epiphanatic » science|technology

Posted on 01.30.08 by jstoner @ 9:04 pm

So at least he’s not a patent troll… Some of you may recall my previous post on the subject of Eric Holzle. Well, he’s doing it: he started Scientificmatch.com, a dating site that matches people based on their major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, plus some personality matching stuff. Plus they check you out, pretty thoroughly. Something to keep an eye on, see how it goes. Still, $1995 for a membership. It’s lifetime, but I wouldn’t expect to spend that much in my life on a dating site.

Filed under: ha and science|technology
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creative implosion

Posted on 05.18.07 by jstoner @ 9:33 am

More and more businesses these days are essentially creative. Maybe art is central to their product, like movie and music industries. Maybe they’re technology businesses–I suppose most businesses are technology businesses these days. Many businesses combine elements of both–the automotive industry comes to mind.

There’s a point of vulnerability in all these businesses. When business turns down–for whatever reason–the business instinct is to cut risk. In an artistic business, that means pushing a blander product: as risk-taking declines, so does interest in their product–art without risk is, well, boring.

I see this dynamic most distinctly in the current music industry. It’s restructuring around new technology, and the major labels built around big blockbuster hits are in a state of free-fall. And they’re pursuing all the defensive business measures, working in Washington to ban as much of their competition as they can, laying off and slashing budgets. And betting on the sure things: the big glamorous groups, the conventional music… Britney Spears would have made the list, until recently.

And the most interesting music is coming from outside of the major labels. Not only is the technology changing, the attitudes of artists are changing. You don’t need to spend millions to distribute music anymore. So people who are amateurs in the original sense of the word–in it for the love–have new modes of success. You can have a really solid middle-class income, or even forgo that, and make music in your spare time, and still get heard, if that’s all you want.

This calls in to question one of the capitalistic rationales that the big labels use to defend the prosecution of piracy: that if you don’t protect copyright, you’ll lose the incentive to make music. Which is ridiculous: we don’t know any human cultures that don’t have music. We’ve had music much longer than we’ve had modern capitalism.

Now, you will lose the opportunity to “make it big.” Which is too bad: after all, isn’t all the best music produced in the name of outsize greed? I mean, I don’t hate capitalism, it does keep a roof over my head. But does everything have to be optimized according to its criteria? I don’t think so.

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patent jealousy

Posted on 01.04.07 by jstoner @ 10:15 pm

I hate you, Eric Holzle. Well, maybe not hate. But I am extremely jealous…
Some of you may have heard of the original ‘stinky t-shirt study‘:

In 1996, Claus Wedekind, a zoologist at Bern University in Switzerland, conducted what’s become known as the stinky T-shirt study. Wedekind had 44 men each wear a t-shirt for two nights straight, then tested how women reacted to the smelly shirts.

Like mice, women preferred the scent of men whose immune systems were unlike their own. If a man’s immune system was similar, a woman tended to describe his T-shirt as smelling like her father or brother.

More recent fiindings link this effect directly to genes in the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC:

…Then they looked at three MHC genes, each with two different varieties, and compared each partner’s genetic makeup.

The more similar, the less sexually responsive they were to their partners. They also were more unfaithful. The genetically similar women reported more attraction, interest and fantasy toward other men prior to ovulation. When they were not in this phase of the cycle, they showed no sexual interest outside of their partner.

So, I’m poking around at this stuff, thinking “This is the basis of a dating site! I can see it now: Get people to get their genes tested, have them post the data about their alleles to the site… it’s a simple match. If you make some money, you could even fund some research to collect more data about the impact of particular differences. You could market through gene testing clinics… damn, this has legs!”

Then, as I googled, I saw Eric’s patent application:

3. A method of matching human beings with others, comprising the steps of: (a) assembling and/or defining a population of human participants, physically and/or virtually, to be matched amongst themselves and/or any future or past participants in the context of a dating service, dating services, or other social groups or organizations; (b) producing, assembling, and/or observing the class I and class II MHC profiles of all or any fraction of the participants, where said profiles include the HLA-A and HLA-B loci in the class I region, and the DRB1 locus in the class II region; (c) comparing said profiles of some or all of the participants with said profiles of others and rating the degree of compatibility between any two or more people according to the number of alleles they have in common, where fewer commonalities represent a greater degree of compatibility; (d) matching said participants based on said comparisons.

Well, it is just a patent application, but if Amazon can get the 1-click patent, this is a shoo-in. I’m not familiar with the relevant bodies of prior art, but as such claims go, this isn’t bad.

Damn you, Eric Holzle. Damn you.

Filed under: ha and science|technology
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a sad opposition

Posted on 04.29.06 by jstoner @ 9:32 pm

In the debate over “network neutrality,” there is a sad and unneccesary opposition between two streams of innovation.

One is bandwidth innovation. The telephone companies claim to champion increased bandwith available to the consumer. They claim that without tiered bandwidth access for big websites, they won’t have incentives to build the next generation of networks.

Notice their rhetoric acknowledges only bandwidth innovation: they say the most important thing the American net needs is more bandwidth, so they can give us more channels of TV. Note also they only acknowledge one source of innovation: themselves. All Google does is freeload on their wires. Who cares where companies like that come from? After all, the telcos have such a sterling history of innovation.

The other stream is applications innovation. Companies from Yahoo to Google to Flickr stand on the other side of the debate as proven innovators. These post-AT&T-breakup companies have delivered wave after wave of new technology to customers around the world.

Notice how the telcos have framed it: you can have one stream, from us, or another, from them. You can’t have both.

It’s interesting to compare their attitudes to those of the applications innovators. In a recent interview, James Gosling had this to say about American telecom firms:

Q: Has North America’s extensive fixed-line networks held back the jump to massive mobile development?

A: No. The place it’s been most advanced and most interesting is Japan, and Japan has at least as much old-line infrastructure as North America. â€¦ They [NTT DoCoMo] came up with this scheme of encouraging third parties to develop lots and lots of services in the hopes that that would drive network usage. They came up with a methodology where you could be a software developer for their network. What it took the join was essentially nothing. So, you get two guys and a dog going off to do a game. The game would get popular and the way that popular culture works it explodes really quickly. People were going from napkin to millionaire in two months. This started this huge feeding frenzy of developers, writing all kinds of software, making it really easy for people to get at. It really hinged on having this mechanism from the phone company that allowed third-parties to do all kinds of stuff, to get great diversity.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been in conversations with people [in North America] where they go, “Well, we think DoCoMo was stupid for giving up all that revenue. We want all of it. We’re going to have our developers develop all the games.” I actually had somebody from Telus say to me, “You know, we did this analysis and we decided that there are eight apps that people need on their cellphones. So we’re having our developers develop those eight apps.” And it’s like â€” (Mr. Gosling scrunches his face with incredulity) â€” the person just so deeply doesn’t get it.

First, the kind of apps that phone companies generate tend to be mind-numbingly bad. And you can’t actually predict what’s going to be successful. In a lot of these things that are truly social experiments, you got to try stuff. You’ve got to have the creative weirdoes out there. And by and large, creative weirdoes don’t work for big phone companies. You’ve got to figure out a way to tap into the creative weirdoes.

So it seems clear that this is what causes this unneccessary opposition: American telcos are unwilling to leave cash on the table. In a very shortsighted, pre-1994 way. I mean, if anyone should have learned the value of establishing an innovation ecosystem in the past ten years, it’s the telcos. But every time their executives open their mouth, they make it clear they haven’t learned a thing.

Worse, the limit of their vision is profoundly narrow. They want to sell more channels of television. Exactly what the world needs: we have conventional broadcast, cable, sattelite, and now AT&T delivering more video. Aain, I’m reminded of 1993: a communications revolution was coming, and right-thinking folks knew it would be based on the Internet, but there were all these visions of 500-channel TV, too. And you know what, we do have 500-channel TV now, and it’s not changing the world. Is it even making much money?

Maybe it’s an organizational culture thing. Maybe the telcos need to go through the same kind of near-death experience IBM did in the mid-nineties. Maybe they just need to die. I find a scenario for their death (er, marginalization) easy to imagine. That’s a future post.

Filed under: politics--us and science|technology
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human powered vehicles in Northbrook

Posted on 07.23.03 by jstoner @ 11:53 pm

So this last Saturday, I went with my friend Todd and some folks from the Chicago Cycling Club up to the Northbrook velodorome to see the human powered vehicles race. It was a great trip, though it was challenging.

First we biked up to Northbrook, from the lakefront in Chicago. Which is 25 miles one way. I don’t think I’ve ridden that far since high school. Not to mention that these CCC types were very serious cyclists. The spandex, the fancy bikes, the 25-mile-a-day bike commute to work…on my city clunker backup bike I was having trouble keeping up. I’m not in bad shape, but I’m more strength-fit than endurance-fit. So it was a trial.

But it was worth it. The velodrome in Northbrook is kinda cool, but the HPVs were awesome. The Barracuda was a big banana-yellow full-fairing machine, that got up to 42 miles/hour. In a 100 lap race it lapped the next fastest competitor five times. You could only see a little bit of the rider’s head sticking up in the canopy, and he was riding hard. I think he averaged in the high thirties. I kept thinking of the old Heart song: “Dum-da-da-Dum-da-da-Dum-da-da-Dum-da-da-Dum-da-da-Da-Da…”

I got to check out some of the bikes up close. Some of the coolest ones were “stock,” or non-fairing bikes. There were a number of Velokraft bikes. Velokraft is a Polish company that makes these carbon-fiber frames that are ridiculously light and super low. The frames on the site are in the 5 1/2 pound range. Some were also front-wheel drive, which was interesting. Some also had solid carbon-fiber wheels. Feel the techo-lust.

It was also interesting to hear about the development of the technology. It’s very much an ad-hoc competitive field, with people of varying degrees of engineering professionalism. There was the guy in a crash last year: he had mounted a camera on top of his bike, and the wire between the cam and the screen got caught in one of his wheels. He was blinded, and he slammed into a post. I think they banned camera bikes after that.

Aso, it seems that trikes are out, too. Three wheeled low racers were big until they started losing races.

The world record stands right now at 81 miles/hour. It’s increased about 20 miles/hour in the last few years. They seem to think 100 is possible soon. imagine doing 100 miles an hour under your own power.

I wish we had gotten to stay for the stock race. It would have been cool to see those Velokraft bikes in action.

Filed under: bike and science|technology
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in the grip of techno-lust

Posted on 06.21.03 by jstoner @ 11:41 pm

must… have… so… cool…

The Medtronic Mag Pro, used by an Autralian research neurologist, is used to selectively activate and supress different areas of the brain, to elicit savant-like capabilities, enhanced creativity and mathematical abilities among other things. Really really hard things like instantaneous recognition of large prime numbers. For the non-mathematicians, it’s a very difficult thing to do.

All of this is based on theories about autism and autisitc savants The article explains it well enough. Suffice it to say, maybe you really do only use ten per cent of your brain.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. I’m reminded of the science fiction of Ted Chiang, one of the better speculators about enhanced intelligence. His collection of short stories, Stories of your Life and Others is superb.

A personal note: I wonder if such a device could treat my dystonia, without brain surgery or drugs that render me unable to finish a sentence.

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extreme programming: some first impressions

Posted on 05.19.03 by jstoner @ 1:04 pm

This post is pretty techie; my non-techie readers may want to ignore it. I promise I’ll try to be less esoteric.

You techies have probably heard all about Extreme Programming. I myself am familiar with the ideas, though I’m only begining to experiment with using them. I have not fully integrated test-first methodology into my development habits, but I do operate in a highly iterative fashion as I write code. I can see the benefits as I alter my habits and move in that direction. I think the coding and testing XP processes look generally salutary.

The problems I see in XP are more at the front-end of the process, working with business stakeholders in a highly iterative and interactive fashion. There seem to be some assumptions there:

that software developers can function well as business analysts: That they can communicate effectively with non-technical personnel; that they understand the business of the customer; that they have well-developed business sense;
that management is willing to cede some authority/accountability in favor of the flexibility created by a more give-and-take relationship between IT and its customers;
fundamentally, that political boundaries between core business and IT organizations–internal and external–are essentially superfluous.

I would like to work in an organization where these assumptions are true. But my experience indicates they don’t always hold. If these assumptions hold in your organization, you’ve already solved or avoided a bunch of problems much more difficult than anything XP addresses.

The gurus who came up with XP seem a little shortsighted. A lot of methodolgy movements seem to spring out of the “hey, this thing works, lets bottle it and sell it” impulse; it’s interesting to note what someone chooses to put in the bottle.

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