IFTF's Future Now

Social Modeling: JASSS Journal

I neglected to mention it in my previous note on agent-based simulation, but an excellent source of information on social simulation, agent-based and otherwise, is the online Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. I have followed it for years. To get a good feeling for how this area is progressing, its useful to browse some of their recent titles. It shows current progress and also the challenge of using social simulation to understand systems of people.

Agents of Change: Social Modeling

A good overview article on Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) philosophy, techniques and applications, from the February ORMS Today, by Douglas Samuelson. He makes the case that this technique will transform social science because of the natural linkage between social and agent entities and their inclusion of behavioral changes. He also links ABMs to classical simulation techniques and Systems Dynamics. Some useful further links.

More on Government 2.0

Ross Mayfield has a lengthy critique of Government 2.0. Ross also points to a second, even more detailed criqitue at WorldChanging.

Accenture's Mirror of Your Future

The effort below is an old idea, showing a simulation of the consequences of lifestyle choices on your face/body on a monitor, we discussed it with BJ Fogg at his Stanford Captology Lab. He is quoted in the full article. It also has relationships to other kinds of display/mirrors, especially for cosmetics. The challenge is somehow getting people to use a device that provides negative feedback. Perhaps it could be used with children to reinforce good choices? Accenture also had a creative consumer/future home lab in Windsor, UK. Philips Homelab had some similar ideas in their research lab, linked to exercise equipment.

Mirror that reflects your future self

In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous subject keeps his youthful looks while the vagaries of age are visited upon his portrait in the attic. Now a digital version of Wilde's idea is being developed to show you what you will look like in five years' time if you take no exercise, eat too much junk food and drink too much alcohol. At Accenture Technology's lab in Sophia Antipolis, near Nice in France, a flat-screen LCD TV linked to a set of cameras and a powerful image-processing computer replaces the portrait described in Wilde's novel.

Initially the system acts just like a sophisticated "mirror" in which an image captured by a wireless camera is displayed in front of you. But that is just the start. Its main purpose is to conjure up a computer-modified image of the effects of overindulgence at the press of a button, says Accenture lab director Martin Illsey.

To do this the computer builds up a profile of your lifestyle, using a network of high-resolution cameras dotted around the house. These webcams will feed images of your everyday activities to a computer running software that is able to recognise different patterns of behaviour ...

RFID in passports

Wired News reports on a recent non-decision to not encrypt data embedded in next-generation passports. As we've noted previously, a number of governments plan to issue passports with RFID chips containing a variety of digital information. The theory is that just as EPC tags are the successors to bar codes, passport RFID will be the successor to the machine-readable lines at the bottom of the photo page of your passport (go look at it).

For customs and border guards, RFID is supposed to improve security and speed passage through customs.

Border agents, equipped with readers, would be able to pull up passport information on a screen and visually compare the digitized photo against the passport bearer.

Agents will also be able to use facial identification software to compare the person to the digitized photo, which is not feasible with current passports....

The government will use chips that can only be written to once, and a further safeguard is provided in the form of a digital signature, which allows readers to verify that the information on the chip is the information originally written to it.

But the rules, which are open for comment until April 4, rule out encrypting the bearer's name, birth date and digital photo, saying such a move would impede worldwide adoption of e-passports and that encrypted data would slow down entry and exit at customs.

The lack of encryption baffles privacy advocates and security researchers, who say the new passports are vulnerable to "skimming," an attack that uses an unauthorized reader to gather information from the RFID chip without the passport owner's knowledge.

It's worth noting that there is an NGO affiliated with the UN that's officially responsible for setting standards in passports, so while the U.S. has been a big proponent of unencrypted passport data, formal responsibility for the standard rests with the International Civil Aviation Organization. These tags are also different from the Electronic Product Code tags that get most press these days: those are designed to be cheap, fairly stupid, and have small memories.

In the history of science, there's a big literature that looks at scientific controversies-- arguments over discoveries, competing theories, that sort of thing. The value of controversies is that they force participants to be explicit about things that normally they don't have to articulate: you don't have to define what you really think "elegance" is, or what makes evidence robust, until you have to defend it. Controversies over technology can have a similar value. The debate over unencrypted RFID in passports is an interesting one, because along with the recent school RFID fiasco here in California, and other controversial rollouts or trials, we're beginning to get a much better sense of the circumstances under which people consider RFID to be problematic, intrusive, or otherwise bothersome.

What are those circumstances? Gee, look at the time....

The future is passé

The row of fashion themes have gone through a fifties white socked and Tommy Steel haircut revival in the 80s, a sixties revival fuelled the grungy early 90s, late 90s saw the unbelievable return of flares and platforms from the seventies, and lately the eighties have now sifted trough the fashion grind. Then what? All retro-themes are used up and re-retro will even be a dash too dumb for the world of chic.

