Day: 30 November 2008

IP city twinning and habitual patterns and stuff like that

I just love this video clip. NYTE, the New York Talk Exchange, “illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualising volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world.”

What fascinates me is the grouping, the concentration. Somewhere in my mind’s eye, New York is twinned, in IP terms, with a bunch of cities in the rest of the world. And the grouping is different for different cities. The top ten cities that New York twins with will be different from the top ten cities that Boston twins with. And it is in that difference that we learn new things.

I remember reading a study some time ago on the use of mobile phones, and finding out just how habitual, how predictable, how localised we really were. The study, by Marta Gonzalez and Cesar Hidalgo of Northeastern, along with Albert-Lazslo Barabasi (of Linked fame) looked at understanding individual human mobility patterns, proving that there is a “high degree of temporal and spatial regularity” in “human trajectories”.

We may have conquered time and space, so to say: we can Tivo-ise anything, record for later playback, and the web allows us to assume the death of distance. We’re heading towards ubiquitous affordable always-on connectivity, in a device-agnostic open-platform world. But. There’s always a but.

But we still assume people will use these devices in specific ways, based on models deeply ingrained with “hit culture” notions of “content usage”, ways that themselves pave the way for draconian DRM and content management solutions and regulation and even legislation.

It’s as if Hollywood and the music industry are the only reasons people would ever want to be connected, anywhere, anytime. It’s as if everyone will only use their ubiquity and affordability of access to consume entertainment. [Heavy accent on the word “consume”.] It’s as if it’s okay to seek to criminalise everyone as a result of the models. Intriguing.

Soon, we’re going to take these debates more into the open. Base them on data. Data that will suggest human beings are creatures of habit, they move around in predictable loci, they talk to the same people at the same time, they belong to a number of overlapping networks, they rely on trusted relationships, they exercise long-tail taste in their entertainment choices once they have that choice, and they are actually qualified to create and share “content”, not just consume it. And they’re not criminals.

Soon.

In the meantime, studies like the Gonzalez paper and the NYTE simulation help me feel good about the future.

Missing the Whale: Will we soon pay to see it?

Twitter stayed up throughout the Mumbai terrorist crisis; at least that’s the way it seemed to me, everything just worked. Never spotted the Whale.

And then today, a few minutes ago, there it was, in all its splendiferous glory, reproduced here for newcomers:

Sightings are getting rarer and more fleeting. So, according to traditional scarcity economics, we should soon be willing to pay to see it, right? :-)

Five-a-day mental habits

Andy Gibson of School Of Everything (disclosure: I’m an investor and board member) pinged me via this post. I was asked to list five things I do to keep myself mentally well (which I do below), to link to the Mindapples site (which I just did) and to invite, publicly,  five others to do the same (which I will do at the end of this post).

1. I go for a 30 min walk daily, varying my route as much as possible. Before I set off, I try and gauge how many steps I will need to reach my destination. This involves visualising the route, breaking it down into estimable chunks and then rounding it off. Then I try and keep count of the steps while thinking about other things. At the end of the walk I learn something about my estimation capacity, as also my ability to do foreground and background tasks in parallel.

2. Every night I will read for at least two hours, online and offline. Often it is more, but the minimum is two hours. At any given time I tend to be reading a number of books, sometimes as much as ten. Some I would I have just started, some would be nearing their finish. When I read at night, I try and switch between books a couple of times, just to learn about keeping switching costs low.

3. In the morning, on my way to work, I write down the things I want to get done regardless of other calls on my time. Then at the end of the day I look at the list, see how I’ve done and then throw it away. I never look at the list in between. The idea is to establish priorities very clearly in my head, priorities that will stand against the vagaries of the day. I have always been bemused by how people tell me about the importance of fixed and variable costs and keeping them in balance, and then they proceed to fill their day up weeks in advance. Don’t understand. So I keep a lot of white space in my day, the challenge is to make sure that I get the fixed things done while adapting to what comes in. And that’s all in the mind.

4. Before I go to sleep I spend a little time counting Fibonacci sheep. This is where the sheep go 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…… or a variant. The idea is to set a goal, to reach a term between 20 and 30. I like the way it stretches me, to remember something while throwing something out. To make sure I don’t land up memorising the answers, I change term 1 and make it 4 or 97 or something like that.

5. Throughout the day, intermittently, I give myself tasks of things to recall and then promptly change tack, move to something else. The idea is to get my brain to have some sort of offline agent, doing information retrieval work for me while I do something else. When I was young, I regularly experienced the weird feeling of trying to recall something, failing to recall it quickly, and then finding it came back to me much later, when I wasn’t trying. Now I try and train that facility, asking my brain to do something for later delivery.

Weird stuff? Told you I was confused. Let me know what you think. In the meantime, I’m going to tag Kevin Marks, Kathy Sierra, David Weinberger, Steven Johnson and Clay Shirky. And use Twitter to let them know I tagged them. How else would you do it?

BTW, if any of you want to get in touch with me, I tweet as @jobsworth.