How to enjoy a night in the wilderness, in 7 easy steps
(1) Create a packing list
(2) Pick a scenic spot
(3) Set up tent before nightfall (and hope the waters don’t rise)
(4) Listen to the nighttime bestiary come alive and supplement with scary stories
(5) Lay down, look up, and let your handheld astronomy app tell you what you’re observing
(6) Sleep well, wake up in the mist
(7) Celebrate!
The city is a platform
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
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
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.)
[Download the DJ set. 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
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
Left-to-right: my father, grandfather, and uncle
Dakin and Sheridan in Lakeview, Chicago. May 29, 2009, some fifty years after the inset photo was taken. (Larger versions available here.)
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
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
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
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?
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!
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
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