The Rantings of Eric Nehrlich

Who am I?

You can look at my home page for more information, but the short answer is that I'm a dilettante who likes thinking about a variety of subjects. I like to think of myself as a systems-level thinker, more concerned with the big picture than with the details. Current interests include politics, community formation, and social interface design. Plus books, of course.

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Mon, 04 Apr 2005

Links of April 4th, 2005
Three links of interest that I came across today.

• Thomas Friedman wrote a long article about outsourcing for the New York Times magazine, making the point that with new technology, the world is flattening out such that anything can be done anywhere. While I believe outsourcing may be good, and while I am amazed, as always, by the technological leaps necessary to enable it that Friedman describes, I disagree with his basic premise that the world has flattened out. And that's why I wrote up my last post this evening, so I could refer to it here.
  
  I agree that it is now technically possible to do these things. But what my previous post indicates, and what I want to develop, is that having the enabling technology will just reveal the really hard task, which is to communicate via that technology. We have only barely started to develop the virtual cues necessary to use such systems, let alone develop the deep connections necessary for effective communication. When developing code, the hard part is often not the code itself, it's figuring out what the code should do. Outsourcing the actual coding to India is easy...if you know what you want it to do. Figuring out what the code should do is very difficult to outsource, because that's where the deep shared context is necessary. Even communicating what you want the code to do will be difficult, as anybody that's spent days trying to write up a decent specification will testify. Just because something is possible doesn't make it easy. Technology does not trump all. Hrm. I'm not explaining this very well, but I'm going to put it up anyway, and maybe take a stab at sorting it out tomorrow. (And, yes, I know that his main point is that China and India will now be able to do everything themselves rather than American firms outsourcing, but I think that they may have a hard time figuring out what to code anyway without being embedded in their customers' society).

• Another good Paul Graham essay where he describes some of the company ideas he got for his seed funding firm. This is the bit I like:

  But by far the most common was some vague combination of a blog, a calendar, a dating site, and Friendster. Maybe there is some new killer app to be discovered here, but it seems perverse to go poking around in this fog when there are valuable, unsolved problems lying about in the open for anyone to see.

  Since this is exactly where my ideas for social software currently lie, I'm glad I didn't bother applying. I think we're going to develop better understanding of what we want in this space over the next few years as more people move more of their communication online, and we start to understand what virtual cues we need, but right now, I agree with him - it's awfully fuzzy.

• This I Believe essay contest from NPR. Thanks to DocBug for the link. I'm going to have to spend some time trying to get a decent summary of what I believe down to 500 interesting and personal words. Brevity is not my strength - my typical blog post is more in the realm of 1000 words. But I want to try, because (a) I think it'd be a good exercise for me, and (b) it'd be way cool on the off chance I do well enough that I get to read my essay on air.

Tue, 29 Mar 2005

Look Up More
Damn. I just read about this awesome performance art piece called Look Up More, performed here in New York a week ago Saturday. And I missed it! Damn! I needed better contacts here, apparently. I was about five blocks away when it went off, watching a play. Ah well.

They put volunteers in each of the windows of a massively huge building on the south side of Union Square, and had a conductor outside to coordinate them. They dressed all in black, and on cue, did jumping jacks, danced free style, did a few dance solos, jumping in unison, etc. It's totally awesome. Check out the video (mp4 format). This is exactly what I need more of in my life. Alas. I am disappointed I missed it, but I'm tempted to sign up for their mailing list just to continue reading about their exploits.

posted at: 10:13 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Mon, 28 Feb 2005

Quick hits of February
A couple random observations, then more links.

• I was ego surfing today and decided to check on some of the neological phrases I've used in this blog. I'm now first on Google for "cognitive subroutines", "information carnivore", and "conservative postmodernism". Of course, nobody but me has really referred to any of those phrases yet. But I will continue to use them, and eventually my wacky brand of punditry will sweep across the nation, carried by such phrases.

• Here's a random observation that a co-worker and I made a while ago. I don't remember how we got onto the topic, but for some reason we started listing off firms that had achieved success through business process innovation rather than technical innovation. Names at the top of the list: Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks. All from Seattle. We have no idea what this means. But it's kind of curious. And, yes, while writing this up, I realized that there are plenty of other companies that could qualify here that weren't started in Seattle, like Dell, but I'm trying to make a point here. Even if I don't know what that point is.

• Another friend pointed me to this essay by Bob Laughlin, a physics professor down at Stanford. I like some of Laughlin's ideas, although I think he expresses them unclearly (a characteristic which I found to be true the one time I took a class with him). I like the idea of emergent behavior, from the science of networks to sync, or, as he puts it, "that the organization can acquire meaning and life of its own and begin to transcend the parts from which it is made." However, while I agree in principle with Laughlin's assertion that there will always be new physics to explore, I don't believe that physics is where relevant science is going to come from for the foreseeable future, unless you count complexity theory and other emergent behavior studies under physics. Then again, I dropped out of physics, so it's not surprising I dismiss it as a field of interest.

• From the New York Times (registration required), A heart-breaking story about the downward spiral of drug addiction. It's just not controllable. And there's nothing anybody can do once you're in the spiral.

• I think this Wired article, describing the shift from the "Information Age" to the "Conceptual Age", captures a lot of my ambivalence towards programming right now. And why I want to become a pundit. Or at least some sort of systems-level thinker.

• The Flickr Color Picker. Flickr is a neat idea - it's the del.icio.us of photos (or vice versa) - but this is a neat little app on top of it that lets you choose a color, and it collects photos with that color dominant. Just a nifty little toy that brings a smile to one's face.

• fac.etio.us is a cute take on how to take advantage of the tags of del.icio.us, and let users slice the data in various ways by partitioning based a sequence of user choices. I like the idea because it reflects how I think our brains actually work.

• Seth Green on Fresh air. Seth Green was Oz on Buffy, of course. He's the Kevin Bacon of his generation, having been in a wide variety of films with pretty much every other actor of his age group. It was fun listening to him and finding out that he's pretty much just as laconic and dryly funny as Oz.

• I like this description of being a micro-Medici, a patron in the mold of the great Medici family of the Renaissance, but on a smaller scale. I tend to subscribe to this theory as well; when I see a band I like, I buy their CD or a T-shirt. I've given money to web comics that I enjoy, especially when I hear that the creator is trying to go full-time like Questionable Content. With the web and Paypal, it's so easy to make a quick donation that there's no reason not to. And it makes me feel good, too.

We'll return to your regularly scheduled rants about obscure topics tomorrow when I'm not braindead from trying to figure out my finances.

posted at: 22:30 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Sat, 05 Feb 2005

Linkage

• In his latest article, Christopher Allen takes on a question that I struggled with at one point: how do we handle our social networks when they grow too large? Too large, in this case, is defined with respect to Dunbar's Number. Some interesting thoughts, especially on how we handled the problem in a pre-technology age. Part of the issue which I don't think he addresses is that the current social networking services don't have any graceful way for us to rate our strength of relationship. In real life, I spend more time with my close circle of friends than with certain other acquaintances. I may like those acquaintances, but I won't go out of my way to see them, or I will only interact with them in certain defined contexts such as chorus or ultimate. With the publicly articulated crude tools currently available online, though, I can't distinguish between those two "friend" relationships without offending the acquaintances. It's a tough question. Nuance is lost online, especially in the realm of autistic social software.
• Speaking of autistic social software, danah boyd just gave a talk at Terry Winograd's HCI seminar at Stanford. I really liked that seminar series when I was at Stanford, and attended a bunch of the talks there. Alas, I could not get down there yesterday to see danah speak, but fortunately the video of the talk is available online, so I just watched it. Nothing too surprising, given that I read her blog and a lot of her informally published work, but it was kind of neat to see her talk. Now that I know Winograd's seminar is online, as well as Rheingold's, I think I'll be wasting time watching those instead of TV. Or at least I should.
• I still haven't read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (it's in the Amazon order that I'm going to submit soon), but he keeps on popping up in weird places. Like this interview on ESPN.com, where he's asked to apply his theories of thin-slicing to analyzing the Super Bowl.
• And, as usual, you can see other links that I've found that were worth bookmarking, but not interesting enough to comment on, over on del.icio.us.

