Testing the system
About to start feeding this site again after a long break - just checking to see if the spiffy new system works.
The Data Gap: When The Tools Are There But The Data's Not
As readers of this blog know, data sets make my heart beat faster. Data sets that have been analyzed/visualized and made to tell a story are even better. The work being done by organizations like the Sunlight Foundation Labs (who are taking publicly available data sets about US congressional/political issues and making them do interesting things online) is tremendously exciting, and inspiring to many other organizations around the world. I spoke to Tate Hausman of dotOrganize earlier this week about the Integration Proclamation, a data sharing manifesto that he hopes will lead to real action on the part of vendors and open source communities. The goal of dotOrganize's latest project: best-practice open APIs ("application programming interface") for all data applications used in the non-profit sector. The end result, in an open API world, will be data that flows easily between applications, and perhaps equally exciting, out of applications and into the world of data analysis.
The (Grand) Challenge of Visualization
If you're spending your weekends figuring out how to use 3D geospatial tools to visualize the human impact on climate change, or better yet, you're devising new tools to do Google Earth and ESRI one better, make sure you get yourself over to the International Symposium on Digital Earth's Grand Challenge 2007 by April 1st. As the site says:
How can we better experience this world of ours at the cross roads of human impacts and climate change? How can we best communicate these experiences, particularly in light of the major changes Earth now faces, as one world? How can we most compellingly understand and communicate those experiences and processes? What 3D experiences or 3D tools can you share that might encourage the opportunity for a better world?If you think you can do this in a way that demonstrates how people can more easily and effectively communicate, YOU COULD WIN BIG!
Although there is a Publishers' Clearinghouse element to this come-on (in fact, you may ALREADY be a winner!), their hearts seem in the right place, and certainly my heart beats faster when someone talks about innovative visualizations of social issues. So, what is it exactly you're supposed to do to win this contest? Keep scrolling down, and they finally tell you at the bottom that "Entries must demonstrate unique or innovative applications, tools, or utilities for 3D Visualization". So in other words, maybe you've found something interesting to do with an existing web 2.0 app, or maybe you've gone ahead and coded your own. Given the competition for uptake among new software tools, I'd be more interested in the former -- what new stuff can you do with what's already out there? However, my suspicion is that the contest will favor the latter -- new tools are more impressive than new applications of old ones.
But whichever way your heart lies, I'm delighted that Google Earth, NASA, ESRI and other sponsors are supporting this contest. And note, on the intellectual property issue: "Copyrights and ownership will remain with the author/creator; however, copyright permission to publish the entry and announce the winner's name will be retained by the ISDE5 Secretariat.". So if you are building a tool, make sure it's open source, would you? The rest of the world will love you even more.
I'll Show You My Data If You Show Me Yours
Will the web 2.0-ness never end? Now we're visualizing shared data sets, with two new projects just launched that encourage users to upload their data sets and map them against each other. Why would you want to do that? Take a look at the map below, which a user on one of the services, Swivel, created to show the relationship between global GDP and yearly average global temperatures. Interesting, no?
Data visualization may sound a bit complicated and off-putting, but it's all about making information sets easier to grasp. Instead of looking at a bunch of tables and numbers, you look at a picture which depicts those tables and numbers. Some simple well-known examples of this are the beloved pie chart, the bar chart, and the x/y graph, although more intricate data visualization can involve graphics, colors, maps, and other design elements. Also sometimes known as "information design" by the dedicated followers of visualization kingpin Edward Tufte (of which we at janethaven.com are one, incidentally), the display of data in quick-to-understand graphics is a skill worth exploring. Better yet, good information design allows you to set apparently unrelated data sets against one another to tease out relationships that are not necessarily obvious in a table of figures set side-by-side.
Campaigns against online censorship in the Middle East
By chance, I came across two new projects within a week dedicated to ending online censorship and surveillance in Middle Eastern countries. The first, OpenArab.net (English here), is a project out of HRInfo.net in Egypt.
The Initiative For an Open Arab Internet is an initiative by the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (HRinfo) advocating free use of the Internet without censorship, blocking or spying. In this context, the initiative seeks to provide international and Arab information and internet related documents. The initiative also defends internet users, web-designers, and writers by organising legal and media campaigns and highlighting practices restricting Internet freedom.
Through HRInfo.net's human rights blogging project, Katib, I also found Article 19's campaign against online censorship in Iran, The Persian Impediment. Where OpenArab.net's project is mostly in Arabic and appears to be aimed at people in the region, The Persian Impediment site is entirely in English (so far as I've seen) and is probably internationally directed. There hasn't been a lot of activity on the site that I can see since early January (the site allows contributors to join a blogged discussion on suggested topics, and/or to report cases of censorship), but it's worth a look regardless.
