Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

Google adding more and more indoor maps of buildings

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Google continues to expand its Maps program by adding more and more indoor maps:

10,000 indoor maps. You can consider this proof-positive that Google is making headway in its effort to chart every nook and cranny of navigable terrain, even if this includes carpet and linoleum.

Even more noteworthy: A great many of these floor plans weren’t created in partnership with Google. Instead, they were uploaded by users — business owners and institutional leaders who were motivated to make their properties just a bit more open to all. A steakhouse in Massachusetts. A camera store in New York. Even the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. More and more pioneering spirits are using Google’s self-service tool to upload their building layouts for everyone to see.

But there’s a caveat: It’s nearly impossible to find most of these indoor maps, unless you happen to stumble upon one during your day-to-day use of the Maps app. Or unless you read Wired.

Google launched its indoor mapping initiative and its Google Maps Floor Plans self-publishing tool in November 2011. But right now, if you look at the Google Maps support site, you’ll find a bare-bones list of some 80 available indoor maps inside the U.S. This list only includes major museums, airports, and business locations that Google has partnered with.

Much more interesting to Wired are the individual businesses and organizations that have made their own indoor-mapping leaps of faith. We were smitten with the idea that so many people willingly uploaded their floorplans to the mapping database, so we asked Google to share a sampling of user-submitted examples. As you can see from the images above, some of the maps are most noteworthy for their sheer, well, normal-ness. But this, in part, reflects the limitations that Google puts on people who voluntarily opt into the service.

While the last uncharted area of the Earth may be deep under the oceans, providing widely available maps of public indoor spaces (Google is not yet accepting private buildings) is also pretty cool. These maps could be really helpful to visitors who don’t realize what may be turn around the corner or corridor inside a nearby building.

So when can I start getting turn-by-turn directions on my smartphone from the entrance to the Field Museum in Chicago to my favorite exhibits?

New York Times review of SimCity Social

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Here is evidence that the world is a changed place: the New York Times has a short review of the new SimCity Social game for Facebook.

SimCity Social brings the original city-building video game to Facebook, though fans will be hard-pressed to find any of the depth and complexity of that popular PC series. Players place businesses, factories, houses and various attractions, as their expansionist ambitions are kept in check by an energy meter that slowly refills.

The game allows friends to establish sister cities or rival cities, which enables some entertaining cross-border acts of charity or benign sabotage. SimCity Social is a cute and capable social city builder. It’s also a shameless attempt to capitalize on the success of Zynga’s wildly popular CityVille, slapping a powerful name on a game that could never live up to SimCity’s legacy.

As a long-time SimCity fan, I’m tempted to try out this new version. However, several things will stop me:

1. I don’t want a watered down version. I’d rather use my computer and XBox 360 to play full, more stunning versions of games.

2. I’m not sure even a full-scale social version would add to the gameplay.

3. Does this app bug all of your friends like Farmville and the like? If so, I’m staying far away.

4. It sounds like this version may have become more “gamified” rather than being the free-flowing game I’m used to. Here is another review that explains some of the game:

So it’s technically Facebook, but when you’re playing it, it feels like a place (OR A CITY) of its own. I started playing it last Friday and I can’t stop. I am on Level 17, my population is at healthy 6,000, and SimCitySocialCheat.com is the website I aspire to be managing editor of. There’s something about the colorful utopia that I can not not stop thinking about.

Maybe it’s the constant yearning of completing tasks to get more energy bolts, thus being able build more houses and increase population and, in doing so, unlock the next level and new attractions.

Perhaps it’s the constant praise the game lauds on you for doing something so dumb and pointless, like planting a tree in a high-populated area. The the real world just doesn’t offer that,  unless you send a tree to Israel. (Then you get a fancy certificate back in return.)

And my friends are redeeming themselves there. You find an inner-circle of people that you can trust and rely on—not for moral support, but for land permits, teamwork badges, and Dunkin’ Donut energy bonuses: Jordanville runs on Dunkin’.

SimCity has always had some incentive to grow as you get to build different kinds of things. This often worked like it does for real cities: as a city grow, it can support monuments, cultural attractions, and more complicated transportation options. However, it sounds like this new version takes it to another level.

 

Some big cities only made possible by air conditioning?

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This seems pertinent with the recent heatwave in the Midwest and East Coast: how many of the major cities of the world wouldn’t exist without air conditioning?

It wasn’t until the beginning of World War II that homes in southern U.S. cities began using air conditioning units. By 1955, one in every 22 American homes had air conditioning. In the South, that number was about 1 in 10, according to the historian Raymond Arsenault [PDF]. Since this increase in air conditioning use, many of these Southern cities experienced a population boom.

I took a look at the metro areas in the U.S. with more than 1 million people and found which have historically been the hottest, based on the number of cooling degree days per year — a statistic used to measure how much and how many days the outside temperature in a certain location is above 65 degrees. Using numbers from NOAA, I found that between 1971-2000, six big cities in the South had an average of at least 3,000 cooling degree days. I also compared the 1940 metro population (when available) to the metro population in 2010. From the time just before air conditioning became popular in the South to today, population growth in the region has skyrocketed. This raises the question: would these hot Southern cities be around, at least in their present form, if air conditioning hadn’t been invented?

But, of course, there are bigger, hotter cities across the globe. In fact, seven of the largest metros in the world have an average high temperature above 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

Not surprisingly, all of these cities are found in developing countries. As Michael Sivak, a professor at the University of Michigan notes, only two of the warmest 30 global metros can be found in developed countries. With the middle class growing in warm metros in countries like India, demand for air conditioning is increasing. A recent New York Times article reported that sales of air conditioning units in India and China are growing 20 percent per year and are fast becoming a middle-class status symbol. Last year, 55 percent of new air conditioners were sold in the Asia Pacific region.

Is there some sort of giant control group we could use to figure this out? Over the weekend, I was in a 150 year old church with no air conditioning. It was hot though I think this was primarily because there was no air movement; indeed, when we walked outside afterward, it felt more pleasant as there was a slight breeze. Before air conditioning, people obviously survived in such temperatures (and also survived in the winters without central heating as we know it today).

So this seems to be the real question: could we expect that there would be major changes in population distributions if there was no air conditioning whatsoever? Would Florida really have few people and post-World War II Sunbelt expansion not taken place? The best solution to all of this would be to have people move to more temperate climates where it doesn’t get too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter. This generally requires consistent breezes, usually off major bodies of water. Of course, not everyone can live in places like Hawaii which only has a record high temperature of 100 degrees. Did the Mediterranean climate help give rise to empires like Greece and Rome (though it makes it difficult to then explain the Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires which must have adapted to desert climates)?

More broadly, we could discuss the influence of ecology on population growth and state building. I remember studying the mysterious decline of the Maya in southeastern Mexico/Guatemala. More recent scholars have suggested some kind of ecological explanation, perhaps a drought, that led to increased contentious competition for dwindling resources.

A sociologist on the iPhone at 5: “There has been no other device that has changed social and technological life in such a short time”

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The iPhone just turned five years old and a sociologist makes some big claims about the impact of the device:

“There has been no other device that has changed social and technological life in such a short time,” said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University sociologist and psychologist who studies how technology impacts society. “There has been nothing like it in the world.”

This is a bold claim. I assume this primarily about the time period: important technology today has the ability to make rapid changes. This is one of the defining features of today’s globalization: stuff happens and spreads quickly. The iPhone itself is influential but it quickly led to other changes and pushed Android and other phone makers as well. I can admit that the smartphone world has some advantages.