Wed, 02 Feb 2005

The Principles Project
I've ranted before on the importance of a clear message in politics. And that the Democrats were lacking that in the last election. It seems that I am not the only one who made that observation. A group called 2020 Democrats has started a website called The Principles Project, which is "an effort to develop a one page statement of principles that summarizes what we as progressives stand for." It's pretty interesting. They posted a draft, went through a round of revision, and are inviting comments on the second draft this week. I poked around for a bit, and added a couple comments of my own. I think it's a pretty decent stab at a coherent statement of progressive principles. I don't fully agree with it, but it's closer than anything else I've seen. So take a look and see what you think.

posted at: 23:17 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Sun, 23 Jan 2005

Whee, links
Couple more quick links I found recently.

• Picasa is an image management software tool written by Google, of all people. I don't remember where I saw a reference to it recently, but I just tried it out, and it's absolutely wonderful. Instantaneous response to typical image manipulations, an "I'm feeling lucky!" button ala Google when you just want it to make the image better, and a pretty reasonable user interface for browsing through images on your hard drive. In the 20 minutes or so I played with it, I really liked it. Check it out.
• An article over at Many-to-Many had a link towards a class being taught over at Stanford by Howard Rheingold called "Toward a Literacy of Cooperation". Rheingold wrote the book Smart Mobs on the rise of spontaneous organizations. The class looks really interesting - I plan to spend some time going through the site at some point. I watched Peter Kollock's talk about social dilemmas this weekend, where he made some points I liked:
  • All games sold for children are finite zero-sum games, not infinite games, using Carse's terminology. He describes observing his nephew (?) learning the game Candyland, and figuring out that if he wanted to win, his opponent had to lose, so he started cheating. On the other hand, I'm hard pressed to think of what infinite games could be taught to our kids; most games are, by nature, finite.
  • He pointed out that, as I mentioned in my discussion of the Ultimatum Game, that our social brains are wired to handle repeated interactions with reputations, that communities can not form without those elements. The corresponding thing he asserted was that the way to destroy a community was to take those elements away. In particular, he pointed out that pseudonymity was the best way to destroy a virtual community. It's even worse than anonymity, because with pseudonymity, I could log on as you and destroy your reputation. Trust is destroyed, and everything falls apart. I thought that was a great insight.
  • He mentioned the importance of forgiveness and generosity in such interactions. In particular, we need to build in generosity because information is often imperfect, so we might misinterpret a mistake as an act of aggression and respond violently (as the Tit-for-Tat strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma would).

  Looks like a class I'd enjoy. I'm going to try to keep a closer eye on the class blog and watch the videos as they're posted. The latest speaker apparently espouses something called panarchy, which I'll have to read a bit more on before I have an opinion.

Thu, 20 Jan 2005

Links
I've been using del.icio.us more, so you can always go there to check out what I've been finding interesting in my trawls through the web, but I wanted to call out a couple specifically.

• I thought Paul Graham's latest essay was really interesting and either inspiring or depressing depending on my mood. Inspiring because he is reminding me that I can and should be chasing after my dreams, no matter what my day job is. Depressing because his essay was aimed at high school students; shouldn't I have a better handle on what I'm doing with my life by now? If nothing else, it points out that I should be trying to find a way to get more writing into my life; I have continued to regularly update this blog over the past year, which is astonishing given my lack of self-discipline. I need to sit down and start putting together some of these essays together into a submittable form and see if that goes anywhere.
• A conversation on Slate between Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, and James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. It's interesting to read their takes on each other's books, but I'm mostly including a link to it because Gladwell mentions Gary Klein's work. That Gladwell would have read Klein's work before writing Blink should have been totally obvious to me, but for some reason it wasn't.
• Interesting New Yorker article about how our armed forces are adapting to life in Iraq. I really liked the description of how the soldiers have found their own decentralized ways of sharing information, particularly through stories. I think it's also a good description of the power of breaking the hierarchy wide open and letting everybody use their initiative. I think it's the way of the future, and given how the army has led many management trends, it shouldn't surprise me to see them in the forefront yet again.

Tue, 04 Jan 2005

More links
You know the drill. I find some pages that amuse me. I yammer on about them.

• Many-to-Many had a couple interesting responses from Clay Shirky and danah boyd to this post about Wikipedia. I particularly liked this point by danah:

  My concern - and that of many of my colleagues - is that students are often not media-savvy enough to recognize when to trust Wikipedia and when this is a dreadful idea. They quote from it as though it cannot be inaccurate.

  This relates back to my thoughts about being an information carnivore, and reminding us of the dangers of consuming information without knowing its provenance. Wikipedia, as a community-created information source, just brings these issues into stark relief.

• Edge ran its annual survey of intellectuals with the question "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?". I like Edge - in fact, last year's question about Laws was where I first read about Lakoff. Not as many interesting answers this year, alas.

• I liked this interview with Michael Schrage. Given my preference for rapid prototyping, I like his ideas about innovation, including in his book Serious Play.

• Given that I like Malcolm Gladwell's stuff, I thought this Fast Company profile was interesting. I should really read Blink at some point.

• I read this depressing Economist article from their Iraq correspondent this morning (subscription necessary, alas). Here's just a taste:

  "If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them," says a bullish lieutenant. "It's kind of a shame, because it means we've killed a lot of innocent people."
  
  And not all of them were in cars. Since discovering that roadside bombs, known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), can be triggered by mobile telephones, marines say they shoot at any Iraqi they see handling a phone near a bomb-blast. Bystanders to an insurgent ambush are also liable to be killed. Sometimes, the marines say they hide near the body of a dead insurgent and kill whoever comes to collect it. According to the marine lieutenant: "It gets to a point where you can't wait to see guys with guns, so you start shooting everybody...It gets to a point where you don't mind the bad stuff you do."

• Another Economist article, subtitled "Why people of the book have such trouble with language, truth and logic", and which discusses the difficulties of treating sacred texts as holy writ. Such behavior leads pretty directly to me ranting about creationism. I figured I'd link to it even though it's subscription only because it ties in well to some recent rants.

• I went to SFMOMA last week. The Glamour exhibit and the Roy Lichtenstein exhibit were pretty excellent, but the art that caught my eye was a picture that had been rotated into the ongoing Picturing Modernity exhibit. It was a print of a whole slew of postcard sized images by Eleanor Antin, each of which depicted 100 boots in various poses. You can see a few of the images at this site. Quirky and whimsical and utterly endearing. I wanted a poster of the whole set for my walls, but such a thing apparently doesn't exist. I spent some time with Google, and even asked the artist directly via email. She did point me to the republished book of postcards, which would let me pull out the postcards and make my own collage. So I'll order that, and figure out what I want to do later.

Fri, 24 Dec 2004

Christmas Eve links
A batch o' links from the last several weeks that I've been too lame to upload until now. If you want a more consistently updated feed of web pages I find interesting, I'm starting to use del.icio.us more regularly, and you can check out my saved links there.

• John Perry Barlow has been involved with a somewhat disturbing case recently. Barlow was, among other things, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a co-founder of the EFF, and the writer of the infamous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. He's an ornery guy that will fight for his rights. So when he got busted coming back from Burning Man for drugs in his checked luggage, instead of pleading out, he decided to fight the case as the result of an illegal search. He feels that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has far overstepped its bounds as a protector of security, and extended it to enforcing other lifestyle choices.
  
  On the one hand, I think Barlow's an idiot. Flying with illegal drugs in your luggage is just dumb, especially when you're a well-known counterculture figure. On the other hand, the prosecution is even more scary. The idea that the TSA can get away with whatever they want under the guise of security is frightening. The fact that they wouldn't even answer questions about their procedures due to the dangers of revealing "Sensitive Security Information" is downright Orwellian. And since I'm unconvinced that any of the security procedures actually make us any safer, I'm for anything that reduces their power. Neither side is particularly respectable in this case, but I have to lean towards Barlow's side. It's a tricky case, though, one worthy of thought. So I link to it.
• Anybody who's read this blog for any length of time knows that I worship Joel on Software. His latest rant, Camels and Rubber Duckies, is an absolutely hilarious discussion of the difficulties and perils of pricing software. He rambles on for about 5000 words and in the end, has no solutions to offer, because people's reactions to prices are so context-dependent (i.e. people will pay more for quality, but will go positively ballistic if other people are getting a better price). Pricing ends up being very difficult because you have to optimize along several different parameters at once. In light of my recent post discussing truth vs. context, I found this quote particularly entertaining:

  There's a real strong tendency to assume that experiments done on large populations of people should work out just like experiments done with chemicals in a high school lab, but everyone that has ever tried to do experiments on people knows that you get wildly variable results that just aren't repeatable and the only way you can be confident in your results is to carefully avoid ever doing the same experiment twice.

