Vacuum

Google+ early reviews: the new software smell

Disclaimer: I have just now gotten access to Google+, so this review is a reflection of other reviews, some personal experience, and a weary view of novelty.

Google+ is out in very limited test. Some small number of well connected people now have access to a new piece of social software from Google, and initial reviews have been generally positive.

How do you assess whether the initial reviews of a system designed for communications are accurate for when the system eventually gets rolled out to a wider audience? Consider that the first people into the system were hand picked, that they generally like getting access to new systems, and that they are relatively experienced and gregarious online experts. Certainly they will like something new that only they have access to - quite independent of the set of features - because it gives them a chance to reconnect to old online friends and make some new ones.

When a communications system becomes available to the general public, the system dynamics change greatly. The initial group of participants can all be presumed to be interesting to each other, so talking to any random individual is likely to be someone relatively near you in social circumstance. As the population explodes, the random person gets less and less interesting, to the limit of when the random person is likely to be a spammer.

Google+ is at the invention stage. Much like Facebook seeded its early use poll with Ivy League students, Google+ is doing its shakedown cruise with fans and friends and family in the first batch. Who wouldn't like to try out a new, expensive, mostly empty system and establish yourself in it? I'm waiting for the next round of invites, and hoping to enjoy it while it's in early growth stages and not when it's in long-in-the-tooth maintenance mode.

Walking Around: bonus points

I walked a lot more today than I normally would have walked, thanks to my new game Walking Around. Here's some of the bonus points I scored that I wouldn't have scored in my previous quest, Sitting Around Typing.

Pedestrian Path (+1). It's always good to find a way to get from here to there that's not on any map. The pedestrian path I found connects Needham Road to Amelia Place. I've added that little segment to Open Street Map so that I can find it again, and so that I can cut through one more neighborhood with confidence. My son and I took this route to his summer camp today, and he suggested one more point for Unfamiliar Route (+1).

Unexpected Lunch Companions (+2). If you wait for the bus at a bus stop near a restaurant, and if someone you know happens to be driving to that restaurant, then not only can you have an unexpectedly pleasant lunch but you can also get a ride downtown. Thanks to the Toziers for the happy coincidence and for a beginning of a discussion of annexation and township islands.

Urban Foraging (+1). Juneberries are in season, which means that a carefully selected path will take you past some delicious snacks, right out there in the open, where thousands of people walk each day but none notice except the birds and a few brave souls who appreciate Amalanchier. For more berrypicking ideas, I follow Linda Diane Feldt's @wildcrafting Twitter account. For lots more detail on Amalanchier, the 1946 American Species of Amalachier has ranges and keys for native species.

Park Benches (+2). If, at the end of your trek, you stop to wait for the bus - then it's useful to note that sometimes the bus stop is close to a park which has a park bench in the shade. Douglas Park is a nice place to wait for the #4, especially if you have RideTrak running on your cell phone to tell you when to get up and walk to the stop 1/2 block south of the park. My walk the next morning circled around all the way back to this park bench.

North Star (+1). A nice night walk on a clear night gives you all of the directions you need when Polaris is visible in the north sky. The drawing is from H. A. Rey's The Stars, my all time favorite book about the night sky.

 

How do I come up with this bonus point structure? If you walk around enough, something that you see or do is bound to make you happy. Give yourself points for those happy places, and know where they are so that you can revisit them.

Walking Around, a new urban walking game

I'm inventing a new urban game called Walking Around. I'm sure that someone else has invented it already, but reinvention is part of the process of creativity. Here's how it's played.

First, you play with a pedometer, which tells you how far you've walked during the day. There are a number of systems already for tracking your pedometer usage, including Walker Tracker, Steps, and a bunch of others. Use whatever system that gives you, or just a spreadsheet, to take care of the basic structure of making certain that you count steps daily.

Second - and here is what is novel, at least to me - is that there's a bonus structure in the game designed to award bonuses for when you have accomplished tasks. The first bonus award that I'm awarding myself looks at constructing a walk so that you make an orbit around the biggest possible chunk of territory; that is to say, repeated walks along the same path will get you zero bonus, but going out of your way on a detour will add to your score, and trekking through unfamiliar territory in a big loop is the best.

