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Investigative journalism by amateurs

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:06:25 -0800

Will bloggers ever go to the same lengths that professional journalists do to get a good story? I mean, without a payroll? Newspapers claim it will never happen.

Sometimes it will. The following is a wonderful case where very passionate fans did their own amazing science and investigative research worthy of any national newspaper or world-class magazine. The story is about whether vegan resturants in LA are truly vegan, but the larger story is how deep and thorough their investigation was. I'd be curious to know where they learned their skills.

Oh, if you are a vegan (or even a vegatarian) you'll want to read this.

Operation Pancake.

Map Label on Package

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:09:02 -0800

I thought this was pretty clever. I just received a package from FedEx. On its label was printed a map to my house. So instead of installing a GPS in every truck, FedEx prints out a map label. If the driver can't find the delivery place, they just look on the package itself. Brilliant!

Taxonomy of Internet Maps

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:19:11 -0800

A fews ago I posted my growing collection of hand-drawn maps of the internet. (If you'd like to contribute one, there's a button to download the blank PDF.) The intent behind this effort is to capture the unconscious layout that ordinary people have in mind when they navigate the internet. In posting the images on Flickr I suggested that they would make great fodder for a creative scholar. Much to my surprise two days later, a professor in Argentina wrote the first paper with a first attempt to classify this initial set of maps.

Mara Vanina Oses is a psychologist and professor of media at the Psychology School at the University of Buenos Aires. You can view her report (PDF) here.

A few samples of her results:

...Even when a lot of people have the idea that Internet is the network of networks a lot more don't have yet this idea; they see the Internet as a connection with a center (star) as a way to get to the rest of the items (mesh) or as a simple line of items.

So far we have that 2 out of 5 people consider themselves as the center of Internet and 1 out of 5 can’t place him/herself there (either because he/she could be anywhere or because doesn’t found a place).

The Internet Mapping Project

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:44:38 -0800

The internet is vast. Bigger than a city, bigger than a country, maybe as big as the universe. It's expanding by the second. No one has seen its borders.

And the internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there.

Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map in our head.

I've become very curious about the maps people have in their minds when they enter the internet. So I've been asking people to draw me a map of the internet as they see it. That's all. More than 50 people of all ages and levels of expertise have mapped their geography of online. Here are three:

You can see them all here.

I'd love to have more folk maps of the internet. You can download a blank PDF here and email it to me when done.

This folk cartography might be useful for some semiotician or anthropologist.

In fact I'll post the best taxonomies and interpretations of these maps submitted to me via comments or email.

UPDATE: A quick-thinking professor in Buenos Aires has extracted an emergent taxonomy from this first set of maps, as explained here.

Never underestimate the web

Fri, 29 May 2009 07:03:01 -0800

The entire trajectory of technology (and its culture) from about 1970 to the end of the century could be summed up by the phrase "Never underestimate the power of chips." All you needed to profit hugely in those 3 decades was to very firmly believe that computers would double in power and shrink in half in size and price every year -- year after year for at least the next 40 years.

The first 40 or so years of this new century will be marked by a similar axiom:

"Never underestimate the web,"

Tim O'Reilly, reporting from the Google I/O conference, provides a neat anecdote illustrating this principle.

"Never underestimate the web," says Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra in his keynote at Google I/O this morning. He goes on to tell the story of a meeting he remembers when he was VP of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft five years ago. "We believed that web apps would never rival desktop apps. There was this small company called Keyhole, which made this most fantastic geo-visualization software for Windows. This was the kind of software we always used to prove to ourselves that there were things that could never be done on the web." A few months later, Google acquired Keyhole, and shortly thereafter released Google Maps with satellite view. "We knew then that the web had won," he said. "What was once thought impossible is now commonplace."

