JT Blog

On the surveillance society

I recently had a chance to do some field work in the UK, with stops in Manchester, London, and Brighton. The goal of this trip was to observe the operation of CCTV control rooms, learn about their role in law enforcement, and get some details on the tasks of the operators who do the watching.
Obviously, transcribing and analyzing the data we collected will be my task for the next few weeks, so I won't and can't go into too much detail. I thought I'd make some comments, however, on how I personally felt about the experience.

Showing off in the home is getting harder

(Photo courtesy patandkat.com)
Maybe you had one of these. Maybe you had to pack everything up and move it periodically. Maybe you remember the tedious process of opening the case, popping the CD into the player, and queuing up the song you wanted to hear. I had one of these too, once. The CD rack is long gone, and the jewel cases are boxed up in a spare closet. Overall, it's much easier to find, mix, and play music from my laptop.

But what is lost?

The CD rack, in many ways, shares much with our bookshelves, the posters and art on our walls, the magazines spread out on our coffee tables, and our framed travel photos. They are a tangible, observable reflection of our interests, the things we show off that can quickly let visitors get to know us better, or find things we have in common. Depending on how seriously you take your music, or books, or art, it may be seen as a reflection of your identity, or even the person you would like others to think you are.

City folk like Gobs too

(Photos courtesy of bookofjoe.com and justbaking.net)
I grew up eating Gobs, the healthy  Pennsylvania snack consisting of two devil's food-like cookies with a generous portion of frosting in between them. The New York Times has an article about the migration of the dessert to such decidedly mainstream and urban outlets as Magnolia Bakery and Williams Sonoma ($49/dozen!)
The article is a fun read, and for those of you who have never had one, it appears that they have or are coming to a bakery near you. Even if you can't find them, you can always order them from Yost's Dutch Maid bakery in Johnstown (above), or make them yourself - there are pretty good recipes here and here.

On e-reading

Over the winter I joined the ranks of the e-reader-owning public. Gadget lust was only part of my reasoning; I read a lot of conference/journal submissions and wanted some way to avoid printing them (I don't keep them after the reviews are done) and further screwing up my eyes by reading them from a laptop display. Since the kindle doesn't play PDF, I picked up the Sony PRS-505. Turns out it doesn't do a great job on PDF either, but there are some 3rd-party apps like Calibre and Rasterfarian that do a passable job of converting them. Once that was sorted out, I was left with the problem of figuring out what else to do with the gadget. I still like to read paper books, and I don't want the hassle of doing daily updates of news/RSS feeds to the device.
So I found a middle ground: lengthy news/magazine articles from the web that are too long for reading from a laptop screen. For example, I loaded WaPo's great series on the AIG meltdown and the New Yorker's 2006 article on the solving of the Poincaré conjecture.
It works well, but I think these devices have a ways to go before they make themselves indispensable. Seth Godin had a great post listing the possibilities for social features in the Kindle. Once that starts to happen (and there is decent support for PDF for chrissakes), you might see a lot more of them around.

Keeping the stuff we make

I discovered recently that an old wiki I used for research during my grad school days has disappeared. While disappointing, I also realized that the permanence of the university lab machine hosting the wiki was not exactly guaranteed. It got me thinking about the information we generate, collect, and publish over time.  Our stores of local, personal data such as photos, music, etc. are well-supported in terms of versioning, portability, and organization. However,  internet content such as blogs, wikis, websites, repositories...over time we may create a number of these sites on a variety of different hosting services or private servers. Assuming this information is not confidential (e.g., owned by one's employer), how do we ensure it can be accessed after our time at an institution is done, or after our active use of a service has stopped? The current solution seems to be to copy the data to our own personal stores and hope we can convert it to whatever new services we use in the future. For instance, one somewhat successful case involved moving my locally hosted moveabletype blog to typepad. But perhaps another solution could exist through something similar to The Internet Archive. Could we have our own personal internet archive, backed up reguarly and linked to our content across hosts and services? Does such a facility exist now?

'Chicago Tonight' segment

I'm not in it, but "Chicago Tonight" aired a short segment on research labs in the area. The segment on Motorola starts about 2:00 in.  In it, you can see a demo of the Social TV system, a project my colleagues and I spent the last few years working on.

Update: removed the embedded player due to the annoying sounds it was making.

Too much irony

I wanted to briefly mention that last week my company had an invited speaker come talk to us about "How People and Companies Succeed During an Economic Crisis". This in and of itself was not terribly strange. Yes, my company has been in its own little recession for several years now, and no, I don't know whether paying motivational speakers to come out and talk to us is the best use of our money right now. The real kicker to this talk was this that the speaker was a high-ranking investment banker for a large, possibly-insolvent bank we will call C.
All kinds of questions...ok, jokes...ran through my mind when I saw the announcement. I thought maybe it would prepare us for a barter economy, or suggest asking the government for some sort of rescue plan. One friend suggested I attend the talk and throw my shoe.
In reality, the talk was basically devoid of useful insight. The speaker comparing himself to Barack Obama and Chesley Sullenberger within the first 10 minutes or so, stressing that his prep school and Harvard education somehow constituted excellence in "times of despair". The general theme distilled to "work hard and you will be fine." The truth is that there are no good answers in times like this, when the events of the economy are beyond the control of most individuals.

Overheard in the bodega today

Customer: "The stimulus, man...did you know that if you spent $1 million per day since the day Jesus was born, you still wouldn't be spending what the government is spending in one day!"

Cashier: "That's ok, Bill Gates makes $3 million a day...he controls the world."

OS X and Windows wireless: A quick geek-out

I periodically dump photos and music from my Windows laptop back to my Mac Mini, in part to back them up and in part to have a central place for all my media. Both machines are on my wireless home network, and I usually just use a simple drag-and-drop to do the copying.

This process has always been painfully slow, taking up to a minute to transfer something as small as a 5MB mp3 file. I finally got fed up with it and did some digging to figure it out. I found this article, which seems to explain the slowness as an evil combination of Windows/Mac TCP segment size differences, Nagle's algorithm, and the delayed ACK setting in OS X. Removing the delayed ACK on the Mac seems to have corrected the problem, but seriously, who would really figure this out, or know how to fix it?

To me at least, it seems like home networking is an area where HCI hasn't caught up to the proliferation of the technology in the homes of end users. There are some interesting academic papers on the topic (see the work of Erika S. Poole at Georgia Tech), but I think some HCI principles really need to be put into practice here. We can't expect people to understand, much less configure, things like DHCP, port forwarding, WEP, etc.

Muxtape: the final word

A lot of internet music services have come and gone or morphed because of the RIAA's pathological desire to lag far behind the digital music curve. In most cases, the downfall is a familiar story: small company takes digital music to uncharted territory, gets threatened with legal action, and folds or gets in bed with the labels to save itself. Muxtape follows the same formula, but this page really has some nice details about what went on behind the scenes. It also drives home the sheer size of these entities, who can have their legal departments threatening to send to you jail while their business development people try to figure how out you can make money for them. A short but compelling read for anyone interested in this stuff.

Oh, and muxtape lives. But in compromising its mission, it seems to be putting itself in direct competition with another major player.