker, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter.]

Microsatellites: What Big Eyes They Have

People already worried about the candid cameras on Google Glass and low-flying drones can add a new potential snooper to the list: cameras on inexpensive, low-orbiting microsatellites that will soon be sending back frequent, low-cost snapshots of most of Earth’s populated regions from space.

They won’t be the first cameras out there, of course. Earth-imaging satellites the size of vans have long circled the globe, but those cost millions of dollars each to build and launch, in part because of their weight and specialized hardware. The new satellites, with some of the same off-the-shelf miniaturized technology that has made smartphones and laptops so powerful, will be far less expensive.

The view from high up is rich in untapped data, said Paul Saffo, a forecaster and essayist. He expects the new satellite services to find many customers.

Insurance companies, for example, could use the satellites’ “before” and “after” views to monitor insured property and validate claims after a disaster. Businesses that update online maps for geologists, city planners or disaster relief officials could be customers, too. The images could also be used to monitor problems like deforestation, melting icecaps and overfishing.

And food companies and commodities traders could use the images to keep track of crops and agricultural yields all over the planet, Mr. Saffo predicted.

But the images are also likely to be viewed as the latest mixed blessing by people already apprehensive of Big Brother-like surveillance in their lives.

First into space in the microsatellite business will be the San Francisco company Planet Labs, which plans to launch a fleet of 28 small satellites at the end of the year that will photograph the planet around the clock, with frequent updates. The company has already sent up two trial satellites for test runs, and will dispatch the entire set, called Flock-1, in December, said Will Marshall, a co-founder of the company and a former NASA scientist.

The Planet Labs’ satellites won’t be able to distinguish your face or read your license plate — the cameras don’t have that level of resolution. But the frequency with which images can be updated could raise privacy questions, said Timothy Edgar, a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and a former director of privacy and civil liberties in the Obama administration.

Mr. Edgar contrasted the satellite images with those provided by Google Earth — the ones that people zoom in on to see, for example, an aerial view of their homes.”That’s just an image of your house that was probably taken a few years ago,” he said. “It may feel like you are being watched, but you aren’t. It’s just a static picture that’s most likely several years old.”

But a satellite that regularly passes over your cabin deep in the woods and photographs a car that is sometimes parked there — and sometimes not — has different ramifications. “It can show a pattern, for example, when you appear to be at home and when you’re away,” he said.

by Anne Eisenberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Matt McDonald

via:

One-Way Ticket

[ed. Interesting dialog in the comments section.]

If you’re a state with the highest rate of homelessness in the country, you’ve got a number of options. You could build more shelters. You could enact new tax credits for the working poor. Maybe provide more counseling and other services.

Or you could take the route lawmakers in Hawaii did: offer homeless residents a one-way ticket out of the state.

State legislators passed funding this year for a new program to offer one-way flights to any of the state’s estimated 17,000 homeless persons. Lawmakers appropriated $100,000 over the next two years for the “return-to-home” program, but that funding could increase if the initiative is viewed as a success.

There are many reasons why homelessness is so pervasive in Hawaii. It’s an expensive state to live in. It’s not easy to leave. There isn’t much affordable housing.

Viewed in the most charitable light, one-way flights allow homeless people who currently live in Hawaii but have a family or better job opportunities on the mainland to be able to move. Viewed more cynically, officials in Hawaii will use this initiative to coerce homeless persons into leaving, freeing the state from any further obligations to help them.

The state Department of Human Services will administer the program, but officials there worry that the program could wind up being abused by those not currently living in Hawaii. “We remain concerned this program is an invitation to purchase a one-way ticket to Hawaii with a guaranteed return flight home,” said Kayla Rosenfeld, the department’s spokeswoman.

by Scott Keyes, Think Progress |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

GitHub: The Software That Builds Software

Complex, specialized tools are often made from simpler ones. Machines are built with power drills; software is built with code editors. And so the future of computing depends partly on coding platforms in much the same way that the future of the movie industry depends on camera technology.

Over the past five years, a rapidly growing San Francisco company called GitHub has become a dominant player in software development, largely because it has fine-tuned the tools used for “version control,” which is the process of logging all the changes made to a set of documents. Programs are fragile enough that even a small change—a single misplaced semicolon, for example—might cause it to crash. GitHub keeps track of those semicolons, and who put them where.

