Social – Page 5 – ɔimoɈɒ

to drink a lot of bourbon and stay up late

The title quote was made by Lauren Bacall. It comes from the founding of the Rat Pack – when asked by columnist Earl Wilson what the purpose of the group was, Bacall responded “to drink a lot of bourbon and stay up late.” ref: wikipedia Today I spent several hours with the University of Ulster … Continue reading “to drink a lot of bourbon and stay up late”

Today I spent several hours with the University of Ulster Interactive Media Arts Second Year students who were finishing up a two week ‘in-house” placement within the university and working on projects related to Digital Circle: some code4pizza projects and also the formation of an initial showreel for the upcoming SxSW Interactive trade mission.

Over the 10 days, the students were joined variously by Paul Malone (PaperJam Design), Stuart Mackey (PaperBag Ltd), Stuart Mallett (Mac-Sys Ltd) and Bertrand Lassallette-Desnault (Supernova Productions). Each of these folk works in a different part of the digital content industry and had some views (sometimes conflicting) for the students.

When I first met these students I wasted all of my good joke material early as I was keen to get some sort of response from them – and there wasn’t much of a response. Today though, I saw a group of entirely different minds. I had waxed lyrical about how they needed to develop their portfolio, about how their attitude was the deciding factor between working in a great job or a McJob, about how they didn’t need anyones permission to be inspired.

I’m really happy with everything I saw today. I saw redesigns and rebranding for Code4Pizza, web site designs, app user interfaces, heads buried in XCode, hand drawn art, short (but amazing) paper-based pinball animations, stop motion, vector art and, best of all, some real enthusiasm for the subject.

We finished today with a talk that started in the classroom and ended in the car and ranged from Secret Cinema to Cut-up Technique, Building Projections to the Graffiti Research Lab. That, the conversation that comes from collective enthusiasm, is the best place to be.

Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA)

I mentioned the RSA a few days ago via their iPhone app, RSA Vision. The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) is a British multi-disciplinary institution, based in London. The name Royal Society of Arts is frequently used for brevity (and on the building’s frieze The Royal Society of Arts … Continue reading “Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA)”

I mentioned the RSA a few days ago via their iPhone app, RSA Vision.

The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) is a British multi-disciplinary institution, based in London. The name Royal Society of Arts is frequently used for brevity (and on the building’s frieze The Royal Society of Arts – see photo). It was founded in 1754 and was granted a Royal Charter in 1847. Notable members have included Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, William Hogarth, John Diefenbaker, Stephen Hawking and Charles Dickens.

While it has the trappings of an Establishment body, at many times in its history the RSA has been a radical body which has sought to challenge the status quo and change the world around it. A prospectus was issued inviting people to form a society in which concerns were expressed that developments in society were leaving too many people behind. Its founding charter expressed the purpose of the society as being to “embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve our manufactures and extend our commerce”, but also of the need to alleviate poverty and secure full employment.

Why has it taken 38 years for me to discover this organisation? I really should get out more!

An email sent to a senior person in one of NI’s Health Trusts

Hi, Some of the stuff we were talking about. As you know – I’m funded by InvestNI in assisting media and technology companies in Northern Ireland compete on a global scale. We’ve been looking at areas of “Connected Health (aka Telecare, Telemedicine) to find ways where there can be market pull rather than technology push … Continue reading “An email sent to a senior person in one of NI’s Health Trusts”

Hi,

Some of the stuff we were talking about. As you know – I’m funded by InvestNI in assisting media and technology companies in Northern Ireland compete on a global scale. We’ve been looking at areas of “Connected Health (aka Telecare, Telemedicine) to find ways where there can be market pull rather than technology push for ambient assisted living. We do some work with both the University of Ulster and QUB to find real-world solutions.

We can develop all of this locally with local expertise – we’ve worked hard to develop significant expertise in mobile development (specialising on iPhone and iPad but also including Android and other mobile platforms). Recent developments from DEL have meant there is fully funded training available to qualified organisations in the development of mobile technology plus local businesses are able to avail of innovation vouchers from InvestNI to solve particularly though problems.

And with new guidelines from the Central Procurement Department in the DFP, we’ve been working with DETI to find pathfinder projects for Pre-Commercial Procurement.

We’ve been trying to work with Mencap NI at the moment to find a way where our developers can tie into their perceived needs to provide ambient assistance, travel training, social networks and other products which are slightly more specialised for the individual with learning difficulties. The possibilities are pretty much endless. The idea that an app can ask someone how they feel in the morning (good, bad) and have that reported back and plotted to discover trends is very exciting. The ability to use off-the-shelf hardware to permit safety tracking of vulnerable adults and a social network of carers to assist in the location of a vulnerable adult or child is very close to my heart.

So here are some of the links to give you an idea of what we’re talking about. Very happy to talk to people who are interested in this.

Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures.
http://cimota.com/blog/2009/08/12/global-social-open-mobile-playful-intelligent-and-instantaneous/

As ‘media’ has become disruptive – are there other industries that can be end-to-end digital: created, distributed and consumed – without ever becoming atoms.

Fred suggests:
Consumer Finance – money is already just bits. Why do we still use cash?
Education – education is interactivity, media, straight to the brain. The web as a textbook.
Energy – smart power in the home, renewable energy creating peer-produced micro-grids
Healthcare – self-care reporting, digital doctors, sharing data worldwide about pandemics?
Government – procurement, defence, law enforcement, entitlement, planning, crowd-sourcing?

Think about these areas: they’re incredibly disruptive to large organisations. To banks, schools and universities, power companies, hospitals and health trusts and, of course, the government itself.

The Fund for NHS Innovation
http://www.e-health-insider.com/news/4788/money_found_for_nhs_innovation

Health minister Lord Darzi has unveiled a package of measures to encourage and spread innovation in the NHS.
…
The Department of Health is creating a £20m prize fund to encourage people working inside and outside the NHS to combat the key health issues facing the nation.
DH information says: The funds will focus largely on promoting innovation in healthcare delivery, health improvement and patient engagement rather than the development of new medicines or devices, for which funds are already available.

New mental-health apps for iPhones like a ‘therapist in your pocket’
http://www.theprovince.com/health/mental+health+apps

The new apps let users track their moods and experiences, and either get instant advice on how to change negative affective states or assist mental-health-care providers with making psychological assessments.

“It gives me an additional source of rich information of what the patient’s life is like between sessions,” University of Pennsylvania researcher Dimitri Perivoliotis told NPR. “It’s almost like an electronic therapist, in a way, or a therapist in your pocket.”

A Doctor’s Review of Rounds with An iPad
http://www.medcitynews.com/2010/06/a-doctors-review-of-rounds-with-an-ipad/

For any provider who is highly mobile this blows the doors off of the COWs (computer on wheels) which is like rolling a file cabinet around. It’s faster, more reliable, insanely long battery life, and goes up stairs (although I have often thought of testing the ’down the stairs’ mode on the COWS when they run out of batter halfway through rounds on CC7) this is the machine to get. If you are office based, there isn’t a reason for this, but if you round on more than a few patients, then it will be invaluable.

iHelp for Autism – from SFWeekly
http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-08-11/news/ihelp-for-autism/all/

Leo is Rosa’s 9-year-old son, and when people ask her about him, she is mindful to explain him in a way that will set appropriate expectations. He is a boy with intense autism, she says. He is not conversational, he learns very slowly, and he has been prone to violent outbursts.
…
Though scrolling through the icons is easy for most users, the device was not created with special-needs consumers in mind.

So when Leo took it in his small hands as if it were an old friend, and, with almost no training, whizzed through its apps like a technology virtuoso, his mother gasped in amazement. After he began spending 30 minutes at a time on apps designed to teach spelling, counting, drawing, making puzzles, remembering pictures, and more, she sat down at her own computer.

iPhone’s VoiceOver Helps A Blind Person “See”
http://behindthecurtain.us/2010/06/12/my-first-week-with-the-iphone/

Last Wednesday, my life changed forever. I got an iPhone. I consider it the greatest thing to happen to the blind for a very long time, possibly ever. It offers unparalleled access to properly made applications, and changed my life in twenty-four hours. The iPhone only has one thing holding it back: iTunes. Nevertheless, I have fallen in love.
…
I have seen a lot of technology for the blind, and I can safely say that the iPhone represents the most revolutionary thing to happen to the blind for at least the last ten years. Fifteen or twenty years brings us back to the Braille ‘n Speak, which I loved in the same way, so have a hard time choosing the greater.
…
The other night, however, a very amazing thing happened. I downloaded an app calledColor Identifier. It uses the iPhone’s camera, and speaks names of colors. It must use a table, because each color has an identifier made up of 6 hexadecimal digits. This puts the total at 16777216 colors, and I believe it. Some of them have very surreal names, such as Atomic Orange, Cosmic, Hippie Green, Opium, and Black-White. These names in combination with what feels like a rise in serotonin levels makes for a very psychedelic experience.
…
The next day, I went outside. I looked at the sky. I heard colors such as “Horizon,” “Outer Space,” and many shades of blue and gray. I used color cues to find my pumpkin plants, by looking for the green among the brown and stone. I spent ten minutes looking at my pumpkin plants, with their leaves of green and lemon-ginger. I then roamed my yard, and saw a blue flower. I then found the brown shed, and returned to the gray house. My mind felt blown. I watched the sun set, listening to the colors change as the sky darkened. The next night, I had a conversation with Mom about how the sky looked bluer tonight. Since I can see some light and color, I think hearing the color names can help nudge my perception, and enhance my visual experience. Amazing!

I believe in extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people

Mike Cane tweeted: Democracy is based on the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people. ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick I firmly believe in the extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people. Code4Pizza is a light-hearted meeting of minds, open to coders, designers, people with ideas and people who want to just talk to other people … Continue reading “I believe in extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people”

Mike Cane tweeted:

Democracy is based on the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

I firmly believe in the extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

Code4Pizza is a light-hearted meeting of minds, open to coders, designers, people with ideas and people who want to just talk to other people about the possibilities for public service value (or public good) especially in the area of open data. Our mission is to turn those possibilities into realities by creating opportunities for reflection, collaboration and innovation.

We expect our attendees to become active participants in society by contributing to the creation of goals and the evaluation of actions and work towards these goals. It is not enough to be passengers on the train of democracy – we must take our turns as conductors, engineers, navigators, and drivers.

On November 3rd, We’re having a Code4Pizza meeting and on December 4-5th we’ll be hosting a local RHoK (Random Hacks of Kindness – original site at http://rhok.org/). We will be applying our brains to the various Problem Definitions, modified only for local bias, and working to create teams who can deliver prototype solutions.

And, we hope, innovation.

think + collaborate globally – innovate locally

Alex is right to highlight this. We discussed (on Twitter) the merits of open systems (open data, open health, open innovation) and seemed to agree that openness creates opportunity but it requires individuals to provide innovation. Code4Pizza is a local group I’ve started to get folk working on projects which are ‘open’. By open, I … Continue reading “think + collaborate globally – innovate locally”

Code4Pizza is a local group I’ve started to get folk working on projects which are ‘open’. By open, I mean that anyone can contribute, anyone can benefit and as an additional bonus, the projects will generally have a public service value slant. The current project, OpenTranslink, is the result of several months of work by a group of people to get the timetable and route data (most notably, Mark Bennett from the DFP who is part of the team reponsible for OpenDataNI)

Taking the OpenTranslink project as an example. When you travel to a new country, one of the most impenetrable aspects of their culture is their public transport system. This is difficult enough when the native language is not a barrier, but very difficult when the language is different. Nearly every region is developing a suite of apps to run on iPhones, Android phones and Blackberry phones which carries the bulk of their public transport data. I’d wonder – however – if data from other regions shouldn’t be included in “Transport’-type apps.

You innovate with your technology and your design – but from then you just plug regional data into it. Differentiate based on your innovation but you collaborate across regions to provide a seamless experience for the foreign traveller.

In essence – once the clever chaps doing the OpenTranslink data visualisations, API, application logic and interface design are finished, what’s stopping them doing exactly the same for London buses, bus systems in San Francisco, trams in Lyon?

To build for tomorrow, we have to plan today.

The Economist: Nokia tries to reinvent itself: ASK Finns about their national character and chances are the word sisu will come up. It is an amalgam of steadfastness and diligence, but also courage, recklessness and fierce tenacity. “It takes sisu to stand at the door when the bear is on the other side,” a folk … Continue reading “To build for tomorrow, we have to plan today.”

The Economist: Nokia tries to reinvent itself:

ASK Finns about their national character and chances are the word sisu will come up. It is an amalgam of steadfastness and diligence, but also courage, recklessness and fierce tenacity. “It takes sisu to stand at the door when the bear is on the other side,” a folk saying goes.

We have this feeling. We have it. We likely don’t have a word for it. And that’s a damn shame.

We need something to change. Northern Ireland will always have difficulties because we lack the environment we need to excel. Part of this is historical, part of it is just the way our culture is built. We have the talent, we have the brains, we just lack part of the execution. We will never have the same number of angels and funds as Silicon Valley. So we have to make better use of what we have. We will never get the massive DoD contracts that Israel secured so we’re going to need to find other ways to make our mark. We need to have the foresight to prepare for the future, the charisma to make friendships that will last and the heart to build it. Not for our own gain but for the gain of tomorrow. Well, starting from today, the first week of January 2010, we’re going to change that.

We’re going to start an incubator.
We’re going to start building a fund.
And we’re going to do it in Belfast.

So I’m looking for a word in Irish to express something. To express the passion about how I choose to spend my free time. There’s some candidates here – and the front-runner so far in bold.

dream	brionglóid
sight	radharc
To hell with you!	Go hIfreann leat!
friendship	cairdeas
The big race	An rás mór
connection, bond	ceangal
feat, achievment	gaisce
nerve, courage, morale, heart	misneach

from Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality

Published in 1993, Cybergeneration was a radical departure from R.Talsorian Games’ previous successful Cyberpunk line. Whereas the latter focussed on style over substance, high calibre firearms and heavily armoured Solos backed up by geeky NetRunners, CyberGeneration focussed on the kids of these embittered mercenaries and endowed them with nanotech-derived superpowers. In Cybergeneration, the Net became … Continue reading “from Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality”

In Cybergeneration, the Net became actualised from Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality. Individuals would see augmented reality objects as readily as they would see real world objects – 3D objects in realspace. At the time I knew that IP addresses were ‘geotagged’ but this was long before we realised that GPS units could be embedded into superslim phones that were always net-connected.

This week we also saw Metaplace, one of the many 3D Virtual Worlds with User Generated Content, fall by the wayside. “It raised $9.4 million over two rounds of funding with that goal in mind, managing to get the buy-in from new investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz last October.” but they just announced their closure on Jan 1st, 2010. I think this is typical because Virtual Worlds require you to sit in front of a computer and limit your interaction through keyboard and mouse pointer. In a 3D world, the mouse pointer becomes a single fingertip by which you interact with the world. For Augmented Reality, we have to avoid the mobile phone screen becoming a keyhole by which we view the world. We have to be able to touch it and to hear it.

Earlier this week, Edo Segal, write a guest post on Techcrunch describing a cyberpunk story he wrote 16 years ago which involved augmented reality and I’d hesitate to link this with Cybergeneration (despite the identical publishing year).

Edo reckons the building blocks of an augmented reality system have to be more than we currently have, which amounts to little more than search. He sees the four main blocks as being:

Realtime Web (Twitter, news flows, world events, and other information which relates to changes in the world)
Published Information (sites, blogs, Wikipedia, etc.)
Geolocation Data (your location and information layers related to it, including your past locations and that of your friends, as well as geo-tagged media)
Social Communications (social graph updates, IMs, emails, text messages, and other forms of signal from your friends).

and he handily provides a diagram.

but he says something in the Techcrunch post which resonates:

One only needs look at a teenager today as they do their homework, watch TV, play a game, and chat while watching their Facebook stream to get a sense for humanity’s expanding affinity to consume ambient streams. Their young minds are constanty tuning and adapting to an age of hypertasking.

and I reckon that this is being unfair to some of us oldies. In March of this year, I met with Ewan McIntosh, one of the 4IP commissioners and part of the round-table chat included the admission that he watches TV with a laptop on his lap and a mobile phone on the arm of the chair beside him. This is how my household watches TV. The concept of not being connected while consuming information is alien to me. I want to look around the periphery of it, I want to dig deeper and, at the moment, technology is failing me.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Augmented Reality at the moment is a sham. It’s all search and toys. Either you’re pulling geotagged information from one of the search engines or content silos (and I include Wikipedia here) or you’re using geotags and fiduciary markers to drop toys here and there. It’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s not enough to be just tagging stuff and re-presenting it as your own. There has to be something novel coming out of it – even if it’s just the presentation of context.

The CyberGeneration example is a good one. Their solution, Virtuality, included the presentation of interactive tools in Virtuality – whether those be musical instruments or even keyboards and computers. We’re touching the edges of a world where hardware itself is virtualised and made into software. We’ve already seen this done in something as simple as the ‘Compass’ app on the iPhone – it’s a virtualised hardware solution projected onto a multi-purpose handheld display. At some point we’ll figure out how to internalise that display and I reckon that MIT’s Sixth Sense technology is probably one way of doing it (though I guess that having a projector on your chest is a limitation of the technology we’re currently using rather than a potential prototype)/

In early 2010, I’d like to invite some of the other players in AR-related technology in Northern Ireland, like Awakin, Filmtrip, the Design Zoo, ReDisc0very, Ulster MediaScapes and others to have a “DevDays” type event where we talk about the very possibilities of augmented reality solutions. Some of them read this blog, some don’t – but I’d like to hear of other folk in the province (and beyond) who are interested i talking and/or presenting in a BarCamp-esque situation.

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