Digital Socialism

Sun, 24 May 2009 13:38:54 -0800

I have a piece in the new issue of Wired that began last January as a post to the Technium, but kept getting longer. As it grew to 7,000 words, it seemed a good fit for Wired,so I never posted it. The essay, called the New Socialism, describes an emerging embrace of socialism-lite or digital socialism in the online realm. It was edited in half to run in Wired this month. An excerpt:

How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society can this movement take us? Every time that question has been asked, the answer has been: closer than we thought. Consider craigslist. Just classified ads, right? But the site amplified the handy community swap board to reach a regional audience, enhanced it with pictures and real-time updates, and suddenly became a national treasure. Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans from perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Every public health care expert declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, prove that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what you're thinking (Twitter), what you're reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Wesabe), your everything (the Web) is becoming a foundation of our culture. Doing it while collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don't know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step.

A similar thing happened with free markets over the past century. Every day, someone asked: What can't markets do? We took a long list of problems that seemed to require rational planning or paternal government and instead applied marketplace logic. In most cases, the market solution worked significantly better. Much of the prosperity in recent decades was gained by unleashing market forces on social problems.

Now we're trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn't solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective? The force of online socialism is growing. Its dynamic is spreading beyond electrons—perhaps into elections.

Galactic Center Rising

Mon, 18 May 2009 07:16:53 -0800

A shift in time can shift our perspective, which is why time lapse photography can be so powerful. Here is a simple time lapse of the night sky, using a wide-angle lens. You get a Big Here/Long Now experience.

But the Canon 5D used to capture this was modified by replacing the standard infrared filter normally ship inside the camera (which also block out the deep reds) with a special filter to permit near infrared photography. Thus the reds you see here that most cameras won't capture. You can buy fully modified Canon 5D cameras, ready for astrophotography, from here.

Here are the technical specifics by William Castleman:

The time-lapse sequence was taken with the simplest equipment that I brought to the star party. I put the Canon EOS-5D (AA screen modified to record hydrogen alpha at 656 nm) with an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens on a weighted tripod. Exposures were 20 seconds at f/2.8 ISO 1600 followed by 40 second interval. Exposures were controlled by an interval timer shutter release (Canon TC80N3). Power was provided by a Hutech EOS203 12v power adapter run off a 12v deep cycle battery. Large jpg files shot in custom white balance were batch processed in Photoshop (levels, curves, contrast, Noise Ninja noise reduction, resize) and assembled in Quicktime Pro. Editing/assembly was with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.

Vanishing Muslims and the Shift to Africa

Sun, 03 May 2009 17:24:33 -0800

There's much news in this startling piece on unexpected global demographic trends in The Wilson Quarterly. It suggests that a possible discontinuity in world affairs may soon arrive in the demographics of Africa. The short story:

The canonical Muslim countries of today, and the Muslim populations in Europe, are rapidly losing fertility. There will be less Muslims in these classical centers of Islam. At the same because of immigration from Eastern Europe, Old Europe is rebounding with raised fertility rates.

But Africa is going monotheist. It will become both the center of Islam's population and Christianity's.

This rich piece has such details as:

Iran is experiencing what may be one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in human history. Thirty years ago, after the shah had been driven into exile and the Islamic Republic was being established, the fertility rate was 6.5. By the turn of the century, it had dropped to 2.2. Today, at 1.7, it has collapsed to European levels.

One striking implication of this growth is that there will be a great religious revolution, as Africa becomes the home of monotheism. By midcentury, sub-Saharan Africa is likely to be the demographic center of Islam, home to as many Muslims as Asia and to far more than inhabit the Middle East. Christianity will also feel the effects of Africa’s growth. By 2025, there will be as many Christians in sub- Saharan Africa— some 640 million— as in South America. By 2050, it is almost certain that most of the world’s Christians will live in Africa. As Kenyan scholar John Mbiti writes, “The centers of the church’s universality [are] no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, New York, but Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa, and Manila.”

Catholic church in Dogon, Mali, by Mark Moxon.

The article also knocks down the conventional wisdom that Chinese will remain the most populous group in the near future.