Last year, GitHub’s financial projections and cultural influence were enough to secure a hundred-million-dollar investment from Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that previously invested in Twitter, Facebook, and Skype. (It is Andreessen Horowitz’s single biggest investment to date, valuing GitHub at roughly seven hundred and fifty million dollars.) Today, GitHub has three and a half million users working on close to seven million projects, and it grows by ten thousand users on a typical weekday. You can find projects written in almost any programming language in existence, from common Web development languages like P.H.P. and JavaScript to the ancient low-level language Fortran, and even LOLCODE, an absurdist programming syntax jokingly assembled from LOLcat captions.

The GitHub Web site is built around an independent piece of version-control software called Git, which was created by the developer Linus Torvalds. Even before Git, Torvalds was a nerd hero. He created Linux, which is one of the most important operating systems in the world. It runs on more kinds of hardware than any other computer operating system, and it is a dominant platform for Web servers and supercomputers; it is also widely deployed on common devices like wireless routers, cell phones, and even TiVos. It is the crown jewel of the open-source-software movement, a school of thought in which even the most valuable code in a program is freely shared so it can be collaboratively improved by many developers at once.

With so many programmers working on it, building Linux is incredibly complicated, and by 2005, Torvalds and his team had decided that the existing version-control systems were inadequate. They decided to write their own. The result, which was named Git after the insult in British slang, was much more powerful than the other available options.

In other development systems, there is often a hierarchy of gatekeepers who delegate access to chunks of code. In Git, every developer working on a project can have full access to every part of the code and its history. The best ideas and the strongest code for any aspect of the project can bubble up to the surface and be approved, no matter where they originate, dramatically flattening and democratizing the development workflow. “In order to avoid all those stupid political issues, you have to basically allow anybody to make changes, and then accept them based on technical merit after the fact, rather than on some pre-approval process,” Torvalds told me via e-mail. (...)

Thinking about GitHub as a social product rather than simply a software-development platform is perhaps the best way to consider its future: the big problem GitHub solves is about collaboration, not software. “For now this is about code, but we can make the burden of decision-making into an opportunity,” Preston-Werner, the site’s founder, told the New York Times last year. “It would be useful if you could capture the process of decision-making, and see who suggested the decisions that created a law or a bill.”

Those seem like lofty aspirations, but in early May, the start-up RapGenius, which originally crowdsourced explanations of lyrics from hip-hop songs, announced its expansion into breaking news, using the same text-annotation platform it had been refining for years. RapGenius could prove useful for parsing complicated legal documents, for example, and if rap enthusiasts can build a useful platform for legal analysis, why can’t coders?

by Vijith Assar, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Tom Preston-Werner, the C.E.O. and co-founder of GitHub. Photograph by Jin Lee/Bloomberg/Getty.

John Singer Sargent - Atlantic Storm 
via:

Grasshopper stapler
via:

Returning to Alter Ego - What if You Could Live Your Life Over Again?

I knew at the time that I was wasting my teens. Not drinking, smoking, doing drugs and having sex. (This would not have been wasteful.) I spent most of mine, as a deeply depressed boy in a small Surrey town, in my bedroom, watching football, writing lyrics for terrible punk bands, furtively cross-dressing whilst suppressing my wish that I’d been born female, and playing computer games, mainly on my Commodore 64. (...)

Alter Ego was a text-based ‘fantasy role-playing game’, frequently cited as one of the best C64 games ever made. The ‘role’ was that of a person: specifically, a cisgender, heterosexual Westerner, as an only child born into a two-parent family with a married mother and father. I first read about Alter Ego in an old issue of Zzap! 64 magazine. I was immediately attracted by the tagline – ‘What if you could live your life over again?’ – and desperate to play it after Zzap! awarded it 98 per cent, stating that ‘the writer. . . displays a great sense of humour and a surprisingly perceptive view of all the problems both the young and old face in their lives’, calling it ‘original, unusual, compelling [and] varied’. There were male and female versions: the male one was released first, and it was this that I managed to find, ten years after its release – by which time the male version was a rarity, the female one virtually untraceable.

Both editions were created by Dr Peter Favaro, a clinical psychologist who interviewed hundreds of men and women about their most memorable experiences, putting those that ‘many people shared’ into the game, along with others that he devised. (Favaro also discussed an infant version called Child’s Play with Activision, but this collapsed due to financial difficulties.) He understood that Alter Ego could only ever be a small quotation of life: the instruction manual asserted that ‘Alter Ego is first and foremost a game. It was designed to be entertaining, not clinical. There are certain insights that can be gained from playing the game, but life improvement or self-analysis should never be the goal.’

The manual also said that ‘Because of the authenticity of the life experiences explored in the program, Alter Ego contains explicit material which may not be suitable for computer users under the age of 16’, and in the US, the game was not to be sold to them. There were no such restrictions in Britain, and in any case they would have been impossible to enforce by 1996, so with all this in mind, I clicked on the game’s first experience icon and threw myself into its alternative reality. (...)

From the start, your experiences were emotionally complex, weighing against playing as the nastiest, most self-destructive or irresponsible person possible – for example, in Childhood, if you opted to keep playing with a box of matches, ignoring your conscience’s repeated exhortations for you to stop, you could burn down your house. You would not be killed here (although one approach was to find all the choices that could lead to your death – I died in a car crash, took an overdose, committed suicide, ignored an ultimately fatal illness and collapsed during a senior citizens’ softball game), but you could cause considerable damage and traumatise your parents; one of the most striking moments in Alter Ego came with the ice-cold conclusion that ‘You are never punished, which somehow makes you feel worse’.

by Juliet Jacques, New Statesman |  Read more:

Image: Alter Ego

The Bot Wars

Diogo Monica was frustrated. All he wanted was to book a table at his favourite restaurant, but it seemed to be an impossible task.

State Bird Provisions, in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, was fully booked for 60 days in advance, and had been ever since last August, when Bon Appétit magazine named it the best new restaurant in the country.

No matter how many times he returned to the website, the answer was always the same: “No reservations are currently available. As tables become available, they will be shown here.”

Sure, the crispy spiced quail is “unparalleled”; yes, the rose-geranium ice cream is “a singular delight”; but could the promise of such culinary gems really rouse so many to try, every single day, that a table became literally unbookable?

Diogo wasn’t the only one having problems, a myriad of online complaints attested to that. “It’s the hardest place to get a seat in the city right now, full stop," said one. “Don’t even bother,” said another. “Tried every day last week = 0 bookings.”

Where could all the reservations be going? Were they even going up at all?

Unlike most customers, however, Diogo had another weapon in his arsenal. As a computer programmer, currently working for Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's new venture Square, he had the skills to build a bot.

“A bot is essentially a computer program that automates the process that a human would go through when making a reservations,” Diogo explained via email. This bot would scan State Bird Provisions’ reservation page at regular intervals, emailing him every time it was updated. “I set it to run once every minute.” (...)

Diogo’s dispatch from the frontlines of the new bot wars provided a rare insight into an underground community of unknown, unseen programmers who compete to build the fastest, most powerful bots in a virtual arms race.

Just as high frequency trading, via automated software, took over the financial markets in the early 2000s, the use of bots is a technique that is increasingly coming to dominate online sales of all stripes.

Diogo admits to deploying bots himself not only for dinner reservations, but to secure cinema tickets on busy opening nights and the cheapest flights to visit his family in Portugal. Anil knows of bots for “concert tickets, camping grounds and marathon registrations”. Such programs “are pretty easy to for any developer to write,” he told me.

Yet despite their ubiquity, in hacker circles there is little discussion of the ethics of bot use. There are no gentleman’s agreements to abstain from silicon wizardry when fighting it out with the general public. When there’s an online race, it’s every man for himself – and no one said the race would be fair.

by Cal Flyn, New Statesman |  Read more:

Image: CJ Isherwood on Flickr, via Creative Commons

Top of the World - Moods in Black Series. Patricia Oblack. 

Available from artist studio 48x55 diptych. http://pahttp://www.blurb.com/books/196889. http://www.ugallery.com/patricia-oblack

via:

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida
via:

via:

Socialism We Can Believe In

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Four years on, the heady idealism of 2008 makes me cringe like a purple passage in a teenage diary, like an old love letter excavated from a dusty pile. In some respects the frustration of that first term has been a uniquely American story: with its two houses, both alike in dignity, Congress will always produce legislation that satisfies no one in particular, and America’s non-stop election calendar will inevitably encourage centrism. But the path that leads a Leftist from “Change We Can Believe In” to “Better The Devil You Know” has become familiar throughout the West. To Brits like myself, for instance, the Obama cycle feels like a Hollywood remake of Tony Blair’s premiership (1997 slogan: “Things Can Only Get Better”), which itself appeared in theaters alongside the French version—more conversation, less drama—starring Lionel Jospin (1997 slogan: “Let’s Change The Future”). And all three remind you of Bill Clinton.

In each case the activist “base” seems to go through the same emotional cycle:

(1) anger at right-wing government precedes
(2) hope in a new Left and
(3) election of a new government;
(4) disgust at that government’s compromises gives way to
(5) protest at betrayals, leading to
(6) refusal to vote which produces
(1) anger at right-wing government.

