Identity iconography

Face recognition is the killer feature for Google glass and similar camera-equipped wearable computing & augmented-reality devices.

The vision is to overlay summarised personal information for the individuals in your field of view.

Privacy concerns (*) to one side, one of the major problems that these systems will come up with is the ability to effectively summarise the vast amount of information that is available about people into an easily-digestible form. Developing a suitable iconographic visualisation that summarises relevant aspects of personality & identity into an easily-digestible visual representation is going to be a significant UX challenge.

Something visually similar to (but representationally richer than) a radar (spider) chart may be required.

I can imagine a police heads-up display that places icons above individuals' heads that indicate if the individual has communicated with or has social connections with known criminals or subversives, if he has read any material that promotes crime or criticises authority, or has recently been in the vicinity of a location where a crime was reported.

Equally, I can imagine a marketing/sales heads-up display that overlays iconography that provides the ability to estimate net worth, current available funds, and emotional state (How successful various methods of persuasion might be).

(*) http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/i-see-you-the-databases-that-facial-
recognition-apps-need-to-survive/283294/

Crypto-Anarcho-Social-Libertarianism: A Salad^H^H^H^H^H Technocrat's solution.

Bitcoin is a decentralised mechanism for the authentication of public records.

Its use to record "cash" transactions and to verify the ownership of tokens (the BitCoins themselves) is almost certainly just the start of something bigger (much bigger).

My initial thoughts for taking BitCoin to the next level (from early 2011), were along the following lines:

To use the BitCoin protocol to create a sort of distributed stock market, where the instruments being traded were the keys to "virtual companies" in the form of forum participation & voting rights, where the outcome of the votes has some role in controlling various intangible assets (probably in the form of collectively-controlled BitCoin wallets themselves), used to pay for the development and operational costs of various products & services. I.e. true "digital native" businesses with no permanent human employees, owners or executives, just transient part-owners with voting & forum-participation rights.

Now, I want to think bigger - instead of creating something to replace corporations, I want to create something to replace states. (Cue diabolical evil laughter: BWAHAHAHA! &c... &c... )

I.e. to create a system that contains entities that are linked by persistent (but conditional) flows of tokens -- the BitCoin equivalent of taxation, but where those flows could be voted upon in a flexible manner.

I.e. individuals can have a wallet, but part of the logic for that system is that wallets "leak" over time, and that the lost funds either get distributed randomly, or individuals can vote on how the funds will be dispersed, or perhaps the funds are dispersed in a manner controlled by a combinatorial optimization algorithm, optimizing for feedback given by individual wallet-holders: I.e. people periodically provide feedback saying how happy and/or sad they are, and the (distributed, natch) combinatorial optimization routine adjusts the weights on how the funds are distributed to maximise (some non-linear aggregating function of) the happiness of each participant.

Anyway, loads of ideas to explore in there.. and the implementation should be quite fun too! (Although perhaps not as much fun as making up stupid titles for these blog posts).

Competitive marketing

In a competitive market, it is not enough to reach out to new customers - you also have to find ways to disrupt the marketing activities of your competitors, to target their prospects and counter their messaging.

We might be able to leverage modern ad-tech to specifically identify & target individuals that our competitors are themselves targeting, enabling us to counter the advances of our competitors in a dynamic and aggressive manner.

General scheme for introducing sub-conscious feedback into wearable/persistent bio-monitoring technology

This idea assumes we have some sort of wearable tech. to capture EEG, EMG & environmental data over an extended time-period, plus a way of providing feedback: both explicit, conscious, attention-requiring feedback, as well as continuous, subtle, sub-conscious, non-attention-requiring feedback.

The basic plan is to try to establish two-way (conscious and/or sub-conscious) communication between a numerical optimization routine and the human brain, allowing us to experiment with the use of numerical optimization procedures to influence behaviour and help train the individual for increased discipline, learning and so on. I.e. to assert conscious control over unconscious aspects of thinking and behaviour.

Take EEG & EMG data & run it through some sort of dimensionality reduction algorithm, such as Hinton's Restricted Boltzmann Bachine based autoencoder network. Continuously update the reduced-dimension distribution and measure the entropy. Initially, optimize the feedback that is given to reduce the entropy in that space. I.e. the objective function for the feedback is to improve the brain-machine communications channel.

If this works, and the entropy reduces as a result of the feedback, then augment the objective function with some explicitly-designed factors to promote the aspects of behaviour that you desire. E.g. suppose we can identify that some part of the reduced-dimension feature space corresponds to stress. We could then try to optimise the feedback to reduce the amount of time spent in that space.

There are a million and one ways that we could riff off this basic idea.

Ultra-cheap, ultra-low-power radar sensor for internet-of-things

There is no reason why radar should be expensive or power hungry. Can we make a radar sensor that is small and light enough for mobile phones and/or the internet of things?

Distributed Git

I am a big fan of Continuous Integration (CI), and the simple, elegant & light-weight approach to Configuration Management that it encourages:

Valid configurations of the system are defined by the revisions that live in the repository that is downstream from the CI quality-gate. No other configuration management is required than that defined by the repository state.

However, this reliance on the repository has consequences: The repository (ideally) holds everything that the system depends on, or stores configuration information at the very least.

This means big repositories.

Now, Git is a fantastic tool, it is terrifically flexible, and you can build all sorts of fantastic build-systems with it, but it is difficult to get to grips with, the user interface is appalling, and it suffers from one really really significant drawback: 

Git does not like large repositories.

Can we fix this? Perhaps by making Git a distributed tool?

GridLines

Traditional print media is quite limiting. Books, newspapers & magazines are fairly limited in how they can present information, and very limited in how the reader can interact with that information.

In transitioning to the on-line world, print publications have largely kept these limitations. Explicit attempts to break free of these self-imposed boundaries (Such as the much-vaunted New York Times "Snowfall" feature) are largely exercises in distraction: The addition of animation and visual effects to a linear, long-form narrative is hardly going to revolutionise the way that we consume media; The accordances are still the same; the communication is still one-way; and the journey through the story is still linear.

The web itself, with it's promise of a non-linear, branching navigation style, was a powerful, exciting and revolutionary concept when it was first introduced ... but what has happened to that revolution? Where has all the excitement gone?

Ultimately, we were let down by our brains: We are simply not quick enough to digest and process information that branches and expands exponentially, and we lack sufficient short term memory to combine it all into a coherent whole. In recognising these fundamental biological limitations, we have fallen back on traditional, linear storytelling, but have we fallen too far back?

There may be a half-way house. What if we could come up with a way of presenting information that goes beyond linear narrative, but is more restrained than a full-blown exponentially branching tree of possibilities? This is not a new idea. Some comment systems limited the depth of threads to preserve the navigability of the conversation as a whole -- and this works, by and large.

Many years ago, I envisioned a print newspaper that presented stories as arguments; editorials for two competing points of view presented on opposite pages of a double-page spread. More recently, the same thought recurred to me while looking at how Google+ lays out it's stream of articles, multiple tall, thin columns of text ("cards") arranged across the page.

I wonder if there could be mileage in combining these concepts - something that goes beyond a linear narrative, yet something that remains constrained to a two dimensional page; a branching, non-linear debate, but with strong limitations on the amount of branching that is possible; and the length of each point/post; a discussion forum and a venue for debate that restricts and guides commentators for the benefit and convenience of the reader. A medium within which text retains it's primacy, but that introduces (restrained) graphical and diagrammatic elements to assist in navigation; and to provide reference points for the reader.

I think that this would be a really interesting experiment to do.