• In a totally separate area, Jakob Nielsen discussed the importance of context in his latest column. For web usability, he points out that having sensible follow-up options available in response to a user's previous actions is much more important than having a sensible global information architecture. People map their own way through the web. A good global architecture may help them find something the first time (if they understand the architecture and it maps well to how they think about the site), but after that, they want to extend their own path. Context context context. Yes, I'm on a bit of an obsession right now.
• Actually, as long as I'm rattling on about context, I'm in the middle of two books from my recent Amazon order which are all about the importance of context. One of them, Sources of Power by Gary Klein, discusses how decision-makers in time-critical life-threatening situations use a form of decision-making that he calls RPD, Recognition-Primed Decisions (something like that - I don't have the book with me). He has studied firefighters, paramedics, and military commanders to demonstrate that they rarely use the logical "draw up a set of options, evaluate each option, and then take action" decision-making process that an MBA might use, because there isn't time. Instead, they recognize aspects of the situation from their previous experience, and act immediately, to the point where several of them claimed they weren't even making decisions - they were just doing what had to be done at each step.
  
  The other book, Managers not MBAs by Henry Mintzberg, bemoans the separation of MBAs from business context. He feels that the MBA culture derides the importance of knowing a business in making decisions about that business, from the prevalence of case studies to the fact that MBA students often have very little experience before going to business school. Because the MBAs have no context with which to evaluate what they're told, they accept it blindly and the cycle of destructive decision-making continues. I just thought it was interesting that both of these books have similar themes at a time when I'm on this context kick myself. But anyway...
• I'm not sure how I found this thoughtful post about the impact of blogging, but I like it a lot.

  ...millions of bloggers adding tens of millions of permanent links to the net every day have to be fundamentally shaping Google’s (and similar engine’s) results, and therefore the information gathering experience of the majority of the online world. I’m not saying this is good, or bad: but if it’s true, it’s terribly significant.

  From my own personal experience, I think he has a point. I don't need a search engine for my blog; I just use Google. A lot of times when I'm writing up a post, I want to refer to an old post of mine. If I can remember a phrase I used (e.g. conservative postmodernism, I put it in Google, add in "nehrlich" and it will find the post for me. And I continue to be amazed by where links to my page pop up. Several of my book reviews are linked to across the web. People come across my stuff in the oddest ways. And, to take his point, posts like this links post are my way of contributing back to Google, of helping to put my imprint on pages that I think matter, by raising their PageRank via my blog. It's a collective endeavor of deciding what matters. This would probably be a fruitful topic for a post of its own at some point, because it's even better than a democracy, because if you don't like what the majority (e.g. Google) thinks, you can always restrict the search set. Information spheres colliding. Ways of making context universes intersect. I'll have to think some more about this.

Thu, 09 Dec 2004

Links of the last two weeks
Since it's been a while since I've written, I have a lot of links to put up and comment on. So here we go.

• danah boyd has made some really great posts to OMST recently. This one asks the interesting question: why are people interested in publicly articulating their social relationships? And this one examines the pitfalls in writing and reading an online description or profile, with the different contexts that may be in play - the person writing a "housing wanted" ad may describe themselves as neat (relative to their former-frat-boy slob roommate), but their new roommate may feel deceived when they move in because their standard of neatness is much higher. Really thought-provoking stuff on context and meaning in a low-information-bandwidth medium such as text.
• danah also pointed to this Salon article which is an overview of how the virtual world, once described as "a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live", is becoming ever more intertwined with the real world, with the integration of GPS and other technologies that are tightly-coupled to physical location. I love this trend. I think that social relationships divorced from real-world contexts tend to be weaker and less meaningful (maybe that's just me). I think that for social software to be meaningful, it has to benefit real-world relationships and networks. So this is another step in that direction. Augmented reality instead of virtual reality.
• I liked this column by Jakob Nielsen, outlining how many of the attributes we associate with progress are consequences of the Industrial Revolution, e.g. "In the physical world, you win by being big, with economies of scale in manufacturing, worldwide distribution, and branding. Most of these benefits accrue even if you're mediocre, and in fact, you usually benefit from targeting the lowest common denominator." In the coming age, we'll move away from the things that used to work, and those of us that recognize the way things will hopefully evolve may have an advantage.
• Creationism is back. CREATIONISM?!?!?! Actually, the thing that scares me most is that the majority of people in this country believe in creationism according to a Gallup poll. The discussion in the comments section of that first post also scares me. Some of the creationists try to defend their position, and have nothing to fall back on except for repeated assertions (much like their president) rather than any sort of logic or argument. We need to start teaching good critical thinking skills in our country. Facts aren't enough. Facts will never be enough. There is too much knowledge in the world for anybody to know even a sliver of it. To live in a world with an abundance of information, people need to learn the skills for evaluating claims made by authorities by applying some basic criteria.
  
  To take the case of creationism, I like Neil Postman's idea of teaching kids the scientific method, and how we evaluate scientific ideas, and then letting them judge for themselves between evolution and other theories like creationism. Otherwise, we have a world where people faithfully accept the pronouncements of experts, where they have no way of making a decision when people they are told are "experts" disagree. This leads to situations like the rising tide of creationism (where one set of "scientists" espouse "intelligent design", and every other legitimate scientist believes in evolution) or even politics (where a poll showed that 40% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 - as my friend Brad pointed out, the war in Iraq is perfectly justified, and in fact required, in the minds of that 40%, so the fact that Kerry came as close as he did to beating Bush is pretty astonishing). Anyway. Sorry. Creationism drives me bonkers. I spent an entire semester in high school arguing with a friend in art class about creationism. We'd both go off, read up on arguments for our side, and present them to each other. In the end, I realized I was never going to convince him. Ever. Because he was not using reason to evaluate which ideas to believe, but merely to rationalize them after having decided. Which is normal (heck, I do it all the time), but it makes it hard to change people's minds.
• More polling sadness. According to Newsweek, 55% of Americans believe that every word of the Bible is literally accurate. 67% believe the Christmas story is literally true. I know polls can be misleading, but things like this depress me. I believe that the story of Jesus is a tremendously powerful one. But there's so much stuff in the Bible that should clearly be treated allegorically. And of the stuff that isn't, we do ignore huge chunks of it when it suits us. I have a point here about literalness and concrete thought vs. abstraction and the ability to think from different perspectives, but it ain't going to come together tonight.
• More good articles over at Alternet. I didn't like this one, proposing that the Democrats need to get back to economic populism. I think that's just pandering in a similar fashion to the Republicans' pandering on cultural issues. I would love to see a party step up and challenge its voters to agree that difficult decisions are necessary. Sometimes factories are no longer competitive and should be shut down. Sometimes abortions are necessary. We would prefer that it not be so, but life is hard sometimes. And parties that tell voters lies on these issues to win their votes may win elections, but they are destroying America. I want a party that commits to education and to critical thinking, but not one that panders to teacher's unions or standardized testing. I know I'm totally dreaming, but I'd like to think that if we challenge people to step up, they will, as they did in WWII, and continue to do when given the chance for serious input (as Kunstler details). Instead, our political leaders are telling us to lie back down and go to sleep while murmuring sweet nothings in our ears. I know I live in a dreamworld. But, damn, wouldn't it be nice?
• I also like this Alternet article where Larry Beinhart, who wrote the book that the movie Wag the Dog is based on, discusses the power of narrative, which is obviously a topic dear to my heart.
• Lastly, a couple good posts from Ideaflow, The 6 Myths of Creativity, and NASA's vision of Prototype-as-Design.

Sun, 14 Nov 2004

Links of the day
Okay, so I'm utterly failing on writing more. Eit. Friday, I went and hung out at Christy and UBoat's, Saturday I went for a bike ride up to Skyline Blvd and then went over to the Lantzes to play with Max, and this morning I played ultimate for the first time in a month, which hurt about as much as might be expected. Despite my claim that I'd try to stay in shape, I pretty much failed. Alas. So I was getting beat pretty good today on defense because I was sloooooooooooow. I did make a couple nice plays when I was marking on D, and I got a totally totally sweet one-handed left-handed layout grab for a score, so that pretty much made my day. You know it's good when people from the other field tell you how good it was. This afternoon was a "Ow, ow, I'm out of shape" kind of afternoon. With football. I wish I'd had satellite TV, though, to watch the Bears win a game by a safety in overtime. How weird is that?

