Biochar (a.k.a. “char,” “agrichar”) is charcoal made from plant waste burned in a low oxygen kiln called a pyrolizer. It really truly is a better answer: a rare “two-fer” that improves soil fertility while absorbing CO2.
Jason Aramburu is the founder of a small company called re:char that has focused most of its efforts on small-plot farmers in Kenya. His team has prototyped a manufacturing facility in a shipping container and developed a “home-brew” pyrolizer, dubbed a Climate Kiln, sold in the US through its website,
Even at this modest scale, results are impressive. According to Aramburu, Kenyan farmers have seen their crop yields double.
We want to find out how well biochar can work in domestic gardening and small-scale farming. We seek growers of all sizes (potted plants up to small farmers) and all skill levels to test out Black Revolution on their crops and report back to us. By backing our campaign, you will become part of the biggest trial in the US to evaluate the effectiveness of biochar for domestic farmers and gardeners. We will ask backers to measure the height and yield of their plants at multiple points for publication into a comprehensive study. We will also determine how much carbon we have all offset through the use of Black Revolution. All backers will receive results of the study upon completion and name recognition in the full-length draft of the study.
Depending on your desired level of participation and pledge, you will receive a corresponding supply of Black Revolution (see rewards for details) along with planting instructions and support during the study. You will receive your bag in time for the fall season of planting. A limited number of rush bags are available for spring and summer planting. We expect to publish the results of our study by January 1st 2013.
Although fall planting is a bit hit and miss here in Chicago, who knows? Given the recent streak of 80 degree days this past March, perhaps we have shifted into milder Mediterranean mode.
However I can help, I am excited to be a part of this. Biochar is one of the few bright spots on the climate horizon—one that could actually help turn the tide.
Straight biochar can be a little tricky for the novice to use, so Black Revolution is a blend of biochar, nutrients and sustainably harvested coconut husks. Compared to conventional growing media, which is made from composted factory farm manure, Bornean peat moss and Kenyan vermiculite, it has a better carbon footprint right out the bag (the recycled burlap coffee bean bag). According to Aramburu, each bag contains enough carbon negative goodness to offset emissions from 60+ miles of driving.
There’s more! Biochar creates a matrix for soil microbes, so soil gets better and better over time. And, unlike chemical fertilizers, there is no run-off problem. The goodness continues downstream where giant algal blooms are not triggered and massive hypoxic “dead zones” are not created. Indeed, biochar may be a fish’s best friend.
•••••••••
URBS IN HORTO: THE CITY IN A GARDEN’S GARDENERS
LaManda Joy has also found inspiration in the past.
During World War II, Chicago led the nation in the Victory Garden movement. This was a shock to almost everyone in the country because not only was Chicago the second largest urban area in the nation, but 90% of its citizens had never gardened before.
Of course, Chicago has always been a foodie city, so maybe it shouldn’t have been a complete surprise…
In any case, over the last couple of years, Joy has become a Pied Piper of urban gardening, spearheading The Peterson Garden Project, which includes the largest community garden in the city along with several neighborhood “pop up Victory Gardens.” Let there be lettuce!
Of course, I also said that below zero temps and window-high snows kept the riffraff from California at bay and that if the best thing you could say about a place was that the weather was good, run.
But now, after a week of record shattering pleasant weather (we no longer merely break records), watching the winter-that-never-was skip past spring and move straight to summer, suspicions nag that this can’t be good. Will June be August? With no snow pack and spotty rain, are we headed for a drought? What will this do to the Great (and I do mean great) Lakes?
While the birds are in full competitive song, daffodils daffing and forsythia sything, tens of thousands of street pot holes are not being born, a generation blighted by the lack of freeze/thaw cycle.
So as I trade in my snow boots for Birkenstocks, grab some sun-block cream and head to the beach, it is with a certain “enjoy it while it lasts” trepidation. Although the skies above my head are blue and the air soft and fragrant, record shattering tornadoes fueled by the same record shattering heat have torn up more than a dozen states, chewing up land, annihilating whole towns and irreversibly changing the course of survivors’ lives.
A few weeks ago, a group of insurance industry representatives gave a few members of Congress who were willing to listen an earful:
“From our industry’s perspective, the footprints of climate change are around us and the trend of increasing damage to property and threat to lives is clear,” said Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. “We need a national policy related to climate and weather.”
Property and casualty insurers in the United States experienced an estimated $44 billion in losses last year when hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes and other natural disasters were more severe, longer, more frequent and less predictable than in the past.
According to Swiss Re, the average weather-related insurance industry loss in the U.S. was about $3 billion a year in the 1980s compared to approximately $20 billion annually by the end of the past decade.
“As a member of the global insurance industry, we have witnessed the increased impact of weather-related events on our industry and around the world,” said Mark Way, head of Swiss Re’s sustainability and climate change activities in the Americas. “A warming climate will only add to this trend of increasing losses, which is why action is needed now.”
The average cost of weather-related insurance pay-outs is up seven-fold in the US?! Even for those who don’t “believe” in climate change (honestly, this is not a matter of faith but fact), insurance bills never lie.
According to phenologists, those tireless, mostly volunteer record-keepers of daily change who meticulously chart the annual emergence of plants, migrations of animals and other seasonal markers, 2012’s headline-grabbing weather fits neatly into long range trends.
We are seeing strong trends almost wherever we look. In the last decade, we’re actually now starting to be able to say OK, well, we see patterns of plants and animals coming earlier. And we have better and better climatological records, temperature records, and we can start to link those together. And there’s a paper coming out it seems every week now that’s saying OK, here’s a trend in bees coming out 10 days earlier over the last 130 years, and we can attribute that to warming temperatures.
As worthy and wonderful as it no doubt will be, it seems like a missed opportunity not to have had at least a mini-ECO conference overlapping the Interactive party.
Imagine if the critical mass of digitally adept entrepreneurial thinkers had actually been presented with a worthy challenge, rather than left to literally twiddle thumbs keeping creepy tabs on alleged “friends” because it’s fun (yes, looking at you Highlight).
Instead of “situational awareness” of the stalker kind, we actually need Situational Awareness writ large to help navigate a dangerously shifted and still shifting climate. This is about food supplies, water resources, migrations of man, beast, plant and microbe. This is about the future.
Clean energy, carbon footprints and conservation, yes, but also sturdier materials (see Neri Oxman’s video at the end of this post: “And You Can Print That, Too”), savvier supply chain logistics and speedier humanitarian response.
If problems present opportunities, techies, this is your moment to shine.
Over at the UN, the Global Pulsegroup is mining data for early signals to slow crises—humanitarian disasters that can take years to make the news. “Finding out today what was happening two years ago is an exercise in history,” noted GP’s director Robert Kirkpatrick, in an presentation at O’Reilly’s Strata Conference last year. “There must be a better way.”
At this point we are talking about triage: how to keep bad from getting worse. But the real goal is resilience.
As I sit here looking out my screened window at a specular June day in mid-March, smelling the fresh scent of new growth, reveling in the haze of maple tree blossoms and red buds a’bursting, it is hard to believe that this isn’t the way things are meant to be.The birds and bugs and bulbs seem to be adapting just fine. Whether the rest of us can catch up is anybody’s guess.
When it comes to innovation, nothing beats microbes. Naturally agile, they iterate early and often and can pivot in a flash. And when you put them in milk, they can make cheese. Can any of the fancy apps being swooned over at this week at the SxSW conference do anything nearly as useful? Or tasty? Not even close…
By contrast, even the last place finisher at the recent biennial World Championship Cheese Contest in Madison, Wisconsin, was a winner. All told, there were more than 2,500 entrants (including dozens of butters) from two dozen countries, split among 82 categories (who knew?), weighing in at a collective 50,000 pounds.
Equally as stunning: a small industry competition that began 55 years ago in a butter cooler up in Green Bay has morphed into live-streamed, twittery sensation and the hottest ticket in town. Four hundred spectators at $25 each, packed a conference center ballroom to witness of the crowning of a grand champion (the upset victor, a low-fat gouda from the Netherlands). Toothpicks and crackers in hand, we grazed tables laden with dozens upon dozens of samples, neatly arranged by country. It was a United Nations of cheese, endless variations on a common theme.
Organizers say they see no reason the event can’t be even bigger in 2014 and hit 3,000 entries by 2016.
“I’m really flabbergasted. Cheese didn’t use to bring crowds like this,” said John Umhoefer, executive director of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association, which organizes the event. “I’m speechless. I think we could have sold 200 more tickets.”
Think bigger, John. If they can make television series about cupcakes and frosting, surely there is a future for competitive cheese on the Food Network.
The staging has all the requisite dramatic flourishes: the ritual formality of Westminster and the hushed play by play commentary of a high-brow sports event. The judges, outfitted in white lab coats and baseball caps, gather around as a core is expertly extracted from a wheel of cheese. It is passed around, sniffed, then sliced for tasting. Notes are jotted. Suspense builds. And in the background, a tiara’ed “Alice in Dairyland” fields media interviews.
The real stars of the show, of course, are too small to be seen: the clever microbial cultures that have trained countless cheesemakers over millennia to do whatever necessary to turn milk into their versions of paradise. It takes a remarkable combination of artisanship, can-do ingenuity, luck and patience to get it just right.
Cheesemaking, it turns out, starts long before the cow, goat, sheep or horse is milked. Everything from the amount of rain to the variety of forage affects the taste of milk and thus cheese. No one knows how this year of no winter will affect things—good or bad—but it is bound to have some sort of impact. Cheese is the original “slow food,” sometimes taking years to reach perfection.
Traditionally, cheese innovation focused on developing better cultures, creating more stable aging environments (e.g., temperature and humidity controlled man-made caves) and improving shelf-life. In the last ten years, the internet has had the biggest impact, exploding distribution. Small specialty shops have set up digital storefronts (be still my heart Fromagination…), while artisanal manufacturers, perhaps too small to interest big food distributors, can now reach chefs directly, picking up sales that otherwise would have been missed.
Back at SxSW, a slew of what’s been dubbed “stalker apps” have taken the spotlight this year, vying for Twitterish faery dust to catapult their developers to fame and cyber-fortune.
The hook: personal situational awareness, a social network-driven way to figure out who’s in the room and whether there is anyone worth meeting. Leading the pack, an app from San Francisco-based start up, Math Camp, Inc:
Highlight is a fun, simple way to learn more about the people around you.
If someone standing near you also has Highlight, their profile will show up on your phone. You can see their name, photos of them, mutual friends, and anything else they have chosen to share. When you meet someone, Highlight helps you see what you have in common with them. And when you forget their name at a party a week later, Highlight can help you remember it.
As you go about your day, Highlight runs quietly in the background, surfacing information about the people around you. If your friends are nearby, it will notify you. If someone interesting crosses your path, it will tell you more about them.
Highlight gives you a sixth sense about the world around you, showing you hidden connections and making your day more fun.
Highlight is available for free in the iPhone App Store.
* emphasis added
An alternative? Put the phone down. Bring out the good cheese. Be bold and strike up a conversation with strangers, bonding over artisanal bounty.
On the first day of the annual TED conference last week, environmentalist Paul Gilding and X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis squared off on our species’ prospects. It was a pairing of a decidedly gloomy bad cop (Resources depleted!) and irrespressibly cheerful good cop (We can tech our way to abundance!).
I really do admire Diamandis’ optimism. The technologies he talks about are stunning. Yet I found myself wondering: Abundance for whom? Diamandis uses a very species-specific metric. Humans are thriving: there are more of them than ever and, taken as an aggregate, living longer, healthier, more prosperous lives. So far, so Hans Rosling.
Diamandis blames the media for putting us all in a bad mood with nonstop “if it bleeds, it leads” news. The implication: attitude counts. And it does. But there actually are a lot of bad things happening. Those stories are true.
The reality is not so black and white. One can be deeply troubled by world events and inspired by the promise of technology at the same time. What one cannot do is brush away the reality of abundant loss: of species, habitats, biodiversity, clean air and non-record breaking weather.
By the time a clear connection can be proved between specific weather events and climate, it will be too late, though evidence is certainly mounting:
Record temperatures (hotter for the planet as a whole, though unevenly distributed —see Europe’s winter 2012).
Diamandis talks a lot about “humanity’s Grand Challenges.” The X Prize Foundation has tackled some genuinely awe-inspiring projects, spearheading advances in everything from commercial space travel to a tricorder-style medical diagnostic devices.
But there are some other kinds of equally Grand Challenges—a little less sparkly and sci-fi cool—that could also benefit from a little more tech.
Exhibit A: The khapra beetle, an itty bitty omnivore munching its merry way through the world’s breadbaskets at an increasingly alarming rate, with implications for humans and pretty much any other species that likes to eat.
or…
Exhibit B: The pine bark beetle which has destroyed 6 billion-with-a-b trees over the last 15 years, just in North America, turning what were once carbon sinks into net carbon emitters (dead trees don’t absorb atmospheric carbon and burn easily).
Without tackling the khapra beetle, there is no point developing more productive, or flood and drought tolerant crops. That is, unless, of course, the point is to address beetle hunger.
Likewise, protecting trees from pine bark beetles would be considerably more effective for slowing carbon emissions than pricey and iffy terraforming schemes, such as seeding iron filings in (increasingly acidic) oceans.
Don’t get me started on what’s ailing the bees and what a game-changer that’s shaping up to be…
We need Diamandis’ enthusiasm and evangelist’s talent for sparking imagination. But the vision and metrics must be broader and deeper. Slick charts illustrating a trajectory of human prosperity driven by Moore’s Law dazzle and mislead. The subtext is that we are a path to a kind of tech-enabled perfection: the Singularity.
The vision is inspiring, but could be so much more if it were…grander, set in the context of Earth’s Grand Challenges
We are part of a whole that is being ripped apart at the seams. It is our past, our future, our hope.
SpotHero has, indeed, become my hero. The Expedia of local parking—pre-selling parking lot spaces, often at a discount—has made Chicago a little more do-able in the aftermath of the now fomer Mayor Daley’s parking privitization fiasco.
Bargains can be especially good in the evening. And there is something slightly “treasure hunt” about it, too. Once you purchase a space (payment via Amazon, which is one-click easy and secure), you print out a map with directions that thoughtfully include details such as “the entrance will be on the right” (even though the street number suggests the left) and “just before Miller’s Pub.”
It turns out there is an unexpectedly fascinating labyrinth of parking beneath Chicago’s streets. What the Palmer House underground garage, for example, may lack in user-friendly design (some really tight turns on the way down—iffy for an SUV), it makes up for in architectural detail (not the pretty kind, but the kind where you get to see the roots of a building) and Downton Abbey vibe. Two floors up and you find yourself in the Palmer’s “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” lobby, surrounded by glorious ceiling frescos and Tiffany statues, strolling on whimsical Paisley carpeting. It is enough to make you forget where you were going.
Liberace was the resident pianist here until 1947—a startling stray fact and a reminder of an era, sadly bygone, when parking wasn’t quite such a problem.
••••••
It certainly is a problem now. Sitting in the sold-out Chase Auditorium (of “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” fame), listening to entrepreneurs give it their all the other night at a Technori Pitch, it occurred to me that the City could have used the services of start up It’s Agreed—which provides online contracts designed to simplify and organize agreements—when it negotiated that gobsmackingly bad parking deal.
Instead, taxpayers—and their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren—are saddled with a contract literally hundreds of pages long, and so badly written, the City is on the hook for millions of dollars worth of parking meter fees waived for the disabled, along with revenue lost when streets are closed for repair, movie shoots or neighborhood festivals.
Should anyone be surprised that the city’s street parking sell off continues to look worse and worse?
Here’s a hint: the answer is no.
In a certain place and time—Chicago City Hall, 2008—a billion bucks may have seemed like a lot of dough for a few thousand antiquated parking meters.
The $1.5 billion Chicago received upfront for the 75-year deal (and has now spent) is, by some accounts, just a tenth of the revenue the meters will generate—even less if meter rates continue to skyrocket. Adding insult to injury, not only is the revenue lost to the Chicago, but a good chunk is departing the country, finding its way into the coffers of the government of Abu Dhabi.
This means that billions of dollars that might have been spent to shore up and expand the metro area’s public transportation system, providing an affordable, safe, considerably less expensive and greener alternative, have been syphoned off.
And that impacts Chicago’s competiveness.
Over the last few months, nervous speculators have been driving oil prices to record levels, with the spector of $6 per gallon gasoline by summer. Good public transportion could easily become the key differentiator that shifts the value balance of one city over another—no tax incentives required. The (lean) bottom line: Companies need employees that can afford to commute.
On the bright side, should gas prices go that high, fewer people will be able to afford to drive, leaving lots of privatized parking spaces empty—a sort of Don’t Occupy movement for cars.
Now, juat add a carpooling service. For example, Zimride, a San Francisco-based start up that that just closed a $6 million funding round last fall. Like SpotHero, Zimride brokers unusued inventory—in this case, the seats in a car—adding a social network spin to the deal. Although to date primarily operating in colleage towns, they have, by their accounting, helped users travel over 100 million miles.
So more people filling more seats in fewer cars, enjoying mutual savings, and finding bargain parking spots.
Great public transportation is the best answer, but this could be, at least, a better one.
I am not a geek. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know what geeks are thinking, even if I can’t quite follow along on all the details. Programmers—as political consultant-turned-author Clay Johnson points out—are the new scribes. Quite literally, they give shape to content, define form that defines function and create tools that can reveal or obscure.
If I have any special talent, it is a curiosity and willingness to walk through doors where, superficially at least, I have no business. Sitting in a room full of programmers fueled on Groupon-sponsored pizza, pop and tiny packets of hermetically sealed Skittles—as I did the other night—listening to a talk by EveryBlock founder, Adrian Holovaty, qualifies.
Holovaty’s passion is in liberating useful data from unruly copy. With “just the facts, ma’am” focus, he teases information order from narrative chaos. And he is brilliant at it. Cell by database cell, details collect over time, providing all sorts of often startling insights in the aggregate, from crime patterns to the arc of a war. There is a spare truth poetry in data structure, the bare bones of news.
Yet it was s flick to a talk by another programmer, Bret Victor, about “Inventing on Principle” that proved the richest data nugget of the evening. “Watch this when you get home,” Holovaty urged, pointing to a slide with screen grab of a video.
So I did.
The video, shot in the dim glaring light of a hotel ballroom, lacks even the barest hint of the warm, slick production values typical of a TED talk—and at nearly an hour, clocks in at three times the length—yet the brilliance shines through.
Victor, clearly a hero, if not a legend, among the programming crowd, was news to me. His lecture, given at the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC) last January, transcends programming. It is about ideas, creativity, purpose, ethics, guiding principles and making a difference.
In short, it is for all of us.
Ideas are very important to me. I think that bringing ideas into the world is one of the most important thing that people do. And I think great ideas—in the form of great art, stories, inventions, scientific theories—these things take on lives of their own, which give meaning to our lives… What sort of tools could a healthy environment for ideas grow?
…Creators need immediate connection to what they are creating. That’s my principle….There can’t be any delay and there can’t be anything hidden.
Victor dazzles his audience with a series of programming demos to prove his point. An image of a tree appears on a page next to its corresponding code. All the values—height of tree, number of leaves per branch, height of mountains, color of sky—are rigged to slide bars, allowing the programmer to see immediately the effects of changes. No more edit, compile, run, check…lather, rinse, repeat.
Playing around, he sees that adding and subtracting the number of blossoms on the tree creates a shimmery effect that could be used in animation.
How would I ever have discovered that if I had had to compile and run between every change? So much of art—so much of creation—is discovery. And you can’t discover anything if you can’t see what you’re doing. … So having this immediate connection allows ideas to surface, to develop in ways that would be impossible before.”
Victor next clicks open magnifying glass that shows how each line of code affects the image. Hold it over the image and, pixel by pixel, it highlights the corresponding line of code.
I can make these ideas as quickly as I think of them. And that is so important to the creative process, to be able to try ideas as you think of them. If there is any delay in that feedback loop between thinking of something and seeing it and building on it, then there is this whole world of ideas that will just never be. These are thoughts that we can’t think.
Then it is onto video games, animating a character’s bounce just so, so that he slides neatly into a little box.
So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to bounce off my turtle. Pause the game. And now hit this button here, which shows my guy’s trail. So now I can see where’s he’s been. And when I rewind, this trail in front of him is where he’s going to be. This is his future. When I change the code, I change his future. So I can find exactly the value I need. And when I hit “play,” he slips right in there.
Victor continues with an an animation demo on an iPad, where, with a gentle touch, Victor guides a leaf to swirl and fall, no keyframing required (and as one currently learning how to keyframe in Final Cut Express and pretty much hating every minute of it…I want this, please…).
This is all just the warm up.
Victor continues, first visualizing an algorithm as it was coded…
The people that we consider skilled software engineers are just those people who are really good at playing computer… But for writing our code on a computer why are we simulating what a computer would do in our head? Why doesn’t the computer just do it and show us?
That’s what it might be like to write an algorithm without a blindfold on.
…then a completely new way to map out an electrical circuit.
Two golden rules of information design: show the data and show comparisons.
There’s nothing hidden. There’s nothing to simulate in your head. So what we have here is a different way of representing a circuit… Instead of being made out of little squiggly symbols, it’s made out of data. And I think it’s important to ask: Why do we have these little squiggly symbols in the first place? Why do they exist? They exist because they’re easy to draw on pencil on paper. This is not paper. So when you have a new medium, you have to rethink these things. You have to think how can this new medium allow us more immediate connection to what we’re making. How can this new medium allow us to work in such a way so we can see what we’re doing? It’s really the same situation with programming.
…This principle—immediate connection—is not even about engineering. It’s about any type of creation.
The audience, completely enthralled, is now ready to hear Victor’s deeper message, one that resonates even for the code-phobic.
When I see ideas dying, it hurts. I see a tragedy. To me it feels like a moral wrong. It feels like an injustice. And if I think there is anything I can do about it, I feel it is my responsibility to do so. Not opportunity. But responsibility. Now this is just my thing. I am not asking you to believe in this the way that I do.
My point here is that these words that I’m using—injustice, responsibility, moral wrong—these aren’t the words we normally hear in a technical field. We do hear these words in association with social causes. So things like censorship, gender discrimination, environmental destruction, we all recognize these things as moral wrongs. Most of us wouldn’t witness a civil rights violation and say, “Oh good! An opportunity.” I hope not. Instead, we have been very fortunate to have had people throughout history, who recognize these social wrongs and saw it as their responsibility to address them.
.. As a technologist, you can recognize a wrong in the world. You can have a vision of a what a better world can be. And you can dedicate yourself to fighting for a principle. Social activists typically fight by organizing, but you can fight by inventing.
…So you can choose this life. Or maybe it will end up choosing you. It may not happen right away. It can take time to find a principle because finding a principle is essentially a form of self-discovery—that you’re trying to figure out what your life is supposed to be about, what you want to stand for as a person.
… And finally, if you choose to follow a principle, a principle can’t be any old thing you believe in. You’ll hear a lot of people say they want to make software easier to use. Or they want to delight their users. Or they want to make things simple. That’s a really big one right now. Everyone wants to make things simple. And those are nice thoughts and kind of give you a direction to go in, but they’re too vague to be directly actionable.
… I believe creators need powerful tools. It’s a nice thought. It didn’t really get me anywhere. My principle is that creators need this immediate connection. So I can watch you changing a line of code and I can ask, “Did you immediately see the effect of that change? And again, all those demos that I showed you came out of me doing that, of me following this principle and letting it lead me to exactly what I needed to do.
So if you’re guiding principle embodies a specific insight, it will guide you. And you’ll always know if what you’re doing is right.
There are many ways to live your life. That’s maybe the most important thing to realize in your life, that every aspect of your life is a choice. There are default choices: You can choose to sleepwalk through your life and accept the path that’s been laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don’t have to. If there is something in the world you feel is wrong, and you have a vision for what a better world would be, you can find your guiding principle. And you can fight for a cause.
So after this talk, I’d like you take a little time and think about what matters to you. What you believe in. And what you might fight for.
••••••••••••
For the last couple of days, I have done just that. I think my guiding principle has always been about the importance of connections: across disciplines, applications, interests, cultures, geography, need. Now, it will be that much more intentional.
Which means there is a lot of work to be done, a lifetime of doors to open.
Few things are quite as delicious as a serendipity day in New York City (even minus snagging a lottery ticket for “Book of Mormon.”Hasa Diga Eebowai…)
I had flown in for a conference, unexpectedly arriving just in time for the start of Social Media Week—an annual celebration of the power and joy of digital connection—which this year took place in a dozen cities, from Hong Kong to Paris…to New York.
And it is how I came to be at the incomparable New York Public Library one sunny afternoon, learning all about NYPL Labs. Think MIT Media Lab meets librarians on a mission and you will begin to have an idea if what’s going on. It turns out the stacks are rife with geeks.
The library’s vast and often quirky archives provide delicious fodder for creating free online tools that not only bring new functionality to collections, but also expand and redefine the library’s public. Anyone with a connection to the web can now be an NYPL patron.
“Patron”— that is how librarians refer to their customers and it sets the tone. Librarians are the original triple bottom line thinkers, measuring success in number of patrons served, ideas sparked and information shared. In the digital age, libraries are being re-imagined as information hubs and API platforms with profound and profoundly wonderful implications.
The NYPL panel highlighted three projects:
The Map Warper: a tool to harmonize and create new maps from the library’s collection of over 10,000 scanned historical maps
… (U)sers both inside and outside the Library can virtually stretch old maps onto a digital model of the world à la Google Maps or OpenStreetMap, thus creating a new copy that is not only aligned with spatial coordinates on the Earth, but normalized across the entire archive of old maps… All of this is done collaboratively, through the piecemeal efforts of staff, volunteers, and interns, a group of roughly 1,500 participants worldwide.
The implications are literally mind-boggling. Imagine, for example, using these maps to chart industrial development over time, then pairing them with epidemiological maps of cancer clusters. To use my friend Robert Kirkpatrick’s term, suddenly you could begin to piece together the picture of a “slow crisis” unfolding. Dots that couldn’t before be connected, now can.
What’s On the Menu: a semantically searchable database based on over 40,000 NY restaurant menus from the 1840s to the present.
The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world, used by historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts. Trouble is, the menus are very difficult to search for the greatest treasures they contain: specific information about dishes, prices, the organization of meals, and all the stories these things tell us about the history of food and culture.
To solve this, we’re working to improve the collection by transcribing the menus, dish by dish. Doing this will allow us to dramatically expand the ways in which the collection can be researched and accessed, opening the door to new kinds of discoveries. We’ve built a simple tool that makes the transcribing pretty easy to do, but it’s a big job, so we need your help.
As one librarian put it, “Imagine the historic Yelp.” Yum.
The Stereogranimator: a tool that turns historic stereographs (stereo photographs) into 3D images on the web
I am told this remarkable application is directly inspired by Reaching for the Out of Reach, my project which ultimately amounts to a 21st century raid of the New York Public Library’s archive of 19th century treasure. That is to say, my project was inspired by the library’s collection first. This kind of mutually beneficial relationship between archivist & user would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago. How did we get here?
How indeed. Each of the projects relies on volunteers—lots of volunteers—to be fully realized, bringing a whole new level of public participation to public libraries. These are literally tools created by the people, for the people.
Friction. This is a word we are hearing more and more and more. Today’s theme is “Fast / Forward / Change.” If you are a public librarian today, the excuse, or concern, that we hear every day about more friction. Slow it down. It’s too easy to borrow ebooks from libraries. To us, that means “Change / Slowly / At a Glacial Rate” And if I can return to my misspent youth, it translates into “Forward into the Past.” (Firesign Theater).
Not only is this approach wrong, it is wrong-headed. Genco, guns a’blazing with data, tore into publishers’ short-sighted policies.
The “power patron”—defined as someone who visits the library at least once a week—reads on average 26 books per year: 16 from the library and 10 purchased.
Drilling down a bit further, about a third of them use the library to discover new genres and writers. Thirty-seven percent purchase books they have previously borrowed. And a stunning 61% buy books by authors whose works they have previously borrowed. This is “discoverability” gold—more valuable than ever given the number of bookstore closures. Nothing beats roaming the shelves, or the “hand-selling” of a librarian or fellow patron’s recommendation.
It is hard to fathom why an author would want to sign on with a publisher determined to restrict access. It’s not even a matter of penny-wise, pound-foolish. It’s just foolish.
“The public library market is possibly one of the largest sleeping giants in the publishing industry today,” noted Genco.
If this is indeed the Information Age, then we are in big trouble. In a talk titled “Is SEO Killing America?” at last week’s Tools of Change digital publishing conference in New York, former political strategist, open source information advocate and author Clay Johnson compared the commodification of information (content farms) to the industrialization of agriculture—with similarly disturbing results.
Agriculture’s relationship to obesity has a lot to do with media’s relationship with ignorance.
From Fox News to the Huffington Post, editors are much less concerned with the actual content of content than they are whether it is what the readers want. It doesn’t take long for the tail-wags-dog-wags-tail-wags-dog spiral to get to the point where we all know too much about things Kardashian and not nearly enough about anything that actually matters. To use Johnson’ analogy from his new book, The Information Diet, we have grown fat and digitally diabetic dining on junk news. It turns out we are not only what we eat, but also what we info-consume.
Food companies want to provide you with the most profitable food possible that will keep you eating it—and the result is our supermarket aisles filled with unimaginable ways to construct and consume corn. Media companies want to provide you with the most profitable information possible that will keep you tuned in, and the result is airwaves filled with fear and affirmation. Those are the things that keep institutional shareholders that own these firms happy.
—The Information Diet
It is not a pretty picture. And, yes, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the insidious practice of using keywords to game search results, is driving this race to the inane. The only metric that counts is popularity. “The problem is no one is searching for the Pentagon Papers,” notes Johnson, “No one is searching for high quality investigative reporting.”
Instead, we have “The AOL Way,” where content is bait, journalists assembly line workers, readers “hits” and, says Johnson, “editorial integrity is market inefficiency.”
The intent of the AOL Way is to decrease the costs and increase the profitability of the company produces. According to the plan, each editor should use four factors to decide what to cover: traffic potential, revenue potential, turn-around time, and at the bottom of the list, editorial quality. All editorial content staff are expected to write between 5 and 10 stories per day, each with an average cost of $84, and a gross margin (from advertising) of 50%.
— The Information Diet
AOL is hardly alone in shredding the once sacred line between newsroom and advertising department, but its clarity of mission is breathtaking.
And that mission is made that much easier by machine learning: the holy grail of figuring out what a consumer wants, then making sure that’s all s/he gets, sucking any potential serendipity out of the system. The cacophony that begins with our clicks—our votes of interest—starts an echo chain from which there is no easy escape.
Even snarkier: profiling disguised as customization. Sex, age, political leanings, religion, nationality, ethnicity, income, reproductive state—all can be guessed from data. Retailer Target recently found itself in the embarrassing position of knowing about a teen’s pregnancy before her father. That level of granular-to-the-individual target marketing can quickly shift from helpful (that teen could probably use coupons for lotions and vitamins) to flat out frightening, leading to a kind of information apartheid: the filter bubble as filter wall, making it increasingly more difficult to find common ground.
When applied to news, it can lead to what Johnson calls “reality dysmorphia,” a mismatch between what we deeply believe is true and what is in fact truth, reinforced by:
agnotology: culturally induced doubt—a co-option of “innocent until proven guilty” used to great effect by Big Tobacco, Big Oil, climate-deniers, et al.
epistemic closure: e.g., A is bad. A thinks B is good. Therefore B is bad. End of discussion.
filter failures: e.g, the unseen hand of algorithmic tyranny editing your Facebook newsfeed
Instead of broadening our horizons, technology is being used to narrow them. Instead of the promise of a renaissance, we are heading straight for a dark ages.
So what’s the solution to this? I’m not here just to scare the heck out of you. That would be a job for FOX News or MSNBC. I’m here to ask you to help me to create a “whole news movement.” To make a “slow news movement.” To make a movement of high end consumers of information that demand that their media changes. We as the reader need to upgrade.
In Michael Pollan-esque haiku: “Consume deliberately. Take in information over affirmation.”
Which isn’t to say that a little junk news nibble every now and again is so bad. But if that’s all there is, well, we could have had it all…
There are plenty of inspired ideas swirling around, but only occasionally does one come across an idea that also charms. Good Karma, a new web-based subscription service for used baby clothes, manages to mix bargain-hunting and environmental responsibility with the irresistible adorable-ness of small-fry fashion. Really, what’s not to love?
The service, still in beta, offers “bundles” priced from $19.99 to $69.99 per month. Each includes seven freshly washed and inspected outfits, which can be returned in a postage pre-paid bag once outgrown. According to the website, babies typically burst through 6 or 7 sizes in a fleeting 24 months, so the clothes are useful for just a matter of weeks.
Subscriptions for “wardrobes”—options include either 21 or 28 outfits—top out at $97.99 per month, still just a small fraction of what the clothes would cost brand new.
Good Karma builds on—and dramatically expands—the time-honored tradition of passing along used but still usable baby clothes to family and friends. In fact, co-founder Sharon Schneider’s entrepreneurial epiphany came while packing up her 18 month-old daughter’s outgrown outfits to ship to a sister who had just had a baby.
Now, though, there is no need to actually have any baby clothes stashed away to share: Anyone can buy a gift subscription. In the 21st century, it doesn’t take a village to raise a child, but a network.
Good Karma is part of the growing trend of “collaborative consumption” (though in this case, serial consumption might be a more apt term), where value shifts from product to function, i.e., it’s not the drill you need, but the hole; it’s not the CD, but the music.
“Technology makes sharing frictionless and fun,” notes innovation strategist Rachel Botsman, who not only coined the term “collaborative consumption,” but also co-wrote a book explaining it.
“Reputational capital” is the grease that makes the system run. In an economy based on sharing, swapping and peer-to-peer (P2P) sales, it is the equivalent of a credit score. Every transaction leaves a digital trail, grading the participants: Were the goods delivered? Was payment made? Was the service worthwhile?
Yet despite Keen’s spot on curmudgeonous concerns, this grassroots, tech-enabled trend is fast becoming part of the mainstream mix.
… More interesting will be the incumbent retailers and manufacturers’ response to successful P2P markets. I wouldn’t be surprised to find automobile dealers offering their cars for rental on collaborative consumption market places. Or hotel chains acquiring apartments to rent them on P2P exchanges.
The ultimate beneficiaries of this competition and additional selection will be the consumer and the environment. Optimizing our resources will change the way we live. In 1900, 41% of the natural resources entering the US economy were recycled. Today, that figure is 13% [2]. Meanwhile, the US population has increased 357%. We simply cannot continue on this path.
One of the best ways to return to a sustainable way of life is to maximize asset use through collaborative consumption market places. By providing economic incentives to maximize efficiency, binding large communities to shared causes and decreasing total consumption, collaborative consumption will become a keystone of a sustainable American society.
Good Karma’s good karma was in full force the other night, winning a literal “sack of cash” (three thousand one dollar bills…) at Common Pitch, a competition for collaborative consumption start-ups, which was held in conjunction with Social Media Week—New York. The beer-buzzed hipster-heavy crowd at Brooklyn Bowl was as taken as the panel of judges with GK’s clever dovetailing of social goodness (e.g. sourcing clothes donated to school fundraising drives, re-purposing worn out clothes into bibs and quilts) and bargain-hunter’s bounty (saving parents over $1,000 on clothes over baby’s first two years). Virtuous circles rock.
Several entrants focused on monetizing access through P2P networks (bicycles via Spinlister, car-pooling via Zimride and wifi access via KeyWifi). Others, including WebThriftStore, Itemology and fashion site UNUM, riffed on developing marketplaces. And then there was Zoko, billed as a “Kickstarter for parties,” founded by a bunch of party-hearty Yalies for whom the collective good means a collective good time. Laissez les bons temps rouler…
Speaking of which, the evening also included a nod to Sir Richard’s, the Tom’s Shoes of condoms, offering a buy-one / give-one model designed to improve birth control access in the developing world. Beyond its “SNL” skit first impression, this is a clever melding of marketing and mission that could actually make a difference, both in terms of public health and preventing unwanted pregnancies.
“Within the last year, Partners In Health has treated more than 6,300 HIV-positive patients in Haiti. Reinforcing the importance of condom use and ensuring that condoms are available and accessible is key in our battle against the spread of HIV/AIDS. PIH is deeply grateful for Sir Richard’s partnership in this mission,“ said Christopher Hamon, Haiti Procurement Coordinator for Partners In Health…
…According to data released by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Haiti has seen a spike in pregnancies following the 2009 earthquake. In the study, conducted in July 2010 of 2391 women in 120 camps, almost 12 percent reported being pregnant. Unfortunately, two thirds of the pregnancies were unwanted.
3D printing just gets better, cheaper and funner. Whether it spreads as fast as tablet tech remains to be seen (JP Morgan predicts over 46 million iPads to ship in 2012 and close to 100 million tablet devices over all). But clearly, this is the Next Big Everybody-Wants-One Thing.
I certainly want one. Or access to one. Enter NY-based start-up Shapeways, a kind of Kinko’s-meets-Etsy mash-up of 3D services and sales. Whether you submit a design to be printed—in plastic, metal or ceramic—or adapt an existing design (create your own sake set!) or buy something ready-made through the online store, this site is a rabbit hole of endless mind-blowing possibilities.
It is not only the objects themselves that fascinate, but also the fact that many of them really couldn’t have been manufactured any other way.
You don’t have to be terribly techie to play, either. For those who need a bit of guidance, you might be able to find a class through Skillshare, a service that connects people who teach just about anything with those who want to learn (although this class is in New York, Skillshare operates in dozens of cities).
from innovation to market: a miscellaneum of stray facts, useful insights, inspiring ideas, sobering realities r••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
The TrackerNews Project / J.A. Ginsburg, editor