At the time of writing, Britain has returned to (1) under David Cameron, although there are hints of (2); France is between (3) and (4) with François Hollande; and the U.S. has just decided (narrowly) not to convert (5) into (6) and hence (1). The most interesting phase is clearly (4): disgust at compromise. Why should the base find compromise disgusting? Everyone knows you can’t always get what you want—that may be disappointing, but it does not, on the face of it, seem disgusting. Yet that is precisely the point. What offends Leftists is the suspicion that their leaders are not actually compromising but triangulating. Compromise is something you do when you know your desired destination; triangulation, by contrast, is just negotiating to stay in power.

Yet it’s not as if the base itself has any kind of articulated vision of the good society. Take last year’s Occupy protests in America and beyond. “We are winning,” they cried. But what exactly were they trying to win? Whereas the Tea Party placed candidates into elected office, and forced others to bend to its will by orchestrating debates, rallies and pledges, Occupy renounced such ambitions from the start. Policies and politics are for dupes, it seemed to sneer: the old world is beyond saving. The idea, its leaders proclaimed, was to model a new direct democracy in which there are no leaders. But if the movement was itself the message, the message was hardly appealing: anyone who has endured student government knows that when everyone talks, nothing gets decided. And this indecision seemed all too convenient, as many pointed out, since it allowed the protesters to wash their hands of the responsibility that comes with concrete commitments.

It may have been unfair to expect detailed policies from the Occupiers. But the real critique was harder to answer: What, the critics asked, is your vision of the good life? And not just the good life in general, but the good life for us, here and now in the twenty-first century West? How does the model of tent-dwelling anarcho-democrats debating long into the night relate to the problem of contemporary inequality? It’s all well and good attacking corruption and cronyism, but inequality is also a function of globalization, which turns first-world countries into service economies that reward the educated and screw the rest. Viewed in this light, Occupy’s central slogan—“We are the 99%”—was as facile as they come; the editor of The Occupy Handbook actually bragged that “Occupy Wall Street has the rare distinction of being a protest movement that even the objects of its attack can find little fault with.” Like the Harvard lawyer at whose feet many of its participants had knelt three years earlier, Occupy managed to wrap itself in the aura of Che Guevara while offending nobody. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Obama and Occupy seem to represent the exhaustion of the Western Left in general. Yet the mood of cynicism, wry and weary, to which I, like so many, presently find myself tempted, can be as blinding as the most dizzying optimism. To dismiss 2008 as mere showbiz, or the Occupy movement as mere self-righteous escapism, would be to ignore the significance of the springs from which they drew: widespread dissatisfaction, even despair, at the status quo; and a yearning, however inarticulate or inchoate, for fundamental transformation. That this yearning has so readily found expression in vacuities points to its strength, not its weakness; if it is capable of sustaining us in empty illusions, at least for a time, that only goes to show how desperately we crave escape from the fetters of contemporary politics. And it is notable that in promising us relief, Obama and Occupy both pointed to the same kind of destination: setting their faces against self-seeking individualism, they spoke to us as individuals in search of self-transcendence. They spoke, that is, to our desire for community without collectivism, for a community forged from the ground up, by us ourselves, in a spirit of what the French Revolutionaries called “fraternity.” We are the change that we seek.

The problem was that neither Obama nor Occupy was able to give the idea of fraternity any real substance. For Obama, it seemed to imply campaign contributions; for Occupy, endless discussions. Neither could connect it to the imperatives of our changing economic climate or to the day-to-day decisions and actions that together constitute society. This, not their idealism, was their failing. If fraternity is to be more than a utopian fantasy or a pious palliative, it will need to find expression in an ethic that can be lived out in everyday life, in institutions that are within our grasp, in a vision of a future radically better than the present yet recognizably rooted in its conditions. (...)

But perhaps we need to rethink socialism. For what differentiates socialism from both left-liberalism and civic conservatism is, at bottom, its focus on the character of work, the day-to-day labor by which we produce both the world around us and, in the end, ourselves. And in and of itself this entails nothing about the state. Once socialism is distinguished from statism, it can also be liberated from it, both practically and theoretically. If we can find a non-statist mold into which to cast the core ideal of socialism, it might be possible for us to forge a politics of fraternity that is transformative without being utopian. And in this respect, I believe, our best guide might turn out to be a theorist described by Hayek himself as “a very wise man” and “a sort of socialist saint”—the inimitable R. H. Tawney (1880-1962).

by Jonny Thakkar, The Point |  Read more:

Image: Pete Souza 

On Location With Foursquare

There's a great, deep story by Austin Carr in Fast Company today giving a broad overview of where Foursquare is headed, as a product and as a company. I was quoted a few times in the piece, and spent a good bit of time talking to Austin, and I thought it might make sense to explain the non-obvious parts of my perspective on Foursquare.

