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From midnight to 7:30 A.M., New York is uncharacteristically quiet, its Citibikes — the city’s new shared bicycles — largely stationary and clustered in residential neighborhoods. Then things begin to move: commuters check out the bikes en masse in residential areas across Manhattan and, over the next two hours, relocate them to Midtown, the Flatiron district, SoHo, and Wall Street. There they remain concentrated, mostly used for local trips, until they start to move back outward around 5 P.M.

Washington, D.C.’s bike-share program exhibits a similar pattern, though, as you’d expect, the movement starts a little earlier in the morning. On my animated map, both cities look like they’re breathing — inhaling and then exhaling once over the course of 12 hours or so.

At Sci Foo Camp last weekend, we enjoyed sitting down with several thoughtful scientists and thinkers-about-science to record a few podcast episodes. Here we speak with Tom Daniel, a professor of biology, computer science, and neurobiology at the University of Washington, andBen Lillie, co-founder of The Story Collider and a Stanford-trained physicist. First topic: what brings people to science, and how we compare to our icons. Along the way, we mention Hans Bethe, Isaac Newton’s epitaph, and John McPhee’s trip across Interstate 80.

How can we collect and transmit data with limited connectivity, safely tag individual elephants, and get local people involved in saving the elephants?

volumexii

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

— Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices (via volumexii)

emergentfutures

A Sesame Street for Makers?

“Discussions of modern technology often evokes the word “magic.” Some of the most popular devices, like the MacBook Air, are built in such a way to seriously dissuade anyone who would go inside and tinker with the works. For the vast consumer market, it makes sense for technology to present itself as a “magic box.” Most people don’t care about how their laptop works; they just want it to work. And that’s fair.

But we must think of the children.”

“I’ve interviewed a lot of engineers over the years, and it’s amazing how many of them can trace their fascination with technology to a youthful moment where they played with or took apart a piece of kit. You can only become fascinated with the structure of something if you can see the structure of it. You need that gear, that spring, that rivet to pop out at you and send you down the rabbit hole. This is how passions are born.”

Full Story: MIT

oreillyradar

Welcome to the "Circuit Playground"

Open government developer Waldo Jaquith had a problem: he wanted transcripts for videos of the Virginia legislature but didn't have the resources to fund their creation nor time to transcribe sessions himself.

When he talked to Matt Cutts at the Newsfoo unconference last December, Google's lead for Web spam suggested to Jacquith that he make use of YouTube ability to automagically created machine-generated transcripts of video.

Last week, Jaquith posted a $500 bounty for a speech transcription program, funded by 95 backers for a Kickstarter campaign to liberate Virginia's legislative video.

That's when something interesting happened, as Jacquith blogged today: Aaron Williamson, a lawyer for the Software Freedom Law Center, created a Python script to fix the problem.

It took just 27 hours for the $500 speech transcription bounty to be claimed. Aaron Williamson produced youtube-transcription, a Python-based pair of scripts that upload video to YouTube and download the resulting machine-generated transcripts of speech.

Jaquith intends to use the code in the Richmond Sunlight project -- and because it's open source, anyone else can press it into service as a means to generate transcripts of video.

The quality of YouTube's machine-generated transcriptions are, to be fair, mixed, although they are improving. That said, they're better than none at all.

Williamson told Jaquith that he'll donate the Kickstarter cash to charity.

@waldojaquith @digiphile @mattcutts (@copiesofcopies, BTW, has directed the bounty to a pair of charities.)

— Waldo Jaquith (@waldojaquith) March 25, 2013

Video of author Cory Doctorow’s talk on ebooks, libraries, and copyright at the Library of Congress.

A Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond (by LibraryOfCongress)

kenyatta

One of my favorite bits from Jacob’s post on “seapunk” was this bit about keeping subcultures “sub”:

It is an impossibility for a subcultural style to be “owned”. Sub-culture exists when gazed at by mass-culture. The only way to ensure that your aesthetic is not going to become used by others is to never share it with anyone. Another approach is to protect your aesthetic with physical violence (see: gang colors). Otherwise, once you allow your presence to be seen, it can be consumed.

Most communities protect their culture through some form of obfuscation: hiding the meaning of their communication by making it hard to interpret.

