Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

New ASA task force on social media

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The American Sociological Association has a new task force on social media that will meet during the 2013 ASA meetings in New York City:

According to Tapia, the ASA has “worked hard to keep pace with the changes in social media” by adopting practices such as maintaining a Facebook page and working with Twitter. However, she added, many sociologists lack the experience and knowledge to fully utilize social media. While in graduate school, sociology students are required to read an extensive amount of literature that goes back hundreds of years but do not receive comparable training in using online tools.

“The purpose of the task force is to think more broadly about ways in which we can help to shine a bright light on sociology,” she said. “For example, many members are eager to promote their books. But some members don’t quite know how to go about it.”…

The Task Force on Social Media will hold its first face-to-face meeting at the ASA Annual Meeting in New York City on Aug. 10. The bulk of the task force work will be done by sub-committees operating electronically and by conference calls over the next 18 months. There will be a second face-to-face meeting in August 2014 at the ASA Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

As a discipline, sociology could use more positive exposure through social media. According to a posting earlier this year, the full name of the group is the Task Force on Using Social Media to Increase the Visibility of Sociological Research. At the same time, Twitter and Facebook and other places don’t always lend themselves to nuanced scientific explanation of the social world…

US government behind in regulating automated features for cars

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As car makers pursue new technologies including driverless cars, the US government is struggling to keep up with the changes:

While truly self-driving cars are years away—if they ever arrive—consumers are seeing far more car models bearing sophisticated semi-autonomous features. These include radar assisted cruise-control, which can keep a fixed distance from the car ahead; systems that warn drivers if they veer out of their lanes; and technologies that can prevent oversteering or even apply the brakes when they detect that a crash is imminent (see “Self-Driving Tech Veers into Mid-Range Cars” and “Proceed With Caution Toward the Self-Driving Car”)…

With three states and the District of Columbia having passed legislation to allow researchers to test such prototypes on real roads, Washington is grappling with how to regulate the cars. John Capp, the director of active safety systems for General Motors, says federal regulators are “trying to understand these things and trying to figure out what role they should have.”…

Unsurprisingly, NHTSA’s statement said that fully autonomous technology isn’t ready for the general public. But the fact that the agency is calling for more study is a reminder of the glacial pace of regulation: in the case of lane-departure warnings and crash-avoidance systems, it’s studying technologies that have already been on the market for several years.

See my post last week on the NHSTA statement. More broadly, this raises interesting questions about technology and the ability of regulators to keep up. For those who want to push technology forward, how much in terms of time, convenience, and dollars is lost if the government slows down the process? At the same time, how much regulation is needed to help protect the public? There is likely some sort of sweet spot when the government has time to declare technology safe and inventors and producers can still get things to the public in a reasonable amount of time…but I suspect this could vary widely across different sectors and the politics involved could change quite a bit. Take, for example, the scandal a few years back involving Toyota and the lack of findings. It cost the company quite a bit, the government still had a duty to step in, but there was little conclusion – except that perhaps we’re all going to have black boxes in our cars  soon. Imagine a few incidents like this happening with a new widespread technology like driverless cars. How much could that set the industry back and feed perceptions that the technology really wasn’t ready?

Game identifying random locations through Google Streetview

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Love to see random sites around the world? Check out the game Locatestreet where you are given a picture from Google Streetview and you have to guess (with multiple choice and with the opportunity to utilize a few hints) the correct location.

After playing the version with random US locations, I discovered that context matters – check out the housing styles and the vegetation for some insights into the location. Indeed, you might just see lots of trees and landscape. Also, knowing where population centers are can go a long way in making a closer guess as to where the exact picture was taken…

h/t Atlantic Cities

Argument for a flat tax for both electric and gas drivers

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There is ongoing discussion in several states about a flat tax for electric and gas cars per mile driven:

“EV drivers want to pay their fair share,” says Jay Friedland, the legislative director of Plug-In America. “We want the roads to be supported, but we’re still in a phase of early adoption and there’s a greater public good.”

That “greater good” is to give electric vehicle technology a chance to crack through its niche status, reducing the continued reliance on fossil fuels from unstable nations. The more state and federal breaks EVs get, the greater the possibility that drivers will look to them as an alternative. But they still need to contribute to the greater good of roads and infrastructure, and Plug-In America agrees.

The advocacy group believes a flat road tax is a better solution – taxing all drivers equally, no matter how their vehicle is powered. That idea is gaining momentum.

In New Jersey, a road tax proposed by Sen. James Whelan, a Democrat from Atlantic City, would charge all drivers 0.00839 cents per mile driven. For the average driver who travels 12,000 miles per year, that comes to a little more than $100. It’s an easy way for Jersey to recoup some cash from EV drivers without targeting them directly.

It’s the same idea with Virginia’s HB 2313, which eliminates the $0.175/gallon tax on fuels in favor of a tax of 3.5 percent for gasoline and six percent for diesel fuel, while imposing larger annual registration fees and a $64 per year for EVs, hybrids and alt-fuel vehicles.

There seem to be several competing interests in these discussions:

1. States who desperately need money to pay for roads.

2. Advocates of electric vehicles who don’t want new taxes and fees to limit the adoption of electric vehicles.

3. Where are the gasoline drivers and the trucking industries? There has not been much reporting on their status in these ongoing discussions…

Another factor that makes these conversations more difficult is the potential changing nature of driving in the coming years. States need certain levels of funding for roads but it is unclear how many people will be driving what and what the status of miles driven per capita will be down the road. All of this means it is harder to make projections and also suggests that whatever is decided in the near future will probably have to be revisited soon.

Combining urban planning and urban informatics

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The Chief Technology Officer for the city of Chicago argues urban planning and urban informatics need to be combined:

“This is a plea – and I make it frequently – for a discipline that doesn’t really exist yet,” Tolva says, “a merger of urban design and urban planning with urban informatics, with networked public space.”

Tolva is touching here on a number of ideas we’ve broached before. The unevenness of digital information has real-world implications in cities. The tools that we use to access it (smartphones, laptops, WiFi) will demand changes to the physical environment. And social norms about privacy in public space are all evolving as a result. But it’s helpful now to pause and think about who should be addressing all this uncharted territory (and whether those people exist yet).

“The real opportunity is in thinking about how many points of tangency with the online world are actually becoming embedded in physical space,” Tolva says. He is specifically not talking here about government data portals that contain information about the physical city. “This notion of e-government – even coming out of my mouth, it seems quaint – is you interacting with your city in front of your computer. But that’s not how we experience cities. Or, it’s not the best part of cities.”

The best part of cities is on the street. And in the future, your experience of the street life of cities could be enhanced if buildings and stoplights and bus stops and parks all gathered information and spoke to each other (and to anyone who wanted to listen). So what do we call this new job, the architect of everything?

While this may make some quite nervous, there is a lot of potential to put together real-time information and information about urban patterns with real-time devices. Imagine city infrastructure that works by dynamic algorithms rather than strict schedules. Perhaps this could be described as “urban big data” with an “urban big data officer”?

Help needed in measuring online newspaper readership

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The newspaper industry is in trouble and it doesn’t help that there is not an agreed-upon way to measure online readership:

It’s no longer uncommon for someone to own three or four devices that can access news content at home, work or almost anywhere. This array causes headaches for newspaper publishers and editors and sows confusion for advertisers who want to know how many readers a newspaper has. How should they be counted? Where should advertisers put their dollars? How many readers does an online advertisement reach? What’s an ad worth anymore?

Perhaps as vexing is who is counting readers and who counts them best. Unlike the methods Arbitron and Nielsen use to develop radio and TV ratings, the science of counting online and digital news consumers has existed only for a short time. At least nine companies have crowded into the business of measuring digital audiences over the past 15 years. Each company employs its own methodology to collect data. And because digital technology seems to leap forward almost every day, measurement techniques that were acceptable yesterday may not be adequate tomorrow.

With the money at stake in advertising and prestige, you would think there would be more agreement here. Without agreed-upon standards, newspapers can claim very different numbers and there is no way to really sort it out.

Why can’t newspapers themselves pick a provider or two they like, perhaps one that is more generous in its counting, and run with it as an industry?

Dana Chinn, a lecturer at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said newspapers haven’t kept up with other industries that do business online.

“There is a stark contrast between the news industry and e-commerce, in that e-commerce is saying analytics is do or die for us because we are a digital business,” Chinn said. “News organizations don’t say that, because if they did they would use the right metrics. All the news organizations I know are usually using the wrong metrics to make the decisions that are needed to survive.”

This is a reminder that money-making today is very closely tied to measurement, particularly when you are selling online information.

Inside Amazon’s fulfillment centers

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If Walmart is where normal America gathers, then here is where much of the stuff Americans order online comes from: Amazon fulfillment centers.

For its “Amazon Unpacked” series, UK’s The Financial Times Weekend Magazine got photographer Ben Roberts a pass into the hyper-systematized environs of one of Amazon.com’s ginormous—roughly the length of nine football fields—fulfillment warehouses. The facility in Rugeley, England, is an expansive structure flooded with natural light and imbued with the sterility and efficiency of a major hospital. Here, employees can walk between seven and 15 miles a day, and they don’t meander; the warehouse gets 35 orders a second and worker productivity is measured via handheld device. Architizer calls it “a warehouse employee’s worst nightmare,” but with all the organization, light, and crisp colors, the space seems pretty ideal for a warehouse—particularly if an employee were training for a 10K or something.

When looking at these pictures, they seem like they could either represent the possibilities of our future (think of what is on all those shelves!) or represent cold, calculating buildings that are all about feeding a consumerist economy in the most efficient way. Either way, their scale alone is impressive.

Combined with my post over the weekend about subway facades, these images could be part of a larger series on the infrastructure behind the 2013 world. When people order from Amazon, they are not likely to think about all that it takes to get the product from a factory to a distribution center and then to their door/mailbox. Yet, they know it all works and like the results. Or, think about the data centers built in places like Iowa to handle all of the information flowing through the Internet. Or, the distribution centers behind Walmart or that helped Netflix quickly ship out DVDs years ago. All of this is relatively hidden in faceless warehouses away from the consumer.

 

 

 

 

 

Facebook to build $1.5 billion data center in…Iowa

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In looking at the geographic dispersion of major data or server centers, it looks like Iowa is pretty popular:

Facebook is building a 1.4-million-square-foot data center on the outskirts of Des Moines, Iowa, according to a local report.

With a price tag estimated at $1.5 billion, the massive facility would join the data centers Facebook has already built in Prineville, Oregon and Forest City, North Carolina, as well as a third under construction in Luleå, Sweden…

Like Oregon and North Carolina, Iowa has become a hotbed for internet data centers. Google runs a facility in Council Bluffs, Iowa, while Microsoft operates a data center in West Des Moines. Facebook’s facility is set for Altoona, a small town north-east of Des Moines.

Companies such as Facebook are attracted to such places in part because local governments provide tax breaks for these enormous computing facilities. According to local reports, Facebook has asked for additional tax credits for using wind power to help the new facility.

It appears tax breaks win again. But, the Des Moines Register also noted some other enticing features of the area:

Iowa has been competing fiercely with Nebraska for the data center, code named Catapult…

City officials and leaders of the companies say Altoona is prime real estate for data farms because it meets all of their primary needs:

• Access to an extensive interstate fiber optic cable system, already installed within the city and running along Interstate Highway 80.

• Proximity to adequate power and water utilities. (A large MidAmerican substation is less than half a mile from the 200-acre site.)

• Open and affordable land with low natural disaster risks. (Coastal cities often face the threat of hurricanes and earthquakes.)

• Transportation access near the crossroads of interstate highways 80 and 35 and U.S. Highway 65.

What would happen if Iowa were to pull these tax breaks? What about having an educated workforce – it looks like Des Moines has a decent share of the “creative class” as measured by Richard Florida.

It would be interesting to put this is a larger Midwestern context. Would these tech companies consider the Chicago area, with or without the tax breaks? How about Ann Arbor or Madison? Are other places even competing for data centers – and if not, why not?

The quick rise and fall of “Pray for Boston” on social media

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One early response to the Boston bombings on social media, “Pray for Boston,” quickly increased and then quickly faded. Here is one reaction and possible explanation:

It was jarring. There was the weirdness of seeing so many references to the divine in spaces normally reserved for vacation photos and article links and quips about the news. It was tempting to think that all the social-media-fueled “prayers for Boston” somehow degraded the idea of prayer. As one Facebook commenter wrote on the Pray for Boston page: “Do you want me to DEFINE prayer? A solemn request for help or expression of thanks addressed to God or an object of worship. Prayer is solemn. Not a ‘like’ on facebook.”

It was also strange to see so many non-religious friends talking about prayer. The majority of my Facebook friends who wrote about praying aren’t especially observant. Maybe they go to church or synagogue on holidays, but not regularly—and they certainly don’t post about prayer under normal circumstances…

But I’m not sure that’s really what’s going on here. I don’t think the outpouring of post-Boston social-media prayer was fueled by a bunch of people who, in the face of tragedy, are suddenly eager to seek God. As Elizabeth Drescher writes in a well-done piece at Religion Dispatches, it didn’t take long for the “pray for Boston” meme to die; it was soon replaced by other, more practical sentiments. I noticed that, too. Here it is in graph form—check out how quickly the phrase “pray for Boston” surged on Twitter on Monday, and then how quickly it fell…

Drescher believes #PrayforBoston rose and fell so quickly because the prayers were never really about religion in the first place. They were more reflections of temporary anxiety and sadness than a lasting call to pursue belief:

I’ll throw out two related ideas:

1. Perhaps expressing prayer for victims of tragedy is an updated feature of civil religion in the United States. After tragic events, particularly deaths, it is common for politicians, media figures, and others to say something like “our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.” This is a shorthand for saying we care about the victims and are hoping for the best for them. Invoking prayer is a generic idea (such phrases are not explicitly about praying to “the Christian God” or Jesus) and works pretty well in a society where 80-90% still believe in God or a higher power. In other words, it is like saying “God bless America” at the end of major political speeches – it is a reference to religion but runs little risk of offending people and taps into some transcendent ideas about ourselves and the United States.

2. It is relatively rare to see sustained expressions of religious faith on social media. While most Americans still have some sort of religious or spiritual belief, social media tends to frown on such expressions. Perhaps this is related to the idea of Moral Therapeutic Deism as found and defined by sociologist Christian Smith – what may work religiously for you is fine as long as you don’t impose your values on me and “force” me to see this on my Facebook or Twitter feed may simply be too much. At the same time, just the fact that this social media meme even started at all indicates some kind of religious background of the users.

The human eyes and hours needed to review CCTV footage to find terrorists

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A common tool in fighting urban terrorism today is the closed-circuit camera system. However, it still takes a tremendous amount of personnel and time to go through all of the available tape. Here is a summary of what was required to put together the narrative of the 2005 bombing in London:

Six days after the attack, police start linking these events together. “By 13 July, the police had strong evidence that Khan, Tanweer, Hussain and Lindsay were the bombers and that they had died in the attacks.” But it was no small feat: Police collected 80,000 CCTV tapes, amounting to hundreds of thousands of hours of footage. The London police brought on some 400 extra officers to help with the grunt of it.

“The scale is enormous,” the narrative concluded.

As Alexis Madrigal writes at The Atlantic, although we have the technology to capture and record every inch of a city in real time, the process very much depends on a human eye to analyze. “Right now, there is no video software that can do this type of analysis,” he writes, “not even in a first-pass way.”

Even so, given the history here, it seems likely that given enough time, the perpetrators of the bombing will be found on camera. Whether the police can connect the thread among all the disparate sources of information is another matter.

In other words, you can collect big data but it still requires humans to make sense of it all. I imagine there is a big opportunity here for someone to create reliable recognition software but this may be a task where humans are simply better.

Wired says the data in Boston is being crowdsourced but the investigation will not:

It is unclear whether law enforcement had overhead cameras mounted in helicopters or other aircraft over the Marathon. (Boston-area cops don’t have spy drones — yet.) But the era of readily-accessible commercial imaging tools provides a twist on the exponential growth of surveillance tech used by law enforcement and homeland security. The data on your phone can become an adjunct to police during the highest-profile investigations.

That isn’t an unfettered benefit to police. The military has found that its explosion of imagery data has stressed its ability to process it, to the point where its futurists are hunting for algorithms that can pre-select images a human analyst sees. Davis requested that any spectator providing media showing the attacks indicate the time they collected the data so police “don’t need to go through the electronic signature.”

Lots of work to do.