Circumvention technologies in the media
Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, has written a very useful article for the non-technical crowd on country-level internet filtering. "The Geopolitics of Asian Cyberspace", was published in the December issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review. For those who are new to the topic or would like a broad overview of the level of filtering that happens regularly, the corporate players facilitating that filtering, and a few projects that are trying to track censorship around the world, it's a good read.
Professor Deibert also showed up on NPR last week, talking about the Citizen Lab's new circumvention software, Psiphon. Unlike other circumvention tools like Tor or TorPark, Psiphon works by harnessing social networks and establishing individual nodes of "host" computers that allow internet access to known users; Deibert mentions in the interview that they had had 30,000 downloads of the software in the first week.
I wish the interviewer at NPR, Bob Garfield, had asked somewhat more pointed quesitons about specific differences between these tools and the theory of how they work -- there are a number of tools out there, and one may be more appropriate than another depending on geography, political situation, and your access to networks outside your own country.
With perfect timing, a correspondant pointed me to Peacefire founder Bennett Haselton's article on Slashdot last month that does some of that work. Bennett is generally annoyed with the attention the "politically correct" Psiphon has received in the media (as opposed to the more suspicious attention Peacefire's similar circumvention tool, Circumventor, received a few years ago). Beyond that, though, he provides a useful 101 on circumvention tools and how they work, as well as offering some commentary on how useless the tools are if a citizenry is apathetic about using them. He says:
This is not to downplay the enormous good that programs like Tor, Circumventor and Psiphon can do in bringing free speech to the people in censored countries who want it. But it's easy to forget that those often do not comprise a large part of the population....The moral is, no matter how much your movement believes in its efforts to help oppressed people, you can't just assume you'll be greeted as liberators (ahem).
Good to keep in mind.
Update: Professor Deibert pointed out another very useful article on Psiphon, this one which talks about Psiphon's aims -- that is, not a be-all end-all anti-circumvention tool, but a way for individuals to help other individuals through direct, personal connections.
Psiphon is not designed to solve all secure Web browsing dilemmas. Rather, it is a means by which those in uncensored countries can assist specific individuals in censored countries access blocked Web content -- without placing any technical (or personal security) burden on those individuals.
It's important to reiterate the point that, as with all technologies, this is not a one-size-fits-all game. There isn't an "unbreakable" anti-censorship tool; all of them can be defeated in one way or another. The crucial issue is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the options well enough to choose one that offers the least risk given the environment.
Tools of Change Conference for publishers
The O'Reilly gang is putting on a new conference this year called Tools of Change for Publishers. The Civil Society Communications proejct that I run is, of course, very interested in "tools of change" -- although within the non-profit sector rather than in publishing. The incredible pace of change in the technology space means that we face unending difficulty in educating organizations in useful technology solutions; once you step outside the world of tech bloggers, Wired magazine, and conferences where no one will show up unless wifi is provided, you find that most people flinch when you cheerfully mention "web 2.0", or the seemingly more user-friendly "read-write web". I was struck, therefore, by O'Reilly's explanation for throwing the conference:
For publishers, these shifts are taking place so rapidly that it's challenging to keep current--let alone create new, profitable opportunities.The first O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference is being launched to raise the level of technology knowledge and discourse in the publishing industry and to provide a meeting ground for those leading the charge into the future of publishing.
It's nice to know that confusion and frustration over integrating innovative technology solutions are not only limited to the sector I work in; on the other hand, once you extrapolate outwards from a single industry (publishing, or the non-profit world) to all industries, you get a lot of confused people. From there, cube that number to include everyone who isn't yet online, or is only online in the most rudimentary way. We've got a lot of work to do to make this stuff more useful and more understandable.
Holiday Reading List Book Reviews
Admitting that the holidays are really and truly over is a painful act, so despite the fact that I've been back at work this week, I'm posting my Holiday Reading List Book Reviews as if I were still at leisure. This holiday season I've managed to plough through a good number of books, fiction and non-, and acquired even more that are waiting for a moment of calm. In case you're looking for something to read, here are some suggestions (and warnings):
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell: Recommended by one of my most trusted book friends, Cloud Atlas was possibly the best piece of fiction I've read in years. My reading of "serious" contemporary fiction has dropped off in the past five years or so, largely because every time I delve in I'm disappointed, annoyed, or overcome by the schlockiness of it all. The last book I found as satisfying as Cloud Atlas was Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. While I don't think The Corrections is for everyone, I can't imagine a reading friend who wouldn't appreciate Cloud Atlas. Go buy a copy.
- Casino Royale by Ian Fleming: Been watching Bond movies for years but you've never read any of the books? Well, don't bother, if the first one is any guide. Casino Royale was a real snooze; the movie, which I saw over the holidays with my family, was ten gazillion times better. Ian Fleming's young Bond seems an arrogant dolt, deeply unperceptive (I wonder if Vesper's nightly sobbing and daily secret phone calls during our romantic getaway spell T R O U B L E...? Bond's conclusion: no, girls are just weepy), and frankly sounds unattractive (not unimportant if you're claiming to be James Bond, right.) Also, predictably, the girls are real sissies, and not nearly vixenish enough to entertain. Ugh. Go see Daniel Craig instead.
- A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes: I actually read this over Thanksgiving, but am including it in holiday reading since Favorite Husband read it over Christmas, sparking much Russian history discussion at the Haven-D'Amato dinner table. The long and short of it is: read this book, if you have any desire to understand the underpinnings of the revolution. It's excellent, a 900-page page-turner, which is something one wouldn't usually expect in a brick-sized tome. Figes packs the book with anecdotes illuminating the tidal shifts in power, particularly from the 1914-1919 era. A main point that both FH and I took away from the narrative was how unlikely the Bolshevik seizure of power really was -- for much of the period under discussion, the country was entirely up for grabs, and much of the reason that the more moderate socialists didn't step forward was their hilarious and tragic belief in the rule book of revolution: we can't seize power, they explained to each other, because the book says that we need to have another twenty years of bourgeois development before the glorious socialist revolution could happen. Of course, anyone who has studied Marx knows that theory, but the idea that a group of so-called revolutionaries were presented with the possibility of taking on the reigns of state and stepped back from because of a theoretical map laid out by a 19th century philosopher is astonishing in 2006. Lenin, of course, only worried about that issue for, say, five minutes before shoving everyone aside and making the fatal grab for Russia.
- Best American Short Stories 2006 edited by Ann Patchett and Katrina Kenison: Usually, I enjoy this collection, but this year, it's draaaaging. I'm only halfway through, so hope lies in the next 10 pieces, but the stories so far have been ethereal, very atmospheric rather than character or plot driven. I mention it because I think my reaction actually points to a good thing about this series, that is, they pull in a new editor every year who brings their own slant to the choices. As Patchett says in her introduction, these aren't the *best* short stories of 2006, they're *her* 20 favorite stories of 2006. I wasn't a big fan of Patchett's book Bel Canto (although it won all sorts of awards), so I'm not surprised, on reflection, that I'm not moved by her short story choices. A word to the wise: know your anthologist.
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth: Like every dutiful American fiction reader, I feel like I should read AND appreciate Philip Roth. I made it through The Human Stain a while back and did, you know, appreciate it, although it left a bad taste...I always find it hard to read novels peopled with wholly unlikable characters. Nevertheless, occasionally when I know I'm headed for a long flight, I choose to bring a book that I have been meaning to read and that I think in other circumstances, I might set down after the first few pages. So I picked up American Pastoral on my way out the door for the flight from London to Los Angeles back in December, and resisted the urge at the airport to pick up any other reading material that might offer me an easy out, should I regret my Roth. Oh, what a mistake. Six hours into the twelve hour flight, my laptop was out of juice, my iPod had mysteriously shut itself off and poutingly refused to turn on again, and I was two agonized hours into American Pastoral, possibly my least favorite forced reading experience of a decade. Why is Roth The Man of contemporary American letters? Why? Why? Why? Although the flight offered me many, many hours to review this question, I did not manage to come up with an answer, despite the fact that I got three-quarters of the way through AP before touching down in LA. Perhaps the last quarter of American Pastoral holds the key to this puzzler, but since I set fire to the book in the backyard barbeque upon reaching my parents' house, I guess we'll never know, will we?
- Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology by David Gelernter: If you need an anecdote to Roth (or your version of Roth), pick up a copy (and go for the hard cover, you cheapskate) of David Gelernter's lovely long essay on beauty as a driver of innovation in technology. It's counterintuitive but obvious in retrospect, and so engaging that you may not even smell the charred Roth wafting in from the backyard.
- December 6 by Martin Cruz Smith and The Moscow Vector by Robert Ludlum: Let's acknowledge the private, dirty joy of an airport spy novel. What more can I say, except that in truth, the 12 hour flight back to London passed much more quickly with Martin Cruz Smith in hand than with Philip Roth on the way out. And my second iPod also broke directly after takeoff, so it was a completely level playing field. I don't recommend either of these books, but then I also wouldn't recommend that you eat an entire bag of Reeses Peanut Butter cups in one sitting, if you get my drift.
- The Elements of Style by Strunk and White: Possibly you read this, or exerpts of this, if you were once an American schoolchild. Read it again. William Strunk's clear, cool advice will resonate. As he tells you to use "definite, specific, concrete language," to "avoid a succession of loose sentences," to "omit needless words", you will think: guilty. My version is new and illustrated by Maira Kalman, which makes it more fun. A large part of the fun is not in her illustrations themselves, but in evaluating her choice of phrases to illustratrate. I would have illustrated the book entirely differently than she did, and imagining your own visuals alongside Strunk and White's spare, wise remarks makes for an amusing afternoon. And perhaps improved writing.
And books to look forward to...my father and brother ganged together and bought me, luxuriously, three of Edward Tufte's toothsome books on information design: Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Beautiful Evidence, his most recent. I also have Julian Barnes latest, Arthur and George, on the stack, Gogol's Dead Souls (which I started in California but haven't finished), and eternally, that bastion of the bedside table, Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China (five years and counting).
Recommendations for further reading always more than welcome.
The Five Things You Don't Know About Me Post
Ethan tagged me in a little bloggame going around to spill five things about yourself that people don't know about you. So here are the first five that come to mind:
1. Because I've lived a big chunk of my adult life in Hungary, most people assume I have some kind of Magyar in the ancestral closet. I don't, not a single one (that I know of). I just like living here.
2. When I travel, I try to bring home textiles from wherever I've been. Every culture makes textiles of some sort or another, whether they are printed, woven, embroidered, silk, wool, cotton. They travel well, and can be pressed into a wide range of services once you get home. I wear, sleep on, sit on, bathe with and frame textiles I've brought home from various corners of the world.
3. Despite the fact that I grew up in Southern California (or because of it?), my favorite beach is not in a particularly warm place: Cannon Beach in Oregon, where Haystack Rock is.
4. I (ineptly) played water polo in college. It was without a doubt the most terrifying but exhilarating athletic activity I've ever participated in. My only near-death experience to date was an away game in a swimming pool at MIT where a very powerful woman held me underwater until my struggles tore the strap on my regulation speedo bathing suit. For this very reason, the women's team members always wore two bathing suits at once, to guard against having to flee the pool with only a shredded suit as cover. I had found it hard to believe that a speedo could give way, but I'm here to tell you that it will, and that that second suit is a life-saver.
5. I despise lima beans with all my heart. (My mother knows this, of course.)
Now I'm supposed to tag others...so Scotty and Peter, if you're still looking at your trackbacks, how about it?
And you thought we were done with the whole wireless thing for the year...
One more note on communications resources for the developing world -- some useful new publications have hit the stands over the past few months:
IT46+, a consultancy has released The Voip Primer: Building Voice Infrastructure in Developing Regions. Written, edited, reviewed and translated by a crack team of wireless for dev's who's who, the book is useful not only for technologists, but also for people who simply want to have a better sense of what VOIP means in the developing world context.
Our friend the stripey book, aka, Wireless Networking for the Developing World, now in French.
APC's ItrainOnlinewireless networking materials in Arabic.
And finally, an orange stripey book, How to Accelerate Your Internet: A practical guide to Bandwidth Management and Optimization using Open Source Software, from the BMO Booksprint Team.
Really, it's not as geeky as it looks!
Wireless networking on the African continent
As it turns out, if wireless networking on the African continent is one of your favorite things, spending your weekend in the basement of APC’s London partner GreenNet with forty of your closest collaborators (and friends) can be a grand old time. This past weekend, I was lucky enough to join a group of African entrepreneurs, “wireless for dev” geeks and trainers, connectivity-focused civil society organizations and international business folk, along with a sprinkling of donors for a meeting focused on the next steps in rolling out rural wireless networks in Africa.
Much ink has been spilled over why wireless networks are good for African connectivity, so I won’t rehash too much. (For a media-focused brief on this, see Panos London's "What's stopping a wireless revolution?"). Suffice to say that wireless connectivity leapfrogs a lot of the infrastructure issues that plague developing countries, like a lack of fiber that has hastened the adoption of communications technologies in the global north; it also means that a single operator with limited equipment can provide connectivity to many more people on an ad-hoc basis than overland connectivity would allow. Generally, the people I work with believe more connectivity at lower rates is a basic building block of both economic growth and social justice movements.
Despite the good work that many people have done in this area over several years, and the significant support that donors (including my own employer, the Open Society Institute, and others like Canada’s IDRC) have brought to the table, rural wireless is still nascent in Africa. The two-day meeting, organized by the Association for Progressive Communications, sought to come up with concrete answers to the question: what more could this group be doing bring wireless to more communities across the African continent?
As with all technology issues in the developing world, the barriers to rollout of wireless networks are varied and require people with quite different skills to address them. Policy regulations are one issue; in some African countries, it’s illegal to operate a wireless network. In other African countries, there simply isn’t any legislation to deal with the issue; monopoly telecoms control the internet market, and see no advantage in allowing an upstart technology to bring other players to the table.
Beyond policy, though, technical and human issues prevent speedy uptake. This weekend, one group discussed the need for business plans and models for Wireless ISPs (WISPS) and training or partnerships targeted at certain key groups: telecenters, schools, youth groups, and community radio stations.
Another group looked at software issues: if one were to aggregate the technology needed to run a WISP—from mesh networking software to billing systems that worked in a world without credit cards—what would it look like? Building off the Tactical Technology Collective's popular "in-a-box" idea, everyone around this table agreed to work towards a "WISP-in-a-box".
A third group envisioned future book sprints to produce complementary manuals to “the striped book”, the affectionate name for the current bible of the wireless for dev movement: Wireless Networking in the Developing World. Yet another group discussed what a more formalized community of wireless actors focused on experience sharing and project tracking could achieve.
And so on. Other issues we didn’t touch on extensively this weekend prevent wireless networking from taking hold faster: procurement of hardware, for instance, is a huge and costly problem. Not only are the bespoke solutions developed for northern users often missing the robust physical features needed for deployment in a developing world context, but import of hardware can be tremendously expensive. (An African colleague mentioned to me this week, by way of example, that in Malawi assembled computers are taxed at 0%, but hardware parts are levied with an import duty of 55%, a huge amount of money for the DIY set to absorb.)
One thing I really liked about this meeting was the view of Africa as a single continent, rather than two continents: sub-Saharan and North Africa. Participants came from Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, as well as Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco.
The other point about this meeting I was glad to see (credit APC and IDRC for this) was a distributed approach to problem solving. Rather than knocking heads together for a weekend to come up with an ambitious (and questionably implementable) Grand Plan, the meeting focused on achievable ideas that individuals could take forward with a small group of like-minded collaborators. I’m almost always a fan of the small-pieces-loosely-joined approach, and this time it produced some excellent ideas. Fortunately, there were some very smart people with us this weekend who are interested in taking up the harder work of making them happen.
Lots of people took pictures this weekend, but I was unfortunately not among them, so as soon as I find the Flickr pool I'll link to it.
Full disclosure: My employer, the Open Society Institute Information Program, provided partial funding for this meeting.
No passport check at Heathrow?
So, this is weird. For the second time this fall, I’ve flown internationally out of Heathrow airport without going through immigration or having anyone, other than airline employees, look at my passport. The first trip was from London to Johannesburg in the middle of September. Traveling Companion and I at that time were puzzled, but theorized that perhaps there was an agreement between the UK and South Africa limiting the need for passport checks (although on reflection, that doesn’t make a lot of sense). But today, I’m on a big American Airlines 777 flying from London to Los Angeles, and no official of the British government examined my passport before I boarded the flight. All kinds of other reviews happened: I took off my shoes, turned on my laptop and stood spread-eagled three different times to be patted down by three different security officers during my journey through the airport. But no passport check. Am I missing something here? What the heck? Given the scrutiny one receives on entering the UK, I can’t believe that they aren’t doing some sort of cross check on the way out.
One other worrying thing about this situation: I was surprised enough to mention it to two different employees of American Airlines. In response, both looked at me blankly and then shrugged and waved me on when I re-elaborated the point. Hm. I’m certainly happy not to have yet another line to stand in to get to the airplane, and I’m not necessarily sure it’s even that important to check everyone’s passport when they leave a country…but given the extent that the UK is going to create an atmosphere of both threat and consequently, safety, at the airports, shouldn’t they have someone giving passports a glance? And shouldn’t an airline care if one of its passengers reports something that seems like it might be amiss?
Update: I asked the immigration officer who checked my passport when I entered the US in Los Angeles yesterday afternoon about exit passport checks. He told me that at LAX, they also don't check international exits. In Euroland and every other country I've ever been to aside from the US and the UK, they certainly do. So what's the calculation that Homeland Security has made here?