This is a practice I’ve been studying for some time and some of it is incredible.

Tum bl r an d L J u sers sep ar ate w ords thr ou gh o dd spacin g in o rde r to fo ol sea rc h en g i nes.

Chinese users hide political messages in image attachments to seemingly benign posts on Weibo.

General Pretraeus communicated solely through draft mode.

4chan scares away the faint of heart with porn.

More technically astute groups communicate through obscure messaging systems.

If you want your subculture to go undetected, all of these techniques are moderately effective at keeping your activity away from people and their machines. Until they *want* to find you. Then they’ll find ways around the gates you throw up.

update #1:

rickwebb replied to your link: The obfuscation of culture (how to hide your shit online)

We see a lot of people posting whole posts in tags, so that they’re only visible in the dashboard and not their external-facing blogs, too.

Brilliant.

update #2: Alex Leavitt points me to this First Monday piece by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, ‘Vernacular Resistance to Data Collection & Analysis: A Political Theory of Obfuscation’

oreillyradar

Nat linked up this post in Radar today.

Last week, Radar's managing editor, Mac Slocum, interviewed Ben Waber at Strata Santa Clara 2013.

Waber's company, Sociometrics, was featured this week in a Wall Street Journal article on tracking sensors in the workplace.

"Gathering big data about human behaviors can be a sensitive topic," said Dave Lathrop, director of workspace futures and strategy at Steelcase Inc.

There's no doubt about that reality.

(Via OReillyMedia)

A look behind the "data sensing lab" at the O'Reilly Strata conference. Last fall, Alasdair Allan, Brian Jepson, Julie Steele, Rob Faludi and interested attendees at the Strata Conference put together a network of data sensors in the conference venue in New York City. This video, featuring Edd Dumbill and others, explains what they created using open source hardware and 3D printing. The video description, by O'Reilly Media, provides more context and looks ahead to what's happening right now, around me.

"Sensors are the future of distributed data. General-purpose computing is dissipating out into the environment and becoming increasingly invisible and embedded into our lives. We will soon begin to move in a sea of data, our movements tracked and our environments measured and adjusted to our preferences, without need for direct intervention. At the Strata Conference in Santa Clara this February, we will observe and report on the conference once again, with more sensors, real-time visualization, and some new interactive features for attendees."

"Distributed Environmental Data: On the Ground at the Data Sensing Lab" (by OreillyMedia)

Last week in New York City, MAKE founder Dale Dougherty talked with entrepreneur Anil Dash about making and participatory design. Video of their conversation is embedded below.

Today, the White House responded to the We The People e-petition on open access.

John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, released a memorandum directing agencies with "more than $100 million in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication."

Today's White house #OA directive & #FASTR = watershed for US public's right to access taxpayer-funded research bit.ly/VBnwC6

February 22, 2013

Great the Pres. is joining the fight to provide free & open access of taxpayer funded research to the American public 1.usa.gov/15Bsenx

February 22, 2013

As Hayley Tsukayama notes in the Washington Post, the White House acknowledged the open access policies of the National Institutes of Health as a successful model for sharing research.

Was this a policy change? An open question on Twitter received clear answers:

@digiphile definitely, and an exciting one. Wonder if DOD/DARPA will get a pass though. #opengov

— Joseph Mosby (@josephmosby) February 22, 2013

@digiphile it is a policy change.NIH PMC only provides articles for free."And analyze" in OSTP policy implies broader usage rights.

— Richard Akerman (@scilib) February 22, 2013

@digiphile Definitely jives with what I'm hearing from @gbinal at #apistrat regarding forward movement on exposing fed data through APIs

— Jeremia Kimelman (@jeremiak) February 22, 2013

@digiphile It's a change--expanding NIH model more Fed agencies (over $100mil budget, i.e. NSF, DARPA, etc.) Mentions data, not just pubs.

— Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) February 22, 2013

@digiphile It's a change--expanding NIH model more Fed agencies (over $100mil budget, i.e. NSF, DARPA, etc.) Mentions data, not just pubs.

— Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) February 22, 2013

@digiphile It's a marked policy change -- the administration hadn't taken a stance previously.

February 22, 2013

From the day they were announced, one of the biggest question marks about We The People e-petitions has always been whether the administration would make policy changes or take public stances it had not before on a given issue.

