Ascent Stage

35 Amazing Science Fair Projects [del.icio.us]

2009-11-14T13:44:45-08:00

Dubious but hilarious (and disturbing) inquiry, such as "What Do My Farts Smell Like?" and "Filariasis: bringer of cankles, balooner of scrotems [sic]".

CNBC Cameraman Can’t Believe He’s Filming Another Blog Off A Computer Monitor [del.icio.us]

2009-11-14T13:31:23-08:00

I think I've been this guy's subject. Can you imagine anything less interesting?

How Many People Are In Space Right Now? [del.icio.us]

2009-11-10T07:37:03-08:00

Looking forward to the day of sustained triple digits.

A new way of looking at the world [del.icio.us]

2009-11-08T15:28:28-08:00

Good, general populace introduction to the diversity of info visualization projects underway.

My Year of the City

2009-11-07T09:59:08-08:00

If my years had titles, like the Chinese lunar calendar, this would be The Year of the City.

October, 2008: I was in Beijing¹ to launch the Virtual Forbidden City, a multi-user 3D world recreation of the famous palace complex. It was the end of many years of immersion in the design of a special kind of city. Seems almost preordained in hindsight, but this was my primer in designing an environment of information atop a traditional "built" environment. A kind of sandboxed proving ground for urban augmentation.

But things were about to change. The economy hit the skids, the US elected a new president, and IBM's Smarter Planet (and Smarter Cities) strategy was just taking off.

Something else happened at the end of last year. For the first time in history more human beings lived in urban areas than not. (It is a trend with momentum: by 2050 more than 70% of the world's population will live in metropolitan areas.)² Recession or not, it was clear that cities were going to be the nodes for effecting the most change -- social, economic, and environmental.

Closer to home, my own city was taking a hard look at itself -- both how it had lived up to what it wanted to be and how it could be something different in the future. Fresh from the glow of sending one of our own to the White House (and before that was dimmed by an idiot governor), the city began a year of celebrating the 100th anniversary of The Plan of Chicago by Daniel Burnham and John Root.

Workshops, concerts, exhibits, tours, dramatizations, even a luminous, gilled pavilion by Zaha Hadid -- all commemorations of this seminal document. But the real effect was to focus the city on itself, to look closely, critically, and comparatively at what had been done in a century and what might still be.

Of course, this self-awareness was magnified by the competition for the 2016 Olympic games. Our bid spurred much discussion, much dissent, and not a little hope that we'd be able to add a fifth star to the city flag.

The bid book was a vision of a city re-imagined from the lakefront inward, a big plan to stir hearts, our own virtual city.

But it too was forbidden, and the games were awarded to Rio de Janeiro. (Maybe there's still a chance?)

This has been a professional year of great upheaval for me. Lots of changes, nearly all for the better, at work. But change is change, and it's been tough to establish new rhythms. Worth it, though, as I'm helming a most fascinating exploration of cities called City Forward. Though it lacks rocket ships, it may be the most perfect merger of personal passion and professional pursuit I've yet experienced. (Psst, Mayor Daley: spaceport on the lake!)

The pace is set now. I've spoken at some great conferences, and I'm gearing up to bring it full circle as part of the Bold Plans For the Next 100 Years panel at the Chicago Humanities Festival: Burnham Centennial Program on Nov. 14. (Looking forward to City Camp in Chicago and a possible panel at SXSW too.)

So if you're urban-averse, like huge cars and suburban commutes, or otherwise think the metropolis is an earthly hell, fair warning. There's gonna be a lot of city talk in this neighborhood in the coming year.

--------

¹ My last trip out of the country and the first time in a decade that I've been so domestic. Dopplr mocks me.

² United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects, 2007. [PDF report]

A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families [del.icio.us]

2009-11-05T13:23:34-08:00

My kids and I speak a LEGO argot all our own. Love this article.

Wordr [del.icio.us]

2009-11-04T13:34:27-08:00

Wordr is like Twitter, except that you can only post one word at a time. Get your bon mots ready.

Papercraft Self Portrait [del.icio.us]

2009-11-03T01:38:06-08:00

Amazing Halloween costume.

All Sorts - a linguistic experiment [del.icio.us]

2009-10-31T08:54:35-07:00

Coin your own collective noun, such as "a clot of vampires" or "a romero of zombies".

Soft Maps [del.icio.us]

2009-10-22T07:19:53-07:00

Beautiful custom quilts and blankets based on maps.

Myna [del.icio.us]

2009-10-13T18:03:37-07:00

Aviary's latest tool, an online audio editing tool. Cloud remixing!

Why We Should Blow Up The Moon [del.icio.us]

2009-10-12T15:46:40-07:00

Suck it, Neil Armstrong.

The kind of program a city is « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird [del.icio.us]

2009-10-12T09:27:59-07:00

"If we’re reaching the point where it makes sense to consider the city as a fabric of addressable, queryable, even scriptable objects and surfaces – to reimagine its pavements, building façades and parking meters as network resources – this raises an order of questions never before confronted ..."

Trendsmap [del.icio.us]

2009-10-09T09:03:43-07:00

Real-time, map-overlaid Twitter trends. Beautifully-done and very useful.

"The Rock" Irish Red Ale

2009-09-21T09:27:04-07:00

Last year, on Sept. 29, my wife's grandfather William Burke, the center of her family, passed away. Rocky, as he was known to family and friends, was a larger-than-life gentleman who would enter a room and, on the rare occasions when he didn't know everyone, would make a point of befriending every last person during the course of their encounter. Rocky was a supernode in the world of social networks before we thought of them as such -- and he went out of his way to make sure people's lives were better for knowing him.

Rocky also enjoyed a good libation, several in fact. Growing up in the Irish Channel in New Orleans, Rocky came from a culture surrounded by alcohol. And, while he demonstrated an understanding of the responsibility drinking entailed, he never let that get in the way of heartily embracing the bonhomie it produced. Rocky wasn't a stranger to anyone and he wasn't a stranger to beer.

This is why I recently decided to turn my wine- and cider-making apparatus and technique towards the goal of creating a brew in honor of Rocky.

In hindsight it almost seems preordained. Had to make an Irish Red Ale, of course. But it was anything but orderly. Making beer, while on paper simpler than making wine, is different in important ways -- most notably, the use of more separate ingredients and high heat.

I'd had the components for months but they went unused until my old Atlanta pal Patrick Childress found himself in Chicago on a work assignment. Patrick is a beer-schooled brewmaster and his tutelage was absolutely essential to the undertaking. My family and I spent a fantastic summer Saturday with Patrick as he stepped us through the finer points of beer-making with the deep knowledge and quick wit of a Food Network host.

Here's a video of the day's activities, wonderfully narrated by the brewmaster.

It turned out great, far better than expected and, I'll admit, better than the wines we've made in the past. Helps to have a board-certified brewer in the mix.

If you've never had an Irish Red Ale I'd recommend O'Hara's Irish Red or Great Lakes Conway's Irish Red. (You get a sense of what it should be from Killian's, but as the Sam's Liquors beer ubergeek told me, that really isn't what it should taste like.) Or, get yourself over to my place and we'll crack The Rock.

The label was particularly fun to make, if not an example of exceptional illustration skills. Every year for the New Orleans St. Joseph's Day parade Rocky would don an red and green tuxedo and march with Italians (and Irish), celebrating his neighborhood and their traditions. We have many photos of him in a variety of Leprechaunish garb -- all of which capture in a small way the man's love for fun and embrace of the moment.

So here's to you, Rocky. A tip of the hat, a clink of the glasses. Sláinte! Thanks for many wonderful years.

Full photoset here.

The cost of my current

2009-08-29T20:54:59-07:00

This will shock no one given my lifestyle data obsession and current work focus, but I am now monitoring our home energy usage (and cost) in real time.

Back in April I noted in a harmless tweet what seemed to be far more attention to home power monitoring solutions in the UK than in the US. This prompted my excellent colleagues at IBM Hursley to try to help me out. The geeks at Hursley had for a while been playing around with the data outputs of monitoring hardware made by Current Cost. They saw my tweet, knew that Current Cost had modified some of their gizmos for US usage, and arranged to send me one.

I have bad luck with electrical home projects and I feared this one quite a lot given that I'd have to fuss with the house mains, but the installation proved remarkably easy. True, there are (as yet) no US-specific FAQs or video tutorials, but the idea was straightforward: find the mains and put the clamps over them.

In most of the UK this means locating the circuit breaker/meter combo which is located outside the house. In the US, only the meter is outside the home (due to the outdated practice of having electrical company employees drop by to read it). Yet, that's where I started. And almost ended. The meter is sheathed in metal for obvious reasons and there didn't seem to be any easy way in without a blowtorch. Live wires I figured I could handle; molten metal and live wires, no.