Um. Yeah. Sorry for the ramble there.

So, yeah, writing more. I figure I'll at least toss up the links I've been collecting for the last little bit. And after this I'll try to type up my AC2004 notes.

Right. To the links.

• While posting a reply to a column on outsourcing over at CNET last week, I found an article from a survey on outsourcing in the Economist this week. The only reason it's notable is because I was pleased to note that the Economist feels the way I do about outsourcing, that it's not only inevitable, but that it's a good thing in that it means more people are doing more innovative work which will lead to productivity increases for everybody. To quote the article:

  What the worriers always forget is that the same changes in production technology that destroy jobs also create new ones. Because machines and foreign workers can perform the same work more cheaply, the cost of production falls. That means higher profits and lower prices, lifting demand for new goods and services. Entrepreneurs set up new businesses to meet demand for these new necessities of life, creating new jobs.

• Several good thoughtful articles over at AlterNet about the aftermath of the election. I liked this one on continuing the fight, this one about building progressive media (although I think he's short-sighted in not figuring out how to leverage the liberal blogosphere), and particularly one by Don Hazen, the chief editor of AlterNet, asking us to face the music and admit that the progressive movement as currently constructed ain't working. In particular, I liked the line "In the end, people vote for core values, and generally we don't know what ours are, and when we do know, we have a terrible time explaining them." which ties into my belief that we need to work on developing our message. AlterNet in general is pretty cool. I sent them a donation earlier this year when they offered copies of Lakoff's latest book.
• I thought about going to this free conference at Harvard about how the internet is changing politics, but decided that my life was too crazy, so I'm going to punt. But it does look neat.
• The San Francisco Symphony released its new recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 2, aka the Resurrection, last week. This is exciting because it's the first album that I've recorded with the symphony - it was recorded at the concerts this past summer. It's an awesome recording. Admittedly, I'm biased. But I can tell you that many sections of it still raise goosebumps, and the first time I listened to the final movement (the part where we sing) on the CD, it brought tears to my eyes. And it's a pretty good bet that it will win a Grammy of some sort, given that the Mahler 6 recording won "Best Orchestral Performance", and Mahler 3 won "Best Classical Album". It'd be cool to win a Grammy. It'd go well with the Emmy I won for Sweeney Todd (well, okay, I didn't win an Emmy, but the production did, and I was in it. Technicalities count, right?). Then I'd just need a Tony and an Oscar to round out the collection. Yeah. Right.

Okay, not as many links as I thought. Oh well. I think I'm going to punt on the AC2004 notes for this evening - a friend called me up while I was working on this, and I ended up talking to him for an hour, and now it's late, and I think I'm going to stock up on sleep for the week. Maybe notes tomorrow. Not that anyone cares. La la la. I could write complete gibberish and nobody would ever know! Ah, the freedom of having no readership. Wait, was that my out-loud voice? Oops. Bye!

posted at: 21:59 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Wed, 20 Oct 2004

Links of October 20, 2004
As usual, a couple links that I want to share.

• I really liked this San Francisco chronicle article describing Laura Cunningham, the manager of the French Laundry. In the account of my visit, I raved about the experience, and how everything was tuned so well for customer enjoyment. It turns out that Cunningham has trained her staff in every aspect of making sure a customer has a good experience, from choreographing their movements with the help of a professional dance coach, to teaching them how to impart their knowledge to diners in a non-condescending way. She has apparently spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the whole experience beyond the food as amazing as possible, and it definitely shows.
• Mitch Kapor is a well-known internet activist. He was one of the founders of Lotus, and then went on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a great organization dedicated to preserving our liberties online. He has continued to take an interest in online organizations, contributing to organizations like Baobabs and CivicSpace. I read this Alternet article about Kapor's site Of, by and for, where he's attempting to open up a political dialogue about self-governance and democracy. Interesting idea - I like his take on things in the Alternet interview. The site itself doesn't do a lot for me yet, although I liked this reference to Thomas Jefferson's Inaugural Address, which is a powerful speech.

Thu, 07 Oct 2004

Links of the day
A few quick links that I thought were interesting.

• After thinking about it, I did sign up to go to the Accelerating Change conference. If you're interested, the Early Bird rate has apparently been extended to this Sunday, with a $50 discount thrown in if you read this post. At some point, I'm planning on writing up a participant statement, which I'll share here, of course.
• I really liked this Salon article (you'll have to get a Salon day pass to read the whole thing), pointing out "Thanks to the Net, we've all got access to poll numbers, fundraising figures and endless political gossip -- and we all know exactly what the candidates need to do to win." I'm certainly as guilty of it as anyone. Does this ability of anybody with an internet connection to get informed about politics and offer ideas make for a better democracy? I'd like to think so. Even if all the ideas aren't accepted, just having an active idea marketplace with more participants leads to better informed citizens, I think. Now if only more people were actually interested in thinking about this stuff...
• I also liked this VentureBlog article detailing the demise of mass marketing, and the rise of the "long tail". It refers to this Wired article which goes into the idea in more detail, but the basic idea is that in a world of scarce attention and mass production, products are aimed at the lowest common denominator; since you can only produce a few things, you need them to appeal to the most people possible. This explains the pablum we see on our televisions (broad comedy has, well, broad appeal), hear on our radio stations (mass-marketed teen pop idols), etc. Only the 20% of products that will appeal to 80% of the population are worth pursuing. In the new world of personalized inventory, vendors can target the long tail - the 80% of the products that will only appeal to small subpopulations. Amazon and eBay are the obvious leaders of this trend - one of the reasons I tend to buy from Amazon rather than supporting my local bookstore is that Amazon has _everything_. The most obscure book I can think of, that probably only a few hundred other people want to read? It's there, and will show up on my doorstep in a few days, whereas my local bookstore would never have it, and would have to special order it at extra cost, etc. eBay does the same thing. It's an interesting idea. And one that appeals to me, since my tastes tend not to overlap with the mass market.

Wed, 15 Sep 2004

Political links
Links links links. Yes, I know I try to keep this blog to original content (or at least original to me) (I've got several longer pieces I've been mulling over that haven't quite come together yet), but occasionally a set of links comes in that I want to share.

Extreme Democracy Future Salon

I'll probably attend this tomorrow evening. I've been to only a couple of the Future Salons, but it's a good group, and this looks like a particularly interesting topic, given how much I've been ranting about politics this year. I'm excited about seeing Zack Rosen's presentation on CivicSpace, which I only heard about today, and then noticed that he was going to be at Future Salon tomorrow. He's working on developing software to enable bottom-up grassroots political networking (he started it for Dean's campaign, and has continued it with funding from a couple angel investors). Very neat stuff, and along the lines of some of my pipe dreams. Except that he has motivation. And competence.

Lawrence Lessig at SDForum

I really like Lessig's work, and have read Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and The Future of Ideas, but not Free Culture yet. So he's speaking next week. He's being introduced by Dan Gillmor, the author of We, the Media, a book that intrigued me recently. I'll probably attend. The entire Distinguished Speaker Series this year looks promising, actually. I've been to a couple before, including Paul Saffo, but I always forgot about them. Fortunately, they finally started an announcement list for these talks, so I should be attending more of them.

A march to irrelevance

I really liked this article over on Alternet about how many liberals' idea of protest is thoroughly antiquated in this new century, invoking a 1960s-era mentality that is pointless in today's world. Well written and thoughtful. I've had similar thoughts - last year during the anti-war protests in San Francisco, I asked my friend who participated what he was trying to accomplish - he said "We have to show people that we're against the war!" - "By annoying your neighbors who probably agree with you?" "Well, we have to show the whole world!" "Do you think you're being televised elsewhere?" "Well, it's important!" I wish I had been more eloquent, as this writer is.

