Russell Davies

lowering the point point

Charles Arthur writes about Gowalla and Foursquare here; basically deciding they're pointless. You'd have thought that post blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter etc people would pause for thought before deciding things had no point. But he's a smart man so it's worth examining why he'd say that, especially as a lot of other smart people (and me) do find them pointful enough to play with.

I suspect one aspect of this is the way web and mobile stuff lowers so many barriers. It's lowered the cost, effort and skills required to build tools, express yourself, connect to people etc etc. All that. It's also lowered the amount of point something needs to have to be worth playing with. It's lowered the point point. Using Foursquare or Gowalla represents such a minimal amount of effort and energy - normally in a moment of your day when you're not doing anything else - that you only need a tiny amount of reward for it to be worthwhile. And, actually, for quite a lot of people, quite a lot of the point is in seeing how much point there is.

Playing with something like Gowalla or Foursquare is worth doing - to see if it's worth doing.

And because it's so little effort to do it you're prepared to give it a bit of time, try it for a few weeks, see how it fits in your life - rather than just doing the brief evaluation a professional reviewer traditionally used to do.

Anyway, hopefully you get my point. Ha!

pulped?

(Above: heady days)

Incidentally, can someone who understands these things explain why there only seems to be one copy of EBCB for sale in the whole Amazon universe. I seem to remember 20,000 were printed originally. (Madness, I know.) According to my last statement about 6,000 were actually sold. So have 14,000 books just got lost? Is it just not worth anyone's while to get another box out of the backroom or something? How's the long tail supposed to work if no-one knows where it is?

I guess I'd really like it to get remaindered so at least someone might buy a copy but I suppose that moment might be past now as well. Thinking about it, I don't think I've got a copy myself any more. Not sure I'm willing to pay £19.99 for it though.

golden egg

This book was one of my favourite finds when I was researching EBCB. (Yes, I did proper research. Didn't use much of it of course, it was mostly a way of postponing the actual writing, but still.) I was especially keen to find out about Golden Eggs, dimly remembered from my childhood.

I came across it again the other day and looked through these pictures. Would have liked to have seen one of these in their pomp. There's not much about Golden Egg online, but some of these pictures are gorgeous.

data campaigning

 

I mentioned that political power of data visualisation video a few days back. Seemed like an interesting thing. And I saw my first bit of dataviz in the current campaign this morning. Labour have done a nice little map showing the differences between unemployment now and the 1990s recession. (Hint: things are better now.) It's not the deepest dive into data you'll ever see but it's a promising start.

scribbled power

I've recently been noticing my mild obsessions. Not in an obsessive way, obviously, just noticing what it is I notice. I don't seem to have many deep obsessions but I've got lots of longitudinal ones. Little things I don't pursue in any detail but which always spark my attention when I bump into them - and which have done for years. Pockets is one, Kinder Eggs is another, and collections, and notebooks, and carry systems and cheap watches and SW Radio. That sort of thing. Two incidents in the last few weeks have made me realise I have another - the marginalia of power.

The first I noticed was Churchill's habit of labeling memos and orders with stickers saying "Action This Day".

Then, when some of Thatcher's papers were released by the national archive I noticed she had a similar habit.

Then this article in the New Yorker pointed out that Deng Xiaoping did the same thing to a letter written to him by some of China's leading scientists:

"China must join the world’s xin jishu geming, the “new technological revolution,” they said, or it would be left behind. They called for an élite project devoted to technology ranging from biotech to space research. Deng agreed, and scribbled on the letter, “Action must be taken on this now.” This was China’s “Sputnik moment,” and the project was code-named the 863 Program, for the year and month of its birth."

I think I like this stuff for two reasons. This is how it feels like power should work. Dramatically. Like in a movie. A moment of decision, an incisive order and the world changes. In a West Wing-y way. So it's an appealing myth.

And secondly, it illustrates how limited the real levers of power are. Supposedly powerful people are fed memos and letters containing partial and limited information. That's how they see the world. Then they make sweeping statements which are entirely open to interpretation by the organisation 'below' them. Their actions are via other people. How many things to be Actioned Immediately never get actioned at all?

That's it really. Nothing significant. Just a little thing.

Anyway.

first world problem

There's a twitter hash tag I quite like - #firstworldproblem or varients thereon. It does something to take the edge of a twitter complaint - acknowledging that these are the peculiar problems of an enormously lucky group of people living in a technologically enabled world.

And, though there's not really a complaint in this, I had something in that spirit happen yesterday. I was in the States and got an automated fraud prevention call from Visa. The robot lady talked me through authentication etc, with the occasional text-to-speech generated interjection for my name or date of birth. Then, as it ran through my transactions to make sure they were valid I found I had no clue what the first one was. Couldn't make it out at all. Then I finally decoded it - it was an English-trained robot trying to pronounce Le Pain Quotidien, and failing. That's a #firstworldproblem.

hand me down a year on

I got the Hand Me Down bag just about a year ago. It's been good, it's worn nicely (the interior got grubby quickly but I didn't mind that too much) and it's been on its travels (though I've not updated the blog as often as I should have). I tried finding a cheap, low power way of letting it stream its location but haven't done so yet. Maybe that'll come in the second half of its life.

I won't say I haven't looked at other bags in the meantime, but turning it from product to project means I haven't thought seriously about replacing it. That seems good, a small win.

the broken escalator phenomenon

"We investigated the physiological basis of the 'broken escalator phenomenon', namely the sensation that when walking onto an escalator which is stationary one experiences an odd sensation of imbalance, despite full awareness that the escalator is not going to move...The findings represent a motor aftereffect of walking onto a moving platform that occurs despite full knowledge of the changing context. As such, it demonstrates dissociation between the declarative and procedural systems in the CNS. Since gait velocity was raised before foot-sled contact, the findings are at least partly explained by open-loop, predictive behaviour. A cautious strategy of limb stiffness was not responsible for the aftereffect, as revealed by no increase in muscle cocontraction."

A phenomenon for the analogy library.

it's all gone F1

Kevin gave a great talk yesterday about High Frequency Trading. (Well, it was about lots of things but probably, mostly about High Frequency Trading.) And, afterwards, we were discussing the human role in all this. Obviously there's a human involved in designing the algorithms and presumably in setting some of the underlying trading assumptions. But the other role seems to be in deciding when to hit the kill switch. It seems these systems can trade effectively and profitably when things are 'normal' - but there are certain market effecting patterns only humans can recognise. Like there's a war coming or a big political scandal or something. When these things come up a human has to pull the plug. But, given that HFT means fortunes can be made or lost in microseconds, presumably there's a human v human edge in precisely when you slam on the brake. It's like F1 - the best drivers brake later and accelerate earlier. Made me wonder if they've got UIs and instruments designed for that. Big, red kill switches and the like.

(NB - I assume I've got all of the above wrong in some significant way. I know very little about either HFT or F1.)

itp

Today I am here. If there's nothing to see you should definitely watch this.