digitalcommons

XO laptop arrives

In November I decided to take part in the Give One Get One program for the One Laptop Per Child. For about $400 one XO will be sent to a child in Haiti, Cambodia, or Rwanda, and another is sent to the donor. On Saturday, December 15, Federal Express handed me a small box just as we were leaving for Santa Cruz. While my wife drove, I unpacked the computer, installed the battery, and plugged it into a converter in the car.  It boots slowly, but once on it detected a number of wireless networks as we drove past Los Gatos.

We were staying at my in-laws house which has wireles. I finally got the right  configuration for the security password, and was able to  connect to the Internet. Each application is called an Action. Browse allows one screen at a time, and the scroll bar is very narrow and a bit hard to use, but response was good. However there is no open source equivalent of Flash (though John Gilmore says they are working on Gnash) so you won't be able to view programs such as YouTube. There is an MPEG player in Etoys, another action, but I did not have very good luck using it.  The News Reader could not detect the RSS feeds already installed. 

The XO is tiny; you can't touch type unless you have the hands of an 9 year old, but I liked most of the design decisions. The problem is that documenation online is very uneven. Important details are glossed over, a sure sign that the writer knows the software but forgets that you don't and makes leaps when he should be going step by step.

One of the most popular applications with the kids (and me) is the camera and mike for recording still photos, sounds, and video clips with sound. The 640 x 480 is enough to give some detail on landscapes, and closeups are even better. Again, consider what
they packed into this machine for less than $200. Both of these photos were taken in Santa Cruz near Natural Bridges State Park.

Recycling old computer gear

Today I was visiting The Insititute For the Future in Palo Alto. At the top of the stairwell was a large pile of computer gear, cables, a Sun workstation, old racks, all waiting to be recycled or disposed of somehow. None of it looked that useful for repurposing in a developing country or local public computer lab.  It boggles the mind to see how much equipment is flowing out of small organizations, schools, and large companies where computers are being replaced rather rapidly.  In a few years there will be millions of standard cathode ray tube television disposed of because they cannot handle a digital signal or the owners deicide to get rid of them rather than convert.  What's in your closet that you will never use?

eldis OnDisc

eldis OnDisc is produced by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. eldis is featured in this web log's sidebar because of its importance as a site for information about development. With the May 1, 2007 free access/no registration access to the U.N. database it will be more important.

Many users with slow or erratic Internet connections have difficulties in accessing some of the files, if not the site itself. eldis has pubished a CD-ROM (PC/Mac. Linux?) containing 866 documents from 190 organizations, as well as Firefox and Adobe Acrobat Reader.  You can search in 29 subject areas from ageing population to trade policy.  Readers in developing countries can request multiple free copies of the CD-ROM, anyone can put the content on their intranet.

Media X Day 2

Media X Day 2, April 17, 2007

Steve Cisler

The presentations today were considerably shorter, usually less than seven minutes with a couple of exceptions by outside vendors who wrapped up the afternoon.

Clifford Nass, Dept. of Communication
"What Media-X does best and what's best for you

His speech was aimed at the business affiliates who support the program and expect certain results from the university.   Paraphrasing him

"You should look for a direct and large impact on actual projects (in the company) and services. Having your competitors here (at Media X) is a great opportunity. Competition is irrelevant. You should demand some general understanding that results in something specific of use in your company. By bringing companies and ideas together, you can discover trends you could never find elsewhere. Stanford provides an incredible amount of enthusiastic labor (who don't demand much money).

"Intellectual property is not a deliverable. it's hard to use; you can't control it. Books and papers are not deliverables, nor are discoveries. We at universities are not good at delivering things, companies do that. Contracts impede; they do not protect, but do consider NDAs so that we know what's going on and can help."

Nass sees the flow from university to business as the best way to make use of all this research and intellectual activity. There seems to be no other outlet for this privitization of IP, no mention of a common pool of knowledge many can draw from.

Nass runs the CHIMe Lab (commnication between humans and interactive media lab)   but the web site is being renovated. However, there's a link to an interview with Nass .

Byron Reeves, co-director Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute. His team is focused on 3D game environment like World of Warcraft.  He listed 12 things that make games work:
1. self representation
2. teams
3. economies
ranks and levels
feedback
transparency
narrative
rules
communications
assets
time pressure
places to explore.

He spoke about the first three. With self-representation you are IN the media. You have 9 extra heartbeats per minute when you are interacting. If you are told the avatar is a real person it becomes a more intense experience.

In teams leadership happens in minutes. The roles are often temporary. Risk-taking is encouraged. Information is everywhere and there is reinforcement in all time domains. He gave an example of the benefits a middle-aged woman said resulted from her game playing.

Synthetic currencies have the same effect as real ones. Reeves has made a synthetic currency and a mapping system to show the trading network within a group.  Later I asked Reeves if his research had changed his personal life. He replied that he liked to watch these interactions but the investment in time to build up strong characters was too great for him, though one of his students had hundreds of hours invested in a number of avatars.

Laura Carstensen, Stanford Center on Longevity. She wants to transform the culture of human aging and improve the quality of life for all ages, since many health problems begin early in life. She spoke about how technology had improved physical systems. Economists fear that old societies will break the bank. Stanford does not want to think about how to cope with frail populations but how to get everyone ready for healthy seniors.

Leroy Hendricks. Learning technologies for the digital generation
The new educational tools are authentic learning situations through task simulation. She showed a surgical team working together, except the patient was a manikin. They found that non-VR trained medical residents were five times more likely to injure the gall bladder in an operation or burn non-target tissue.

Stuart Gannes. Digital Vision Program showed BookBox, a program in India using same language subtitling to teach reading. Gannes claimed that 'in a few years every child in the world would have a cell phone.'

Brigid Barron, School of Education, is studying collaboration. Her breakout session featured more details of her research into collaborators good and bad experiences than she was able to cover in her short presentation. This has relevance for my work, and I spoke with one person from Steelcase who has software for engineers working together, and the head of the Oracle Education Foundation. We compared challenges of getting different groups to work together.

Daniel Schwartz from the AAA lab spoke about teachable agents where students learned tasks better when they had to teach a computer agent to answer questions about the task.

Ward Hanson. Institute for Economic Policy Research, spoke about the changing demographics of the next billion Internet users. New users from North America and Europe are few as the growth curve flattens, so the new ones will be the elite from emerging economies. He noted that Americans spend a very small amount of money for going online but 10% of their leisure time is spent there. Addressing the business community he said we will have to be culturally sensitive to the new users. (Witness the problems of YouTube in Thailand as one example.)

Ken Salisbury's research focuses on human-centered robotics. He showed a number of short video of Stanford robots that could vacuum the room, feed a human, and even fetch a cold beer and serve it to a researcher (without checking his i.d.).


The conference wound up with longer talks by Eric Hauser of Swivel media who thinks we have seen the birth of the prosumer (producer-consumer) and that the customer has "unprecedented control." While he has worked with Second Life, he said it's about like AOL ten years ago. Shooting star that will burn out? Lots of growth but other platforms are coming. Then he showed an SL property done for Wells Fargo Bank. Stagecoach Island "fostered a community that is 99% fun and 1% financial education."

Julian Lighton from Cisco deals with emerging markets, and his talk reminded me of  the one his CEO gave at the Internet Society years ago. While they are in more than 100 countries, their focus is on large urban areas. He spoke of "lighting up" the cities where they concentrate their efforts and detailed some work in Azerbaijan. He noted, "we love benevolent despots. They make decisions quickly." He spoke glowingly of rfids all around Saudi Arabia to facilitate tracking vehicles and people.

At the end of the day I wondered how you might synthesize all the presentations into a single product. I guess it might be a robot taking part in using Second Life on a mobile phone while all the metrics are being charted by the different human grad students in the various Stanford labs.  Though this is a remote concept, I did feel that in a short time many of the presenters made a good case of why some of their very special research could make or has made a difference in the lives of technology users as well as the companies who are rolling out new products and services.

Media X conference, Day 1

Media X Conference, April 16-17, 2007

"Pretty soon your medical personnel will be crawling around inside your data sets."

For the past four years Stanford University has held a show-and-tell conference for partners and affiliates involved in new interactive applications. MediaX highlights research in biometrics, wireless network sensors, gaming, virtual economies with mechanisms for rewarding participants. They promise to include in the research conclusions "what has been awkward, difficult, or even disastrous." The presenters come from the schools of business, education, medical, and engineering.

I am approaching this as someone interested in where this may lead for our very affluent region (Silicon Valley) but also questioning how much relevance this has for people just getting their hands on commodity computers and relatively slow networks, people who hope the electricity works when they need to go online, and people without a lot of time or money to spend in front of a mobile phone, computer, or television screen. These sessions feature accomplished chefs preparing outstanding and innovative meals when some of my constituents are just waiting for the next sack of wheat, corn meal, or milk powder to be distributed in their village. Others ARE well fed already and might like to see what's on the menu for tomorrow.

Chuck House, director of Media X and highly decorated computer scientist, welcomes a crowd of 200 plus at the Stanford Alumni Center for a day and a half of presentations. There will be ten speakers on Monday and the 22 on Tuesday.  Media X wants to participate in the Web 2.0 world.   House says the challenge is to make technology transfer from the academic research environment to the business world with high profile models such as HP, Yahoo!, and Google in his mind.  Media X is interdisciplinary and seeks to help find unpublished work in progress and to connect faculty/students with industry contacts.   He asks, "How do you anticipate the unanticipated?" I'm wondering what, if any, will be the role of open source and sharing, rather than simply the academic lab to commercial product path.

Each speaker took about twenty minutes. During the whole afternoon about five questions were posed by the audience, but there were breakout rooms far from the conference hall (and break time refreshments) where you could discuss projects with some of the presenters. In spite of the one-way broadcast mode, I learned a lot and did not mind watching and listening for four hours.

*Robert Sutton gave a sort of inspirational talk on "treating your organization as an unfinished prototype."  After a year long ethnographic study of IDeo, the famous design firm, he is trying to bring design thinking to business theory. He mentioned that Yahoo has dozens of experiments going on at once because they have such a large user base, and if they change a web site they have a built-in control group. In one case they moved the search box from the left to the center of the screen, and the increased click-throughs brought in about $20 million extra in revenue. Sutton offered advice from Andy Grove, former head of Intel:

-act under temporary conviction as if it were a real conviction. Correct course very quickly. If you are depressed, you can't motivate your staff. So you have to keep your spirits up even though you well understand that you don't know what you're doing.-

If only Rumsfeld and his boss had heeded the second sentence...

*Sebastian Thrun runs the Stanford Racing Team. They won the DARPA grand challenge for robotic vehicles in 2005 when their car navigated 150 miles off road in the Mojave desert. Using the prize money and sponsorship from Google, Intel, VW this year's Passat is equipped with devices that can scan 360 degrees and has a GPS system with 5 cm of accuracy. Because this year's race will be in traffic (not just scrub and sagebrush), the VW has a databank of 11,000 car images so it can sense when a car is in front or in back. There is a 3D laser to sense other objects that are rendered, and maps to show the progress. The image to the left shows the VW after it has calculated it can pass one car and avoid another.  I immediately thought of the military applications, and indeed Thrun predicted a production military vehicle would be off the assembly line in 2015 and a car for the public in 2030. His dream is right out of Popular Science from the 1950's or GM's Futurama where the family travels in a bubble car chatting, playing cards, and watching TV. he added that you could do your email after pushing the "chauffeur" button.

B.J. Fogg of the Persuasive Technology lab thinks otherwise. "How email cheapens your life and 5 things you can do about it." He has a new book called "Mobile persuasion" about the future behavior attributed to cell phones.  As for email, he believes the  more you use it to manage your closest relationships, the worse those relationships become. For distant contacts it's okay but not for close friends and family.

People far away can be brought closer, but those close to us drift away. Our happiness is dependent on our closest relationships not those far away.

The solution:
1. Focus on the most important relationships.
2. Share your emotions.
3. Know details about someone else.
4. Give gifts with shared meaning.
5. Use email for just those things where you have to use it.

His own enterprise www.yackpack.net   and pbwiki.com
allow you to connect with friends using voice messages and recordings. His demo found most of his close friends online (perhaps waiting for this particular demo), and I thought that was fine if you are in the same time zone and connected at home but not for many other situations. Still, it looked like it might serve some of my needs at work.

Paul Saffo, on sabbatical from the Institute for the Future does a great delivery, but his material was not very fresh. However, since he looks ahead so many years, many in the audience had not heard or read it before.  He thinks the so-called information revolution is over: "when it goes deep and ubiquitous it becomes meaningless."  He explained the main trends since WWII and reminded us that it takes about 20 years for a technology S curve to peak. He is attuned to what doctors called prodomes: indicators or whistles in the Zeitgeist of things that are coming.  He thinks that robots are the next big thing. And he closed with the advice to pay attention to how you feel about change.

Qwaq.  This is a private virtual space with editing and spatially placed voices in the virtual business offices. Real time collaboration is possible, and you  can do markups in shared spaces importing documents from Open Office or proprietary formats. This young business is built on Croquet--which uses Squeak--and is part of an open source consortium. At the end of March 2007 they released the software toolkit <http://croquetconsortium.org >.   Greg Nuyens, CEO, mentioned workers in Tajikistan and Nigeria making use of this, and I asked how it worked in low bandwidth situations. During the breakout XX explained that you need about 60 kbps to move the messages, but most of the work is done in the 3D software on your machine. As for what machines work he said that almost anything less than two years old would be good, and more recently laptop makers prepared for this by including fast video cards because MS Vista had some 3D requirements. My two year old Power PC Mac might not work well he said.

Scott Burns, Director of "an inconvenient truth" spoke about converting Gore's long slide show into a feature film and the process they used to shape it. I still don't understand why they focused more on Gore and what kind of guy he is now rather than the topic at hand. Bringing in his family crises might be appropriate for the campaign trail but not a movie like this.

"Unleash your inner video producer"  Dave Toole and J.D. Lasica (author of Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation) run Ourmedia.org  ("It's your Internet") to encourage people to make their own videos using original material or combinations from different sources. They now have 130,000 users but seem to feel they are in the shadow of YouTube--along with the 360 other video hosting sites around the world.  Their talk encourages sharing, and they are trying to build a community based on open source. They are looking for sponsors to build up the online learning center, and I pointed them to Video Volunteers and should also mention Pixel Corps.

Roy Pea, Stanford Center for Innovation in Learning spoke about 'video conversations' --not recordings of conversations but the discussions about videos which could yield more content than the video. He demoed Diver, a tool that can point to and annotate video, much like footnotes in a text document.

House introduced the 3D visualization talk by Paul Brown of the medical school: "If you have not experienced Second Life next year we won't let you in," he joked.  Brown gave credit to a commercial company called Fovia as he showed the kinds of fly throughs of high resolution models of anatomy. I never knew how complex my teeth are, and now I understand why root canals are so much fun--and so expensive. Brown showed how you can explore a skull, look inside it, or just roam around the teeth.  He remarked,

"Pretty soon your medical personnel will be crawling around inside your data sets." And he showed real time rendering of live patients as well as Sherit, a little girl who had been dead for thousands of year: a mummy from San Jose's Rosicrucian museum. In one minute the device took 490 images and then later it was taken apart using VR methods. Quite an amazing visual impact.

The final speaker was a fellow I knew at Apple, Eric Hoffert who was the principal architect of Apple's QuickTime. He's had several companies since then, and today he showed ShareMethods to encourage "teams that play together." First he went though public tools like wikipedia and Flickr. While ShareNow is a commercial service it is open source and serves as a sales and marketing portal. What was most impressive was the claimed adoption rate by the the employees (who may not have had any say in choosing the system introduced by the IT department).  I need to find out more about it.