Color-blindness is when the eye lacks a certain type of photoreceptor. Roughly 5-7% of men lack either the red or green photoreceptor, causing these colors to be more difficult to distinguish. The gist of the research we worked on was building the groundwork for assistive devices for the color-blind, by using software to manipulate an image’s colorspace. Features in the resulting image would be easier to distinguish, although the image might appear a bit funky.

We ran dozens of tests on the software, comparing results against traditional color tests like HRR and ishihara. Doing the research was a blast and one of my favorite memories of undergrad. One of the hopes was that – one day – someone would use this software in an augmented reality (AR) product. AR was still pretty much a sci-fi pipedream back in 2004, the idea that you could overlay information in realtime on top of reality. Well, fast forward to 2010, and someone’s done it! Of course, the author likely didn’t use the results of our research (some logistics and dropped balls out of my control prevented us from publishing in anything other than posters), but it’s great to see this come to life! Try it out – the app is called DanKam on the App store. It’s still rough around the edges UI-wise, but definitely a good first go at a solution.

 

http://www.facebook.com/nickpunt

http://www.quora.com/Nick-Punt

Some posts I’ve made recently:

http://www.quora.com/If-given-1-billion-how-would-you-best-improve-U-S-education

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-need-for-Quora-when-Yahoo!-Answers-has-such-widespread-adoption

http://www.quora.com/How-is-Facebook-building-the-hover-card-feature-in-their-UI

http://www.quora.com/What-do-you-associate-with-a-brand-named-emergent

http://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-do-Foursquare-Who-cares-how-many-badges-you-get

 

Facebook Page - Darwin

A friend recently contacted me about an idea she had to use Facebook to teach history, by having students pick political thinkers from the enlightenment to today and have them friend each other and talk. This great idea of hers got me thinking about how the temporal- and connection-focus of Facebook could be leveraged to build powerful and engaging activities. While Facebook isn’t the right tool for these activities (due to not being controlled environment, and not having the appropriate teacher oversights), a Facebook app could be. Here is my response to her inquiry–

“

I think it makes total sense and your instincts for how to tap into students ways of thinking to make this activity work are right on. I also think participating in and visualizing connections is a really great way to teach otherwise abstract ideas that you refer to. Unfortunately I don’t know of tools that can do this really well, especially the concepts part.

Some things that might be problems–

• defining the connections – you need a way for each student to not only reach out and connect two thinkers, but to define why they’re connect (e.g. the ideals they share). Currently Facebook doesn’t allow any sort of connection metadata like this.
• creating the profiles – Facebook Pages are okay, but not perfect. Has quite a bit of unnecessary overhead just to create things. It’s okay if you’re only making one, but if you’re making a number of thinkers, it’s extra work. Also, duplication is an issue (two people make Obama).
• connecting thinkers to concepts – there’s no straightforward way to have many ideas or ideals connected to users- its just one user to another.

That said, Facebook Pages can work, and to really exploit the value of Facebook Pages, you want students to make good use of the Wall for ongoing publishing activities.

I’m assuming you’re assigning students one enlightenment thinker each, where they will build a Facebook Page for them. From there you’ve got a bunch of activities you can run.

Activity 1- Define Connections

Students should connect thinkers to each other based on common ideals and perspectives. Every time the student connects their thinker to another, the student should post on the other’s wall about what they agree upon (defines why they are connected).

Activity 2- Introduce an Event

Create an ‘event’ (a news article), and have students respond to that event by commenting as their thinker on other thinker’s walls. How would the thinker respond to the event? How would their conversations go with their buddies? Would their ideals be reinforced or challenged?

Activity 3- Post Updates

Have students post the growth of their thinkers’ views over time, using their own walls to post updates. Ask students to start each post with the date and time that the thinker is going through their thoughts. This would be especially great if you selected a period of time and had everyone in sync (e.g. you email students telling them what period of time it is every few hours, and have them post a set of wall posts representing the context and social scenarios of the time).

Activity 4- Find Differences

Pointing out differences is generally a better teaching practice than pointing out similarities – it requires a deeper understanding of the subject matter. Give students a concept and have them seek out a thinker that has a radically opposing viewpoint and a slightly opposing viewpoint. Have the student  post on their wall describing how they are different.

For activities 2 and 4, you should use the ability to attach Links to reference the concept or event you want to have them post on. Post articles somewhere (e.g. Google Docs) and give students the URLs of those articles. Then have the students post on the walls attaching links to those articles, and add their comments along with the posting.

In general, letting students loose to role play a character naturally taps into how we’re wired as social creatures, and as a  learning exercise really has no upper boundary for how creative and involved a student can get. If two students characters get in a ‘fight’ by disagreeing back and forth on their walls, citing their own histories, that’s a fantastic outcome.

”

There are probably many dozen activities that can be put together with the tools Facebook has and lightly structured teacher involvement. Assessment would be an interesting challenge, but probably not that difficult.

I think with just a few weeks of engineering time, it’s possible to build an application that supports the above PLUS privacy and tracking. Maybe when I get some downtime

 

In the wake of Facebook’s announcement to begin giving ‘Vanity URLs’ for users, it’s useful to look into a few properties that make up these unique identifiers, to determine how this change will play out.

Properties of Names

First, our degree of influence is our uniqueness. The more influential you are, the more unique you are. When we have a nickname, that nickname is known to everybody we carry influence with – but unknown to everybody else.

Second, our influence has many colors – the multiple circles of influence within our various social groups. Each social group may know us by a different name, and perhaps different behaviors. Sometimes these colors overlap – Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie.

Third, our influence changes degree and color over time – different people are influenced by us at different times, in different ways. The most influential capture their uniqueness far beyond their lives – Lucy, Buddha, Caesar.

Fourth, uniqueness is |finite|. Our language can only carry so many memorable identifiers, be they words, names, or made up bundles of meaning that can be unpacked by those in the know. Further, our minds are tuned to remember particular combinations of sounds / letters / numbers better than others, further reducing what is memorable. John is easy to remember. John293 is harder. J3ho9n2 or Ohjn293 are really hard.  These combinations differ across cultures.

Effects of Using Vanity URLs

Given these properties, what is the effect of a Vanity URL on a service like Facebook with 250mm users, expanding by tens to hundreds of thousands daily?

A. It flattens influence. People are no longer nicknames in a community or circle of friends. They’re entering a single, global community, with one color (no dupe accounts!). This washes away any meaning one may have applied to their nickname, and replaces it with the reader’s best guess.

B. If Facebook’s world domination plans succeed, Vanity URLs supersede any other uniqueness one has. In other words, as you continue to be engaged by Facebook’s awesome features and community, this unique identifier is with you forever, and it matters more than any other by orders of magnitude (e.g. it’s your first Google hit).

C. It bumps against finite limits of uniqueness to language. The easy and unique (John) will be replaced by the slightly less easy and unique (John21), then the more obscure and unique (AloofPanda), then the obscure and un-unique (AloofPanda21). The more you go down this road the less likely these names will stand the test of time, and users will be less satisfied with their past choice.

D. Similarly, it draws unnecessary attention to itself. Having the ability to set my name as AloofPanda, or Nickpunt, or just Nick, means that people will pay attention to these, yet they do a poor job of describing me. The details of my profile and the many dimensions, labels, brands, and whatever else that define me are now down to a few letters and numbers that stand out but don’t say anything, or worse yet, say the wrong thing.

An aside: Vanity URLs are Generally Good

I don’t think Vanity URLs are all bad. In fact, Vanity URLs are excellent ways to identify people in small groups or communities, because they function like nicknames, and because people’s influence changes colors over time as they move between groups. They are successful in almost all communities out there.

I’d go as far as to say that most startups doing anything with social networking or online communities should absolutely offer them to users. They’re useful and will attract and engage users, and getting engaged users is the #1 priority for these startups. You have to first build community (who value nicknames), before you can build meta-community (who don’t as much), and frankly the meta-community / digital identity battles are now the domain of massive, established players like Facebook, Google, and QQ, who may likely all go open regardless.

Facebook’s Situation

Right now we have Facebook offering today a global, persistent, and incredibly important online identity around a highly engaging product. Through good timing, properties of their early market, sticking to their design principles, and possibly indifference, Facebook has succeeded despite the value-add that Vanity URLs offer to smaller communities. Yet they’re now at a point of being so ubiquitous that they could conceivably have the digital identity for every person on earth that is online in the next 10 years.

Facebook wants to own your digital identity and build the best services around that identity as possible. To do so, Facebook needs an easy way to find / reference / share people, and provide fully public profiles as well as more detailed private ones with different privacy gradations. All stuff that’s being improved upon every day. So what’s the right move for the next year? Two years? Five years?

My opinion: Stick with the numbers

In my opinion it’s precisely now when using numbers as identifiers starts becoming valuable. Why?

a) numbers are highly scalable
b) numbers are something users are indifferent to (vs worried about)
c) finding / referencing / sharing people is getting better (and URLs are less and less important) as we gain better tech, better data on each person’s social graph, and better interface designs.
d) (Facebook-Specific) it’s the status quo

Given the above-mentioned drawbacks to Vanity URLs, I think that although meaningless and hard to remember, numbers actually make sense for Facebook. Therefore, my big question for Facebook is “Why Now?” At this point, for everyone who is not an early adopter (specifically, in the hours and days following 9:01pm this Friday), you only get the downsides of Vanity URLs – the feeling of being un-unique (John291), the lost-in-translation meaning (PandaMedic), and the following user discomfort and worry (why did I call myself PandaMedic? / I am *definitely* not SxyGirl17 anymore).

Fin

In conclusion, obviously there are many short-term benefits to adding vanity URLs, especially to smaller sites. However, we can never reduce the digital identities of everybody on a global scale into a single string, and doing so carries with it many downsides that get worse in time. If the whole purpose of this is to aid in finding, referencing, and interacting with people, we need to focus on the improved data, technology, and interfaces that will get us there, and worry less how things are named.

 

Well, I’m really happy to announce that as of today, someone is doing just that. Scientists who worked on the old 80s anti-missile defense are taking their skills and using them to build high speed lasers, to kill mosquitos and stop the spread of malaria.

I really like this kind of solution because it sidesteps the hazards of traditional solutions like pesticides and genetics, and it doesn’t seem like there’s an easy way for mosquitos to adapt to this new predator. Further, the economics could work in this, as the components are likely available off-the-shelf, and the number of units needed (10 million+) would probably be enough to manufacture nearly at cost. The only challenge would be distribution, an extremely localized problem that is a hurdle to every initiative in the third world. How exactly would you come across to your average tribal leader if you just show up and say this black box keeps disease away? I’m reminded of the Arthur C Clarke quote “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding this project and it’s part of their larger vision to get people out of extreme poverty by solving fundamental needs like sanitation, disease prevention, and basic education. Projects like this show they can really think laterally about problems which is an impressive and altogether lacking capability in many large organizations. Here’s Bill Gates’ talk on malaria at the TED conference in February:

Who knows? Maybe historians will look back and point at a little mosquito laser as being a turning point in the struggle to overcome world poverty. Stranger things have happened.

 

One of the things I love to do to train this muscle is just messing around on the internet, letting my interests take me where they will. Its really useful to sit back and experience the things as a regular user does, except listening to yourself and what you’re feeling when you’re in this process. It always feels like a personal psychology experiment – you must reflect on the dataset of your motivations and actions while browsing, and come to some research-y conclusion of what triggered what emotion/motivation/action, and whether satisfaction was found with the products that were used. Research stops when you get an interesting conclusion.

Finding something cool

My experience tonight shed some light for me on micro-blogging and what place it serves, after having finally gotten bored of my latest obsession/analysis of hulu (*). This led to memes with the introduction of a confounding variable (my housemate), which very quickly led to lolcats. I found two recent ones I loved, and finally hit the snag – what the hell do I do with these?

Yeah.. not an easy question to answer. Laugh, obviously. Laugh quite a bit. Seriously, the one below is just great:

But now what?

This reached a level of significance to me that I could not ignore. *I’m not going to leave this behind, it means too much* (i think). Pseudosignificance. How do I deal with this?

Save it? Nah, hard drive too cluttered. Stopped saving stuff years ago – that’s what the internet is for!

Bookmark it? Well, my history of bookmarks suggest that I never look at them again and they only clutter things up.

Social bookmark it? I use delicious enough, that’s for sure. But that’s more reference-y, nobody tracks my bookmarks but me (that I know of), and I rarely look at mine again.

Sign up on lolcats forums and chat about it? Well… I don’t really know those people, I prefer not to write in lolcat (see the comments section in the link of the picture), and after comment 200 who is really reading?

Vote it up on lolcats? I never pay attention to their voting system (from 0-5 cheeseburgers) because a) it’s ratings haven’t been the most accurate predictors of humor, b) nothing gets below a 3 anyways, and c) why do I care about casting one of a few thousand votes on something so non-personal to me?

Oh! Facebook it! Well, except not really. With such a wide a variety of things showing up in the facebook feed nowadays, the random a process of selection, and the ambiguous group of friends / acquaintances / business contacts all mashed into one, if a lolcat is the only thing people see of my activity they probably get the wrong idea about me. Nix ‘posted items’

Finally, I remembered twitter. Media like this image, plus maybe a quick comment, is perfect for micro-blogging (and to a lesser extent for micro-blogging aggregation). What is it I want to do with this pseudosignificance I’ve discovered? I want to convert the immediate happiness and feeling of significance into long term satisfaction. Twitter is it.

Wait, so twitter earned the escalation of commitment, while neither the content provider (ichc) nor my social life aggregator/distributor (facebook) nor my persona life aggregator (PC) did? Unexpected.

Using microblogging to throw important stuff away

What is it that microblogging tools like twitter have over identical functionality on facebook? Expectations first, commitment second. Unlike facebook’s posted items, there are no social concerns for me to post because a) the reader expects this type of content (based on the constraints of the service and the type of material other members post) and b) the reader has asked for it (by explicitly subscribing to your twitter feed). In addition, I feel satisfaction that I have a place to ‘keep’ this, and have the potential opportunity to turn that ‘keeping’ into something more – implicit ‘i’m sure one or two of my friends saw that’ to explicit social interactions around the topic. Right there is the escalation of commitment I was looking for.

What is microblogging used for then exactly? Too important to be kept to myself. Not important enough to inspire breaking new social ground. Might or might not elicit other responses. Expected type of media by those that happen upon it, though few expected to happen upon it. Semi-public. The place where these pseudosignifiant pieces of information go to make us feel satisfied we’ve given them a proper place so we can move on. But maybe not, if they, you know, really hit a nerve and create a shared experience. Then we’re open to staying around, before moving on.

Until this point, I thought of microblogging as a niche product – one that certainly had it’s place as another method of journalism, for those few that strive to be journalist-connectors or happen to be at the scene of a natural disaster or breaking news story… but not for everyday use by everyday people. The internet though looks more like that lolcats picture than a breaking twitter news story, as defined by the slicing and dicing and re-packaging of information into new formats that has happened thus far. So why not – micro-blogging as a sort-of bookmark, sort-of public, definitely opt-in with clear expectations, means of getting stuff that sort of matters off your chest and out of your mind. I can see that as mainstream.

In conclusion, my personal realization is that microblogging is like a recycling bin of information you’ve already found useful and used, that you want to live on in some way, that you gain ease of mind discarding. Everything we do creates ‘waste’ that must be discarded in some fashion, and internet browsing is no exception.

–
* My hulu insights: lacking more full eps is really a buzzkill, ads are great and i watch them, and !!i want to know more about the shows, their casts, and all that crap!! – bring in imdb-like data and more please!)

 

Although there were shades of it in my design, I never explicitly thought about adding Parkour (free running) to the mix, mainly because it wasn’t really well known at the time. After the awesome chase scene at the beginning of Casino Royale, apparently someone in the industry got on this track.

The gameplay in Mirror’s Edge looks *phenomenal*, running and jumping and using the environment in a realistic way. I love the need to think creatively about your environment in this – in most games the environment is just a set of simple constraints and does not inspire you to pay close attention to it (think about all those invisible walls you’ve encountered in games – ‘why can’t I go there?’ scenarios). Check it out:

In my game, I had thought of navigating in the third person, which would afford you the opportunity to scan the environment and see the cool ducks and dives of your character. However, I’m really impressed with this first person mode – much more visceral and adrenaline pumping.

As a nitpick, it seems like they had to play the usual teenage angst card and make it an action game with guns and some faceless government to rebel against. I would have much preferred an espionage game, because you can layer in some more nuanced plots there.

A preview is available here (thanks Digg).

 

One of my favorite thought experiments is what level of free will, versus environmental condition, make for the integration and acceptance of knowledge one has been exposed to. Why do we reject some ideas and accept others, and is there something completely independent of the idea itself that is driving that process? This question has both an explicit community aspect and an implicit one. Explicitly, we always have our place in the community on our mind – we naturally desire social harmony, and seek to minimize time and energy spent correcting others (as it is a waste of our energy, and we are cognitive misers). Implicitly, we have our super-ego, the internalization of our community experience, as a throttle on how much we entertain ideas in our minds. The super-ego makes sure we do not stray too far in our thinking, which in turn makes sure we do not stray too far from our community.

Another way to put this is the question I ask myself whenever I wonder why people come to conclusions: What is the easiest conclusion one can come to in this situation? These easy conclusions are what sustain us in the short term. Yet, I think it’s the few times that we come to challenging conclusions that we are expressing our free will, which in turn allows us to progress. This process, in the face of more valid opinion, is somewhat akin to the age old question of ‘do you do what’s right, or do what’s easy?’. If you plotted all the different possibilities of opinion v community you would probably find a host of similar axioms.

Another analog can be derived from evolution: gradual change versus punctuated equilibrium. Communities may make the choice to let the larger meta-community affect them as it will (gradual change, external determination), or some members may choose to build islands from the rest and engage in a more punctuated, self-driven change. Some of this probably sounds like regular old decision making, but it’s not a well explored area in the context of communities of learning.

In my opinion, there’s no question we need better metacognitive education: metacognition frames, motivates, and strengthens our learning, and this power of reflection is perhaps one of the few truly human pursuits. It is the best, and only, tool we have to overcome our natural cognitive flaws. In the context of opinion and idea dissemination and adoption, we need to understand how we pick our battles about what divergent information we choose to accept. Now the design challenge: how do we teach people to identify and overcome community bias?

 

Empathy is of course feeling what someone else feels, often because we have similar personal experiences. Part of our brain is dedicated to this function, and it helps make us the social creatures we are. One side-effect of this is how we anthropomorphize non-human things, such as animals – essentially we bring the feelings we have of empathy and apply them to other objects or creatures that often have certain features we identify with (big sad eyes, non-scary shapes). We then craft our own little story around them – they’re humans, just stuck in a cat’s body, with all the trappings therein (see my lolcats post below).

Mimicry, on the other hand, is about motivation and action. We see an action that looks fun, something that we want to feel in physical form. Where empathy generates automatic feeling (barring any built-up tolerance) in one part of our mind, mimicry generates the automatic compulsion for a different type of feeling in another.

The motivation that induces mimicry is something about an action we’re perceiving that is alluring to us. Some possibilities:

• We question whether we can do that action ourselves (desire to learn)
• We like the external outcome of that action (sights, sounds, etc)
• We like the internal outcome of that action (desire to feel something)
• The action reminds us of our capability and we have an audience (desire to perform)

What’s most fascinating is that mimicry is not interactive, yet it feels like it is. Much like certain online communities where participation isn’t really (I will explore this in another post).

The impetus for this post is a cute little thing called the Yellow Drum Machine… a robot that exudes a ton of toddler-like personality. When I saw it, I said to myself ‘this thing really nails the essence of fun’, yet it was totally non-interactive. Since I had just read the Theory of Fun again, I had ludemes on my mind… so why not ludemes of mimicry? The attitude could be broken down into just two key systems:

1. move the eyes left and right, and
2. bang on things.

What a simple, elegant system.

Note: Of course it needs locomotion, but it’s not strutting around, so there’s no attitude / mimicry there yet.

Checkkit: