Location-based apps

/ Wearable Computing

The theme for NPUC this year was The future of portable computing, so naturally there was a lot of talk about location-based applications. Ian Smith‘s talk on social mobile computing especially focused on using location. Personally I’m getting more and more skeptical about location-based apps. They’ve been right around the corner for a good decade now, and I’m starting to wonder if location-based apps are like video conferencing — something that sounds like it should be a hit but once they’re implemented nobody seems to care.

That said, I think if there’s ever going to be a successful location-aware application (outside of the ubiquitous museum-tourguide app) it’ll be one that uses location as an excuse to socialize. I’m not sure whether the final winners will look more like Dodgeball, GeoCaching, moblogs, or a cross between LiveJournal and the geospatial web (or all of these), but I’m pretty confident that when you scratch the surface the real point won’t be location, it’ll be human-to-human interaction that just happens to use location as the medium.

That also fits my general rule of thumb: The killer app is always communications. (That or sex, which is really a subset of communications.)

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Wrist-top computers

/ Wearable Computing

Aaron Marcus of AMandA just gave a talk promoting the wrist-top computer as a prime ubiquitous computing platform. I’m skeptical — It feels to me like the wrist is good for quick access to info that’s already showing or just a button-press away, but if you have to drill down (pushing small buttons with your wrist in front of your face) then that quick-access gets washed out by the slow interaction speed. That leaves a pretty narrow set of applications where you just a little bit of information with very little cognitive load.

Reasons to work on wrist:

  1. quick access for quick snippit of visual info
  2. fashionable on wrist (bracelet)
  3. quick access for interaction (a little better than phone clip?)
  4. need wrist access (e.g. pulse monitor)

Reasons not to work on wrist:

  1. small screen
  2. very limited input possible
  3. anything you need to look at for a while (wrist gets tired of being held in that position).
  4. needs hardening (so it won’t break when you bang it on something)

So what applications have the wrist-top as the clear winner interface? Well, there’s telling the time, there’s textual alarms, there’s … um … gimme a second, there’s gotta be more ….

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Finding evidence to support our theories

/ Politics

According to some psychologists, people subconsciously try to find evidence to support their own theories. It’s more than just the optimist seeing the glass half full and the pessimist seeing it half empty — the pessimist will actually go out of his way to find an empty glass and then say “see, I was right.” I think that’s the main explanation for why some people always sabotage themselves just when things are about to go well, while others always land on their feet.

Post 9-11 America is showing this symptom on a societal level. The Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq is a prime example, of course, but it’s also pervasive in society at large. The Terrorist is the perfect boogyman — he’s so ill-defined and inscrutable that we can and do project anything that scares us onto him. And then we go out and find the evidence to support that fear, be it a glitch in airport security or the arrest of someone who once visited an Al Qaeda training camp. Some of that evidence is real — this week’s attack in London is just the latest reminder that there is some basis to our fear — but most of it is simply driving ourselves into a panic playing games of “what if?”.

The Hemant Lakhani case, featured on this week’s This American Life radio show, sounds like a perfect example of finding (really, manufacturing) evidence to support a theory. Here’s somebody that the FBI approached and asked to supply a missile to terrorists. Lakhani agreed, but couldn’t actually deliver. After waiting 22 months for him to actually commit the crime, the FBI provided the missile to him themselves, and then arrested him. The guy is clearly amoral, but also pretty clearly incompetent, and he didn’t even have the idea to provide terrorists with weapons until the FBI suggested it. Setting him up like this so we can throw him in jail is like airport security confiscating grandma’s nail clipper — it was never a big threat to begin with, but when they find it we all breath a sigh of relief while we visualize the horrible things that might have happened had we not gotten lucky this time.

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Kennedy on the vaccine/autism link

/ Science

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a good overview on the potential link between mercury-based preservatives used in vaccines from 1981 to 2003 and the simultaneous huge increase in autism. I’d sort of bunched this theory in with fluoridation paranoia, but it looks like there’s a lot of concern among level-headed people who have looked at the data and have the expertise to understand it. If what this article implies is accurate, this whole thing could blow into another Thalidomide.

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Grokster glass half full?

/ Intellectual Property

I’m feeling very “glass is half full” about today’s Supreme Court decision in MGM v. Grokster, which essentially says a technology company can be guilty of contributory copyright infringement if it induces others to violate copyright (e.g. through advertising). Sure it leaves open lots of questions hanging, which no doubt will be clarified after much more blood on the field. On the whole I’m still optimistic for where this might lead us in the long run:

  1. Peer-to-peer sharing of copyrighted files will continue unabated, that was a given regardless of the decision. I think this is a good thing not because I’ve some anarchist itch than needs scratching, but because the content cartel have been abusing their government-granted limited monopoly for decades, and they’ve become damaging to society. Congress is a part of the problem, so there’s no remedy there. Monopolies don’t change willingly, and the only two forces I see moving the cartel to serve their customers instead of abuse them are files-sharing on the one hand and empowered artists eliminating the middleman on the other. My big hope is that somehow these two stakeholders figure out the right way to join forces.
  2. The decision makes it harder for companies like Grokster to profit from copyright violations with a wink and a nod. That makes it less likely that we trade one set of market-masters and gatekeepers for another, and it also makes it a little easier for the cartel to survive as they (hopefully) reform into good corporate citizens. The message I’d take from this decision if I were MGM would be “OK, we’ll still have our clock cleaned if we don’t offer our customers something better than free, distributed, somewhat undercover, all-volunteer-provided infrastructure, but at least we don’t have to compete with funded commercial versions as well.” Or at least they’ll have a reprieve until legal alternatives like voluntary collective licensing or Creative Commons start to take their market-share.
  3. It’ll make P2P technologies even more decentralized and distributed. We’d never have seen the P2P technology explosion if the RIAA had embraced the posting of MP3s on the Web back in the mid-90s. Like a weakened virus that trains the immune system to later fight off a full-strength disease, we’re building the technology and mindset that will one day help protect us against far worse threats than the Disney Secret Police. Which leads my to my last hope…
  4. Maybe this will encourage businesses and technologists working with P2P to raise public awareness of the P2P applications that don’t involve copyright violations, like load-balancing, wireless ad-hoc networking, store-and-forward networks for the third world, and censorship-resistant communication.

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