Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

“New Apps Instantly Convert Spreadsheets Into Something Actually Readable”

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Several new apps transform spreadsheet data into a chart or graph without having to spend much or any time with the raw data:

It’s called Project Elastic, and he unveiled the thing this fall at a conference run by his company, Tableau. The Seattle-based company has been massively successful selling software that helps big businesses “visualize” the massive amount of online data they generate—transform all those words and numbers into charts and graphics their data scientists can more readily digest—but Project Elastic is something different. It’s not meant for big businesses. It’s meant for everyone.

The idea is that, when someone emails a spreadsheet to your iPad, the app will open it up—but not as a series of rows and columns. It will open the thing as chart or graph, and with a swipe of the finger, you can reformat the data into a new chart or graph. The hope is that this will make is easier for anyone to read a digital spreadsheet—an age-old computer creation that’s still looks like Greek to so many people. “We think that seeing and understanding your data is a human right,” says Story, the Tableau vice president in charge of the project.

And Story isn’t the only one. A startup called ChartCube has developed a similar tool that can turn raw data into easy-to-understand charts and graphs, and just this week, the new-age publishing outfit Medium released a tool called Charted that can visualize data in similar ways. So many companies aim to democratize access to online data, but for all the different data analysis tool out on the market, this is still the domain of experts—people schooled in the art of data analysis. These projects aim to put the democracy in democratize.

Two quick thoughts:

1. I understand the impulse to create charts and graphs that communicate patterns. Yet, such devices are not infallible in themselves. I would suggest we need more education in interpreting and using the information from infographics. Additionally, this might be a temporary solution but wouldn’t it be better in the long run if more people know how to read and use a spreadsheet?

2. Interesting quote: “We think that seeing and understanding your data is a human right.” I have a right to data or to the graphing and charting of my data? This adds to a collection of voices arguing for a human right to information and data.

Looking for needed bridging ties online

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A new book argues the Internet doesn’t connect people like it could do and part of the issue has to do with bridging ties:

The Chinese activist and journalist Xiao Qiang and I started using the term “bridging” to describe the work bloggers were doing in translating and contextualizing ideas from one culture into another. Shortly afterward, the Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan gave a memorable talk at the Berkman Center as part of the Global Voices inaugural meeting. Hossein explained that, in 2004, blogs in Iran acted as windows, bridges, and cafés, offering opportunities to catch a glimpse of another life, to make a connection to another person, or to convene and converse in a public space. I’ve been using the term “bridgeblogger” ever since for people building connections between different cultures by means of online media, and “bridge figures” to describe people engaged in the larger process of cultural translation, brokering connections and building understanding between people from different nations.

To understand what’s going on in another part of the world often requires a guide. The best guides have a deep understanding of both the culture they’re encountering and the culture they’re rooted in. This understanding usually comes from living for long periods in close contact with different cultures. Sometimes this is a function of physical relocation—an African student who pursues higher education in Europe, an American Peace Corps volunteer who settles into life in Niger semipermanently. It can also be a function of the job you do. A professional tour guide who spends her days leading travelers through Dogon country may end up knowing more about the peculiarities of American and Australian culture than a Malian who lives in New York City or Sydney but interacts primarily with fellow immigrants…

Merely being bicultural isn’t sufficient to qualify you as a bridge figure. Motivation matters as well. Bridge figures care passionately about one of their cultures and want to celebrate it to a wide audience. One of the profound surprises for me in working on Global Voices has been discovering that many of our community members are motivated not by a sense of postnationalist, hand-holding “Kumbaya”-singing, small-world globalism but by a form of nationalism. Behind their work on Global Voices often lies a passion for explaining their home cultures to the people they’re now living and working with. As with Erik’s celebration of Kenyan engineering creativity, and Rosenthal’s passion for the complexity and beauty of South African music, the best bridge figures are not just interpreters but also advocates for the creative richness of other cultures…

It’s not simply the number of acquaintances that represent power, as Gladwell posits. It’s also their quality as bridges between different social networks. Lots of friends who have access to the same information and opportunities are less helpful than a few friends who can connect you to people and ideas outside your ordinary orbit.

Without trying to be too pessimistic about the Internet and social media, it has tended to reproduce existing kinds of social relationships: limited public spaces, domination by corporations (particularly the nascent tech industry), creating echo chambers where people only find the content and people who agree with them, and not always having the open and fair-minded dialogue that might help bring people together. Yet, I’d be curious to know if there are workable and effective solutions to creating lasting online bridging ties. In my own social media use, I rely on a number of Facebook friends who consistently discuss or post regarding topics further from my own personal orbit.

Don’t see social media as representative of full populations

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This should be obvious but computer scientists remind us that social media users are not representative populations:

One of the major problems with sites like Twitter, Pinterest or Facebook is ‘population bias’ where platforms are populated by a very narrow section of society.

Latest figures on Twitter suggest that just five per cent of over 65s use the platform compared with 35 per cent for those aged 18-29. Similarly far more men use the social networking site than women.

Instagram has a particular appeal to younger adults, urban dwellers, and non-whites.

In contrast, the picture-posting site Pinterest is dominated by females aged between 25 and 34. LinkedIn is especially popular among graduates and internet users in higher income households.

Although Facebook is popular across a diverse mix of demographic groups scientists warn that postings can be skewed because there is no ‘dislike’ button. There are also more women using Facebook than men, 76 per cent of female internet users use the site compared with 66 per cent of males.

Who does the data from social media represent? The people who use social media who, as pointed out above, tend to skew younger across the board and have other differences based on the service. Just because people are willing to put information out there doesn’t mean that it is a widely shared perspective, even if a Twitter account has millions of followers or a Facebook group has a lot of likes. Until we have a world where everyone participates in social media in similar ways and makes much of the same information public, we need to be careful about social media samples.

Boom in Data Designer jobs in the future?

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One designer argues the proliferation of data means the job of data designer will be needed in the coming years:

When I began my career 25 years ago, the notion of design in the software industry was still nascent. It was an engineer’s world, in which just making software function was the consuming focus. So the qualification for this design role was quite simple: do you know anything about software? Those of us trying to apply humanistic or artistic notions to the process faced fundamental technical challenges. It was actually quite exciting, but a constant uphill battle to effect change…The new design challenge is to use this data for the same humanistic outcomes that we have in mind when we shape products through the user interface or physical form. Even conceding that many interfaces are not changing much—we still use PCs, and the mobile experience still mirrors traditional PC software tropes—we can see the data that moves through these systems is becoming more interesting. Just having this data affords the possibility of exciting new products. And the kind of data we choose to acquire can begin to humanize our experiences with technology…

We might consider the Data Designer a hybrid of two existing disciplines. Right now, Data Analysts and Interaction Designers work at two ends of the spectrum, from technical to humanistic. Data Analysts offer the most expertise in the medium, which is a great place to start; but they are approaching the problem from a largely technical and analytical perspective, without the concentration we need in the humanistic aspects of the design problems they address. Interaction Designers today are expert in designing interfaces for devices with screens. They may encounter and even understand the data behind their interfaces; but for the most part, it’s too often left out of the design equation…

Sociological implications. Presented with new capabilities of new technology, the design problem is to determine not just if a certain capability can be used, but how and why it should be used. When systems take in data quietly, from behind the scenes, from more parts of our lives, and shape this data in radical new ways, then we find an emerging set of implications that design does not often face, with profound sociological and safety issues to consider.

Data doesn’t interpret itself; people need to make sense of it and then use it effectively. Simply having all of this data is a good start but skilled practitioners can do effective, useful, and aesthetically pleasing things with the data.

My question would be about how to make to this happen? Is this best addressed top-down by certain organizations who have the foresight and/or resources to make this happen? Or, is this best done by some new startups and innovators who show others the way?

The historical (in)accuracy of Assassin’s Creed Unity

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Video games can help shape our understandings of historical events. Thus, a debate over the portrayal of the French Revolution in the new Assassin’s Creed:

The former leftist French presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, called it “propaganda against the people, the people who are [portrayed as] barbarians, bloodthirsty savages,” while the “cretin” that is Marie-Antoinette and the “treacherous” Louis XVI are portrayed as noble victims. “The denigration of the great Revolution is a dirty job to instill more self-loathing and déclinisme in the French,” he told Le Figaro. The secretary general of the Left Front, Alexis Corbière, said on his blog:

To all those who will buy Assassin’s Creed: Unity, I wish them a good time, but I also tell them that the pleasure of playing does not stop you from thinking. Play, yes, but do not let yourself be manipulated by those who make propaganda.

Ubisoft, the maker of the Assassin’s Creed series of video games, which has been going since 2007 and has sold more than 70 million copies, is in fact French. One of the makers of the game replied that Assassin’s Creed: Unity is a “consumer video game, not a history lesson” but did say that his team hired a historian and specialists on the Terror and other aspects of the Revolution. Le Monde lays out seven errors in the game here (in French).

In fact, the debate over who are the heroes and villains of the Revolution goes back to the 1790s. British counter-revolutionary thought often focused on the suffering of the monarchy in their stories, such as the King’s tearful goodbye to his family before his execution on Jan. 21st, 1793 or Marie-Antoinette’s perhaps apocryphal last words to her executioner after stepping on his foot just before her head was cut off: “Pardon me sir. I did not mean to do it.”

So perhaps the game simply reflects the ongoing debates of which actors in the French Revolution should be cast as heroes or villains? This all intrigued me because one of my classes recently considered how historical narratives are constructed and then played several historical video games to see how each portrays history. Some games clearly try to impart more historical accuracy – and these seem to be ones more intent on educational purposes – while others suffer from the gamification of history. This can lead to two things:

1. The games differ in their levels of ambiguity; after all, there has to be a winner. But, even as this debate illustrates, it is not always easy to depict who benefited or should have benefited from particular events. On one hand, it is easy to fight Nazis – there are a video game go-to for a clear enemy – but other events or periods are much more unclear. One solution is to simply drop in an outside story – as the Assassin’s Creed line does – and make it up from there.

2. This often means there is the potential to change history. This may just be a modern fad – This American Life recently asked some Americans about time travel and there was a subset of people who wanted to change big events:

Jonathan Goldstein

And even though they’ve been mulling this over for so long, many still reach for the most well-trodden sci-fi comic book staple.

Man 4

My first impulse about time travel is the same one that I would guess that everybody has. You know, thinking that I’m going to go back and I’m going to kill Hitler.

Sean Cole

What’s funny is that they know it’s kind of lame. You can hear it in their voices.

Man 4

Or kill Hitler when he’s a baby, or kill his mother or something.

Jonathan Goldstein

They preface it with phrases like–

Woman 1

It’s the thing everyone always says is–

Sean Cole

And then they say it anyway.

Woman 1

If there hadn’t been a Hitler–

Man 5

Put a bullet in Adolf Hitler’s head when he was still a student, I guess…

And of course, no one imagines that they’ll end up with an iron collar around their neck, working in a quarry. Instead, they have a starring role in the historical docu-drama. Like this guy, who’d set the controls for the Revolutionary War.

Man On Street 2

I don’t think I’d be like, a general in the field or anything like that. But I’d probably be more of like an adviser to Washington. Like Alexander Hamilton was, right? And a few other folks. So yeah.

Jonathan Goldstein

I love how you’re already an officer in this.

Man On Street 2

Exactly. Yeah.

Historical games can pose an interesting “what if?” yet also lead to improbable events or outcomes.

I would guess most of these action-oriented games are not concerned much about historical accuracy outside of how it can enhance the backdrop or the gameplay. Yet, given the sales of these games, the amount of time spent playing them, and who purchases them (often younger people), such games could go a long way toward influencing perceptions of the past.

Teaching student tech designers to treat users more humanely

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Here are a few college classes intended to help future tech designers keep the well-being of users in mind:

The class, which she taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and the MIT Media Lab, attempted to teach a sense of responsibility to technology inventors through science fiction, a genre in which writers have been thinking deeply about the impact of today’s technologies for decades. “It encourages people to have that long-term version that I think is missing in the world of innovation right now,” she says, “What happens when your idea scales to millions of people? What happens when people are using your product hundreds of times a day? I think the people who are developing new technologies need to be thinking about that.”

Students in Brueckner’s class built functional prototypes of technologies depicted by science fiction texts. One group created a “sensory fiction” book and wearable gadget that, in addition to adding lights and sounds to a story, constricts the body through air pressure bags, changing temperature and vibrating “to influence the heart” depending on how the narrative’s protagonist feels. Another group was inspired by a dating technology in Dave Eggers’s The Circle that uses information scraped from the Internet about a date to give suggestions about how to impress him or her. They created an interactive website about a friend using his public information to see how he would react to the idea. A third group imagined how a material that could transition from liquid to solid on command like the killing material “ice-nine” from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle could be used as a prototyping tool…

Neema Moraveji, the founding director of Standford’s Calming Technology Lab and a cofounder of breath-tracking company Spire, has a different approach for teaching students to consider the human impact of what they are designing. His classes teach students to create technology that actively promotes a calm or focused state of mind, and he co-authored a paper that laid out several suggestions for technology designers, including:

  • Letting users control or temporarily disable interruptions, the way that TweetDeck allows users to control from whom to receive notifications on Twitter.
  • Avoiding overload through the number of features available and the way information is presented. For instance, a Twitter app that opens to the least-recent tweet, “gives users the sense that they must read through all the tweets before they are done.”
  • Using a human tone or humor
  • Providing positive feedback such as “Thanks for filling out the form” and “You successfully updated the application” in addition to error alerts
  • Including easy ways to interact socially, such as Likes and Retweets, which allow people to interact without worrying about how they appear to others.
  • Avoiding time pressure when not necessary.
  • Incorporating natural elements like “soothing error tones, naturalistic animations, and desktop wallpapers taken from the natural world.”

These sound like interesting ideas that may just help designers think not just about the end goals of a product but also consider the user experience. Yet, I still wonder about the ability of tech designers to resist the pressure their employers might put on them. For example, putting these more humane options into practice could be easier when working for your own startup but would be more difficult if a big corporation is breathing down your neck to push the bottom line or end product. Think the Milgram experiment: can individual designers follow the ethical path? Perhaps some of this training also needs to happen at the executive and managerial levels so that the emphasis on protecting the user is pervasive throughout organizations.

Smartphones can turn urban dwellers into zombie pedestrians

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What happens when urban residents and visitors are engrossed in their smartphones? It can lead to zombie pedestrians.

But the growing ranks of these cellphone addicts are turning cities like Tokyo, London, New York and Hong Kong into increasingly hazardous hotspots, where zombified shoppers appear to be part of vast games of human pinball…

Tokyo Fire Department, which runs the ambulance service in the megalopolis, says that in the four years to 2013, 122 people had to be rushed to hospital after accidents caused by pedestrians using cellphones.

As well as the vaguely comedic incidents of businessmen smacking into lamp-posts or tripping over dogs, this total also included a middle-aged man who died after straying onto a railway crossing while looking at his phone…

Phone fidgeters dawdling along at snail’s pace, forcing cyclists and pram-pushing mums to swerve out of the way have become such an irritant in Tokyo that public notices have started to appear warning offenders to expect “icy stares”, appealing to the Japanese sense of social harmony — assuming people look up from their phones in the first place.

Smartphone apps activated by sensors that flash warning signs or display the pavement on the screen have also been developed in response to the problem.

An unintended side effect of technological advancement. Walking in a big city can be a dangerous task, particularly given the emphasis in many places on helping cars get to their destinations faster. Things that distract pedestrians – just like things that can distract drivers – can lead to negative outcomes.

It is interesting to note the last piece above that tries to solve a problem created by technology with a technological advancement: just have an app that alerts people. It’s technology all the way down! Would something like Google Glass help get rid of these issues since people would still have their eyes facing forward?

Americans talk differently about faith online

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Pew reports that religious faith is expressed differently online compared to offline:

But according to a new report from Pew, the way people talk about their faith online actually is different from how they talk about it in real life. In a nationally representative survey of more than 3,200 Americans, only 20 percent said they had “shared something about [their] religious faith on social networking websites/apps” in the past week. Twice as many said they had talked about faith in person within the same period.

Although people from different religious backgrounds reported different levels of what one might call faith-sharing, this relationship between on- and offline sharing was roughly the same across Christian denominations and the religiously unaffiliated: Twice as many people talked about their religious beliefs offline vs. online…

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this is that there’s hardly any variation among age groups: People younger and older than 50 were nearly equally likely to say they’d talked about their faith on social media within the last week. That’s remarkable for two reasons: In general, younger Americans are less religious than older Americans, and they’re also much heavier users of social media. Across two demographics who think about both faith and the Internet very differently, the mores of talking about God online seem to be similar.

This survey doesn’t say much what those mores are. But it does suggest that people like talking about their religious beliefs face-to-face more than they do online—or, perhaps, they’re more willing. Broadcasting your faith to all your Facebook friends is a very public act, and religion is a very personal thing; it may be that people feel more comfortable discussing God in communities that exist offline, like youth groups or book clubs. These spaces can feel much less vulnerable: It’s possible to know exactly who will hear you and maybe even have a sense of how they’ll respond. On Facebook or Twitter, that’s impossible.

Having conducted research in this area as well as having been online quite a bit in the last decade or so, I’m not surprised. I remember noticing this in the early days of Facebook. At that point, I believe certain information like your religion was more prominently featured on your profile. A number of my online friends – people of faith from a variety of institutional contexts and often with relatively high levels of education – tended to complicate their religious listing as if “Protestant” or “Christian” wasn’t individualized enough.

I don’t know that people are afraid of judgment when talking about faith online or through social media; we know that people talk about all sorts of other personal things. Perhaps this is all evidence of the increasing privatization of religion. You can participate in the public sphere of the Internet as long as you generally keep broad declarations of faith to an acceptable level. There might be some judgment but it maybe goes even further to indifference or embarrassment for such a user. You might be able to get away with more within certain circles – like white evangelicals who share their faith more online – but it wouldn’t be as welcomed within other online networks and sites.

That said, the figures still suggest some decent levels of religious activity online with roughly 20% sharing about their faith regularly and 46% regularly seeing things regarding the faith of other users. Faith isn’t dead online even if it doesn’t quite match offline activity.

 

Empty stores at the mall? Fill them with data centers

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Here is one new solution to vacant stores at the shopping mall: use the space for data centers.

In Fort Wayne, Ind., a vacated Target store is about to be home to rows of computer servers, network routers and Ethernet cables courtesy of a local data-center operator. In Jackson, Miss., a former McRae’s department store will get the same treatment next year. And one quadrant of the Marley Station Mall south of Baltimore is already occupied by a data-center company that last year offered to buy out the rest of the building.

As America’s retailers struggle to keep up with online shopping, the Internet is starting to settle into some of the very spaces where brick-and-mortar customers used to shop. The shift brings welcome tenants to some abandoned stretches of the suburban landscape, though it doesn’t replace all the jobs and sales-tax revenue that local communities lost when stores left the building…

Many malls and neighborhood shopping centers are still grappling with vacancies five years after the recession. The average mall vacancy rate hovers around 5.8%, according to market researcher CoStar Group, the same level as in the third quarter of 2009. Strip-mall vacancy sits at 10.1%, down from 11.5% five years ago. Rents are down too. Asking rents at malls have fallen 16% over the past five years, while strip mall rents declined 12%, according to CoStar…

Converting retail properties isn’t simple, however. Data-center operators have specific needs for their properties including access to heavy-duty fiber optic communications cables and reliable and affordable power access. The buildings need to be able to withstand tumultuous weather, from hurricanes to tornadoes. Windows are a negative.

An interesting use of space. Since presumably some of these empty stores are in malls where there still are open stores, how exactly do these new data centers interact with their surroundings? Probably not very well if they are windowless.

Facebook not going to run voting experiments in 2014

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Facebook is taking an increasing role in curating your news but has decided to not conducts experiments with the 2014 elections:

Election Day is coming up, and if you use Facebook, you’ll see an option to tell everyone you voted. This isn’t new; Facebook introduced the “I Voted” button in 2008. What is new is that, according to Facebook, this year the company isn’t conducting any experiments related to election season.

That’d be the first time in a long time. Facebook has experimented with the voting button in several elections since 2008, and the company’s researchers have presented evidence that the button actually influences voter behavior…

Facebook’s experiments in 2012 are also believed to have influenced voter behavior. Of course, everything is user-reported, so there’s no way of knowing how many people are being honest and who is lying; the social network’s influence could be larger or smaller than reported.

Facebook has not been very forthright about these experiments. It didn’t tell people at the time that they were being conducted. This lack of transparency is troubling, but not surprising. Facebook can introduce and change features that influence elections, and that means it is an enormously powerful political tool. And that means the company’s ability to sway voters will be of great interest to politicians and other powerful figures.

Facebook will still have the “I voted” button this week:

On Tuesday, the company will again deploy its voting tool. But Facebook’s Buckley insists that the firm will not this time be conducting any research experiments with the voter megaphone. That day, he says, almost every Facebook user in the United States over the age of 18 will see the “I Voted” button. And if the friends they typically interact with on Facebook click on it, users will see that too. The message: Facebook wants its users to vote, and the social-networking firm will not be manipulating its voter promotion effort for research purposes. How do we know this? Only because Facebook says so.

It seems like there are two related issues here:

1. Should Facebook promote voting? I would guess many experts would like popular efforts to try to get people to vote. After all, how good is democracy if many people don’t take advantage of their rights to vote? Facebook is a popular tool and if this can help boost political and civic engagement, what could be wrong with that?

2. However, Facebook is also a corporation that is collecting data. Their efforts to promote voting might be part of experiments. Users aren’t immediately aware that they are participating in an experiment when they see a “I voted” button. Or, the company may decide to try to influence elections.

Facebook is not alone in promoting elections. Hundreds of media outlets promote election news. Don’t they encourage voting? Aren’t they major corporations? The key here appears to be the experimental angle: people might be manipulated. Might this be okay if (1) they know they are taking part (voluntary participation is key to social science experiments) and (2) it promotes the public good? This sort of critique implies that the first part is necessary because fulfilling a public good is not enough to justify the potential manipulation.