Tom Hume

The Science Museum in London is currently showing an exhibition about Alan Turing. Kate and I wandered up there on Saturday. I found the exhibition itself a little superficial - which isn't so surprising given the breadth of material the curators had to draw on between his personal life and death, contributions to computing, the war effort and Bletchley park, and his work on morphogenesis.

But there were two little gems in there which I focused on: the first, one of the tortoises of W. Grey Walter: beautiful and tremendously simplistic devices which exhibit eerily animalistic behaviours. And secondly, a bombsight computer from a Lancaster bomber, on which I was chuffed to discover the manufacturer's mark of Sperry. For it was a Sperry machine which D P Henry used to create his spirograph...

So, down the right hand side of this page you'll see a block, marked "AdSense". That'll be me playing with advertising; I'm interesting in learning a bit more about how online advertising works from a practical perspective, and I like learning about stuff by doing stuff.

So there'll be a small ad - or it might be a large ad in future, who knows? - running there for a little while at least. I'll be donating all income from it to the WWF, to one or several of their efforts around preserving big cats.

In the animalia-and-tech link-pile today, an iPhone case which acts as an ECG for pets and cows that SMS the farmer. The latter's particularly poignant, as the Sardinian chap who for many years rented FP their offices approached us to build a similar thing for him.

I've just started reading Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs after a Jones-post. I'm hoping it's the missing link between puppets, furries, and technology that I've been waiting for. This stuff has history.

I've been thinking about this for a little while, spurred on by a combination of The Real Life Social Network (an excellent slideshow from a Googler) and going to see Robin Dunbar talk at the Ropetackle Centre back in February.

Dunbar was fun. Some highlights from my notes (which I forgot to post here at the time):

• Dunbar's number pops up everywhere: early hunter/gatherer clans were 150. Average village size in the Doomsday book was 150 (except in Kent, where it was 100). Hutterites split communities when they hit 150, because that's the point where they think you start needing a police force - and they want to avoid hierarchies;
• Urbanisation prevents coherent social communities: your 150 are scattered and you end up with isolated groups of friends, places to hide yourself from the unblinking gaze of your 150 - which leads to mischief;
• Lifelong monogamous relationships require computational brainpower: larger brained birds tend to be lifelong pair-bonders; the next biggest are annual pair bonders. This is driven by the need for bi-parental care: they need to coordinate to do it well;
• Primates have usefully generalised this pair-bonding to create friendships. They developed the skill of modelling the mental processes of others to help with this;
• Friendships deteriorate over time fast, without investment in them. By contrast, kinship deepens over time;
• Those from large extended families have fewer friends: your 150 gets filled kin-first;
• Military structures conform to Dunbar numbers: a section of 15 men, a platoon of 35-50, a company of 150, a battalion of 350. The seriousness of military endeavour means it's important to get coordination right. The company is the primary unit of loyalty in the military; most competitive sports are between companies;

I've been mentally collecting "lies of social software" since then, if that doesn't sound too melodramatic. So far I've come up with these, mainly based on my experiences with blogging, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook:

• "Your friends are equally important". Dunbar pointed out that we have concentric circles of friends: 5 close ones, 15 acquaintances, 50 rough friends, etc. Yet in my friends lists on Twitter and Facebook, everyone's equal (and usually alphabetical). I like what Path have done around limiting the size of your network, and the Flickr concept of Family, Friends and Contacts - but what about software for just you and those 5 of your closest? Or for you and your other half?
• "Your friends are arranged into discrete groups", with a corollary that these groups rarely change. Managing lists of friends is unpleasantly icky. I bet Google or Facebook could take away much of the pain of creating these lists by analysing my flow of communications. I bet they could notice and prompt me to confirm changes ("you're emailing Freda a lot at the moment - working late or is she a friend outside work nowadays?"). Perhaps the challenge is less technical and more how to present this to a privacy-concerned public;
• "You can manage hundreds of friends". Dunbar talked about Facebook offering circles of friends beyond the sizes our brains would naturally sustain, and mentioned that conventional friendships need sustaining interactions. I asked whether software might act as a friend-ship sustaining interaction in the absence of physical nearness - i.e. as a prosthetic primate-grooming tool. His suspicion was that without some physical contact even virtual friendships will fade, but virtual contact would slow this degradation. Conversely, in the real world, friendships don't last forever: why do we insist that they do in the virtual world? I don't know of any social network that times them out in the absence of contact;
• "Friendship is reciprocal and equal". Some people are more important to me than I am to them, and vice versa; we might not like to face up to this in every day life but it's true nonetheless, and our digital tools don't reflect this. More than that, commuting relationships into binary leaves them unhelpfully stark: what room for plausible deniability in a world built on flippable but certain bits?

I think that if we're going to use software for social purposes in future (that is, to mediate, extend or substitute our social relationships), we'll need to start fixing some of these bugs in the current implementation. I'm having some fun thinking about playful ways this might be done...

Aubrey de Grey: Prospects for regenerative medecine against aging

Aubrey doesn't work on immortality, he works on aging, for a US nonprofit called SENS Foundation, interested in combatting aging using regenerative medicine.

