syslog
25Apr/120

NSDI 2012 Day 1

Posted by Jon Crowcroft

NSDI 2012@San Jose Fairmont.

Other info from here:-

https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi12/tech-schedule/technical-sessions

18Apr/120

smart cities, big data

Posted by Daniele Quercia

it's the title of a very nice editorial (pdf) by mike batty. i'm from the bit (and not from the beat) generation, and yet i like to cut & paste bits from the editorial (i would recommend to fully read it though):

I first wrote about `smart cities' almost as soon as I began writing these editorials in the early 1980s. ... In the 1980s the focus on instrumenting the city using network technologies was enshrined in the idea of the wired city. ... Many of these conceptions were based on visions of what wired cities might become rather than on the reality of what was actually possible then. ... What has changed these initial conceptions of the wired city is the development of ubiquitous devices of comparatively low cost that can be deployed to sense what is happening over very small time scales - seconds and faster - as well as over very fine levels of spatial resolution.

The idea of integrating much of this diverse data together to add value to our conceptions of how it might be linked to other more traditional data as well as focusing it on specific ways to make cities more efficient and more equitable, has come to define the `smart cities movement'.

Most urban theory and indeed planning and design fifty years or more ago was predicated on radical and massive change to city form and structure through instruments such as new towns, large-scale highway building, redevelopment, and public housing schemes. Planning was little concerned with smaller-scale development except its design, for nowhere was the function of the city understood in terms of how small spaces and local movements sustained the city. In short, the routine and short term were subsumed in the much longer term. New data and big data are changing all of this...

This is an issue that has barely been broached to date - how short-term big data informs longer-term data is part and parcel of our concern for how we might integrate traditional datasets from household interviews and so on with crowd-sourced data where there is less control, and remotely or directly sensed data.

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11Apr/120

Disrespect, Violence, and Privacy Outcries: From the Bible to Google

Posted by Daniele Quercia

Licia and I wrote a piece for Middleware titled "Middleware for Social Computing: A Roadmap". One of the sections was about how the middleware research agenda could promote healthy social norms at design stage. The main idea is that:

to promote the emergence of healthy social norms, system design of social media sites is crucially important. The way a new system is designed partly impacts which social norms emerge in it. However, once settled, social norms are hard to change, and when companies (e.g., Google) tell people how they must behave (e.g., they enforce the use of real identities), things go terribly wrong.

That is because being forcibly told how to use a service is perceived as a sign of disrespect by users, and disrespect has often cause violence in physical societies and, for now, only public outcries in digital systems. To explain why more unequal societies experience more violence, in their book ``The Spirit Level'', Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett cite the work of the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist James Gilligan, who has said that he has

yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of being shamed and humiliated... and that did not represent the attempt to ... undo this "loss of face".

The two authors also recall that, over 2000 years ago, Cain committed the first murder in history by killing his brother Abel because God has rejected his offerings of produce but accepted the animal sacrifices brought by Abel. In King James Version of Genesis:

And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering: But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth

Disrespect as a cause for violence is a human truth recognised for millennia. It comes as no surprise that this truth still holds in our digital world. What is surprising, instead, is that large media companies keep on making the same mistake over and over again. When Google launched a social media service called Google Plus, most of its early adopters were using their real names, and a few were not. Google decided to go after those few with a heavy-handed regulatory policy to enforce the use of real names, and Google+ started to sink, and sink, and sink . The interaction designer behind  Google+ Paul Adams did not agreed with those brilliant engineering decisions and "was forced to move" to Facebook. Any better over there?

- daniele

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15Mar/120

Turing’s Cathedral

Posted by Jon Crowcroft

Am about 1/3 the way through the new excellent book by George Dyson, on the history of computing - its a bit revisionist, but it is very detailed and interesting. One thing he glosses over is how Cathode Ray Tubes are used for Random Access Memory in the early work in Princeton (and in the UK by Kilburn et al) - I never stopped to think, but how do you readback from a cathode ray tube? The answer is obvious, and its interesting that the ideas of DRAM (with strobing, refresh, and destructive writes) all just re-echo this weird choice of technology which was just lying around (lots of radar screens going begging at the end of the 2nd world war), and was so much easier than building a lot of RAM out of Valves/Tubes, which would have required an insane interconnect (and been very much slower too)....

local luminaries (Wilkes and Wheeler) get quotes (not just namechecked) so its not such a landgrab as I had thought from reading reviews....and he's really captured the excitement, plus it goes on to look at the wider vision, which is really impressive...

available from an eBookstore near you right now... ... ...

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10Mar/120

must read more (widely)

Posted by Jon Crowcroft

So lunchtime conversation yesterday, two books came up (actually some others, but they triggered my memory of these two, which are a bit left field, hence I will mention them here)

1. Greg Bateson's extraordinary Steps to an Ecology of mind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steps_to_an_Ecology_of_Mind
which certainly made me think:)

2. George Lakoff's wacky, but seminar Women, Fire and Dangerous Things
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff
which is oft-times cited as the origin of OO-thinking (I think it influenced the Smalltalk folks)

so there:)

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