At the same time, I wonder if this claim is too much. Looking at the broad sweep of human history, how does the iPhone stack up? What about the printing press, the plow, the steam engine, and so on? These devices may not have had such a quick effect but these led or contributed to whole eras like the Renaissance, the Agricultural Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Will we look back in fifty or one hundred years and see the iPhone as a similar singular device or is it part of the computer-age process?

Why sociologists should make their own apps

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A sociologist who has made her own medical sociology app argues that her colleagues should be making their own apps:

My decision to make an app stemmed from two major reasons. First, I have long been interested in the ways people interact with computer technologies, and have published some research on this in the past.

More recently my interest has turned to health-related apps available for smartphones and tablet computers. I had been researching the various apps available for such purposes and had noted that many apps have been developed for teaching purposes for medical students.

Second, we have mobile digital devices at home that are very popular with my two school-aged daughters. I had noticed the huge number of educational apps that are available for children’s use, from infancy to high-school level. Some Australian high schools, including my older daughter’s school, have acknowledged young people’s high take-up of mobile digital devices and are beginning to advocate that students bring their devices to school and use them for educational purposes during the school day.

The relevance for tertiary-level education appeared obvious. I wondered whether many universities, academic publishers or academics themselves had begun to develop apps. Yet, having searched both the Android and the Apple App Stores using the search term of my discipline, ‘sociology’, I discovered only a handful of apps related to this subject for tertiary students. Nor were there many for other social sciences. There seemed to be a wide-open gap in the market…

My app is very simple. It is text-based only and has no illustrations or graphics, but there is provision for these to be included if the developer so chooses. Apps developed using this particular wizard are only be available for use on Android devices, but having looked at similar app makers for Apple devices I was put off by their more technical nature and the greater expense involved.

In just a couple of hours my app was ready. I had typed in over 25 medical sociology key concepts (for example, social class, discourse, identity, illness narratives, poststructuralism), plus a list of books for further reading, chosen a nice-looking background and paid US$79.00 for the app to appear without ads and to guarantee that it would be submitted to the Android App Store.

Three issues I could see with this:

1. How much demand is there really for such apps? I can’t imagine too many people look for sociology or social science apps. Of course, it is relatively easy to make so it isn’t like tons of time has to be invested in such apps (though there could be a relationship between the time put into an app and how engaging it is).

2. The assumption here is that people want to use these apps for educational purposes. Would this work? Can apps effectively be used for education

3. How much better is making an app than putting together a website?

I’m glad to see more sociologists venturing into new technologies but it is worthwhile to consider the payoffs and how they are really going to be used.

When you find out that your dissertation is for sale as an ebook without you knowing about it

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A recent sociology PhD describes an interesting experience: he found that his dissertation was being sold online as an ebook.

A Google search brought me to a link to BarnesandNoble.com, where with one click I soon discovered that my dissertation was being sold. It took a minute of staring at the computer screen to fully accept that my work could be purchased for (at the time) $32.34 as an eTextbook for the Nook reader. I thought the price was a steal. Literally.

I had graduated about a year earlier with a Ph.D. in sociology. Although I had hoped to turn my dissertation into a book one day, I had not yet started that process. I hadn’t even secured a contract with a publisher…

I began investigating how it could have come to be for sale. Like many graduate students, I was burned out after defending my dissertation. My immediate thoughts were not about which publisher I should contact but about whether I would be able to afford rent and food in this economy. My final weeks of graduate school had been a bit foggy, and I couldn’t recall the specific publication options I had selected when I submitted the dissertation to my university as a degree requirement.

So I dug out my copies of handouts from the Office of Graduate Studies, describing my options for publication with ProQuest (the university’s publisher of theses and dissertations). Reading through the papers, I could find nothing on all the possible ways my dissertation could be sold.

Then I logged into my account on the ProQuest site and saw that when I had submitted my dissertation electronically I had chosen an option for third-party selling. At the time, I was unsure what that meant, and in my end-of-graduate-school haze, I had neglected to find out. I assumed it meant that some other academic company could sell my work to individual researchers, typically few in number, who would have to exert great effort even to discover its whereabouts. I never thought it meant it could be sold, in its entirety, on the same site where one can purchase calendars and the complete series of The Sopranos on DVD.

Remembering some similar feelings at the end of my time in graduate school as I was looking to complete and defend my dissertation, I could see how this information could slip through the cracks. However, the lesson still remains: read all of that fine print so you know what you are agreeing to.

A call to “begin creating synthetic sociology”

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Two academics call for “synthetic sociology”:

Well, it’s time we begin creating synthetic sociology. Along with Nicholas Christakis, I recently laid out the potential for this new field:

We wanted to see if this could be done in humans. Like crabs, humans have specific kinds of behavior that can be predicted, in groups. To harness this, we created a survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, surveying lots of people at once.

We asked a couple hundred people to complete a string of 1’s and 0’s, and asked them to make it “as random as possible.” As it happens, people are fairly bad at generating random numbers—there is a broad human tendency to suppose that strings must alternate more than they do. And what we found in our Mechanical Turk survey was exactly this: Predictably, people would generate a nonrandom number. For example, faced with 0, 0, there was about a 70 percent chance the next number would be 1.

From this single behavioral quirk, it is theoretically possible to construct a way in which a group of humans can act as what is known as a logic gate in computer science. By running such a question through a survey of enough people, and feeding those results to other people, you can turn them into what computer scientists call a “NOR” gate—a tool to take two pieces of binary input and yield consistent answers. And with just a handful of NOR gates, you can make a binary adder, a very simple computing device that can add two numbers together.

What this means is that, given sufficient numbers of people, and their willingness to answer questions about random bits, we can re-deploy humans for a purpose they were not intended, namely to act as a kind of computer—doing anything from adding two bits to running Microsoft Word (albeit really, really slowly).

On one hand, it sounds like we are far from using these methods to have humans finish complicated tasks yet, on the other hand, this continues to build upon research about social networks and how information and other traits can be passed along and built on in a group of people. As these academics suggest, we have come some distance in recent decades in understanding and modeling human behavior and advances are likely to continue to come in the near future.

This also isn’t the first time that I have heard of social scientists using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for studies. For a relatively small amount of money, researchers can find a willing group of participants for experiments or other tasks.

Facebook’s Data Science Team running experiments

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Facebook’s Data Science Team of 12 researchers is working with all of its data (900 million users worth) and running experiments:

“Recently the Data Science Team has begun to use its unique position to experiment with the way Facebook works, tweaking the site-the way scientists might prod an ant’s nest-to see how users react… So [Eytan Bakshy] messed with how Facebook operated for a quarter of a billion users. Over a seven-week period, the 76 million links that those users shared with each other were logged. Then, on 219 million randomly chosen occasions, Facebook prevented someone from seeing a link shared by a friend. Hiding links this way created a control group so that Bakshy could assess how often people end up promoting the same links because they have similar information sources and interests.

“He found that our close friends strongly sway which information we share, but overall their impact is dwarfed by the collective influence of numerous more distant contacts-what sociologists call “weak ties.” It is our diverse collection of weak ties that most powerfully determines what information we’re exposed to.”

But if that sounds a little creepy, it shouldn’t. Well, not too creepy, because these kinds of experiments aren’t designed to influence us, but rather understand us. The piece continues:

“Marlow says his team wants to divine the rules of online social life to understand what’s going on inside Facebook, not to develop ways to manipulate it. “Our goal is not to change the pattern of communication in society,” he says. “Our goal is to understand it so we can adapt our platform to give people the experience that they want.” But some of his team’s work and the attitudes of Facebook’s leaders show that the company is not above using its platform to tweak users’ behavior. Unlike academic social scientists, Facebook’s employees have a short path from an idea to an experiment on hundreds of millions of people.”

I think there is a lot of room to explore the world of weak ties on Facebook and similar websites. Just how much do friends of friends affect us? What is the impact of people a few ties along in our network? For example, the book Connected shows that traits like obesity and happiness are tied to network behavior which could be examined on Facebook.

I would guess some people may not like hearing this but there are at least three points in Facebook’s favor here:

1. They are not the only online company running such experiments. Google has been doing such things with search results for quite a while. Theoretically, these experiments could help create a better user experience.

2. People are voluntarily giving their data. I don’t think these companies have to explain that user’s data might be used in experiments…but perhaps I am wrong?

3. This is “Big Data” writ large. Facebook and others would love to be able to run randomized trials with this large group and with all of the information available to researchers.

A Prius can only power a McMansion for a few hours but a Japanese home for four days

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A future study will look at how a Toyota Prius can power a home:

Pull electricity from a Toyota Prius Plug-in to a McMansion, and the lights may go out within a matter of a couple of hours. For a typical Japanese house, though, you’d be taken care of for the better part of a week.

Toyota said it will start testing a vehicle-to-home (V2H) system with the Prius Plug-in in Japan by the end of the year. The trial will involve a two-way power-supply system in which the car could supply the home with power in the event of a black-out. About 10 Toyota City homes will be involved in the testing.

The Japanese automaker says a fully-charged, filled-up Prius Plug-In can supply a typical Japanese house with 10 kilowatts, or enough for about four days. In addition to supplying power to blacked-out homes, the car will eventually be able to power up emergency shelters and other buildings.

Last August, Nissan started testing a similar system with its battery-electric Leaf, which the automaker said could provide about two days electricity for an average Japanese home when the car is fully charged. Nissan said it intended to commercialize the system, but didn’t provide further details.

So, if you are really worried about your power supply, one option is to buy a Toyota Prius and purchase a Japanese-sized home. Figures from 2003 suggest the average Japanese home has about 1,021 square feet. Or, you could go further: pair a Prius with a Japanese or American “tiny house” and have power for even longer!

In the long run, is having the Prius help power your home (or other objects) a greener outcome?

Civilization II a good “sociological simulator”? I say no

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I was amused earlier this week to see a report from a guy who has been playing the same game of Civilization II for ten years. Here is a little bit of his report on the state of the Civ II world:

  • The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.
  • There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

While I loved playing Civ II (and I think the gameplay was superior to later versions of the game), I’m scratching my head at how much attention this report has received in the media. Does it really tell us anything about the world’s possible future? Here is one overview from the BBC that I think goes too far:

A man who has been playing the computer game Civilisation II for ten years describes the year 3991 AD as a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.

Daniel Knowles, from the Telegraph and a fan of the game, says the game has certain assumptions built in to it about what will happen if there is a nuclear war or if you stop producing green technology.

“It’s a kind of sociological simulator… a giant economical model” he told the Today programme.

He believes gamer James Moore “would not still be playing it if he had reached an Utopia”.

Civilization II is a “sociological simulator”? I doubt it. Granted, the game is intended to replicate real-world nation-building and interaction. As you build your society, you have to make decisions like what kind of government to have (for example, in latter stages of the game fundamentalism is quite effective when waging all-out war), what to build and produce in individual cities, how to move certain units (military and otherwise) around, and pursue scientific and technological advancements. But, all of these types of games (and I’ve also been a fan in recent years of Age of Empires III) are only as good as what they account for. In other words, this is a low-level simulator of anything. The real world is far more complicated and many more moving pieces that games like this can allow. Indeed, these sorts of games seem geared toward all-out war between nations even as some would argue the international scene is getting more peaceful.

We are still far from a true “sociological simulator” that could account for all of the human variability in real life. This hasn’t stopped some scientists from trying – there was news recently of a group trying to put together a “Living Earth Simulator.” But, we need to remember what Civ II really is: it is a fun game with some modeling of human behavior but it really tells us very little or nothing about what the world might look like in 3991 AD.