Death from aging isn't just "natural causes": it's anything that mainly kills old people. Don't think about longevity, think about keeping people healthy. When we're good at this, people will live longer - but that's a side-effect, it's not the main purpose. 2/3 of the 150k people who die every day die of aging (90% in the industrialised world).

And aging isn't fun, even if you don't get nasty diseases.

Being old and frail is extremely expensive: $200bn p.a. in the USA alone. The last year of life, if you're over 60, costs more than the rest of your life. So it makes economic sense too.

Why is aging defended? Rational denial: it's both ghastly and inevitable. And it's rational to put ghastly inevitable things out of our minds. But what if it wasn't so clearly inevitable? Aubrey thinks we'll have a big effect on it within our lifetimes.

What is aging? The accumulation of damage, the side-effects of normal metabolic processes. Our existing treatments against aging are "the geriatrics approach": trying to do something about the pathology of old age. This is a losing battle. The other approach (gerontology) is that prevention is better than cure: clean up metabolism by slowing down the accumulation of damage.

But metabolism is incredibly complicated: we only understand a tiny amount of it. If we try and interfere, we'll fail.

In the "maintenance approach", we don't try to slow down the creation of damage, or its consequences: we repair it periodically. Damage isn't complicated, compared to metabolism. Damage is junk, cells, mutations and protein crosslinks. No new types of damage have been confirmed since 1982, we can be confident this is a complete list.

This would lead to an extra 30 years of human life. These are all maintenance therapies, applied to people who are already middle-age: making 60/70 year olds biologically younger.

Longevity Escape Velocity: the rate at which rejuvenation therapies must improve to outpace the accumulation of so-far irreparable damage. By the standards of most technologies, we're going fast. So anyone getting first-generation treatment should live for as long as the therapies keep developing.

He has a book; is interested in donations of money, or research time.

Doomed to be forever young, Antonio A Casilli

Shows his cousin and grandmother using MySpace and Youtube respectively. What does "digital native" mean?

There is no empirical evidence for digital natives. Not all children are computer-savvy (there's strong variability in language/linguistic skills/etc/). The situation is changing quickly and sharply.

The myth of "wired kids" was created in 1982, and has flourished ever since. Let's look at artifacts (computers) and how they've been at the centre of two social dynamics: reterritorialisation (computers have changed the place where they sit: military bases to factories to offices to households) and miniturisation.

The commercial names of computers performed a "dismissal of adulthood": the Piccolo, the Husky, the IBM PC Jr, Microbee, Apricot, Apple. The worst performers in the market: Vixen, Power 10 Cortex, Dragon, Charlemagne.

Why this dismissal of adulthood? Economic reasons: younger generations buy high added-value services, so are targeted by more aggressive marketing campaigns. Cultural reasons: technology associated with a futuristic optimism (post-Big Brother), leading to a change in our perception of age cohorts and generations. Political reasons: the divide between digital natives and immigrants mirrors a real-life divide between old and young that we see in real life.

Actually, digital natives never existed. Economic, cultural and political factors account for the creation of this myth. With 2bn people online, perception evolves.

How is my generation being transformed by technology: Julian Zbar

Anyone my age is an expert on the Internet. We are no different to any other generation; some preconceptions about us are true, some false. We've not known a world without the Internet, it's a given for us. One physiological change: the Internet is our extra limb. We're as cost-conscious as you, but expect everything to be free.

Connectivity is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity: whatever you're doing, you need to be connected to the Internet. It's not as important what you're connected with.

Everything beyond hardware should be free. What we do on the Internet has no monetary cost, there's no opportunity cost for us to be online. We don't consume out of necessity, but there's lots of music I wouldn't own if its ownership had meant giving up something else.

We're accustomed to receiving an awful amount and giving back nothing at all. The internet is feeding us all the free lunches we can stomach. You wouldn't download a car? If I could, I would.

Short attention spans. Interchangeable sources. Instant information. When it becomes so easy to get something, you have less interest in it. Articles would be more interesting if I had to wander somewhere to fetch them.

We discard the things we don't like, rather than choosing the things we do like: choosing things takes too much time.

The Internet follows us everywhere. We are never doing nothing. Don't confuse this with exponential growth in productivity, it's just very easy to fill every waking moment with activity.

On social media: 2 years ago a few people were resisted, today everyone has a Facebook account. Being social is no longer an active decision: your social scene falls onto your lap without your wanting or seeking it. Facebook is a paparazzi magazine of everyone you have ever met. The beauty of meeting people and forming relationships has been lost. When you meet someone, you already have a great deal of information about them: it changes the way you act even when you're not using it.

Everything is classified and exposed: like, ignore, add, etc. Social actions are trivialised: judging, rejecting, commenting is all less important. You don't get the human reaction to your own actions in front of you.

It's easier to use Facebook and Skype to say difficult things; it's as though we're forgetting the spontaneity of conversation. Like road rage, two drivers sitting in their cars and cursing each other for a trivial motoring incident.

No-one is consciously worrying about privacy. Google stalks your searches, Facebook knows your social info. How can you worry about your privacy?

Every situation is documented and exposed. Little judgement is given to what is put up. This distorts our scale of value: everything is consistently and repeatedly replaced by something new.

Twitter doesn't add any value over and above a Facebook account. It hasn't caught on for my generation in Switzerland.

At 6 o'clock this evening I dashed from the office up to Brighton station and hopped onto a train bound for London Bridge, to make it to This Happened. It was an absolutely enchanting evening of four talks, each running through the background to a product and its design process. It's late and I only have a few scrabbled notes, but I want to get them down whilst the memory is fresh:

1. Jussi Angesleva on the nasty realities of creating digital wave-patterns which seamlessly(ish) transferred themselves into real water, for an installation in Japan. Interesting to hear about the horrors of doing work which integrates with a space without taking it over (or just sticking up a screen and projecting cute stuff onto it). Cue lots of stories on the pain of cross-continental collaboration or "getting your hands dirty at a distance": edit/compile/test in real life. Icky, and unnervingly familiar: the real world is messy, physical proximity and the ability to have conversations wins out over documentation and electronic tools. Hmm, where have I heard that before?

2. Mr Schulze gave a slightly downbeat and self-effacing version of the Olinda story. It was refreshing to hear that even geniuses have problems balancing consultancy and their own product development, and a bit sad that the beeb can't produce the Olinda radios: I really hope that someone takes the open source designs and builds them (and that a suitable public back-end can be found for the social goodness which lurks backs them up). I wanted to know more about the modularity of the hardware too - Jack hinted at some smarts behind that side of things.

3. Kenichi Okada showed off animal superpowers, my absolute favourite: toys to give children the perspective of animals (giraffe for adult-style height of vision, ant for microscopic sight through "feelers", and bird for a homing instinct). Beautiful looking toys, charmingly simple, wonderfully presented. Timely for me too: I've been thinking a lot about animals recently, and had a blog post on the topic which MarsEdit seemed to drop somewhere :(

4. And finally, Hattie Coppard of Snug and Outdoor ran through their experimental playground kit: incredibly cute, kinda life-size lego. And her slide on narrative and play had my Loco-sensors tingling: arenas, pathways, obstacles, territories, thresholds, destinations and sanctuaries being the components of games. What a beautiful way to envisage outdoor play!
   

All great stuff, all thoroughly recommended. Please don't tell your friends, I think I only just scraped onto the entry list this time around and will be sad to miss the next one :)

PICNIC07: Dennis Crowley

Used to work on Dodgeball, now looking at how people experience urban spaces. Sounds like a micro-dopplr: once your friends are aware of your location, it encourages interactions.

Now works at Area/code. As devices and people become location-aware, they're using this data for playful purposes.

Plundr: why should games be restricted to a board? Why can't monopoly be played across Manhatten? Plundr uses wi-fi positioning and creates a commodity trading game around it. Islands are superimposed onto a real-world map by the game, and players collect items from islands to sell them on other ones. It's a bit like a location-aware dopewars, where you need to physically move.

(Wonder what, exactly, he means by "wi-fi positioning")

Done a game for the Sopranos; a game you play whilst you're watching the broadcast. Each element on the game board appears in the TV show, and the aim of the game is to position the elements on the game screen such that as many as possible are in the programme at the same time: betting that characters appear together. All synced up with the broadcast.

Shark Runners: they partnered with marine biologists, tagged real sharks, and used the movement data of these sharks in the real world game, played out in real time. It's not be played in a short setting, it's a long-term, in-the-background game.

(Is there a term for these games which involve infrequent interactions, but play out constantly?)

Dennis shows Pacmanhattan, obviously. Crossroads is a game where you capture street intersections from other players.

One for the Locomatrix crowd :)

PICNIC07: New interaction partners, Nicolas Nova

The problem with ubicomp: the model translated into gaming is messy, it's not clean.

Examples: augmenting animals. Shows a cockroach controlling a robot; a rat with survival goggles; special collar to track floating dogs; wiring poultry up to the internet.

How about playing against animals, or using animals as partners in gaming? Pac-man against animals instead of against an AI; or another one where a rodent is pursuing you through a virtual environment.

MMORPGs for pets: a dog running around a physical environment, transmitting its movements to a dwarf inside Wow. Twitter communication with a cat: when the cat scratches the device, the device reports onto Twitter - or when a message is twittered by the owner, it's reflected on the device.

Nicolas is not interested in trivialising animals, bee-dogs, or just controlling them. It's about animals, plants or weather as new interaction partners.

Just had this email from the folks at Nabaztag:

"We're choking up a bit. There's a few tear drops on our cheecks. Sadness? Anxiety? Really, it's both. Because it's been a while since Twh, your Nabaztag, that cute little Rabbit in your life, has given even the smallest sign of life! Please, so we can go on, so we can be happy... reassure us, tell us what's up."

Sweet that they do this - that they watch for a customer (me) who's long since paid them any cash, keep an eye on me, and then both to contact me to offer support.

Whilst Mr Melon enjoys the delights of Costa Rica, he's found time to get some of his artwork mugged up - check out Animalgebra on DeviantArt.