So back inside to dismantle the circuit breaker. And there they were. Three big cables: two mains, plus a ground (at the very top of the photo).

You don't mess with wiring at all, actually. Just gently place the clamps right on the insulated lines. The clamps lead to a battery-powered transmitter box. I bolted the breaker back up and that was that. Once I plugged in the receiver I was immediately receiving real-time data and cost for electricity usage.

In the image above you see that the display shows two power feeds (one per main) in the upper left and that it has a firm connection to the transmitter (upper right). You always have a current energy usage readout (2.8KW). The cost cycles between at-the-moment and per month. The display is rounded out with historical data, time, and temp. (Here's an annotated version.)

At a glance the data seems dead-on compared to our monthly electricity bills. And it is true that the current usage/cost changes merely by switching lights off and on around the house. It is definitely real-time. But the real value of the system comes in the ability to hook the monitor to your computer. Once that link is established there's a whole set of services you can plug into.

I use the Current Cost to Pachube app to send my data to the feed aggregator/visualizer service Pachube. Once there you can view the three data feeds -- temperature and wattage for the two mains -- over time. (The y axis is power in kilowatts.)

The week after I installed the unit we took a bit of a vacation so we were afforded the experiment of observing the house while we were not living in it. Obviously usage was way down (especially since we essentially shut off the AC), but the very quietness of the electricity usage surfaced interesting patterns in home energy consumption unprompted by human need. The graphs were mostly flatlines with regular, periodic low plateaus -- obviously something was kicking in on a regular interval. We're pretty sure one of these is the refrigerator/ice-maker, but there's one on the other main that we've not been able to sleuth just yet. Has to be something with a motor, we think.

We asked our housekeeper to come while we were out -- and of course knew precisely when she was there because the graph spiked (vacuum cleaner!). But the next day the graph spiked at roughly the same time and in the same way. Turns out she left early the first day and came back to finish the second (since we weren't there). So there it is: personal energy monitoring can also help you nab squatters and spy on your home help.

Because Pachube is really a service for mixing various sets of data (ala ManyEyes) you can nearly instantly see your home's energy usage plotted as CO₂ output. And there's a great iPhone app for viewing your Pachube feeds.

So there are two reasons to care about any of this and both relate to increasing awareness of one's own consumption patterns (something I wrote about extensively after my stint in Africa). First is cost savings. When you have in-your-face evidence of the impact of turning down the AC or switching off the lights, you are more inclined to do it. (To say nothing of using the monitor to track down energy sucks you didn't know you had.)

Second is that the idea of instrumenting part of one's consumption opens up all kinds of possibilities for how we might as a planet solve larger problems. Few would argue that we need smarter power grids. Bills that reflected actual usage (rather than estimated or aggregate) would prompt even great attention to personal usage. Widespread adoption of home monitoring like Current Cost -- and the sharing of anonymous data -- would show utilities and local governments patterns of usage that could inform smarter maintenance, more flexible infrastructure build-out, and even "competitive" incentive programs between localities.

Last year I used WattzOn to calculate a rough personal footprint. It was atrocious. Sure I commute to work by public transportation or bike, but my international air travel shoved my impact off the charts. This year my travel is very different -- lots of small trips, none international. So I recalculated my CO₂ and, no surprise, housing is the number one contributor. (And that's just the house and the power/materials it uses. The Stuff category in the chart below largely deals with our home's appliances.)

My goal is modest. I've like to bring the combined housing and stuff number down by 25% in twelve months. Not sure if that's possible with the three kids, but they do like the idea of real-time feedback for their actions (rather than, say, a parent praising them merely for turning off the lights in their rooms).

In the end, beyond the sheer nerd factor of monitoring your own energy, what good is it if you don't use the new information to effect change?

How to enjoy a night in the wilderness, in 7 easy steps

2009-08-27T22:46:39-07:00

➀ Create a packing list

➁ Pick a scenic spot

➂ Set up tent before nightfall (and hope the waters don't rise)

➃ Listen to the nighttime bestiary come alive and supplement with scary stories

➄ Lay down, look up, and let your handheld astronomy app tell you what you're observing

➅ Sleep well, wake up in the mist

➆ Celebrate!

The city is a platform

2009-08-20T11:44:44-07:00

But it needs your vote.

In what is becoming an annual ritual here, I'd like to ask for the support of Ascent Stage readers in nominating my panel for inclusion at this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference/fest-a-go-go next year.

Here's the quick version.

Cities abound in data generated by their inhabitants (virtual worlds, city websites) and created automatically by systems or monitoring. How does this online manifestation of the city interact in tangible ways with urban design and informal urban constructs? Is there such a thing as "the street as platform"?

I have a bunch of panelists in mind, including Andrew Huff of Gapers Block, Dan O'Neill from Everyblock (today of MSNBC!), and some urban design peeps, but we'll wait to finalize if we get accepted.

The panel-picking site is live and if you'd just scoot over to it, weigh the merits of it against all the other nominees, forget about my past indiscretions and any slights I've made against you and your family, then vote for it that'd be great.

Wait, you say you already voted for this a year ago? Well, you may have and if you did, thank you, because this panel was submitted last year -- and it was accepted! But so was another proposal I sent in and the organizers deemed the other one better. (I disagreed, thought it turned out OK.) So, if you wouldn't mind, let's try to go two for two.

And yes, folks, this is the first hint I've dropped on this blog about the newest project I'm working on. More soon!

Put a fork in it

2009-08-09T19:39:25-07:00

A phenomenal weekend that began with beermakin' and a crawfish boil concluded today with the merger of several of my favorite things: an outing with my wife (my birthday gift from her) on bike through the neighborhoods of Chicago in search of unique home-grown food fare.

We were part of the new Fork and the Road culinary bike tour of Unsung Chicago Classics. Our group was 13 with two knowledgeable, friendly guides and, though the weather was chafetastically hot, it was a splendid time.

First stop after departing the Loop was Maxwell Street Market and a "brunch" of huaraches, pineapple (!) tamales, and tacos al pastor, including a wonderful taco of beef tongue.

From Market Street we headed just up and over to Greektown to savor lamb and saganaki at The Parthenon where, we were told, the traditional of lighting it on fire, dousing it with lemon juice, and yelling "opaa!" originated. The Parthenon apparently is one of the few Greek restaurants that still builds their gyro cones on the vertical spit in-house. Tasty and ambient (and worth it for the air conditioning), but the best part was yet to come.

We zagged and zigged through the West Loop to Humboldt Park to our final stop at Borinquen Restaurant, originator of the Jibarito "sandwich". The Jibarito was the best discovery of the trip: steak, lettuce, tomato, and garlic mayo smooshed between plantains. Total delight.

The group was headed back to the Loop whence we began, but thelovelywife and I were so close to home we peeled off. Not a minute after heading out we heard the chimes of an ice cream truck and, given that it was nearly 100° out, we stopped for dessert.

Nearly home, biking up Western, I heard a nasty thwack!, looked back, and found a screw had pierced my tire and exited the other side. We walked the final mile home, sweaty and full.

It's simply a great thing, exploring the city by bike while indulging in its unique foods, but note even on a hot day and with several miles of pedaling the experience is still, as we were told, "calorie positive". And absolutely worth it.

Full photoset here.

Kid in a treehouse

2009-08-05T19:55:35-07:00

This past weekend was our annual neighborhood party, Retro on Roscoe. It's a all-out fest that ignites the blocks around it for 48 hours. As such, some friends of ours host an annual pre-party that spans all five of their contiguous backyards -- something you don't often see in the city.

I was asked to DJ the party whose theme this year was "Boogie Nights", basically 70's tunes infused with other tracks that carry forward the ethos from that era. The booth was a treehouse smack in the middle of the party which we outfitted tip-to-tail with music and lighting gear. I played from 8pm to 3am and, though I almost wet myself (with no backup until late), it was an astounding event.

I had a stripped-down setup (compared to, say, Christmas Party), but it was ample. Just the Macbook Pro running Ableton Live, a Native Instruments Audio Kontrol multichannel interface, and an Akai APC40 control surface. The Akai was perfect, a monome-esque grid with the knobs and sliders of a Novation SL Remote -- though far sturdier.

I had hundreds of song fragments pre-loaded and warped -- something that gave me almost unlimited flexibility to respond to the crowd without letting things drop. I even entertained requests from those brave enough to scale the nearly vertical steps.

I didn't want to come down. Why? Let's recap. I was in a kickass treehouse with another geek (Tom, on lights), a good friend, and a cooler of beer. We were controlling several hundred watts of music and commanding the best view of the space. Sure, we were one chain link's failure away from death by falling steel, but if that's how I was supposed to go, I wouldn't complain.

