Like everyone else, I spent Friday with a bricked-up Iphone during the update process. But I’m willing to forgive Apple since Pandora was included among the available apps. For me, this is a killer app.
The Music Genome project behind Pandora fascinates me. It is a great combination of humans and technology – trained musicians analyzing the characteristics of music and creating a genomic breakdown of each composition, and then algorithms automatically selecting the music most similar to the pieces you select. It’s hard not to anthropomorphize Pandora’s inner workings, since it gets my taste so exactly right (and my taste is not mainstream, running to Steve Reich, Arvo Part, John Adams, Bela Bartok, etc.).
It would be great if that same sort of expert human/technology combination were brought together to create genomes for other areas. I’m thinking of things like a History Genome Project – having expert historians define “history” genomes and then classifying current and historical events based on their genomic similarities. We all know that “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” etc. etc., yet I don’t really know enough history to always see the parallels between now and then. But if I could, say, type in a current event and have the 3 most similar events from history pop up as the search results, that would not only be a way to understand the present, but would ignite my curiosity to find out more about the cited past events. And how about an Economic Genome Project, bringing some badly-needed perspective to our current times?
If I were a web 2.0 couples therapist, here’s what I’d do:
Record a lot of the couple’s conversations and analyze them with IBM’s Many Eyes data visualization tools. A great way for the couple to see their patterns of communicating. (Hey, I bet my word map would show that I say “Yes, but …” or “I’ll be ready in just a minute…” a million times).
and set it up to give visual feedback on all the hot spots in the couple’s communication. Even I might be embarrassed to keep saying “I’ll be ready in just a minute…” if I could see the frequency with which my kitchen counter started emitting blaring red lights.
A little more complicated than reading “Men are from Mars” (or is it Venus?), but much more effective. And if the relationship fails after that, there is always revenge on YouTube ala Trisha Walsh-Smith.
I just finished reading Blink - really interesting, I especially liked the research on facial expressions by psychologist Paul Ekman. Ekman’s work codes facial expressions with the emotions they represent in amazing detail, and makes me want to become much more sophisticated in observation. I feel like I was handed a really easy example to practice on - the Emily Gould cover story in the NY Times Magazine that is getting so much comment around the web led me to watch her interview by Jimmy Kimmel. Watch this - even an amateur like me can easily figure out what all her eye rolls, eyebrow movements, and other facial gestures mean - it makes a great companion piece to the NY Times article because while you can read her article and have some sympathy for her, the sympathy vanishes once you watch the video.
This is one of the things I love about YouTube - the ability to see demonstrations that make me want to find out more and more about areas that I’m weaker in. Am now reading a physics text to see if I can get a basic understanding of how this works.
I’ve recently become more and more obsessed with typography, so the recent N.Y. Times article about the typography of McCain’s campaign logo comes at a good time for me.
One of the comments is that his logo uses the same typeface (Optima) as is used for the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. Deliberate or chance? I think it has to be deliberate. I’ve been to the memorial several times, and the power of the etched names is unforgettable even to someone who wasn’t directly involved in the war.
Typography has emotional connotations at levels we often are not consciously aware of. Monkeys can apparently be trained to recognize Helvetica fonts with a 90% success rate, so it is not surprising that we can differentiate typefaces on an emotional level.
What if your real life is pretty difficult, and there is not much you can do about it? Well, virtual life can sometimes provide more realness than real life, especially if you have the spirit of Alice Krueger. She can’t get around easily in real life, but she has created a community to help others on Second Life.
Her story was recently featured at the Health 2.0 conference on Web 2.0 technologies in San Diego.
I’ve used databases for a long time, but I’ve taken them for granted as things that worked well for what I wanted to do and didn’t require much further thought. I feel kind of stupid that it had never occurred to me to think about how dependent they were on the concept of rows – that is, it is the row that dominates the database, not the column.
But once I started to read about Michael Stonebreaker’s company, Vertica, it become so obvious – of course, if you make the column central to the database instead of the row, you open up all sorts of possibilities because the data in each column is uniform. Imagine a simple database of names and addresses – each row contains the name and address for an individual, but each column contains only one sort of data, like the zip code. Making a database column-centric rather than row-centric means that you have uniform data to store and access. Vertica claims that it is faster by 80-fold to access the data in a column-centric database, as well as offering major advantages in compression for storage.
Once you are told this concept, it seems so obvious in its potential advantages that it is a total no-brainer. Yet I probably would not have thought of it on my own. I wonder how many other paradigm shifts are out there waiting for someone to make the rest of us see how obvious they are. Vertica has raised 20+ million for its database idea. As they say, current relational databases have stayed the same for 30 years. What else could benefit from a 180 degree turn?
It continues to be massively frustrating that Maryland has passed a new 6% tax on computer services without hearings or industry input or much thought. Two months after passing the bill, more than half the legislators have signed a bill to repeal it. One wonders what these same legislators were thinking when they voted for the tax, but at least they now have seen its folly. However, the Ways and Means Committee seems very likely to prevent a vote on the repeal. Wasn’t this one of the hardest ideas to understand when you were a young idealistic kid in high school government classes - that we have a representative democracy with elected representatives, but then they are subject to the control of a few powerful committee members?
If you want to help with the efforts to repeal this tax, go to www.fightthetechtax.com, organized by the Tech Council of Maryland and the Maryland Chamber of Commerce. And if you are a Maryland resident, you can use the site to send emails to your state legislators with just a few seconds of effort.
Maryland’s state legislators have made a very short-sighted decision in voting to impose a 6% sales tax on computer services. It creates a direct burden on computer service firms and the companies that need their services. Perhaps more importantly, it sends a strong message to the technological community that the state does not want to create a good climate for them. Don’t the legislators understand that it is in Maryland’s best interest to encourage technological businesses and development?
By any standards, the tax is unfair and arbitrary. Maryland does not tax other comparable services. The legislature also imposed the tax in a special session without an open hearing or chance for testimony. Maryland’s Comptroller calls the measure “disturbing,” “highly irregular,” and might “undermine our ability to compete effectively in the global technology marketplace.” The tax is also very difficult to administer and has been a failure in the few other states that have experimented with it.
What frustrates me even more is that I think it represents the great divide between the people who get the future of technology and those who don’t. The legislators originally had several service businesses under consideration for taxation, including landscaping, massage, and auto repair. But yet the final bill included just computer services. I think many of the legislators voted to tax computer services rather than landscaping or auto repair because at a gut level they understand the economics of lawn-care or auto repair businesses but are clueless about computer services. When you don’t understand something, it is much easier to make it a target without realizing the far-reaching consequences.
3-D printers will be cheap enough in a few years for ordinary home use. Of course the printer will be yet another technology item to fit into an already crowded house, and the frustration level with the usual printer jams and misprints (imagine the mess and the waste of materials) will be sky-high. And for the near future the materials will probably be limited to things like various polymers, cornstarch derivatives, wax, and chocolate. But it would still be so much fun to own – kind of like a grown-up version of the Easy-Bake Oven.
These printers will cause an odd transfer of control, with the consumer now becoming the manufacturer, and new intermediaries springing up to provide the design programs. The ability for anyone to rapidly prototype inventions or variations on existing products should lead to massive creativity.
And when the printers are sophisticated enough to allow embedded electronics, the practical uses are unlimited – imagine making your own light bulbs, flashlights, cell phones, and for me, a remote to replace the one my dog ate. My guess as to the most popular items to print will be not be the practical or the innovative ones, however, but the true basics - chocolate body parts for adults, and small plastic toys for kids.