ThThe Obama administration has been considering access to federally funded scientific research for years, including a report to Congress in March 2012. The relevant e-petition, which had gathered more than 65,000 signatures had gone unanswered since May of last year.

While the memorandum and the potential outcomes from its release come with caveats, from that $100M threshold to national security or economic competitions, an answer from the director of the White House Office of Science Policy accompanied by a memorandum directing agencies to make changes is a substantive outcome.

While there are many reasons to be critical of some open government initiatives, it certainly appears that today, We The People were heard in the halls of government.

Earlier this week, Lawrence Lessig marked his appointment as Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School with a lecture entitled "Aaron's Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age."

"Hacking is the use of technical knowledge to advance a public good," said Lessig, seeking to bring the term back to its original meaning and away from the cracking, espionage and malicious use in which it is frequently employed by media today.

(Source: HarvardLawSchool)

smartercities

‘Bioconcrete’ Uses Bacteria to Heal Self | ThisBigCity

No product evokes a sense of solidity and sturdiness the way concrete does. However, the tiniest of cracks in an otherwise colossal slab will inevitably lead to structural degradation, leakages and costly repairs.

It is precisely this problem that two Dutch researchers from Delft Technical University have been working on. Beginning in 2006, Henk Jonkers, a microbiologist, and Eric Schlangen, a specialist in concrete development, sought to develop a self-healing cement [pictured] that would stop cracks from forming in the concrete, thereby extending the life of constructions.

oreillyradar

Self-healing concrete.

On February 8th, Tim O'Reilly gave a keynote speech at the 2013 State of the Valley Conference in downtown San Jose, CA.

The event was sponsored by JointVentureSV.

Limor Fried asks President Obama about patents and tech

Last January, President Barack Obama participated in the first Presidential Google Plus Hangout. The hangout featured real questions from citizens, in real-time.

Last week, the White House hosting a second iteration, calling it a “fireside Hangout” in a nod to the fireside chats that President Franklin Roosevelt held in the 21st century.

President Obama was asked about gun violence, eliminating the penny, the best book to understand his political philosophy ("the writings of Lincoln), the Senate filibuster of Hagel & drones during the hangout. Notably, Limor Fried, the founder of Adafruit, asked him several questions focused on technology.

Worth watching @adafruit on the G+ Hangout with @barackobama bit.ly/139hwkc Patent reform, women in tech, programming in high school

— Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) February 19, 2013

You can watch the entire White House hangout at YouTube, WhiteHouse.gov or below:

With more than 5 million users, "We the People" want to be heard online.

Today, the White House announced a major upgrade to its We The People petition site.

There are several ways that this e-petition platform could be improved, which is always true if you think of open government being in beta. (That’s particularly true architects are improving a given government platform using citizen feedback).

Last August, the White House open sourced We The People on Github.

While the code hasn’t been repurposed by another national government yet, in the months since, they’ve continued to work on an API that would allow other petition services, like Avaaz, Change.org, 38 Degrees or SignOn, to tie into it.

In January, the White House released a snapshot of data about the nature and growth of the platform's use but didn't sharing open data about the Web analytics behind We The People as it changes. The upgrade could change that, as Nick Judd pointed out at TechPresident:

Beyond all the ways a developer could make use of the read API — tracking petitions that are removed, for instance, displaying brand-new petitions, or analyzing petitions and connecting ones with common characteristics like similar keywords — a write API would change that.

Such an API could also allow integration into Facebook or other social networking services, which could expand the reach and power of e-petitions, particularly if networks of people can be activated to engage in offline actions, like phone calls, in-person visits, demonstrations or votes.

This is genuinely good news for those trying to make sense of what's happening there. It would be useful to have more than check-ins twice a year on use and to be able to see how long petitions have been open or how quickly they’ve passed a threshold.

Now, there's a real chance that's going to happen.

Today, the White House invited developers to come work on that vision at a hackathon held at the White House on Open Data Day, later this month.

If you want to participate in the White House hackathon, you'll need to move quickly: the application period closes at 5 PM ET tomorrow, February 6th.

If more civic coders get involved in “hacking the government this month, some of the improvements might come sooner rather than later.

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