A few have asked for a recording from the night. I'm still cleaning up most of it, but here's an excerpt from when I think the most people were out in the yard dancing. (Specifically the slightly sped-up Diana Ross with a few claps and bloops layered on top was the pinnacle, if memory serves.)

Treehouse Boogie (10:24)

[Download]

Full photoset here.

PS - I'm two-for-two luring Chicago's finest with low frequencies. I suppose next Christmas we'll go for the hat trick.

Geeks with a project

2009-07-20T22:16:20-07:00

If you spend any time on the web you know that today is the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's moon landing and the first steps of humans on the lunar surface. There's been some great coverage from We Choose The Moon, to the live Twitter feed "replay", to Kottke's (now-finished) real-time TV coverage playback, to the Google graphic that actually has changed to follow the progression of the landing (and earthrise)!

The commemoration has caused me to reflect personally on the impact of the moon landing. Despite what you may have heard, the name of this blog references the upper half of the lunar lander, the stage that ascends to rendezvous with the command module for the journey home. My choice of that term came from a period of my life of intense interest in spaceflight* partially because of the sheer thrill of it, partially because of the series From The Earth To The Moon, but mostly because, at the time, I was a young project manager in a massive organization who saw in the moonshots the attempt to do something amazing with lots of smart people, cutting-edge technology, and a common goal. I didn't want to be Neil Armstrong so much as Gene Kranz.

In the tributes, you're not hearing a lot about the thousands of private contractors who helped plop the 12 guys on the moon. But the organization of that many people to do something of that magnitude in just a little more than 7 years may be as remarkable as the outcome.

IBM, the company that I work for, was a large part of this effort and I admit that this is a source of pride for me. I've had this photo of mission control taped to my cube for as long as I can remember.

These are my people. Practitioners of a timeless nerdiness that I think of often when I confront organizational bureaucracy or technical hurdles in my own job -- one which ain't, after all, rocket science. IBM has a great subsite up on our contribution to the space race.

Closer to home, I have the memory of my wife's grandfather, William Boulet, who went to work as an engineer for Boeing after leaving the Army Air Corps after WWII (where he survived a year as a Nazi prisoner). At Boeing Grandpa Boulet designed a particular bolt that was used inside the fuselage of the Saturn V rocket and for his service he was given a commemorative medal -- a keepsake I was given by his family when he passed away in 2005. I grabbed it before I left for work today. Not exactly sure why, but I felt like having it with me.

It isn't nostalgia, of course, for I was not alive for any but the very last landing -- and only a newborn then. For me, the Apollo program is equal parts inspirational and aspirational. Whether you agree with the purely political motives that set us on the course to the moon or not, my feeling is that what the effort itself represents is the very best of what humans can do when given a massive challenge packaged in a disheveled box of constraint.

We certainly have freighters full of that particular parcel today. Let's get unwrapping.

_{* An interest, it should be noted, that has not so much waned as been tempered by the seeming lack of grand purpose that NASA has fallen into as an orbital trucking company.}

Looking into the Past

2009-07-21T07:45:18-07:00

Larger versions available here.

Dakin and Sheridan in Lakeview, Chicago. May 29, 2009, some fifty years after the inset photo was taken. Pictured are left-to-right my father, grandfather, and uncle.

This location is a few houses down from where my father grew up. To the west (behind the photographer) Dakin dead-ends into the Hebrew Cemetary. Straight ahead is the CTA Red Line at the Sheridan stop. Three blocks to the south (right of the photographer) is Wrigley Field. A childhood paradise!

This particular corner has housed a pharmacy, a porn shop, a coffee house, and a taqueria, among other things.

There's a lot more of this now-and-then style photography in the Looking into the Past Flickr pool.

Thanks to Chris Gansen for a fun midday diversion.

Meedan

2009-04-27T11:53:52-07:00

So there's this project I've been working on for years which I've been (mostly) mum about.

No more. Now's the time for talking -- across borders, between languages, outside of our disconnected ecosystems of news-gathering.

Welcome to Meedan.

Meedan is a space for conversation and networking -- the word 'meedan' (ميدان) means 'town square' or 'gathering place' in Arabic -- where everything posted is mirrored between English and Arabic using a mix of human and machine translation.

The project is based on the simple (even self-evident) premise: it's easy to distrust and misconstrue someone you can't have a one-on-one conversation with. While the web is a place of massive social interaction, this interaction is almost universally bounded within language groups -- a startling barrier to true understanding.