Federalist Paper #10

I think I was reading the social interface design forum at Joel on Software, when somebody invoked this Federalist Paper, in response to how the designer can attempt to prevent cliques from forming. And this paper does a pretty good job of identifying how factions form, and what we can do to try to minimize their influence. It's interesting how several of their recommendations start to fall apart in the age of mass media. But the insight into human nature is unmistakable. I should really sit down and read the Federalist Papers at some point. And Tocqueville's Democracy in America. And all sorts of other things. *sigh*

George Lakoff's class Language of Politics

My hero, George Lakoff, is teaching a class in the Language of Politics this term. danah boyd is taking the class, and hosting a blog for those of us that aren't Berkeley students. Neat stuff. Two articles I've read so far that I particularly liked were one on reinventing the Republican party in a way that would actually appeal to me a lot, and one on reinventing the Democratic party, also in a way that appeals to me. Yay being a swing voter. Or at least a swing personality. I'm looking forward to following along with the class.

Sun, 12 Sep 2004

Ultimate frisbee video
The college national championships of ultimate frisbee were televised this year on the College Sports TV network. Unfortunately, that's not one I get - I think it's on deep cable someplace, or maybe only satellite. But they kindly have decided to post the video to several of the games online (they are archived down the right side). I've watched the first couple this weekend, and it's actually kind of fun to watch it with a couple different camera angles and expert commentary. The other thing that struck me was how the offense has such a huge advantage at the highest levels. It really is like volleyball in that the side that receives scores the vast majority of the time. Of course, to get to that level requires everybody on the team to have great throws, great cuts, and be in incredible shape. I'll be there any day now. Yeah. Right.

posted at: 19:33 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Thu, 09 Sep 2004

Pepsi Can Fu!
Pepsi Can Fu! Yay. Much like the ping pong Matrix-style video.

posted at: 20:38 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Paul Graham on essays
Paul Graham wrote a new essay this month about the process of writing an essay. Some interesting observations about the essay form, and why he writes essays. I particularly liked this nugget:

An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.

Tue, 07 Sep 2004

Joel on Software on social interface design
As many of you know, I'm a total fan of Joel on Software. I even went to a fan club dinner of his when he was in the Bay Area (he posted that he was going to be at a restaurant in Berkeley about a week in advance, and about 30 software geeks of all sorts showed up - it was surprisingly fun). Anyway, he often posts longer articles discussing various aspects of running a software company or project (he started his own software company after working at Microsoft and several other places), or writing good software. Today's article was entitled "It's Not Just Usability".

Software in the 1980s, when usability was "invented," was all about computer-human interaction. A lot of software still is. But the Internet brings us a new kind of software: software that's about human-human interaction. When you're writing software that mediates between people, after you get the usability right, you have to get the social interface right. And the social interface is more important. The best UI in the world won't save software with an awkward social interface.

Those of you who have been shocked to hear that I occasionally have thoughts of going back to grad school, just so you know, I was never going to go back in physics. Social interface design is the field. I didn't have an appropriate label for it - I kept on calling it social informatics, or computer-mediated communities or something. But Joel nailed it with that label. It involves describing how people interact, a favorite topic of my rants about politics and management and people, and online communities, which have been a favorite topic of mine from way back. And I even know that Berkeley has the closest thing to a department in this right now, with illustrious students like danah boyd, whom Joel references in his article (I linked to the same talk actually). And, of course, I love the group blog at Many-to-Many, as my continual links demonstrate. I need to spend some time thinking about what research I could contribute this field, and how this could happen. Hrm.

Anyway, I felt I needed to link to Joel's article, because it's a really good overview that lays out the problems and gives anecdotal examples of possible solutions, and generally just does a good job of demonstrating what the field is. But, for now, I have to run to my real job.

posted at: 05:59 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Mon, 06 Sep 2004

Lego construction equipment
A friend forwarded me this link to this woman who builds working construction equipment models out of lego. She actually implements fully motorized cranes and all-wheel steering and things like that. It's spectacular. And kind of scary.

posted at: 08:06 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Sun, 15 Aug 2004

Phil Agre on Conservatism
I'm on Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater mailing list. Agre is a wonderful thinker about information systems and how they integrate into society. He hasn't posted as much to RRE as he used to, but he posted a new article today, which discusses the conservative movement in detail, what it represents, and how we should fight it. While I'm not sure I agree with all of his points ("Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.", for instance), he does a good job of identifying the tactics of the conservative movement, especially in their use of language (similar to George Lakoff), and identifying ways in which we can fight them. The article is long, but I found it interesting, so I figured I'd link to it.

posted at: 13:17 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Sat, 14 Aug 2004

Transit villages
There was an interesting article in the San Francisco Chronicle the other day about the rise of transit villages in the Bay Area, where transit villages are little groups of residences and shops that sprout up around public transit stops on BART and Caltrain. Since I am growing to detest driving and like the idea of having mixed use neighborhoods (as opposed to the new standard of subdivisions and strip malls), I support the idea of these transit villages. Fortunately, I already live in a nice neighborhood with easy access to BART, but I'm glad there's an effort underway to make it possible for others to do so as well. The article is not particularly well written, but it asks some good questions. A better treatment of the subject, for those who are interested, is available in the book The Geography Of Nowhere, which I liked a lot.

posted at: 01:11 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Sun, 08 Aug 2004

We the Media, by Dan Gillmor
I used to like reading Dan Gillmor's column in the San Jose Mercury News, but stopped reading it once I moved off the peninsula and stopped getting the paper. Which is lame, because it's available online. But anyway. Some page I was reading recently pointed to Gillmor's new book, We the Media. Even better, though, it pointed to the electronic version. I've read the introduction, and it seems like the book might have some interesting thoughts on the participatory nature of journalism in the future, as everybody becomes both a consumer and a producer. We'll see. This entry is mostly for me to have a convenient link to it, so I can read it...

posted at: 15:32 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Sat, 31 Jul 2004

Paul Graham
A friend of mine passed along the link to this article by Paul Graham, talking about what distinguishes great hackers from the rest of us, in light of my entry discussing the extreme gradient in the ability of programmers. I liked the article a lot, partially because it's eloquent, but mostly because he has similar thoughts to ones I've had. His analysis of how great hackers should be used behind the scenes to architect things, so that "the less smart people writing the actual applications wouldn't be doing low-level stuff like allocating memory. Instead of writing Word directly in C, they'd be plugging together big Lego blocks of Word-language. (Duplo, I believe, is the technical term.)" ties in nicely with my projections of where things are heading in the software industry. I also agree with his sentiment that hackers question the assumptions (his quote: "Programs are very complex and, at least in the hands of good programmers, very fluid. In such situations it's helpful to have a habit of questioning assumptions.")

I don't know who Paul Graham is. From poking around his site a bit, he sounds like an accomplished Lisp hacker. He's written a bunch of thoughtful articles, primarily on programming, but a few in other areas. I particularly liked this article about the unpopularity of nerds, where he points out that being popular in high school, dressing right and acting right and everything, is a lot of work, and nerds can't be bothered because they'd rather be smart and curious than popular. Interesting analysis of the dynamics of high school, especially in retrospect.

Some neat stuff. I'm not too interested in his programming essays, mostly because they seem to often end up proselytizing for Lisp, but the couple social essays I read were pretty interesting. I'll keep an eye on his site in the future, I think.

posted at: 00:06 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Tue, 27 Jul 2004

Height Study Redux Redux
Several months ago, I ranted about a height study that I thought was kind of bogus. Then I ranted about it again. And I just read a New Yorker article that is the article I could only wish I'd written, if I had, y'know, a research budget and stuff, instead of just my rantings. In particular, he supports my theory about childhood nutrition correlating with height.

Biologists say that we achieve our stature in three spurts: the first in infancy, the second between the ages of six and eight, the last in adolescence. Any decent diet can send us sprouting at these ages, but take away any one of forty-five or fifty essential nutrients and the body stops growing. ("Iodine deficiency alone can knock off ten centimetres and fifteen I.Q. points," one nutritionist told me.)