So far this is a pen and paper game and I haven't fully worked out the point structure. I have a notion that you capture territory every time you orbit it, so that you might win a park by going all the way around it, and you might win a political ward or precinct by capturing a loop around it. To simplify greatly, since I am trying to keep record of this in a small book, I'm just drawing a graph with destinations rather than tracking every street.

Some idea sources:

Riverwalks Ann Arbor is a book of walking loops along the Huron River, written by Brenda E. Bentley.

Lake Trek is the weblog for  Loreen Niewenhuis who wrote A 1000-Mile Walk on the Beach about her circumnavigation on foot of Lake Michigan. I don't think I'm going to beat that top score.

Tom Graham wrote about Walking The World, and his quest to walk every street in San Francisco, in 2005 for SF Gate; his web site is SF Walking Man.

The AADL Summer Reading Game has points for reading books and badges for doing various other tasks, and the gamers there know how to make a game that will make you read. There should therefore be points in my Walking Around game every time you complete part of a circuit that connects to a library.

All City New York is the work of Moses Gates, whose game board includes the challenge of visiting all of the census tracts of New York City. Thanks to Ruth Kraut for the link. 

In Tacoma, Brian Kerr is getting bonus points in his version of the game for elevation.

Now pardon me while I connect some dots in my game map.

 

Paraphrase, regurgitate, cut, and paste

Failure of the fourth estate. Newspapers and websites all over the country have reported on the flooding and fire at Fort Calhoun, but most articles simply paraphrase and regurgitate information from the NRC and OPPD press releases, which aggregators and bloggers then, in turn, simply cut and paste. Even the Omaha World-Herald didn't send local reporters to cover the story; instead, the newspaper published an article on the recent fire written by Associated Press reporters -- based in Atlanta and Washington.

Dawn Stover's piece Rising Water, Falling Journalism for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pokes a sharp stick in the eye of bloggers and journalists alike in failing to do original work when reporting on the risks to the public from flooding at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant. 

See also: World Net Daily punking USA Today on a story about Delta Airlines and travel to Saudi Arabia, described neatly by Adam Hochberg for Poynter.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps, asks Brad DeLong and Cosma Shalizi. The answer may be too painfully clear, if you stop to think too hard about it - in the face of content mills like Examiner and Patch, who on earth could afford to write something that took a long time to write for only a few page views?

Top of mind vs. top of page vs Top Of The Park

At what point did "top of mind" get replaced by "top of page" ? For people like me who spend a lot of time online, it's easy for social network systems like Twitter and Facebook to be a steady stream of distractions, especially when the usual clues for what is important get replaced simply by cues for what is new.

Some background for context.

The earliest use of the phrase "top of mind" that I can find in a modern context is Alin Gruber's Top of Mind Awareness and Share of Families (1969), a discussion in the Journal of Marketing Research on how closely the snap judgments that consumers make about brand recogition map to market share.

"Top of page" shows up in the news and design business as "above the fold"; see this Boxes and Arrows design article, Blasting the Myth of the Fold (2007).

Facebook's Top News page comes from their Edgerank algorithm, the details of which change as quickly as and are kept as proprietary as Google's Pagerank algorithm. EdgeRank: The Secret Sauce That Makes Facebook’s News Feed Tick (Techcrunch, 2010) gives a simplified explanation of it.

"Top of the park" is the music and movies part of the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, held on Ingalls Mall. It used to be hosted at the top of the parking structure next to the Power Center, hence the name.

Thanks to Rod Johnson ("Top of Park").

Michigan summer festivals for 2011

Absolute Michigan is running a promotional campaign for summer festivals in Michigan, offering a chance to win a free admissions to selected events. See the Absolute Michigan Festival Summer page, and if you are organizing a festival and are looking to promote it, give Andrew McFarlane a holler and tell him I sent you.

Here's some of these summer festivals for 2011:

• Thunder Over Michigan - July 23 & 24 in Belleville MI at the Yankee Air Museum
• Maker Faire Detroit - July 30 & 31 in Dearborn MI at The Henry Ford
• Paella In The Park - August 5 in Traverse City MI
• Dunegrass Music Festival - August 5-7 in Empire MI
• Farm Fest - August 11-14 in Johannesburg MI
• Traverse City Wine & Art Festival - August 20
• Hoxeyville Music Festival - August 19 & 20
• Traverse City Microbrew & Music Festival - August 26 & 27
• Porcupine Mountain Music Festival - August 26-28
• Crystal Mountain's Taste of Michigan - September 3
• Midwest Fest 2011 - September 28-October 1, Mt Pleasant MI

I'm sure there are more - have a great time (and help me fill in the page, if I'm missing any that you are organizing).

For more Michigan festival information, see the Popular Events and Festivals in Michigan page that Madman Mike maintains. For fireworks, see the Michigan Fireworks site (412 displays!) maintained by Meg Geddes.

Unpolished writing in the open notebook

Steve Crocker, Internet Request for Comments 3, from 1969: "There is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition."

From time to time, someone reads Vacuum and comments that the writing looks unpolished and incomplete. Why would you publish this kind of work, which obviously isn't up to the standards that would let you sell it to someone for use in print? Why wouldn't you hide it in your notebooks?

I'm using this weblog as a notebook, and publishing my notes for myself instead of always as a tightly edited, polished, finished work. By exposing this part of a process I hope to be prepared to find some way to make myself understood, even if I don't completely understand myself immediately as I write through an issue or question. Thoughts go in, get refined as far as they need to be to make them coherent, and then go onto the net and into the world so that there's room for the next piece to emerge.

The open notebook is going to be messy, but it also means that I have some hope of finding my own half-finished work and revisiting it years later; when I don't do that, there's always something lost. Writing this way lets me tune into ideas, spin them around for a bit until I have a clearer focus, and move on. In most cases, I'm not ready to make things shiny and neat, and I'm content to explore facets of an unpolished gem over a series of years.

Previously, because I put it out there in first draft format so that I could find it again: make the first version coherent (from 2011);  creativity vs productivity (from 2008); on shitty first drafts (from 2007); wishing that my weblog looked more like my quadrille notebooks (from 2004).

Summer 2011 discardia notes

Discardia is a quarterly holiday where we decide to let go of some things around us in order to make way to do things for the new season. It's a modern invention of Dinah Sanders, who writes about it at discardia.com. The season runs from the solstice or equinox to the following new moon. For summer 2011, the dates are June 21 through July 1.

For my kids, Lego is the part of their existence which most calls out for straightforward decisionmaking to create order amidst the chaos. Before you can do a rebuild of a model that you already have, you need to find all of the impossibly tiny scattered pieces that make it up. A multipart storage box container is a great way to occupy a small boy's hour cleaning and sorting, because only when you have all of the yellow pieces together do you find the tiny Lego-sized firefighters accessories. Once you get down to the level that you can find the tiny black fireman's axe, the small child is content to build with it rather than agitate to buy more.

Books are my bane of accumulation existence, to the point where deciding what to do with them takes more energy than actually reading them. We have used Paperback Swap to maintain a steady state of inventory and still get new reading materials, and Books By Chance to dispose of surplus. Fortunately, the Lego situation (q.v.) is under control enough that I have reclaimed one bookshelf, which is being carefully curated as best I can to contain the collection that I would keep if it were my only shelf of books. Every decision to add to it means there's a corresponding decision to remove a book, and that keeps the shelf from accumulating dust and ennui.

The element of my life that absorbs more time than it should is the Internet, especially the Internet of flitting around from site to site trying to decide that someone has written something new worth writing. My self control is weak for shiny new things, but what I have discovered is that I can replace self control with ritual sometimes, and a ritual of writing on a specific topic for a specific person rather than reading aimlessly repays the time. I don't know yet how to cure a ritual addiction to being online, though Paul Jones's "no email" project points to one way to discard a portion of the online existence while staying connected.

Thanks to Dinah Sanders for the "decide and do" theme for this season's Discardia. John Weise and Stephanie Bentley run Books By Chance, a consignment used bookstore which helps deal with my book surplus. Duane Collicott's Bricks for Brains provides an annual Lego surplus at Brick Bash. Reach Paul Jones by any of a thousand online systems, all except email. LEGO is a registered trademark owned by the LEGO Group, and don't you forget it.

Potholes and performance warranties for road construction

After a rough winter, potholes are ubiquitous on Ann Arbor streets. The end of winter marks the beginning of road repair season, and some fraction of the potholes get filled in. The beginning of snow removal season marks the end of road repair season, and the cycle repeats. Annual Google trend lines show most news stories about potholes happen between January and April, as do most searches for potholes.

The technology to repair a pothole is relatively cheap, with a one or two person truck and some hot patch all that is needed to deal with the incident. In comparison, preventing a pothole from appearing in the first place means spending a lot more capital on road construction to build a more sturdy roadbed capable of handling heavier loads and less likely to buckle or crumble with frost.