It makes sense to start at the end:

Crowley is a rare breed of founder obsessed with the problem he's trying to solve. "The thing I fear, which would be devastating for the industry, let alone Dennis, is that he gets rushed and Foursquare can't monetize, they can't raise [another round], and they have to sell to Facebook or Google or whoever," Dash says. "And then at 40, Dennis has to start over. Because he'll do it again—there's no question. But then the world will have to wait another goddamn 10 years for this thing."

This articulates what may be the two most important points underpinning my opinion of Foursquare:

• There's undoubtedly going to be a location layer to the Internet. It's too powerful of an idea, and too valuable of a technology, for it not to come into existence in the next few years.
• Dennis Crowley has incontrovertibly been obsessed with this idea for over a decade.

Now, simply being a person obsessed with a particular class of problem doesn't always mean that someone will be the one who brings it to large-scale adoption — just ask Nikola Tesla. But my bet is that Foursquare cracks the code on this before anyone else. To understand why, let's take a look at what Foursquare really does today. (...)

They've simply done more work, at a deeper level, to really understand the problems around location and location-enabled apps. Astoundingly, for all the public paranoia about online tracking, Foursquare's never made any mistakes that have caused a panic about the way they collect and share data. And its team is respected by other startups and media companies as being authoritative on nearly every important aspect of location-based technology on the Internet. Perhaps most importantly, its position as a neutral third party offers all of these partners an option which doesn't empower the competitors they actually fear.

The truth is, aside from simple mapping apps, nobody has truly built a large-scale consumer technology business around the potential of location. As I noted when discussing the importance of public traffic data, there is enormous value to be created by understanding how people move around: Both Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey's first companies were based on data about how people move around through cities. If Foursquare's given enough time to keep iterating on the incredible success it's had as a platform, and its first few steps toward driving revenue through ads make it stable enough financially, there's no reason it can't be the company that taps into the value of being the location layer of the Internet.

by Anil Dash |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. One of my favorite photos (repost).]

Philip-Lorca-diCorcia, Alice 1988

via:

Why Freud Still Matters

He’s been dead for nearly 70 years, but Sigmund Freud’s provocative theories are still a huge part of psychology, neuroscience, and culture — this despite the fact that many of his ideas were mindboggingly, catastrophically wrong. Here’s why Freud just won’t go away.

Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that Sigmund Freud was a giant in his field. When it comes to his influence on psychology, psychoanalysis, and our theories of mind, he’s often credited for kindling a revolution; with Freud, it’s kind of a before-and-after thing.

Freud’s Century

Indeed, the 20th century has often been called Freud’s century. His books landed with the subtlety of hand grenades, featuring such seminal titles as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1915-1916).

Freud’s legacy has transcended science, with his ideas permeating deep into Western culture. Rarely does a day go by where we don’t find ourselves uttering a term drawn from his work: Mommy and daddy issues. Arrested development. Death wishes. Freudian slips. Phallic symbols. Anal retentiveness. Defense mechanisms. Cathartic release. And on and on and on.

As psychologist and Freud critic John Kihlstrom himself admits, “More than Einstein or Watson and Crick, more than Hitler or Lenin, Roosevelt or Kennedy, more than Picasso, Eliot, or Stravinsky, more than the Beatles or Bob Dylan, Freud's influence on modern culture has been profound and long-lasting.”

An Outdated Paradigm

But his legacy is a shaky one. Freud has, for the most part, fallen completely out of favor in academia. Virtually no institution in any discipline would dare use him as a credible source. In 1996, Psychological Science reached the conclusion that “[T]here is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas." As a research paradigm, it’s pretty much dead.

Many of Freud’s methodologies, techniques, and conclusions have been put into question. Moreover, his theories have even proved damaging — and even dangerous — to certain segments of the population. His perspectives on female sexuality and homosexuality are reviled, causing many feminists to refer to him by a different kind of ‘F’ word. Some even argue that his name should be spelled “Fraud” and not Freud.

“Freud is truly in a class of his own,” writes Todd Dufresne, an outspoken critic. “Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say. But, luckily for him, academics have been — and still are — infinitely creative in their efforts to whitewash his errors, even as lay readers grow increasingly dumbfounded by the entire mess.”

Without a doubt, many of these criticisms and valid and totally justified. But a renewed look at his legacy shows that Freud’s contribution is far from over — both in terms of his influence on culture and science.

by George Dvorsky, io9|  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via:

via:

Masao Yamamoto, from the Prism Book.
via: