On Order from Chaos and Purpose from Principle: Holovaty, Victor and Connections

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 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 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 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, he guides a leaf to swirl and fall, no keyframing required (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 is 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.

…and 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.

Yes.

—J.A Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

••••••••••••

RELATED

• Ex-Apple Deisgner Creates Teaching UI That “Kills Math” using Data Viz / John Pavlus / Fast Company
  

• Refresh Meetup / Chicago (big shout out for hosting Holovaty’s talk, sparking this whole virtuous circle of thought)

• The Information Diet: You Are What You Read…Really (so read this) / J.A. Ginsburg / TrackerNews Dot to Dot

(Source: principle)

Libraries on the Digital Edge: NYPL Labs, eBook Wars & “Friendly Fire”

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. 

—Matt Knutzen, geospatial librarian

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?

—Joshua Heineman

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.

LESS IS LESS

By contrast, some publishers, notably Penguin, are severely restricting sales of ebooks to libraries, casting public libraries as a Napster-ish villain threatening to undermine their business model. Nevermind that lending content has always been the library’s raison d’etre. The lightening fast transfer of electrons makes them nervous.

“Please don’t let the library patron be the victim of friendly fire in the ebook wars,” pleaded Library Journal’s Barbara Genco at the recent Tools of Change conference in New York.

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. 

Let’s not kill the giant.

— J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

The Information Diet: You Are What You Read…Really (so read this)

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…

RELATED:

• The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser / book website

• The Shallows by Nicholas Carr / book website

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

Baby Clothes, Sharing, Paradigm Shifts & Collaborative Consumption (with addendum, 2/17/12)

(9/12: UPDATE. Great things have happened for Good Karma over the last six months, including a residency at the Excelerate Labs accelerator program and a reincarnation as Moxie Jean, an online consignment business.)

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? 

Botsman’s colleague, Lauren Anderson, recently went toe to toe with a somewhat skeptical Andrew Keen for TechCrunch, who wondered what will happen to people (such as himself) who don’t particularly care to share. How much of this is breathy hype? Although the numbers have grown dramatically for car-sharing over the last decade, for example, it remains a marginal player.

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.

— Tomasz Tunguz, MIT Entrepreneurship Review

Certainly a keystone for baby fashionistas…

ADDENDUM (2/17/12)

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.

The two-and-a-half year old Boulder, Colorado-based company just announced its first major donation: a half million condoms to Haiti distributed through Paul Farmer’s organization, Partners In Health. Renamed “KORE”—local slang for “I’ve got your back”—the packaging includes Haitian Kréyòl messaging and visual instructions.

“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.

Collaborative smarts.

RELATED:

• Collaborative Consumption Hub

• Collaborative Consumption Resources / Scoop.It! / Sharon Schneider

• Arlington Heights-based online baby clothes rental business takes off / Trib Local / Michelle Stoffel

• Common / collaborative brand and creative community for accelerating social change

• Common / Facebook page

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

The Age of 3D / Let’s Play!

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.

Consider Gyro the Cube:

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).

                                             ••••••••••••••••••••••••

For those preferring to own the means of production, MakerBot Industries just unveiled its latest gizmo at the Consumer Electronics Show:  The Replicator The Replicator. With a hat tip to one of Star Trek’s most magical imagine-ventions (now trademarked), the new printer offers three notable improvements over v.1:

• comes assembled
• can print in 2 colors
• can print bigger things

The Cube, also launched at CES, offers a Thingiverse / Shapeways / RepRap-style “community” for sharing 3D designs.

Let’s play!

RELATED:

And You Can Print That, Too…  / J. A. Ginsburg / TrackerNews: Dot to Dot

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

Cool. Even Cooler? What ELSE It Can Do: The Lessons of Robin Williams

At some point, my “smart phone” is going to morph into a just plain “smart”—its phone component having been demoted from the title for being its least interesting and least reliable feature (Hello A&TT…) 

It’s a camera! It’s a book! It’s a game! It’s a clock! It’s a map! It’s a translator! It’s just wonderful! 

One idea. Endless incarnations. 

Which is why it is so puzzling when an idea comes along with loads of potential, but a narrow, blinders-on focus. Case in point: Educreations. 

One of ten companies chosen by Silicon Valley edu-tech accelerator, Imagine K12, for its first “class,” Educreations has developed a whiteboard app for iPad that can also be accessed through web browsers. Designed to bring out teachers’ “inner Sal Khan,” it is super simple to create, save and share lessons—either to a select group or to the global classroom. You can upload photos and graphics, write using a rainbow of colors and record track as you go. Hours of fun. 

Yes, there are plenty of beta squiffs, but the “bones” are impressive. The developers’ vision is broad… 

from Edumemic / Erin Brown 

Roberts says he and co-founder, Chris Streeter, are aiming to create something like a YouTube for learning. “The overall quality of the lessons will continually improve as more teachers contribute and the data helps us identify which lessons are the most effective. Similar to the way Netflix and Amazon recommend movies and products you will like, our goal is to be able to recommend the lessons that will be most helpful to each student, whether those lessons were created by their teacher at school or by a teacher on the other side of the world.”

“We expect many teachers will develop massive followings, because they explain a complex topic in a fantastic way that just makes sense to students. We’ll know we’ve succeeded if a bunch of teachers on Educreations become internet sensations – because they’re that good, and the world can finally hear what they have to say.”

…though not nearly as broad as it might be. 

The emphasis is almost entirely on the educational market. And it is quite wonderful to learn about Fibonacci and The Skeletal System (Did you know babies have over 300 bones and adults just over 200? Or that some people pronouce “skeletal” as skel-ee-tal, with the emphasis on the middle syllable?)

Yet almost everyone could find a use for this, from humanitarian aid workers in the field to one Mr. Glorvigan, who made a Christmas card. This a powerful piece of communications software. And though not exactly video-editing, it makes up in ease (or at least it will once all the squiffs are fixed) for what it lacks in special effects grace. 

Education is just one application.

To see what the Educreations app could—and couldn’t—do, I created a “lesson.” Mine is more of a narrated slide show with a few whiteboard tricks. (It may take a little time to upload. If you don’t hear sound, refresh the blog page…) 

According to several edu-bloggers, the Educreations’ app beats the competition by a mile.

My votes for “please fix asap!”— beyond all the ones listed on the site’s feedback forum:

• Make it possible and re-record a section of audio. Currently, if you make an error, you have to erase the whole thing, images and all, and start again from scratch.
• Improve search. A random “showcase” of lessons appears on the browser-based website, but it is impossible to search beyond them, or to search at all via the iPad app. 

                                            •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Business models are keen on iteration: try, test, try again. Rarely, though, is the question raised: What else can the product /service do? How else can the product/ service be used?

So to inspire such thinking, here are two videos that rarely show up in business seminars: 

First, Robin Williams from the Actors’ Studio Interview (especially the part about the pink scarf, starting at 3:23)

Next, an animation of Tom Leher’s classic, New Math. The goal? An app good enough to launch “The Educreations Mashup Challenge”

Teachers: Rev up your iPads…

* Extra credit: The Elements (for extra extra credit, include all the elements discovered since the song was recorded) and The Derivatives songs 

— J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

And You Can Print That, Too…

There will come a day—very soon—when 3D printing won’t be amazing. It will be assumed. 

From body parts and tools, to jewelry, furniture, footwear and iPod covers, a vast array of printed things were on display recently at EuroMold, a manufacturing trade show in Frankfurt, Germany.

(Don’t be put off by the word “dentistry” in this video. By the time they get to the printed spine, your jaw will be on the floor—which isn’t a problem, because those can be printed, too. Click over to YouTube for more trade show videos)

Buoyed by the playful novelty of Makerbots and RepRaps, 3D printing (or “additive manufacturing” as those in the trade prefer to call it) is having a zeitgeist moment. Faster than you can say Moore’s Law, technical hurdles are vanishing, costs dropping and imagination soaring. With a bit of tweaking, almost anything can be turned into an “ink”: plastic, metal, silicon, cell. And almost anything can be made, with an astonishing level of customization simply not possible with more traditional methods such as injection molding or die casting. 

Exhibit A: a series of molds created using Geomagic software from 3D scans designed to reduce the cleft width of a baby born with a severe cleft lip and palate before surgery, without inhibiting upper-jaw growth. 

Additive manufacturing is more than a new way of making things. It is about making new things and better things. The Singularity of Stuff is here, with some of the most innovative designs inspired by Nature (or pilfered from Nature, if you’re a pro-SOPA sort…). Biomimicry is the 3D design muse, leading the way to products that are lighter, stronger and more durable, such as: 

• an artificial hip with an internal lattice structure so similar to bone, it binds to real bone better. 
• a load-bearing concrete column that mimics a plant stem, filled with vertical structures 
• hydraulic fluid that flows with significantly increased efficiency through artery-like channels in a gear box

from The Economist: 

…That ability to create light, strong structures which have complex internal shapes may well turn out to be additive manufacturing’s killer app. The layering of powders or droplets that are then sintered into solidity, or cured with heat or ultraviolet light, allows spaces to be left inside the product. And if such a space would otherwise collapse, it can be filled with a powder that remains intact during curing and is then washed out or blown away. Even moving parts, like clock mechanisms, have thus been made in one go in a 3D printer… (ed.: emphasis added) 

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Nature authors not forms, but processes to think about form. Recipes that mix materials and environment together. And it it due to those mixtures and these relationships that form emerges. 

—Neri Oxman

While the focus at EuroMold is squarely on the wow of the tangible, Oxman, who heads up the Mediated Matter research group at MIT’s Media Lab, looks at the implications for design and, by extension, for science and technology. She starts with analysis, meticulously studying materials, looking for multifuctionality (e.g. an egg shell provides strength while allowing for the exchange of oxygen and CO2). Form doesn’t follow function so much as function is allowed by form. 

The ramifications are significant. If, as Oxman proposes at the end of this Poptech talk from 2010, it is possible to “print” concrete forms that are lighter yet stronger, it would dramatically cut the greenhouse gas tally from construction. Better buildings. A more stable planet. Yes, let’s print that. 

—J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED: 

• It’s a 3-D World  / Sam Green / blog for Object, 3D printer manufacturer
• amerimold expo / June 2012 

* (3D electric light shoe pictured at the top of this post from Freedom of Creation)

LEDs, New Paradigms, Fashion Glow, Implications for Easy-Bake Baking & Reinventing Fire…

As any little girl who grew up making cake-oids and pretzel-ettes with an Easy-Bake Oven knows, light bulbs give off a lot of energy in the form of heat.* 

Which is why, in an bid to improve the nation’s energy efficiency, a law was passed five years ago phasing out 100 watt incandescent bulbs in the US, beginning January 1, 2012—although a Tea Party-backed rider to the spending bill prevents the government from enforcing the law for at least another few months. 

While the Tea Party talks freedom of choice, manufacturers and consumers have already chosen freedom of Choice. The lighting aisles in hardware stores have never been more dazzling. Bulbs of every shape, color, design and technology cram shelves, dangling equally dazzling price tags—some as much as 15 times the cost of an old-timey bulb. The savings, however, accrue over years of reduced energy bills and can tally thousands of dollars per household.  

Like a presidential primary, compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs), halogens and even spiffed up energy miser incandescents are angling for customers’ votes. But the clear front-runner is the LED, which not only is more versatile, durable and requires just 1/10 as much energy to run as a conventional bulb, but is also comparatively easy to recycle (no mercury, which is the dirty little secret of CFLs). 

Sales of LEDs have doubled for each of the last three years to reach 10% market share, according to Tom Soares, Philips director of consumer products in an interview with Bloomberg. Over the next three years, that number is expected rocket to 50%. “It’s really a paradigm shift. It’s thinking about the product as a durable good as opposed to a disposable good.”

If Edison were alive today, he would be leading the charge (pun serendipitous). The incandescent bulb has become a paradigm of the past, a symbol of yesterday’s bright ideas. 

Now, add greener, leaner, cheaper energy supplies and we may yet be able to save those ice sheets. 

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LEDs are also fashion forward. Why turn on a light when you can shine all by yourself? For inspiration, visit the endlessly fascinating website of Lynne Bruning, “creatrix of exclusive wearable art, eTextiles and adaptive technologies.” It’s full of links to Instructables videos, too. 

Here’s to a brilliant future….Happy New Year!

— J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

* Toymaker Hasbro (which bought Kenner, the original manufacturer) have adapted to the times. “No more light bulbs needed!” for the new Ulitmate Easy-Bake Oven. The cake-oids and pretzel-ettes just won’t be the same without that special incandescent glow…

RELATED: 

Reinventing Fire: Rocky Mountain Institute’s path to a smarter, better, cleaner, more abundant energy future: 

Innovation Squared

It is the genius of the obvious: applying the “Lean Launchpad” methodology of entrepreneurship to science-driven startups. 

It turns out there is not much difference between the scientific method (hypothesis / experiment / analysis / refine hypothesis / repeat) and the codified common sense business development strategy pioneered by serial entrepreneur and Stanford b-school legend Steve Blank (business hypothesis / field surveys / analysis / refine hypothesis). So why not put them together? 

Which is exactly what the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program has done in an effort to speed up the commercialization of promising technologies developed in university labs. The inaugural class of 21 teams from across the country gathered for the very first demo day last week in Palo Alto.

The results are impressive. Notes Errol Arkilic, the NSF program officer overseeing I-Corps, “Some of these teams have made more progress in understanding what their opportunity is and repositioning their effort in six weeks than projects we’ve supported for six months.”

Xconomy’s Wade Roush has been covering the project since it was announced last summer. Here are his thumbnails describing some of the proto-businesses: 

• TexCone (University of Virginia, Charlottesville: Laser-treated hydrophobic surfaces for reducing ice buildup on aircraft wings.
• Ion Express (UCLA): Cheaper, simpler ion channel screening test systems for pharmaceutical companies.
• BigData (George Washington University): Data mining for intelligence agencies and hedge-fund analysts.
• Carbon Cultures (University of Washington): Conversion of timber waste into “biochar” for soil amendment.
• Explosives Detection (University of Connecticut, Storrs): Nanocomposite materials that change their appearance under ultraviolet light when exposed to explosives.
• Fluid Synchrony (USC): Miniaturized, implantable drug infusion pumps for control of chronic pain.
• BiddingPal/iDecideFast (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Online tools based using psychological and decision science insights to help real-estate buyers and auction participants maximize their changes of submitting a winning bid.
• Ground Fluor Pharmaceuticals (University of Nebraska, Lincoln): A cheaper, simpler system for synthesizing the radiopharmaceutical agents injected into patients before PET scans.
• TOSCA (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute): “Terahertz on silicon chip arrays” for defense, aerospace, and security applications that require very fast on-chip processing.
• GlucoSentient (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Technology that tweaks existing glucose meters to test for other health indicators such as HbA1C, a marker of diabetes.
• Graphene Frontiers (University of Pennsylvania): A chemical vapor deposition method for growing sheets of carbon atoms on plastic or glass, for use as transparent conductors in solar panels, smart windows, or advanced displays.

Gracious. 

Even the losers—those teams that won’t go on to receive next stage NSF grants—are winners, emerging from the competition with tighter business models, better positioned to go after other funding. 

Although the “lean startup” mantra of continuous consumer research has its limits (Steve Jobs was famously allergic to focus groups, saying that consumers cannot imagine they need something that does not yet exist, e.g., an iPad), it works beautifully for innovations that focus on improvements to existing technologies or address specific, readily identifiable needs. 

Add Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation to the mix as an analytical litmus test, both to rate the odds for success and point to areas where business models can be strengthened, and NSF could find itself with a startup success rate the envy of every VC fund. 

Nerds rule!

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“Startups are not smaller visions of larger companies. Large companies execute known business modules. But startups search for them,” says Steve Blank. And to help startups better figure out how to find them, he offers a free online course through Stanford University called, “The Lean Launchpad.” The next class starts February 2012.

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(updated 3/26/12)

I-Corps Slideshare Presentations:

— J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

The Eyes Have It

Why follow the bouncing ball? Well, for starters, this particular ball may be following you. Designed by a team at the Technische Universität Berlin, the “Eye Ball”—as the clever editors at MITs Technology Review dubbed it—is tricked out with three dozen synchronized cell phone cameras, each snapping a single two-megapixel image coordinated by a sensor, which triggers when the ball is tossed in the air. The collective image, stitched together by computer, reveals the ultimate in panoramic views: 360 degrees spherical. Take that Google Street View… 

Actually, this could be Google Street View 2.0. Somewhere between the Wow! and the vertigo is an innovation in search of a purpose and developers eager to license the technology. 

Beyond Street View and other snoopy surveillance / reconnaissance applications, how could the Eye Ball be used? Any ideas? 

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Not since the Cambrian explosion over a half billion years ago have eyes—this time in the form of cameras—triggered such a race to see-and-be-seen. 

From Instagram to Gigapan, not only are we shooting more, but sharing more, too. (Carnegie Mellon’s Gigapan project seems to have lost a bit of steam of over the last year, but the site is still a delight.)

It is no surprise that the olloclip, a clip-on suite of lenses for iPhone 4s, was one of Kickstarter’s big success stories, raising more than 450% of its modest $15,000 fundraising goal in two months. 

Kogeto, which raised $120,000 through Kickstarter and now is lining up $3 million in series A funding, offers a iPhone (and soon Android) lens attachment for shooting panoramic videos. 

In a sense, this is biomimicry on a cultural level. “Eyes,” notes biologist Richard Dawkins, “evolve at the drop of hat.” And in this fascinating lecture from the 1991 Royal Institution series, Growing Up In the Universe, he brilliantly explains how: 

 — J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED: 

News from the… / J.A. Ginsburg