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Frog Offspring: new phone designs. Phonescoop reports on some visionary ideas for mobile hardware, emerging from a Frog Design-Motorola intersection. The key concept is Offspring, a combination of parent and daughter units. The central piece is a wireless device, and a host of small ones connect to it through Bluetooth. Devices may include cells, PDAs, video game controllers, wrist units, and goggles. The combination of multiple, small, unwired units reduces the prominence of the machinery in one's lifestyle.
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109 9:00:31 PM
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New Social Network Mapping tools. Yesterday, Roland Piquepaille wrote about New Social Network Mapping Tools Are Emerging. The story was Slashdotted and many Slashdot readers sent Roland suggestions, so he wrote a new column based on their suggestions: More Social-Network Mapping Tools
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108 8:56:51 PM
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I don't usually post on politically charged topics - War in Iraq. Abortion... So I won't say anything here, except that I expect that the military objectives will be achieved swiftly and that the political objectives will take a lot longer and re-engage the UN. Guess I just felt compelled to post something, since it is dominating the news - and I am as susceptible as anyone else to follow what's going on. Yes I do have opinions - but they are not relevant the the decisions I need to take today. They might be relevant to the environment I find myself in, but generally not to the decisions... So in the end the topic is fascinating (like rubbernecking and accident scene), but distracting from my Life's goals and objectives.
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107 8:20:56 PM
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Nice Article - Saw the Name of MIT's Judith Donath. Last spoke to her regarding Capacitive Curtains! It is a small world after all...;-) ============================ Is Valdis a Galileo or Pasteur - The Man who uses a tool so that we can see what was unseen before?. Who Loves ya ,Baby?. DISCOVER Vol. 24 No. 4 (April 2003) article in full...
In his classic novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done— as Vonnegut describes it, "a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing." A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a "false karass," a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is "meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done." No doubt you've experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it's an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID. For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software called social-network mapping promises to change all that. Instead of polishing up the org chart, the new social maps are designed to locate karasses wherever they emerge. Mapping social networks turns out to be one of those computational problems— like factoring pi out to a hundred decimal points or rendering complex light patterns on a 3-D shape— that computers can do effortlessly if you give them the right data. Until software designer Valdis Krebs came along, however, there wasn't an easy way to translate social interactions into a machine-readable language— short of following people around, anthropologist-style, noting whom they called or whom they chatted with at the watercooler, and then typing it all into a PC. "In the late '80s," Krebs says, "I was taking two graduate classes at UCLA— a class in organization design and a class in artificial intelligence. I was real busy at my day job, and I had a lot going on in my personal life, and I started thinking, 'Boy, it would be great if I could figure out a way to do one project to hand in for both classes.' " It seemed like an unlikely combination, until a friend showed Krebs an article about an early rendition of social-network-mapping software. "I looked at the article and had that 'aha!' moment: 'Here's the project for both my classes.' " Krebs has spent most of the last 15 years honing his mapping software, which he called InFlow. He quit his day job in 1995, after IBM agreed to license the technology, and now he makes social maps full-time. Krebs is half sociologist and half digital cartographer: Many of his organizational maps are based on surveys taken of employees answering questions about whom they collaborate with, what their work patterns are. That data is then fed into InFlow, which paints striking visual portraits of social structures in organizations. They look almost like images from a chemistry textbook— dozens of molecules strung together in an intricate shape, each one representing an employee. The links between each person are a way of visualizing the flow of information through a company. "The maps show how ideas happen, how decision making happens, who the real experts are that everybody goes to," Krebs says. They show the karass buried inside the granfalloon. Of course, modern corporations no longer need surveys to make sense of their employees' social interactions. With the rise of e-mail, chat rooms, bulletin boards, and Web personals— the watering holes of the digital realm— our social interactions now leave behind an increasingly long trail of data. And that makes them easy to map. "If we're going to spend more of our social life online," Judith Donath says, sitting in her office at the MIT Media Lab, "how can we improve what that experience feels like? How can you convey the sense of being in a crowd or the movements of a crowd?" Stylish, and aided by a subdued, affable vocal style, Donath runs the Media Lab's Sociable Media Group, exploring what we can do with all the digital data we're implicitly collecting about ourselves. "You have this enormous archive of your social interactions, but you need tools for visualizing that history, for feeling like you're actually inhabiting it," Donath says. Turning her sleek, black flat-panel display toward me, she loads up Social Network Fragments, created by Danah Boyd, a grad student, and Jeff Potter, a programmer. The program is visually stunning, if somewhat overwhelming: a floating mass of colored proper names projected over a black background and clustered into five or six loosely defined groups. It looks more like a work of information sculpture than a supplement to e-mail software. The program was featured as a work of art in a gallery show in New York City in the summer of 2002. But the data it represents are culled from mundane sources: the addresses of e-mail messages sent or received. By looking at the names of people whom you send messages to or receive them from, and who gets cc'd or bcc'd on those messages, the software builds a portrait of your social networks. If you often send messages to your entire family, the software will draw links between the names of all the people you've included in those messages; if you cc a few colleagues on a message to an important client, it will connect those names as well. Assuming you have a significant amount of e-mail traffic, the software will create a remarkably sophisticated assessment of your various social groups, showing you not only their relative size but also the interactions between different groups. If your college buddies have grown close to members of your family, you'll see those two groups overlap on the screen, like two crowds huddled next to each other.
If these visualizations are interesting for individuals, they're even more interesting for large organizations, where social networks can play a key role in the success or failure of the operation without any individual really knowing where all the networks are. Every large organization has its granfalloons and its karasses. You have your executive vice president for sales, and the 10 deputies who report to her— that's a granfalloon. The karass is the group of 10 people from 10 different divisions who come together to make sure the new product ships on time. Granfalloons are what you see in the annual report and the business plan; the karass is what actually happens on the ground, when things are going well. It's that implicit social structure that both Donath and Krebs are after, in their different ways. Social mapping is not just for corporate sociologists. Krebs has used his software to analyze the social networks visible in book-buying patterns on Amazon.com, by tracking the "people who bought this book bought these other books" feature. The software starts with one book and follows the links out to five books connected by an Amazon customer's purchasing habits; then the software moves on to 25 books connected to the five. (If he's attempting a particularly broad study, he'll do another sweep.) Then the InFlow software creates a map showing clusters of books that are often purchased together— and by association, clusters of book buyers with shared interests. These are implicit social networks, not explicit ones; you don't necessarily know the people in your cluster, but you have a lot in common nonetheless. Not surprisingly, social-network software is ripe for political analysis. "A few weeks ago," Krebs says, "I got into a discussion online about the state of the country politically, and some people were arguing that the country was really divided, that we were back to where we were after the 2000 election. One side can't stand the other side. And I started thinking, I wonder if you could see evidence for this in the book-reading networks." Krebs used InFlow to analyze the network of book purchases surrounding two best-selling titles, one from the left (Michael Moore's Stupid White Men) and one from the right (Ann Coulter's Slander). "What I got were two cliques that were about as distinct as they could be. I kept looking for paths that crossed between them. Every time I tried to follow one of these paths, I'd go out three or four steps, and then boom, I'm right back in the clique." Most strikingly, the two networks intersected only on a single title: Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong. Otherwise, the two groups were engrossed in entirely different reading lists, with no common ground. Those two cliques make it clear that tools designed to detect social networks are just as good at detecting antisocial behavior as well— for sniffing out the karasses that don't ever speak to each other or those linked by one solitary thread. For corporate managers and sociologists alike, this may prove to be the software's most useful function. It shows us the gaps in the network, the borders that no one dares cross.
RELATED WEB SITES: Learn more about InFlow and the work of Valdis Krebs: www.orgnet.com. Read about Danah Boyd and Jeff Potter's Social Network Fragments project at smg.media.mit.edu/ projects/SocialNetworkFragments. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] Too Good an article to miss Rob [Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]
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106 7:59:44 PM
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Option Value of Networks is Source of Information Overload... Clearly the more options are available the more information you have to sift to decide what to do with your time and resources... Decision Support to Act and Not Act in pursuit of Conflicting Missions and Personal Needs: Enormous need for tools to aid in decision support - AT THE EDGES of Networks. Within Networks - the Echo Hypothesis allows for heuristic (rule of thumb) decisionmaking. At the Edges, the level of stress increases dramatically, the level of confusion, and emotional difficulty, social support etc. all contribute to conflicting Drives to: Relieve the stress - Escape, etc. Relieve the stress - Take appropriate action. Tools that recognize these needs and support them are valuable... Knowledge Management Tools, Analytical Tools, Emotional Support Tools, Physical Support Tools... etc. Need for Dynamic Reconfigurable Systems for living at the EDGE of the network and forming bridges across structural holes. Comments Welcome!
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105 7:31:35 PM
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Interesting Convergence of ideas: 1 - Option Value of Groups in Networks, drives Value Perception (Reed's Law) 2 - Capacity Utilization Value in Networks limits Value Perception (reality of bandwitdth hypothesis) 3 - Time-Shifting and Aggregation Agents can alter (improve or degrade) Decisions on Capacity Utilization and thus alter the limit on Value Perception. (Hypothesis - Value is altered by Decisions about how to utilize Capacity) ======== Not sure where I'm going with this - Maybe the improvement of Agents - allows for the SAME Bandwidth utilization - but through time-shifting and aggregation agents, it allows more robust handling of poor decisions! In other words - you can make bad decisions on the use of your time, but still catch up on the things that need to be accomplished by the use of Agents. Example, if you want to watch a certain TV show, and you blow it off when it is playing because you don't feel like it, or you chose to do something stupid and dissipative with your time (to releive the stress...?) then you can let Replay TV watch it for you and then catch up with it later. In fact when you do catch up with it, you get to skip the ads and so it is even more efficient and focused than the original view. So, Query - Is there Value in Releiving the Stress???... I think the answer is Yes. And people will pay for it, but they need to see how technology gives them the freedom to get the same things done with less time and stress...Here's where the use of anecdotes comes in.
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104 7:20:03 PM
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Joho the Blog - World of Ends entry brings up a number of interesting points: Some of these come from the fuzzy use of the word "ends" (let alone world, kingdom, realm, etc.) Ends as purposes/themes - the web as loosely connected network of communities pursuing their own purposes. This would seem to be pretty accurate. It follows Social Network Analytics - where there are tightly focused themes that draw people in. - Love the Amazon book reccommendation example, where people generally suffer from the Echo Hypotheses - getting reinforcing cues and information from their purpose oriented communities Ends as Nodes - the web as a simpler set of nodal connections - perhaps very complex in structure and mechanism of connection (my mind boggles just thinking about how this blog is actually working over a 802.11 network, then a LAN, then a WAN to the Servers..etc), but point to point when it comes to an information transfer event (Information Transactions). Ends as Conduits - Nodes in a Web aren't Ends at all - An individual Node is part of a world (or multiple worlds?), and so are not Ends, but Conduits or Carriers... This makes some sense, but I guess it is a frame of reference question - If you are at a node, then you feel like you are at the end. The incoming and outgoing information is coming to you in the present, or being sent by you in the present. The forward most point/end in time... Or you are looking at an intemediary node (or nodes, or network), and seeing it as conduit. Ends as Edges - The boundaries of networks, or the holes in Networks, help to identify options, potential value creation opportunities. The Value is Created by Bridging these structural holes. But the Potential Value Creation function is much larger than the actual Value that can be created (See Reed's Law Article in Stories).
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103 6:55:49 PM
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Interesting discussion on the Currency of Community. ========================== First - "Exonumia" - non-explicit-currencies (e.g. cigarettes in a POW camp). Second - Writing about Community, vs Writing that makes one feel part of a Community. Third - Examples of Writing that get down to a common currency of human experience that anyone can cash... or at least those who can have empathy for the scenario laid out. Perhaps these come in archetypal groupings (different currencies?), but they are independent of Tribal affiliation. So... Writing in these currencies - archetypal storylines - finds "aesthetic resonance" (currency, immediacy, empathy, value), as I have called it, with others. So you get a group of individuals who share the experience and find community by sharing the experience - even if they are not explicitly part of a defined Community. Extending - reminds me of Gibson's "Apophenia" - Finding meaning that is resonant to the individual in shared experiences (e.g. 9/11), but the meanings might be different for each, since each is attributing meaning differently to the serendipitous coincidence of events that they feel should have meaning... Question - what kind of events do people feel should have meaning? Perhaps those that follow the archetypal currencies of human experience... Joy/Birth, Love/Marriage, Anger/War, Sadness/Death, Mystery/Ritual... In other words - it is common for humans to attach Affects to Events. This is the shared currency. Emergence - of Community from enough people who share a common affect toward an event. Christ on the Cross. Love of Star Wars. Rocky Horror. 9/11. Some inspire explicit community actions - e.g. going to church, donning special clothing for reliving the event ritualistically. Writing about it, etc. Perhaps the key to emerging communities from these exonumic experiences is the formation of a mainstream currency. With the key characteristic that currencies are used for transactions - Value is traded in a Marketplace - as with Cluetrain's view of Markets as Conversations - perhaps it's markets as transactions in these new currencies - once the market emerges, then the community can be said to emerge. ==================== Getting a Purchase on Community Apropos of individuals and communities, I came across a word the other day I simply fell in love with. It was on Anu's word a day list:
Objects that resemble money but do not circulate as coin or paper money. For example, tokens, coupons, medal, etc. [From New Latin exo- (outside) + num (as in numismatic: related to currency).]
"Objects such as savings bonds, gas-ration coupons and meat- and butter-ration coupons are indeed collectible. ... I have seen coin dealers, primarily at shows, handle exonumia on these and other subjects." Don Alpert; Bond's Value Higher With Dec. 7 Stamp; The Los Angeles Times; Aug 11, 1988.
"While Canada and other countries have occasionally struck wooden currency, wooden money is `considered distinctly an American contribution to exonumia' -- objects that resemble money but are not for circulation as money." Theresa Humphrey; They Take Wooden Nickels; The Sun (Baltimore, Maryland); Jan 27, 1993.
Somehow it failed to come as a complete surprise that wooden nickles are a distinctly American contribution to the world's endless appetite for things to collect. But this notion of the exonuminal struck another chord, somehow relating to an aspect of the recent rich thread on community /slash/ individuality that I have been having trouble getting at. It has to do with a perceived difference - at least for me - between writing that talks a lot about community and writing that causes one to feel one is part of something shared. Take Halley's recent Alpha male pieces. When they began, it was tempting to think Halley was creating, out of whole cloth, one of those exercises in magazine phantasy -- ''19 Ways to Pummel Your 146 Sex Partners into 35 More Cro-Magnon Demonstrations of Slavish Submission'' -- that grocers choose to tease us with as we caught in the flagrant act of paying for groceries. As one whose temperament tends to be more in sync with the alfalfa male than the alpha male segment of the herd, this seemed a little out of my zone of interest. Yet, there was insight in the writing, a way it would glancingly turn from the level of style to challenges to character and action, that augured a wider focus, more pressing concerns. An ethical standard was raised, one which a reader, not necessarily one who belonged to some fictive zine realm of outsized maleness, could consider and acknowledge. Somehow, as the series approached its direct, painful encounter with an alpha father who manifested his love and understanding of family and community through money, the wooden nickle of desire has turned into something that can be cashed by any who recognizes its face value. In a kindred way, Christopher Locke's recent moving meditations have for me, and judging from other blogged responses, for others as well, this kind of currency. They narrate loss and pain - things of considerable moment to an individual - but in a way that summons an implicit other to the possibility of communing. One need not be part of any particular group, tribe, nation or committee to be standing there with him, at a small strip of earth, moved. Death is central to both these writings. As if it were the narrative equivalent of a passage through which an individual's voice acquires the means to speak from a place beyond his or her own private life, to us, with us, in us. Neither Halley nor Chris have made ''community'' or ''the individual'' the stated, thematic subjects of their recent writing. Yet when they write in this way, a community is there - not the sort that requires external amulets of group identification or rituals of group admission to be recognized. It is there - we are allegorically there - both in the "I" of the one speaking and the "you" spoken to. This is writing community into existence instead of talking about whether it exists. No special social software necessary, just common currency, coin of the realm.
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102 5:36:45 PM
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