Meedan focuses on reducing this barrier by enabling English and Arabic speakers to

share news and opinion from the English-language and Arabic-language web
join cross-language conversations about technology, arts, business and politics
widen their social network with people who speak a different language and who partake of very different cultures
write, vet and edit translations in collaboration with users around the world

The project is led by the Meedan organization, a non-profit in San Francisco, with technical development and translation technologies from IBM. Here's a video introducing Meedan.

So, how does it work?

Comments are instantly translated into Arabic or English using IBM's machine translation. But because machine translation is not perfect (especially with a language as complex as Arabic) community translators are allowed to edit the translation.

This ability to improve the translations works like editing a Wikipedia article and, in my opinion, is the really novel use of social media on Meedan. (The plan is to allow translations to be rated such that, over time, the best translators emerge as part of a social network of trusted bilingual users.) As a final step, professional translators vet the community-submitted edits. Here's a video demonstrating comment translation.

These hybrid machine-human translations are then fed back into the system which learns from the ever-growing, vetted corpus. The more people talk, the smarter the machine translation becomes.

Can the system be gamed? Sure. Will there still be misunderstanding, enmity, and deliberate mischievousness? Likely. You can't change human nature. What Meedan does is provide tools for mitigating the less salutary effects of long-distance, networked conversation between peoples of different cultures.

That's the hope, anyway. Meedan is in an open (though relatively quiet) beta phase right now. Come on in.

Update: You can get updates via Meedan on Twitter or at their blog.

Everything I need to know about people management I learned from M

2009-04-25T10:01:32-07:00

A while back I was editing my annual business goals, the benchmark against which I am evaluated at the end of the year. Coincidentally my wife and I and some friends were also watching the latest Bond flick, Quantum of Solace.

Turns out there is a ton of great management advice sprinkled in between the car chases, gun fights, and general tuxedo-style bad-assery. Nearly all of these are said by Judi Dench's icy Q M*.

How to tell someone that they may be laid off

"I need to know that I can trust you."

How to give someone the appearance of a last chance even though in your mind you've already laid them off

"I need to know you're on the team. I need to know you value your career."

How to answer a phone with confidence

"What is it?"

How to delegate

When asked for something have an assistant say on your behalf "Not in the mood."

How to motivate

"Impress me."

How to deal with competitors

Ask "Is he one of ours?" If he is not, say "Then he shouldn't be looking at me."

How to compliment a colleague

"There is something horribly efficient about you."

How to deal with government "regulation"

"I don't give a shit about the CIA."

How to deal with an over-eager assistant

"[I need] nothing, go away."

How to end a conversation

Calmly interject "Quiet," then walk away.

* Update: Wasn't minding my P's and Q's and got M's code name wrong in the original of this post. Sorry, Bond nerds!

Be like Ada

2009-03-23T22:11:41-07:00

Today is international Ada Lovelace Day. Don't know who Ada Lovelace was? Well, that's part of the problem.

See, a while back I pledged to post on this day about a woman in technology who I admire. The pledge is part of a campaign to raise the profile of women's contributions to the field. More importantly to me is the collective effort to define role models for young women considering a career in high tech -- and who are likely daunted by the overwhelming gender discrepancy therein. It's astonishing, really, considering how limitless the field is and how generally egalitarian the overall vibe is of the tech scene. But you don't need charts and surveys to know that things are out of whack. Just get yourself to a tech conference. It's a sausage fest.

I've had the luck of working with dozens of talented women in my decade-plus of employment at IBM and my generally geeky wanderings have given me the privilege of meeting many more.

But today I want to tell you about Jennifer Martin. Jen's a Creative Director in the Chicago Center for Solution Innovation in IBM. I've worked with her for most of the last eight years. Her title belies her unique skills in information architecture and user interaction design. Jen is an expert in bridging the gap between end-user requirements, usability, and design that can be easily translated into a coded thing.

If you've ever wondered where the magic happens between an idea and a piece of code, it is with the information architecture -- and Jen is a magician of the highest order. Except that it isn't sorcery. Far from it: IA, as it is called, is wickedly difficult to do well because the devil is most certainly in the details. That page with boxes and arrows on it might look like it represents how you think your app will work, but hand it to a developer who needs to code for every eventuality or hand it to a graphic designer who needs to know what functions really do and nine times out of ten it will be back to the drawing board.

Not with Jen. She's fluent in the language of both user needs and developer requirements -- a false distinction I'm perpetuating even by writing it that way. Design is design and when you get it right it is mostly incontrovertible. Jen gets it right. (And she's got her priorities in line too.)