At the turn of this century, the conventional wisdom among demographers was that the population of Europe was in precipitous decline, the Islamic world was in the grip of a population explosion, and Africa’s population faced devastation by HIV/AIDS. Only a handful of scholars questioned the idea that the Chinese would outnumber all other groups for decades or even centuries to come. In fact, however, the latest UN projections suggest that China’s population, now 1.3 billion, will increase slowly through 2030 but may then be reduced to half that number by the end of the century.

Digital Recovery of Moon Images

Sun, 03 May 2009 13:49:32 -0800

It is very difficult to keep digital data moving forward in time. I call that movage and its hard to do. Exhibit A: "Mankind's first up-close photos of the lunar landscape have been rescued from four decades of dusty storage."

Steve Jurvetson writes:

Behind the counter of an abandoned McDonalds lie 48,000 lbs of 70mm tape the only copy of extremely high-resolution images of the moon.

Forty years ago, unmanned lunar orbiters circled the moon taking extremely high-res photos of the surface to plan landing spots for Apollo 11 onward... In this McDonalds, the only copy of that data is about to be resurrected. These tapes were recorded 40 years ago as part of the Apollo program to map the lunar surface to plan landing spots for Apollo 11 onward. They have never been seen by the public because at the time, they were classified as they reveal the extreme precision of our spy satellites. Instead, all we have ever seen are the grainy photo-of-a-photo images that were released to the public.

The spacecraft did not ship this film back to Earth. Instead, they developed the film on the Lunar Orbiter and then raster scanned the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/millimeter resolution) and beamed the data back to Earth using yet-to-be-patented-by-others lossless analog compression. Three ground stations on Earth (one was in Madrid) recorded the transmissions on these magnetic tapes.

Recovering the data has proven to be very difficult, requiring technological archeology. The only working version of the Ampex tape player ($300K when new) was discovered in a chicken coop and restored with the help of the original designer. There is only one person on Earth who still refurbishes these tape heads, and he is retiring this year. The skills to read this data archive are on the cusp of disappearing forever.

Some of the applications of this project, beyond accessing the best images of the moon ever taken, are to look for new landing sites for the new Google Lunar X-Prize robo-landers, and to compare the new craters on the moon today to 40 years ago, a measure of micrometeorite flux and risk to future lunar operations.

From KTVU:

In an abandoned McDonald’s restaurant on NASA Ames property in Mountain View, a pirate flag is taped to the window. Inside, it gets even stranger. Three researchers huddle around a wheezing 45-year-old Ampex FR-900A tape machine, a one-of-a-kind reel to reel 2-inch model designed to record data for the National Security Agency. It now sits where people used to wolf down Big Macs. Behind the counter, where the fry-tubs and refrigerators used to be, one-thousand five hundred 14-inch diameter tape reels are clustered in five piles. Each reel has a two letter identifier followed by three numbers. “These tapes hold the best images of the moon ever taken, even to today,” says Dennis Wingo, a lanky 55-year-old engineering physicist who heads the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project.

From Moonviews:

Those images include a high-resolution version of “Earthrise,” the first picture of the Earth from the Moon’s vantage point. Time Magazine has called this image “the photo of the century.” The tapes also contain the first stereo imagery of the Moon’s surface. Indeed, these are some of the best images of the Moon ever taken, far superior from those received from the Hubble telescope.

Astonishingly, all of the images stored on the 1,500 14-inch diameter tape reels were nearly destroyed. With its focus turned to the Apollo mission, NASA saw little further use for the tapes. Fortunately, Nancy Evans, co-founder of NASA Planetary Data Systems, convinced her superiors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to retain the tapes. Evans also salvaged three refrigerator-sized FR-900 tape drives, which she stored in her own garage for two decades. Evans and Mark Nelson, of Caltech, managed to get a few tape drives running but their project ultimately folded. NASA turned down her requests for assistance after placing an estimate of $6 million on the cost to restore the data.

More details of this unlikely rescue operation from Dr. X

This project started in the late 1980's when the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) discovered a cache of the only known remaining set of Lunar Orbiter tapes in existence stored in a "salt mine." The story there is that there are abandon salt mines that store government records, as the temperature and humidity are stable. There was some documentation attached indicating what they were and that JPL should be notified as to what their ultimate fate should be. JPL took possession of them in about 1988 or so, as there was some interest in recovering the data so that the images could be digitized and made available to the general public as the pictures were then a bulky 2000, 28" x 30" prints. The problem at that point was that no one knew what technology created the tapes so the format and method was unknown. At the time a private consulting firm became aware of the project and decided to research the issue with the purpose of proposing a data recovery project. After amassing all the Lunar Orbiter literature available, it was determined that the Ampex FR900 tape recorder (the first real video tape recorder), was used to create the tapes. More importantly it was revealed that the data was in an analog format with the video in a format called “Vestigial Sideband Filtered", slow scan TV. This knowledge set about the search for any source of FR900 tape drives. The search covered NASA sites, Vandenberg’s Pacific Missile Range at Kwajalein, the CIA and Egland AFB's radar test site in Florida. Ultimately a total of four tape drives were obtained and as far as is known, are the only remaining drives of their type in the world.

Bendy Map Projection

Fri, 01 May 2009 08:55:39 -0800

It's not often a new kind of map perspective is invented, but this one by Schulze & Webb looks new to me. It's an ingenious blend of 3D and overhead orthogonal. The "bent" perspective is wonderfully intuitive. Their map of Manhattan is static, printed, and meant to be "poured over." But the cartographic view wants to be dynamic, interactive, and generated on the fly as you scroll around. Let's hope Google Maps et al pick up the concept. (Via Kottke)

Found Quotes

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 04:06:33 -0800

"Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity. But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life." -- David Brooks

"Most of them seemed to be Twittering the conference as they went, and following each other's Twitter feeds. Surreal moment: At one point, the guy sitting closest to me was reading a blog post containing a photo of the guy sitting immediately behind him." -- Owen Thomas

"I am not in favor of immortality. I believe death for humans is the way of getting rid of accumulated errors - as in trial and error. Without death, the old folks would start to gang up on the babies (the new trials). Immortality ---> immortal mistakes." -- Esther Dyson

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.” -- Warren Buffett

"When people use your electronic systems to do anything, renew a fishing license, register a pregnancy, apply for planning permission, give them the option to collaborate with other people going through or affected by the same process. They will feel less alone, and will help your services to reform from the bottom up." -- Tom Steinberg (via Scott Heiferman)

"If only I could figure out a way to make money by holding fashionable opinions decades prematurely." -- Charles Platt

"The perfect war is started for obscure reasons, is hopelessly murderous, and accomplishes nothing." -- Errol Morris

"As you make a prototype, assume you are right and everyone else is wrong. When you share your prototype, assume you are wrong and everyone else is right." - Diego Rodriguez

"The World Wide Web was precisely what we were trying to PREVENT-- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management." – Ted Nelson

"The thought of people in this day and age sitting down to listen to a radio variety show on Saturday evening is rather implausible and was even more so in 1974 when we started "A Prairie Home Companion." Thank goodness Minnesota Public Radio was too poor to afford good advice or the show never would've got on the air. We only did it because we knew it would be fun to do. It was a dumb idea. I wish I knew how to be that dumb again." -- Garrison Keillor

"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it." -- Lore Sjöberg

"This is my long-run forecast in brief: The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse." -- Julian Simon

The Persistence Paradox

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:45:31 -0800

Listen to this summary of a new paper (PDF) by the reknowned internet researcher Bernardo Huberman (now at HP Labs):

People persistently upload content to social media sites, hoping for the highly unlikely outcome of topping the charts and reaching a wide audience. And yet, an analysis of the production histories and success dynamics of 10 million videos from YouTube revealed that the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold. This paradoxical result is further compounded by the fact that the average quality of submissions does increase with the number of uploads, with the likelihood of success less than that of playing a lottery.

Whoa! So even though their later videos are ranked higher in quality, additional videos posted by users will usually fare worse in popularity than their earlier ones. One caveat: Success in this experiment is measured as the top 1% videos, so in fact the number of views might increase, but the ranking of the video in the overall world of YouTube decreases; it is less of a "hit."

The researchers say they have no explanation for why folks continue to persist in posting videos despite their lowering hit rankings, but they note, they would have better luck on a lottery. Hit-ness must not be as important as many folks think. I am more impressed that this paper shows that persistence increases quality -- which is what any artist will tell you.

So the Persistence Paradox says that persistence increases quality but not hits.

Worse than the lottery. The red line plots the success probability of YouTube producers as a function of their persistence level. The blue line plots the success probability of a producer who participates in a lottery with 0.01 winning probability for each draw, as a function of her persistence level.

Building the 10K Clock

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:02:22 -0800

The Long Now Foundation holds monthly seminars on long-term thinking which are open to the public. I filter the questions for the speakers at the event, and the questions and the talks are usually pretty good. Upcoming speakers include Paul Romer, economist, and Michael Pollan, of "eat a little" fame.

While its other work may not be very visible, the Long Now Foundation is more than just talk. There's a bunch of projects that Long Now has launched. Behind the scenes a very large, very-long term clock is being built. A team led by Danny Hillis, who designed the clock, are currently constructing the third version of a clock designed to run for 10,000 years. This one will be momumental in size and will live inside a mountain.

Here is a schematic for the chimes mechanism. This will produce a never-repeating set of "rings" or melodies for 10,000 years. In case you were counting, that is 3.5 billion different tunes. This generative music was conceived by musician Brian Eno.

To give you a sense of the scale of this clock, here are the Geneva gears (hidden in the back of the drawing) of the chimes being assembled for the first time. This time lapse captures 3 days. Alexander Rose, engineer on the clock and Long Now's director says "note the spiffy 'trilobe' gears; these triangular gears help flatten out the speed and torque curve of driving the mechanism. This version is made of steel, aluminum, and even wood while we sort out the engineering and scaling issues. The next versions will be ceramic, stone, and stainless steel."

Now imagine 30 stacks of these gears rising a hundred feet vertical in a hollow cave inside a mountain. The chimes will ring as long as pilgrims come to wind the clock.

The purpose of the clock, and the seminars (which are free), is to encourage long-term thinking. If you want to join this movement, join us at the Long Now Foundation.

Computational DNA

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 07:14:48 -0800

The computational aspects of DNA become more evident each day. Recently a series of experiments have suggested that classic Mendelian genetics is not the whole story. Specifically, contrary to classic Mendel, a certain research plant can revert back to its original grandparents after breeding. It would be like you recovering genes of your grandparents that your parents did not have. The question is, if this is true, where do the old genes come from? Because the research was done on plants, some skeptical of the findings thought it came from cross-pollination even though the plants self-pollinate. New research in isolated chambers dismisses that conjecture. But the original researcher has an idea, as recounted in a The Scientist article:

According to this theory, somewhere in the plant cells exists an RNA copy of ancestral DNA.

In other words, cells carry their own internal backups. For some reason, something can trigger the "restore" button and the chromosome is restored with an archival version of the gene.

That's one of several theories but all of them assume that the genetic information process in a cell is like a computer with dozens of weird sum-checking, error-correcting, self-governing circuits -- and all the recursive weirdness they entail.

(Thanks Zander)

Particles Have Free Will

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:45:29 -0800

Everything in the universe has some degree of free will. Even quantum particles. An elemental particle "decides" which way to spin. A cosmic ray decides when to decay. Not consciously, but choose they do. A new paper co-authored by mathematician John Conway, inventor of a cellular automata demonstration known as the Game of Life, argues that you can't explain the spin or decay of particles by randomness, nor are they determined, so free will is the only option left.

The Strong Free Will Theorem (PDF) is a technical paper, but they insert a few passages in English:

It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. More precisely, if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic—the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe.

***
Some readers may object to our use of the term “free will” to describe the indeterminism of particle responses. Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate explanation of our own.