What's also interesting is how I found this article. This week's New Yorker had an article about gifted education and nerd camps that sounded interesting to me (I have a previous interest). Unfortunately, it wasn't available online except for this interview snippet with the author. So I googled the author, looking for other articles, and found the height article. Wacky. It's like he's writing the articles I'd want to, if I were more than an Internet hack. Never fear, I did end up with a copy of the nerd camp article the old-fashioned way, by copying it from my friend's dead tree edition.

posted at: 16:08 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Fri, 23 Jul 2004

Bloglines
I just heard of a service called Bloglines, which is a great way to manage subscriptions to various blogs. I previously recommended Bloglet, but that service has failed to work for me for months. I tried NewsGator for a while, but it wasn't very convenient. Bloglines seems pretty good in the couple days I've used it so far. I can check it anywhere I have a web connection, and it lets me easily click and read on the newest entries in my blogs of interest. Thumbs up for now. If you're interested, you can look at my list of subscriptions there.

posted at: 17:54 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Sun, 18 Jul 2004

World Watch column by Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card has written some of my favorite books, and his ideas have influenced my own in various ways. So when I came across his World Watch column, which he writes on a weekly basis, I was pretty excited. Until I started actually reading the columns. I knew Card was a devoted Mormon, but the stances he takes in these columns are so at odds with my own, it surprised me. Not only that, it was a great disappointment, because his arguments seem opposed to his own writing. In his book, Speaker for the Dead, the philosophy espoused is that nobody is evil in their own minds, that you can't judge somebody merely by the results of their actions, but must include a recognition of their intentions. He even has his protagonist explicitly mock the Calvinist student who says "Murder is murder ... If the act is evil, then the actor is evil." So it shocked me to find Card making similar statements in his columns, calling gay marriage wrong, and drugs "devastatingly harmful".

His inconsistencies also bother me. He was never particularly strong at consistency in his novels, but when he says things like we should be at peace with our bodies and "Even if a person is heavy because of his own choices, why does that give anybody else a reason to abuse them?" in one column, but tells gays that they should marry someone of the opposite sex if they want to be married, it bothers me. Of course, the fact that he's struggled with his own weight problems probably gives him more sympathy to the fat people.

I could spend a lot of time deconstructing his arguments, but suffice it to say that his columns disappointed me greatly. Even the ones where I agreed with him were unconvincing because they suffered from the same sense of moral outrage. I guess I'm particularly sensitized to this because it's one of my own failings as a writer. I assume that because something is obviously outrageous to me, it's outrageous to everybody, and my ability to convince people disappears in a blaze of self-righteousness. So I understand why it happens. But it still makes me lose respect for Card the columnist. He's still a good writer, especially in his use of adjectives to up the emotional quotient of his writing. But when he says that anybody who disagrees with him must be somebody out for personal gain, it's a great disappointment coming from the same writer who once described the Speaker for the Dead, and his ability to see everybody else's perspective.

posted at: 07:07 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Monkeys at Many-to-Many
I was catching up on the articles at Many-to-Many recently, and saw this entertaining one about "the monkey-mind, that primal and social part of our brains that evolved long before the human species emerged." I particularly like this rant about the Monkeysphere, where a guy uses the idea of Dunbar's number (Dunbar postulated that our brains are limited to being able to track only about 150 other stable social relationships at a time) to suggest that anybody outside our 150 people network, which he dubs the Monkeysphere, is treated by our brains as nobody worth considering, thus explaining our indifference to them in our actions. It's a bit of a rant, but it's got some interesting ideas. In particular, something along these lines is why I don't believe that anarchy can work at a large scale, despite my idealistic hopes that people would be responsible and take care of themselves and not screw each other over. At least until we all grow up and can see the value in everybody. Easier said than done.

posted at: 06:59 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Fri, 16 Jul 2004

Esther Dyson on LinkedIn
After reading danah boyd's post about autistic social software a couple weeks ago, it was interesting to read this CNET commentary by Esther Dyson on LinkedIn, discussing several of the same issues. Since Dyson is one of the high-powered elite of the computer world, she is looking for a tool to help her manage her own social network, which involves board members that she works with, friends, etc. As she put it, "LinkedIn should acknowledge that each person is a member of a variety of networks, of which that person is the center. Networks overlap through individuals, not as groups."

This is similar to danah's point that existing social software does a poor job of capturing the complexity of social relationships. I also really like Dyson's phrasing, because it makes a lot of sense to me. I recently had a BBQ to celebrate my birthday, and it was interesting because a couple representatives from each of my facets of life showed up. I had a few college friends there, a couple chorus friends, an ultimate frisbee friend, and my family there. All these different networks of people, intersecting through the locus of me. I'm not sure how best to capture that in an online setting. Perhaps something like Tribe.net does a better job, with its explicit acknowledgement of groups of people. I haven't played with that, though.

I guess the ideal social networking software would be something like the Remembrance Agent, except augmented to handle social duties as well. Something that unobtrusively tracks my interactions with people, and reminds me when something comes up that is relevant to another friend or contact. For instance, if I know that one friend is looking for a database programming job, and I hear that another friend has such a job open, I should put them together. That's simplistic, because that example is obvious enough that I'd probably put the pieces together on my own. But I could see a more complex version being of great use, especially to people who do a lot of business networking, keeping track of all of their contacts. Thoughts for future software...

posted at: 00:16 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Thu, 01 Jul 2004

The Living Web
I came across this article called "10 Tips on Writing the Living Web" today, which I really liked. Some things to think about when writing for the web. It's good to help me reflect on what I am doing with this weblog. On the occasional days when I actually write something. I should at least consider writing more regularly. Try to post something every day, even if it's just a paragraph. I'll think about it at least. Right now I tend to want to post something big every time, and that intimidation often keeps me from posting anything at all. So I have to consider what I want to do. Anybody that has an opinion, feel free to drop me a line.

posted at: 14:11 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Tue, 29 Jun 2004

Hypertext thesis
While talking to somebody today, I made a reference to the Panopticon, an idealized prison, but couldn't remember the details of it. So I typed it into Google, and found this page describing it. The page turned out to be part of a collection of pages that was this guy's master's thesis in English, titled "Argumentation on the World Wide Web: Challenging Traditional Notions of Communication". Lots of really interesting stuff in there describing the change in relationship between author, reader, and text. Worth a look if you're interested in postmodern theory and related issues.

posted at: 14:58 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Sun, 27 Jun 2004

"Autistic Social Software" talk by danah boyd
One of the few blogs I try to keep up with is the Many-to-Many blog at Corante, because the work they're doing involving studying community fascinates me. One of the posters there is danah boyd, who posted an interesting talk that she gave at a conference, noting that social software has many of the same tendencies of autism that are displayed by the programmers that write such software. She notes that social software not only allows, but often encourages, multiple personality disorder, as people are encouraged to make up different avatars to express different aspects of their personalities. As she says in exasperation, "Why on earth should we encourage people to perform a mental disorder in the digital world??"

One of the key points that she makes is that the programmers tend to have limited understanding of social roles themselves, and prefer social cues that are "programmatically and algorithmically processed and understood on simplistic categorizable levels". They don't have a feel for the full richness of social possibilities, and so it's not surprising that the social software they write, like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn, asks you to boil down your friends to a binary "Is John your friend - yes or no?". As danah puts it, "It's so simplistic that people are forced to engage as though they have autism, as though they must interact procedurally."

Interesting talk. One of the thoughts I had after reading it was that many geeks might actually view the multiple personality aspect of social software as a feature, not a drawback, precisely because it lets them create new identities. Such people are often insecure with their real-world identity, and use worlds such as role-playing games, both on- and off-line, to experiment with new identities that have no "taint" of their real-world loserness. A similar case could be made for the simplistic view of friendships and social relationships. Until there are people involved in writing the code that take into account nuances like "I work with him, but I would never hang out with him outside of work" or "I'm friends with her in the context of the chorus we sing in", social software will always be deficient.

One of the other good points that danah makes is that people will make software serve their needs. She takes the example of Friendster ("users saw it as a flexible artifact that they could repurpose to reflect their social practices."). She proposes a Call to Action, "to make technology work in the context of people". I really like her second one: "#2: Make a technology, throw it out to the public and see what catches on. Follow the people who use it. Understand them. Understand what they are doing and why and how the technology fits into their lives. Evolve to better meet the needs and desires of the people who love the technology." This reflects my own biases, of course.

Oh, and she refers to a Douglas Adams piece, "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet", which is just fabulous. I particularly like this bit, describing how technology is adopted:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Tue, 15 Jun 2004

Keeping Score
Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony have apparently launched an effort to bring more people into appreciation of classical music and how it fits together (here's the Chronicle article this morning). The effort is called Keeping Score, and is going to be a five year multimedia effort. The first fruits of that effort are being broadcast this week on PBS in a Great Performances special focusing on Tschaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 (Check local listings - it's at 8pm on KQED in the Bay Area). The first hour will apparently be a behind the scenes look at how the symphony rehearses and prepares for such a performance, and the second will be a complete performance of the finished work. Sounds like it could be really interesting.