At an extreme, you get the original World War Two era Davison Freeway in Detroit, which was over-engineered so that no highway problems would get in the way of the speedy shipment of materials for the war effort. That roadbed lasted from 1942 to 1997 - beat up and dangerous at the end, but still working 55 years before it was rebuilt.

To spend less on pothole repair, spend more on road construction? Perhaps, though there is no guarantee that new pavement will withstand daily traffic. A possible solution is to give a contract which specifies that the road builder is also the road maintainer, and that the cost of a pothole repair comes out of whatever profits were made by the building of the road. At least in theory, it would allow someone to make a reasonable tradeoff between current capital costs and future operations costs of maintaining a road; in practice, it probably would mean low-ball bidding by bidders who would build insubstantial roads and then under-deliver on the promise of keeping them maintained.

Thanks to Fred Posner for the prompt to write about this, and to Peggy Page for post-publication editorial feedback. Previously on potholes: the Ann Arbor Citizen Request System. Archival photos of the Davison Freeway under construction and at its first opening show the impact that freeway building has on a neighborhood. A 2010 story describes potholes for sale in eastern Germany, with the purchaser getting a sponsorship message on the repair; a similar stunt in 2009 featured road repair by KFC.  The city has a dedicated phone number to report potholes: call 734-99-HOLES. 

Addendum: After publishing a first draft of this piece, I found this 2001 Michigan House Fiscal Agency report on performance warranties for road construction, which goes into some more of the purchasing process for major roadwork to understand how a road builder might manage a contract that required them to make whole a road that had not lived up to promises. It notes that a "warranty bond" would be required to ensure that if the road builder went out of business that the road would still be maintained - a sizable cost that would limit the number of bidders. A report from a performance-based warranty for a rebuild of US 550 in New Mexico describes a successful project for a difficult road; the warranty costs are substantial, amounting to 20% of the total bid. 

Prediction markets are too easy to game, so let's play games instead

Prediction markets provide a nice, idealized way to use market mechanisms to predict the future. They are a slightly idealized version of an office betting pool and allow small scale bets (real or virtual) on future events. Unlike a real futures market, where you can get guarantees of future performance on things like delivery of gasoline or frozen orange juice, there's no way that betting on some prospective GOP hopeful will lift your candidate to office.

Market manipulation is the bane of most prediction markets. Consider Intrade, a prediction market in which GOP hopefuls are listed. The media will report that a newcomer is trading well, but won't necessarily note that the frontrunner's place is based on less than $500 worth of daily trades. If someone were to want to bump their favorite over the top for at least a little while it would only take pocket money from a proper hidden campaign pocket to game the system in your favor.

Gaming the system is a problem in systems that pretend to be markets, and where some ideal form of market is lionized as a way to gain enlightenment from the invisible hand of Adam Smith. Turning the system into a game to be one sullies the economist's ideals of a rational allocation of resources based on infinite economic rigor.

Why fight people's tendencies to want to subvert the intent of the system builder? The new hot trend in online environments is gamification, where gaming the system becomes the whole goal of the system. Unlike markets, which try to come to truth with some single-valued score of value, games have the opportunity to bring the world into a lovely multi-valued focus, with different people winning each at their own version of the game. The introduction of badges, short term competitions, lots of ways to score points and other fun side games overwhelms the narrow trading interests in market-based predicitons. 

The future of prediction markets lives inside complex predictive games. The game design has to take into account not only the rapid conclusions that you can draw when you have an efficient market for opinions, but also the continuous efforts you have to keep up to maintain people's attention on a topic for any length of time. The good games reward active participation; the challenge becomes how to draw conclusions from the work of engaged gamers working inside your system.

Thanks to Brian Kerr for the idea. Games are on my mind because of the work of the Ann Arbor District Library and Eli Neiburger to build games into the summer reading program at the library. I tried to predict library use with a prediction market in 2007, and attendance at lunch in 2009, using Inkling Markets. The game of choice at the Workantile Exchange is a version of bingo; when I bring my kid to work an alert player may win. The Intrade GOP market shows the book of available trades; at this writing, purchasing about 300 shares of Mitt Romney would push the price up 8% at a cost of less than $1200. Empire Avenue turns social media friendships into a giant game, with badges and prizes.