Don't believe me? Have a look at a few of the projects I've worked on with her. Eternal Egypt, a challenge to design a seamless experience across a website, PDA's, mobile phones, and a standalone kiosk. Or, The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time, truly the bleeding edge of information design as Jen took to designing an experience in a custom, multi-user virtual world for the Palace Museum in Beijing. I'll stop there not for lack of other examples or to mitigate Jen's embarrassment at this post, but because in a way this isn't the point at all.

Jen Martin is just an example herself. She doesn't design circuits (though there are plenty of women who do). She's not a stereotypical geek or the female caricature portrayed in so man male-designed games. She's just someone who had talent, chose a very high-technology field underserved by that talent, and made a name for herself. We need more like her. Many, many more.

So girls -- or ladies, if you're considering a career change (and who isn't during this economic apocalypse?) -- know that you'll be in good company if technology interests you. And remember that the popular image of the pocket-protecter wearing man in ill-fitting clothes is just an image. Like any stereotype, it can be erased. You have the undo.

Did a panelist just say bestiality?

2009-03-19T20:56:15-07:00

So, the panel I moderated at SXSW went exceedingly well. That's what happens when you stack the deck with smart, witty, quotable peeps. I was honored to be up there with them.

We projected the #sxswbeast feed for the audience in real time to get a sense of the mood and questions. In lieu of the podcast of the talk (which has not yet been posted) you can thumb through the feed and get a pretty damn good idea of the meat of the talk. The Hive Mind as Cliffs Notes.

Here's a Wordle cloud of all the tweets that came in. Click for larger. (Find the suppository!)

In another vein is this visualization from Social Collider. It shows lateral connections between Twitter conversations. The vortex at the middle represents all the different audience conversations happening during the talk. But the interesting bits are the lines that shoot out to the left and right, like the rings of Saturn. These represent similarities to other tweets taking place at the same time. Most are from SXSW itself so the graph is, in a way, a snapshot of thematic resonance at the conference between sessions. The more horizontal the line, the more simultaneous the discussion.

Here's the visualization. Click for larger.

Slightly humorous is that one of the tweets was about the book Orbiting the Giant Hairball -- a classic on the topic of corporate entrepreneurship. Hairball indeed!

Straight from T. Herman Zweibel

2009-03-08T22:40:41-07:00

While on the hunt for my family's local history I was helpfully pointed to the online archive of the Chicago Tribune. It is an amazing resource and one hell of a timesuck. Half the time it feels like you're reading the Onion; the other half makes you realize just how far newspapers have fallen as the organ of record for society.

I stumbled upon this bizarre blurb from Oct. 14, 1920, back when the Trib was known as the Chicago Daily Tribune ("The World's Greatest Newspaper," apparently). It reads like some kind of personal alternate universe.

That John Tolva sure was an ass.

Note that I too have three children, though they are thankfully not motherless. Also, I do not eat a pound and a half of spaghetti each night.

1903

2009-03-03T22:15:48-08:00

Departure

On the train to Naples the old ladies in black thought she was menstruating when she asked them for help disposing the bloody cloth. She let them think so. The train was cramped when they left Barile, but when it picked up passengers in Potenza it filled so full you merely leaned into others to maintain balance. It was not the place to make a public fuss over a choleric baby.

Living in a big, old city like Chicago is a four-dimensional experience. You move around the street grid, up high into skyscrapers, down into the underbelly of subway tubes, but time too is layered into the built things, seen only if you are looking, meshed into the streetscape like a discolored piece of gum that's just another part of the sidewalk. Until you look more closely at it.

The baby hadn't made a noise since they arrived at the port. He was swaddled up against Grazia tight enough that she'd feel it if his shallow breaths stopped. She sat down on the steamer trunk. Giuseppe, unsure which ship was theirs, barreled chest-first into the noisy confusion of Neapolitan seamen, stevedores, travelers, and common thieves. Grazia attempted to nurse, but she couldn't let down. The baby had not taken milk in eight days.

I knew that my great-grandparents had come to live in Chicago in the same way I know Mrs. O'Leary and Al Capone and Saul Bellow lived here -- and with about as much tangible connection to same. Certainly I had occasion to think of their lives. Three times in 14 years I had trekked to their village in poor, arid southern Italy, learning a bit more each time, eventually being welcomed by their hometown as one of their own. And that was part of the problem. I could connect with them in Italy, but not here, in the town where they started a new life and became American.

Gibraltar was still in sight when baby Michele died. There were no facilities to keep his body on board. An Arbëreshë steward who heard his own strange accent echoed in the parents' sobbing drew Giuseppe close, felt the bitter waft of Amaro Lucano on the big man's breath, and told him that he could not emigrate with a corpse. Michele, tightly bound and ballasted, was lowered gently into the waves. Grazia heaved somewhere in a mass of ladies in black and rosaries. Giuseppe changed some of his dollars for lire and drank it away.

I had gone searching before, just before the last trip to Italy. I started at the end, hunting with my kids for a nondescript tomb marker. We found Giuseppe, buried Joseph Tolva, on a sweltering summer day that gave way to a torrential storm just as we found the house he lived in when he registered for World War I in 1915. But these were milestones only. Markers of events, not the experience of a life. I had the records from Italy, the scraps of US government documents from the period, even a few photographs, but what most eluded me was Giuseppe's connection to my city.

They had argued about taking the baby to America as sick as he was, but the passage was paid, the job was arranged, and the padrone was waiting in Chicago. There would not be a second chance. On July 28, 1903, nine days after they lost the only thing of importance they brought from Italy, Giuseppe and Grazie Tolve arrived in New York City. Three lines, one of them crossed out, on the ship manifest marked their entry. Giuseppe admitted to carrying $25 and told the agent they were bound for one Rocco Calandriello Jr. at 50 Blue Island Ave., Chicago.

Arrival

That name and that address have perplexed me for years. None of my living relatives had heard of Rocco Calandriello, Ancestry.com had too many records to be useful, and 50 Blue Island Ave wasn't an address that existed anymore. I considered it a dead end.

A few weeks ago at a conference I met Dennis McClendon, a professional mapmaker from Chicago. I casually mentioned that I knew that streets had been renumbered earlier last century but that I had gotten no further. Dennis cleared up my confusion in the span of about 15 minutes. On his laptop he brought up a scan of the 1909 document detailing all the renumbered buildings. Six years after Giuseppe and Grazia arrived 50 became 707 Blue Island Ave.

Blue Island Avenue covered in snow, with stores on either side, pedestrians on the sidewalk and horse drawn vehicles in the street, 1907 [source: Chicago Historical Society]

But I wanted to know what that address was. Who was Rocco, the "relative or friend" that Giuseppe had listed on the manifest? Dennis drew my attention to two amazing resources, Robinson's Map of Chicago from 1886 and the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps 1894 - 1951. Both of them list in great detail what was where, building by building, at two distinct points in the city's history, thanks mostly to a chance to start fresh from (and insure against another) Chicago Fire.

[source: Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of Chicago]

In 1917 the building housed a glass and mirror factory, though there's no evidence that Giuseppe was a glassworker.

[source: Polk's "Criss-Cross" Directory]

In 1928, the year after Giuseppe died, the building housed an electric company and some plumbers and bore names of distinctly non-Italian lineage.

Of course, the building could have been something vastly different in 1903, though it is marked as a business rather than a residence from as early as 1886. My guess is that Rocco Calandriello really was Giuseppe's uncle, though an uncle through marriage, but what he did and why he did it at 50 Blue Island Ave. is not something the documents tell us.

Before I could inform Dennis that Google Maps still couldn't locate 707 Blue Island Ave. he noted that part of that street had been demolished in the 60's to make space for the University of Illinois at Chicago campus -- the very campus the conference we were attending was being held on!

We overlaid the pre-destruction map on current satellite photography of the area and had a lock. I was out the door with my camera before I could even say thanks.

Blue Island Avenue is one of a handful of diagonal streets in Chicago, cutting southwest to northeast into the city center. Before the university was built it ended at Harrison Street; now it stops at Roosevelt Rd. Interestingly -- and helpfully -- the campus layout largely preserves the outline of the original thoroughfare. The gum you notice on the sidewalk only when you step in it.

I'm pretty sure this is where 50 Blue Island Avenue once stood. Coincidentally, this spot is a few hundred feet from where Jane Adams' Hull House now resides, having been moved from its original location during the UIC construction. Given that recently-arrived Italians constituted a major slice of the neighborhood that Hull House served it is almost impossible to think that Giuseppe and Grazia did not receive assistance from Adams.

I didn't find Rocco and of course the building is gone, but I tramped around the Near West Side on a few Saturdays and came to know the area of town my great-grandparents called home. It grounded something for me, fleshed out another dimension of my personal relationship to the urban space. And set the stage for 1909.