Be if we look around, all the retroreps are there. Grunge guys, white socked wonders, headbanded "hippies", even the odd hat wielding oldie revering the spats era of the 30s (and I am not talking about Tom Wolfe). The music is there too, back catalogue music being more available than ever. In fact, ebay privides you with all the opportunities you want for itemising yourself back to your favorite period. Maybe that's it. All these pointy eared Star Trek fantasies about a pure future, a time of cleancut tights and big belts and gleaming linearity, a world of pure form and completely different'cy, it will never come. The worlds imagined in Orwellian 1984 and Kubrickian 2001 never actually happened (at least on a non-metaphorical level).

So maybe the future belongs to the pasts, it is essentially passé. In a world of both on and offline community making, anyone can establish or enter an anacronism and decide to suspend thematic time. Artifacts and fashion, music and cuisine, even bars and restaurants will be availble to suit your world. The world has finally become a time machine!

Maytag Personal Vending Blog

Here is another example of an externally facing blog, by Maytag, featuring its Skybox Personal Beverage Vending Machine. A chatty place, mostly about sports. Its interesting that this is brand, rather than corporate oriented, though the Maytag name is prominent. Does this kind of approach best address products whose proposition is unclear or unusual? Comments are enabled with filtering. Updated about twice a week. Just discovered here, but its apparently been in operation since last June. Skybox in Gizmodo. Also, more recently, AskJeeves has set up a corporate presence blog. This also led me to Rick Bruner's Business Blogging Site.

William Eggers on "Government 2.0"

See the caveat on talk notes, at the end of the post.

Big idea. Today's governments are designed for a different era: the last major set of reforms dates from the Progressive Era, and was guided by a mechanistic vision of government, and a Tayloristic ideal of constructing the "one best way" to run things.

Today's information technologies let us change everything about how the government works, from education to regulation to connections with citizens. Adding e-gov front ends, Web sites, etc. won't do much in the way of basic changes; but rethinking the role of IT in government could produce a "new Progressive Era."

In the 1970s, IT was about cost and efficiency; in the 1990s, Web was about accessibility and service; the challenge now is to use it to create reform and results (a tech-enabled transformation).

Anthony Townsend on "Korea: The Broadband Republic"

See the caveat on talk notes, at the end of the post.

Big Idea. "You don't have to be in front of a Web browser to see the impact of the Internet; it's out in the streets." The emerging Korean broadband society is about Koreanness, not broadband; so the lessons may not translate.

Yet it's still worth studying for two reasons. 1) Speed at which things have happened: it's 3-5 years ahead of Japan, 10 ahead of US, 20 ahead of Europe. 2) Korea is one of the most urbanized countries in the world: 90% of the population lives in 7 urban areas, putting it on the edge of global demographic trends.

"I'm Jason, and I've become an online photo sharing addict."

In the past week I've lost a fair bit of sleep to the year-old Web photo community Flickr, going from about 4 photos to almost 800 in just a few days. I'm not entirely what prompted my change of heart, since I always claimed that I could get into carrying a camera and taking photos but the photo-sharing and -tagging genes were just not in me. Regardless of what got me started with Flickr, I've been going non-stop. During the times I've come up for air from uploading, tagging, and exploring I've made some observations about the service and the interactions it facilitates.

I'd attribute Flickr's popularity to two intertwined core features: a carefully crafted interface and the large community that has developed around a common platform for online photos. Flickr provides a zillion ways to get photos into the system, and the process of adding both descriptions and categorizations--known as tags--could hardly be simpler. One measure of success for an interface is the required number of clicks to accomplish a task, and I've found that Flickr rarely requires more than necessary to get from file on my hard drive to annotated entry in my online photo collection (I can think of only one step that annoys me every time, and even then I've adapted). Just because the interface makes it easy to add photos, however, doesn't provide the motivation for taking interesting ones and giving them life with descriptions and tags. For me that desire came when I quickly realized that people can see my public photos as I add to the service, they can easily find them if the photos have enough descriptive information, and, most notably, they can interact with me through my photos.

This is addictive stuff. These interactions can occur in several ways, including adding comments to photos and indicating those photos that you especially enjoy. I woke up the morning after my first furious late-night tagging session to find that I had 2 of my photos tagged as "favorites" and a couple of comments left behind, all done by other Flickr-ers I didn't know that aren't even on my continent. They likely found these either in the general display as I uploaded them (which brings back fun childhood memories of watching other people's photos as they were developed at the mall photomat) or as they stumbled upon my photos because of the way I tagged them. The size of Flickr and ease of exploring tags in the database--often just one click--greatly facilitate these types of serendipitous discoveries. For example, the same diminutive word that is the loving nickname for a big gruff Slovenian friend of mine will return photos only of him and a cute-as-a-button Asian toddler. Talk about the world getting smaller!

Many of these interactions around photos were still possible online, before and outside of the Flickr system, but I'd argue that the burden was on people to seek each other out and navigate across different systems. In Flickr's case, a smart & relatively painless interface led to a large community of users while the inclusion of many simple tools for interaction and exploration have kept people coming back. I'll post soon about the fun experiences I've had playing in the sandbox that is Flickr's folksonomy tagging system.