Category Archives: Technology

Batman’s gizmo

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From Technology Review…

It takes about six minutes for a firefighter with a full load of gear to reach the top of a 30-story building by running up the stairs–and when he gets there, he’s tired. A group of MIT students have designed a rope-climbing device that can carry 250 pounds at a top speed of 10 feet per second. They have a contract to make the climbing device for the U.S. Army for use in urban combat zones, and they hope to make it available to rescue workers.

The students founded a company, Atlas Devices, based in Cambridge, MA, to commercialize the device, which is about the size of a power drill.

It’s amazing: see the video on the Atlas site.

Yahoo Pipes

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There’s a lot of blogobuzz about Yahoo Pipes.

Yahoo describes it as:

a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Tim O’Reilly has a typically thoughtful piece about it. He calls it

a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone…

Brady Forrest has created a terrific exposition of the modules for building pipes.

One of the most intriguing things about Pipes is that it has enabled Yahoo to recapture some of the high technical ground it had ceded to Google. The company — which is having its problems with Wall Street recently — has just raised the threshold for Web 2.0 innovation.

Yippee!

Wikipedia: “an addressable knowledge base”

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Thoughtful post by Lorcan Dempsey…

I was looking at an announcement on the University of Edinburgh’s site about The British Academy Warton Lecture on Poetry, to be given this year on Yeats by his biographer Roy Foster. A distinguished event! I was interested looking to the bottom of the page to see links to the Wikipedia pages for both Yeats and Warton.

This seemed to me to show Wikipedia’s growing role as an addressable knowledge base. It makes further information about a topic available at the end of a URL. It relieves people of having to create their own context and background. As in this case, context, or condensed background, about Warton and Yeats is available for linking, relieving the developers of having to provide it themselves.

Condensed background is a phrase used by Timothy Burke, history professor at Swarthmore, and author of the Burn the catalog piece of some years back. I was rereading Burn the catalog earlier and was interested to come across his blog discussion of Wikipedia.

“I’m using Wikipedia this semester where it seems appropriate: to provide quick, condensed background on a historical subject as preparation for a more general discussion. Next week, for example, the students are having a quick look at the Malthus entry as part of a broader discussion of critiques of progress in the Enlightenment.”

And he goes on to comment on the Middlebury decision which is discussed in my post of the other day.

“Big deal. The folks at Middlebury are perfectly correct to say that students shouldn’t be using Wikipedia as an evidentiary source in research papers. That’s got nothing to do with Wikipedia’s “unreliability”, or the fact that it’s on the web, or anything else of that sort. It’s because you don’t cite an encyclopedia article as a source when you’re writing an undergraduate paper in a history course at a selective liberal-arts college. Any encyclopedia is just a starting place, a locator, a navigational beacon. I’d be just as distressed at reading a long research paper in my course that used the Encylopedia Britannica extensively. As a starting place, Wikipedia has an advantage over Brittanica, though: it covers more topics, is easier to access and use, and frankly often has a fairly good set of suggestions about where to look next.”

He uses Wikitedium in the title of the post, and I thought how apt an expression this was to characterize the periodic library discussions about Wikipedia which pitch authority against editorial permissiveness.

Wikipedia is a collection. Some entries are excellent, some less so. One cannot summarily judge its value in the way that one might have done when deciding whether or not to buy or recommend a reference book. Judgements about ‘authority’ and utility have to be made at the article level, and who has the time and expertise to flag individual articles in this way? Rather than continuing a tedious Wikipedia good/Wikipedia bad conversation, we should recognize the attraction it has as an addressable knowledge base, understand the variety of uses to which it is put, and remind folks of the judgments they need to make depending on those uses.

Wearing iPods in public to be outlawed?

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From wcbstv.com

First it was cell phones in cars, then trans fats. Now, a new plan is on the table to ban gadget use while crossing city streets.

We all seem to have one — an iPod, a BlackBerry, a cell phone — taking up more and more of our time, but can they make us too distracted to walk safely? Some people think so.

If you use them in the crosswalk, your favorite electronic devices could be in the crosshairs.

Legislation will be introduced in Albany on Wednesday to lay a $100 fine on pedestrians succumbing to what State Sen. Carl Kruger calls iPod oblivion.

“We’re talking about people walking sort of tuned in and in the process of being tuned in, tuned out,” Kruger said. “Tuned out to the world around them. They’re walking into speeding cars. They’re walking into buses. They’re walking into one another and it’s creating a number of fatalities that have been documented right here in the city.”

Pedestrians have been hurt and killed in the manner Kruger describes. Not surprisingly, though, iPod users are less than thrilled with the senator’s proposal…

Hmmm…. I’ve written about this phenomenon before, musing on the way the iPod has redefined the notion of social space.

Mesh networking: another disruptive technology

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Jon Hannibal Stokes has a thoughtful piece on ArsTechnica about Meraki Networks, a start-up which is commercialising networking technology that emerged from the MIT Roofnet project.

In a nutshell, MIT’s Roofnet allows people in and around Central Square in Cambridge to gang together their wireless access points into a kind of wireless cloud that anyone with a WiFi device can access if they’re in range. There are some specifics I’m leaving out—you have to use a particular model of router, and you have to sign up for the program—but you get the general idea.

There are two ways to participate in Roofnet as a wireless access provider: as a node on the mesh, or as a gateway. If you participate as a node, then all you do is put the right model of wireless router running the right software in your window and turn it on. The router connects to other, nearby wireless routers, and it routes packets for the network and acts as an access point for end users. Of course, there have to be wired connections providing Internet connectivity somewhere in the mesh, and that’s where the gateways come in. If you participate in Roofnet as a gateway, then you’re sharing your own personal cable or DSL bandwidth with the rest of the network.

Meraki Networks plans to commercialize this mesh network model by offering a small, cheap ($50) wireless router, the Meraki Mini, that comes pre-loaded with the mesh network software. You can use the Mini to launch your own wireless network by just plugging it into your own broadband connection. The Mini’s software lets you do traffic monitoring and shaping, branding, and billing, so that you’re essentially reselling the bandwidth of a company like Comcast or AT&T. (Yeah, the telcos are gonna love that idea, but more on that in a moment.) Other users with Minis can connect to your router and extend the network outwards, choosing to participate as nodes or as gateways. With enough of these devices, you could cover a whole apartment building, or a whole block, with wireless… that is, if they don’t step on each other.

As Stokes points out, there are lots of interesting potential problems here. Some are technical — e.g. what happens when the mesh becomes very dense and interference starts to become a real problem? But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to spot the other, more intractable, problems.

As for the legal challenges, everyone from the federal government to the RIAA to your broadband provider are going to want a piece of you the moment you hang out an ISP shingle and start billing customers. Will you be obliged to comply with CALEA if you choose to route VoIP traffic? Will your (quasi?) official status as an “ISP” grant you immunity to RIAA lawsuits while making you the target of subpoenas instead? Is Comcast really going to sit still while the number of wired Internet connections in an apartment block drops by half or more, with their remaining customers acting as competition by reselling Comcast’s own bandwidth to former customers?

Of course, not all ISPs are like Comcast and Verizon, which forbid sharing your wireless connection with others. Speakeasy, for instance, actively encourages their users to share their connection with the public. I think ISPs could get creative and ask for a cut of the proceeds that users get from reselling bandwidth, in effect making their end users authorized bandwidth resellers. But that idea makes sense, and when it comes to anything that smells of “P2P” and “grassroots,” rationality rarely prevails in the boardroom.

There’s an extra angle to this in the UK, in that I think that it’s actually illegal under the provisions of one of the Communications Acts for an ordinary person to sell bandwidth. (I can freely share my wireless network with my neighbour, but I couldn’t sell him airtime.)

Of course the guys who set up Meraki know all this, which is where the interesting bit comes in. The NYT reports that Google and Sequoia Capital have invested in the company.

Stay tuned.

Human-assisted search

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From Technology Review…

The Web has grown orders of magnitude bigger since the founding of Google, and neither the company nor its competitors have come up with new automatic search algorithms as seemingly magical or game changing as PageRank. Now some entrepreneurs believe it’s time to replace the algorithmic search engine with humans.

ChaCha, a free advertising-supported service launched last year by former MIT AI Lab research scientist Scott Jones and software entrepreneur Brad Bostic, doesn’t exactly give up on the concept of computerized search. Web wanderers in search of answers are free to settle for the algorithmic results served up by ChaCha’s own search engine. But the site’s real calling card is its collection of 29,000 human guides, who earn $5 to $10 per hour working with users in live chat sessions to locate the Web’s best answers to their queries.

Web services that tap the brainpower of real humans are all the rage. Many now-familiar sites such as Digg and Wikipedia depend on the “wisdom of the crowd”–users who contribute, edit, and collectively rank information items. But newer ventures depend on individuals. Yahoo Answers, where anyone may submit a question and anyone else may respond, has proved immensely popular, attracting more than 60 million users (despite the varying quality of the site’s answers). More recently, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a marketplace where individuals can earn small amounts for completing “simple tasks that people do better than computers,” in Amazon’s words, has provoked much discussion among followers of the user-centered Web 2.0 movement…

The search for Jim Gray

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From the New York Times…

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 2 — When James Gray failed to return home from a sailing trip on Sunday night, Silicon Valley’s best and brightest went out to help find him.

After all, Dr. Gray, 63, a Microsoft researcher, is one of their own.

The United States Coast Guard, which started a search Sunday night, suspended it on Thursday, after sending aircraft and boats to scour 132,000 square miles of ocean, stretching from the Channel Islands in Southern California to the Oregon border. Teams turned up nothing, not so much as a shard of aluminum hull or a swatch of sail from Dr. Gray’s 40-foot sailboat, Tenacious.

In the meantime, as word swept through the high-technology community, dozens of Dr. Gray’s colleagues, friends and former students began banding together on Monday to supplement the Coast Guard’s efforts with the tool they know best: computer technology.

The flurry of activity, which began in earnest on Tuesday, escalated as the days and nights passed. A veritable Who’s Who of computer scientists from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NASA and universities across the country spent sleepless nights writing ad hoc software, creating a blog and reconfiguring satellite images so that dozens of volunteers could pore over them, searching for a speck of red hull and white deck among a sea of gray pixels.

Coast Guard officials said they had never before seen such a concerted, technically creative effort carried out by friends and family of a missing sailor. “This is the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen,” said Capt. David Swatland, deputy commander of the Coast Guard sector in San Francisco, who has spent most of his 23-year career in search and rescue…

Jim’s home page is here.

If you want to help, Werner Vogels, Amazon’ CTO, explains how. Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.

Gmail and docs

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Here’s an interesting development. If you have a Gmail account and receive (or send yourself) a Word or RTF document as an attachment, Gmail will now offer you the option of opening it as a “Google document” — which immediately makes it shareable (enabling other people to work on it collaboratively). And it’s seamless. Very neat — and immediately useful for people like me.

How we’re feeling

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Here’s a clever Web 2.0 application — a site that reads blogs looking for certain kinds of phrases denoting emotions…

At the core of We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.

We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. This is an approach that was inspired by techniques used in Listening Post, a wonderful project by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.

Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.

Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”. This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs. The full list of valid feelings, along with the total count of each feeling, and the color assigned to each feeling, is here.

If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way.

If an image is found in the post, the image is saved along with the sentence, and the image is said to represent one person who feels the feeling expressed in the sentence.

Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post’s author. Given the author’s username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user’s profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog’s owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.

This process is repeated automatically every ten minutes, generally identifying and saving between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day.

Thanks to Tony Hirst for spotting it.