The effort also includes an online component at KeepingScore.org, giving the interested viewer a chance to learn more. It looks like a neat effort all around, and entirely in fitting with what I know of Michael's desire to share the joy of music with everyone he meets.

posted at: 00:17 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Mon, 14 Jun 2004

Zoning at Burning Man
I went to Burning Man in 2000, mostly because a bunch of my friends were going, and I figured it was one of those things that everybody should experience once. It was an interesting experience. I think the best part from my perspective was getting there early before the party started (I was there nine days), and watching the city grow up around me. I was helping to set up the central cafe, and each morning as I wandered from our campsite to center camp, there would be more and more structures around; landmarks would change daily. It was fascinating to watch this city of 30,000 people appear around me.

Anyway, what reminded me of it was reading an article in the Chronicle this morning, discussing the planning that is necessary to make a town work. Even a town as anarchic and free-spirited as Black Rock City needs rules. They have roads, they have a public works department, and they try to situate similar camps together. Good article.

posted at: 23:47 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Thu, 11 Mar 2004

More links
I recently found the site AlterNet, a website devoted to alternative media. In particular, I've been regularly reading their election section. Some recent articles that I found interesting include Arianna Huffington's advice to the Kerry campaign, and an article describing the effect that Howard Stern, of all people, could have on the race. Interesting stuff. Another site that alternet often links to is TomPaine.com, which has its own interesting set of articles.

As long as I'm doing random links, I just read an interesting speculation on the different sizes that a group can grow through, and in particular where the danger spots are. Things like the Dunbar number, which I first read about in The Tipping Point - the idea that humans can only maintain stable social connections with 150 others at a time. I find that his observations match up pretty well with my experiences in different organizations as they've grown and shrunk. Worth a read. Even if it doesn't display properly in Mozilla.

I also liked this article by Malcolm Gladwell, on the social life of paper. It speculates how we use paper and other aspects of our environment to externalize the contents of our brain, using it as a spark to memory. How many of us leave a pile of papers on our desk each evening to help remind us the next morning what we were working on? However, each of us organizes our stacks differently, and that's a reflection of how our brains are organized differently. I could spend all day looking at your stack of papers and not be able to extract the cognitive connections that you had developed. The documentation alone isn't enough, which is a point well-developed in The Social Life of Information. Gladwell makes the point as well:

The correspondence, notes, and other documents such discussions would produce formed a significant part of the documents buyers kept. These materials therefore supported rather than constituted the expertise of the buyers. In other words, the knowledge existed not so much in the documents as in the heads of the people who owned them -- in their memories of what the documents were, in their knowledge of the history of that supplier relationship, and in the recollections that were prompted whenever they went through the files.

Mon, 09 Feb 2004

Links, Schminks
It's time for another round of links. As was the case last time, these are links that I found interesting for one reason or another, but I didn't have enough commentary to justify a full entry.

Dean's movement

Mitch Ratcliffe wrote an article, suggesting that "I think the opportunity now is to establish a permanent activism, one that can have the influence of the Christian Coalition and the roots of a populist movement." I don't know who Mitch Ratcliffe, but I like his thinking, since I suggested the very same thing a month ago. While poking around, I found another similar post. It should be noted that Dean shouldn't necessarily be counted out of the race yet. He's still second in delegates, and could still make waves at the convention. But I think if he can use his position to get issues on the table, he should consider it a success. And by those criteria, he's been a huge success; part of the reason he's lost ground is that all of the other candidates co-opted his defining issues.

Exiting Deanspace

As long as we're on the subject of Dean, I wanted to draw attention to this great article by Clay Shirky on what went wrong with Dean's campaign that turned the momentum against him so quickly. Or even whether there was any momentum to begin with: "...the hard thing to explain is not how the Dean campaign blew such a huge lead, but rather why we ever thought that lead actually existed. Dean’s campaign didn’t just fail, it dissolved on contact with reality." Well worth a read for some thoughts on political organization. And there are loads of links to other interesting posts on the topic in the comments section below.

Context

I saw this post by David Weinberger linked to over at Corante, discussing the importance of the unspoken context of groups. Context is a topic that fascinates me. It's the basis of several forms of humor (changing the context makes things funny) and grounds most human relations. As Weinberger notes, the "knowledge management" industry was a perfect example of the futility of attempting to make the implicit context explicit (The Social Life of Information is an entire book devoted to that particular concept).

It's also amazing how good people are at context. While talking to my sister on the phone this evening I said something like "Remember that one place we went that one time?" And she knew what I was talking about, because the previous conversation set the context for which place and which time. But I just had to stop and laugh, because what I actually said was so devoid of information content that it was ludicrous. And yet she still was able to extract the meaning. Another example is my friends' toddler. He's just learning to talk, so he only has a few words, but can generally make himself understood because we can guess what he wants and say "Do you mean such-and-such?" and he says "Yeah!" and we go on. Unleash a speech recognition program on him and it would get gibberish. People understand him just fine. It's all about context. Hrm. I thought I could maybe expand this into a full post, but it looks like I'm striking out. Oh well. I'll pick up on this thread later. If I were more artsy, I could try to extend it into postmodernism and its tenet that nothing has any meaning without context, but I'd be faking it and somebody would probably call me on it, so I won't.

Fall of the Creative Class

I really liked reading The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida. So it was interesting to read this article, which I saw over at Corante attacking Florida's theories based on the actual economic performance of his Creative Centers. I think Florida did a good job capturing the spirit of my generation, even if it doesn't necessarily translate into the raw economic numbers that this article looks at. But it's good to have the discussion. It's boring when everybody agrees.

The Political Effects of Blogging

Saw this article over at Corante. Considering how I get basically none of my news from television at this point, I think the transition they're describing of the internet's influence overtaking that of traditional media is well on its way. The thing I wanted to comment on, though, was this quote describing how they might measure the effect of bloggers on political debate: "It might be possible to use textual analysis to track the passage of key phrases from their origin in blogs into use in official party or governmental position papers and debates, as well as the mass media." This entertains me because it reminds me of Ender's Game where Peter and Val use the nets to start influencing the political debates of the time (a storyline that continues to inspire me; heck, at some level, this blog is probably a result of my belief in the possibility of that happening):

Peter took careful note of all their most memorable phrases and then did searches from time to time to find those phrases cropping up in other places. Not all of them did, but most of them were repeated here and there, and some of them even showed up in the major debates on the prestige nets. "We're being read," Peter said. "The ideas are seeping out."
"The phrases, anyway."
"That's just the measure. Look, we're having some influence. Nobody quotes us by name, yet, but they're discussing the points we raise. We're helping set the agenda. We're getting there."

Tue, 27 Jan 2004

Creative Class War
I just wanted to link to this great article by Richard Florida that I saw referenced over at Corante's IdeaFlow. Richard Florida is the author of The Rise of the Creative Class, which I really liked. In this article, entitled Creative Class War, he takes his ideas and uses them to set the stage for this year's presidential election. In particular, he points out that the "blue" sections of the country that are considered Democratic or liberal tend to also be the cities that are attractive to the Creative Class and have a more technological creative focus, whereas the "red" sections are the ones that have a more traditional economic focus, such as assembly lines or agriculture. He also points out:

a much bigger problem. Other countries are now encroaching more directly and successfully on what has been, for almost two decades, the heartland of our economic success -- the creative economy. Better than any other country in recent years, America has developed new technologies and ideas that spawn new industries and modernize old ones, from the Internet to big-box stores to innovative product designs. And these have proved the principal force behind the U.S. economy's creation of more than 20 million jobs in the creative sector during the 1990s, even as it continued to shed manufacturing, agricultural, and other jobs.

He also mentions in passing a point I touched on in my discussion of community, where I noted that "new technologies and cultural changes have created a nation which is slowly splitting itself apart into communities of choice." He calls the phenomenon the Big Sort:

City by city, neighborhood to neighborhood, Gimpel and others have found, our politics are becoming more concentrated and polarized. We may live in a 50-50 country, but the actual places we live (inner-ring v. outer-ring suburbs, San Francisco v. Fresno) are much more likely to distribute their loyalties 60-40, and getting more lopsided rather than less. These divisions arise not from some master plan but from millions upon millions of individual choices. Individuals are sorting themselves into communities of like-minded people which validate their choices and identities. ... More than ever before, those who possess the means move to the city and neighborhood that reinforces their social and cultural view of the world.

Tue, 13 Jan 2004

A smattering of links
I have a bunch of things that I've been meaning to link to when I got around to writing up an accompanying blurb. I'm not sure that will ever happen. So rather than lose the links, I'm going to post them with minimal commentary because I've found it incredibly handy for me to be able to access links to cool things that I've seen easily from any web-enabled location. There's no real order or organization here; just things that have caught my attention over the past few weeks.

The echo chamber

I liked this article on the perils of meetings of only like-minded people that I saw linked to in the comments section of a Clay Shirky article. If only because the idea that like-minded people tend to egg each other on in the absence of the brake of a dissenter appeals to me and fits in with my thoughts on political extremism, and my aspirations of becoming a contrarian. I especially liked this quote:

Research groups made of scientists from the same discipline and background have very efficient meetings but don’t make as much progress as more diverse groups, who have more contentious meetings and spend more time explaining the obvious to each other and discovering that it’s not quite as obvious as they thought it was.

As part of a twelve-person team at work, composed of four biologists, two marketing folks, three engineers and three physicists, I've seen this effect firsthand. When we were all at Signature and ensconced in our own groups, we all proceeded in our own directions with our own set of assumptions. One of the first things we did when this team was formed was spend an entire week locked into a conference room "explaining the obvious to each other." It was incredibly useful, and something that continues to be necessary, because our perspectives are so different. But it's contributed to genuine progress as we figure out things that are relevant to each others' research.

The contrast between my hometowns

I linked to this Economist article in my last post, but it deserves its own mention here. It's an article comparing and contrasting two congressional districts, those of Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco, and Dennis Hastert in the western suburbs of Chicago. As somebody who grew up in those western suburbs and now resides in the San Francisco area, it was of particular interest to me. They really are alien lands. It's hard to explain to people who have spent their entire life in California or on the East Coast how different things are in the Midwest. But this article is a good start, so I wanted to link to it.

Are blogs just?

After a discussion started on the fairness of blogs by Joi Ito, Clay Shirky responded, and then later went back and took another crack. I don't really have much more to say, but some of the comments on those pages are interesting, and the discussion ranges across several blogs (follow the trackbacks in the comments) of varying interest.

Bay Area Future Salon

I joined the mailing list of this group recently, and have been impressed with the variety of discussion on it. I haven't made it to a real-world meeting yet, but one of these days... Okay, this link is mostly here for my own benefit.

Dorkbot

Speaking of interesting groups, this group of people devoted to "doing strange things with electricity" is neat as well. I've only been to one meeting, but I may try to make tomorrow night's gathering.

Long Now seminars available online

I've been to two of the Long Now Seminars About Long-term Thinking now, including the talk by Peter Schwartz. I missed the talk by Brian Eno, but fortunately the talks are available online now. Now I just have to find time to listen to Eno's talk...

What's your law?

I am a subscriber to the Good Experience newsletter, which included this column by Mark Hurst describing "Five Ideas for 2004, which had a link to the Edge website, which I was already a fan of. In particular, Hurst linked to Edge's Annual Question, where they ask a question of their numerous member luminaries. This year's question asked for people to coin their own law in analogy to Moore's Law. Hurst linked to his own law, of course, but scanning the other laws turned up some very interesting ones. It's certainly worth skimming through the entire list.

My favorite by far were the laws by George Lakoff, especially his First Law, that frames trump facts. The framing of the question is more important in determining the answer given than almost anything else, a fact well known to pollsters. His example of framing tax cuts as "tax relief" is brilliant in showing how the use of that phrase immediately calls in the connotations of taxes as an affliction that must be relieved. As he suggests, if taxes were treated as a membership fee, "used to maintain and expand services and the infrastructure", they would have an entirely different connotation. The implications are endless, and I really want to write about them at some point (especially the inevitable consequence that he mentions that it is a myth that people make rational decisions based on the facts, which is insanely relevant to how politics is handled), but for now I'll just link to it. I need more time to develop my thoughts on the subject.

The size of the nation-state

I really liked this Economist article on the economically appropriate size for the nation-state. Definitely worth a read. I read it in the print edition; for finding the online version, thanks must go to the the blog of Charles Murtaugh, which I found through Corante's In the Pipeline blog. I'd been having thoughts along these lines recently; in my post about Peter Schwartz's talk, I say:

An obvious extension in my eyes is whether countries are going to continue to be a relevant social entity. It seems likely to me that nation-states are at an awkward size - too big to earn the personal loyalty of its citizens, but too small to deal with issues of global significance like the environment, or even terrorism. I can see the powers of the nation-state devolving in both directions, where the personal loyalty will move down the chain to a tribal level, and the global problems move upwards to some sort of global association of tribes, like the United Nations except more effective.

I just want to note that I wrote that before reading the Economist article; unfortunately, unlike their referenced economists, I had no evidence to support my assertion other than my gut feeling. Alas. This thread also ties into my recent post about community, musing about how we are steadily segregating ourselves into smaller like-minded communities in both a physical and virtual sense. It all ties together. I just haven't figured out how yet.

Sun, 07 Dec 2003

Bloglet
If you're interested in the content of this blog, but don't want to deal with checking the web page sporadically, I'd recommend using the service at Bloglet. Create a new account with your email address, click on "your subscriptions" on the right side" and enter http://www.nehrlich.com/blog/index.rss in the box labelled "To subscribe to an RSS feed, enter the feed URL below:" and click on the Subscribe button. After doing this, the bloglet software will go out and check the website once a day and send you an e-mail with any updates. This is particularly convenient if there are several blogs or other web pages that you like to keep track of; I currently have eight web pages in my subscriptions list on bloglet.

posted at: 02:28 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

Sat, 06 Dec 2003

The Semantic Web
The Semantic Web was recently brought to my attention after reading an article by Clay Shirky, previously mentioned in this blog. As usual, I agree with much of what Shirky has to say. But apparently, he ignited quite a discussion, including this rebuttal and the further discussion here.

In the terms that Shirky originally states, I have to agree with him. It does sound like proponents of the Semantic Web are vastly oversimplifying the problem. Even after reading the further discussion, I'm not sure such proponents disagree with Shirky. They provide as counterexamples very simple use cases, such as indexing books, where the information structure is already well-defined. If that's all they mean by the Semantic Web, then sure, that makes sense. But Shirky makes a good point that extending such a concept to more complicated scenarios is going to be an extremely difficult problem, where the Semantic Web folks are trying to gloss over the complexity by concentrating on the parts they already know how to do.

It sounds a lot like the debates on artificial intelligence to me. The AI researchers make grand statements about the future of AI. Critics say it's going to be a lot harder than that. The researchers show how they can do all these cool things in environments of limited scope (like chess-playing), without realizing that such demonstrations imply absolutely nothing about their ability to handle the general case. For the Semantic Web to be nifty cool, it'll have to be able to handle general implications on its own. And that will be tricky. In the meantime, the only metadata that is generated will be that which somebody has figured out a use for. The Semantic Web tools may make it slightly easier to deal with that metadata, but it won't be able to extend it by creating its own metadata, for instance.

I don't know. I thought I had something interesting to say about this topic, but maybe not. I'll still post this, because I think the links and discussions posted above are interesting, but I'm not going to spend any more time on extending out this post.

posted at: 15:05 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal

LookinGlass Architecture and Design
My friend, Emil Mertzel, and his business partner Nick were recently published in a Taiwanese design journal. The article is available from their website, at this link (down at the moment that I am posting, but I'm sure it will be back up eventually).

I sent Emil the following e-mail after reading the article:

I think you make some interesting points about the role of architects in a world where physical space is starting to be de-emphasized. Your example of the call centers in India where the workers practice their Midwestern accent and make up suburban lives was excellent. Do architects move to constructing the mental spaces that people begin to occupy? I mean, there's already a whole field of information architecture, which is all about constructing mental structures of information that are compatible with how people think, in analogy to constructing physical structures that are compatible with how people live.

There's also a lot of work to be done in developing the tools to let people construct their own virtual worlds. I've been fascinated by such possibilities since I was introduced to MUDs (multi-user domains) in high school. Making the tools easy enough to use such that everybody can construct the virtual structures that they envision is a daunting task. Or maybe that level doesn't need to be reached; after all, we don't expect people to design and build their buildings in real life.

Definitely some interesting stuff there. I'll be thinking about it.

posted at: 14:32 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal