Signs in the ‘Hood

Sep 19

lindsayrgwattUncategorized street art, subway Comments Off

One of the little joys of living in my neighbourhood is watching the subway ads get defaced. If it was just a matter of people tagging the ads, I’d consider it vandalism, but the locals have turned it into an art form (I think there are some very creative but underemployed folks in my hood who are quite bored waiting for their morning commute to Manhattan. Perhaps a hint of social deviance as well).

Below is a scene from earlier today. Our local artist carved out the baby’s smile and found that it was perfectly overlaid above a row of teeth below. There is an artistry of sorts lurking here.

Why I’m Bullish on Education

Sep 02

lindsayrgwattRandom, Uncategorized charter schools, education, reform, union View Comments

It’s widely acknowledged that the U.S. education system is a mess.  It was, arguably, designed to train people for an industrial society – a society that no longer exists.  Most people admit that some type of reform is needed, although there’s little consensus on what is right.  However, lots of people are doing great things in education – and I’m confident that the system can be fixed (but it ain’t going to be easy).

Here are a couple of recent themes/articles outlining some of the great things that are being done in education today:

1. Teacher accountability.  It’s widely acknowledged that, on average, the quality of teachers is the single biggest determinant of a student’s success.  The trick is rewarding good teachers and punishing bad ones.  Michelle Rhee in D.C. proposes higher salaries for great teachers.  In NYC, Joel Klein uses the Rubber Room to get bad teachers away from students.
2. Community involvement.  Greet Dot is “transforming” underperforming LA schools, in part by requiring that all parents provide 35 hours a year of volunteer work at the school.  You don’t send your kids to a Green Dot school, you’re part of it too.
3. Online education.  Hot off the presses: online education outperforms traditional, face-to-face education.  What makes this so exciting is that this space is likely only going to get better.  As tools like IM, wikis, etc. get folded into all online learning experiences we’re going to see even better results (a lot of the successful studies reference in the article are from late ’90s/early ’00s and don’t reflect newer technologies)
4. Emphasizing learning: High Tech High and Roxbury Prep are schools that work hard to ensure that no one is made fun of for learning.  Combine this with rewards for learning (e.g., public recognition of good grades) and fun team projects and you’ve got a supportive environment that generates great people.

Two interesting themes arise here: a) the most interesting stuff is happening at charter schools (the “startups” of the education world?) and b) if you want better schools you’re on a collision course with the union.  I’m hoping some of these memes go national soon.

Update (Oct 20, 2009):

Another interesting program reported on by FastCompany: in North Carolina, kids were given smart phones to make and share movies about how they solved math problems.  This also provided after hours access to their math teacher.  Net result: pilot group had higher algebra scores than the non-pilot group plus every student had a 100% proficiency rating (vs. 70% for those not in pilot).

Super Surreal Fiction

Aug 03

lindsayrgwattRandom, Uncategorized ballard, fiction, quotes, writing Comments Off

I just finished reading J.G. Ballard’s Super Cannes.  It was an amazing book: I don’t know if I’ll ever again find a book that mixes corporate intrigue, mass murder, psychopathy and architecture in a great read.  For those who don’t know, Ballard narratives tend to involve similar worlds to ours, except that the architecture frequently has an overpowering effect on the characters.

Throw in a dash of great lines and you’ve got rewarding literature.

For your pleasure, here are a few lines that caught my fancy.  For more, read the book:

I began to count the pools, each a flare of turquoise light lost  behind the high walls of the villas with their screens of cycads  and bougainvillaea. Ten thousand years in the future, long after  the Cote d’Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would  puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons  and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like  aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race  of visionary geometers.

…

Reflections from its disturbed surface seemed to bruise the smooth walls of the house.

…

Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the  same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical  world-view were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747.

…

The strong  sunlight had stirred up an atlas of currents that cast their shadows across the tiled floor…

…

The mental climate that presided over Eden-Olympia never varied, its moral thermostat set somewhere between duty and caution.

…

Memories jump the rails and speed off down the wrong track.

…

They were pleasantly high, but in an almost self-conscious way, as if they were members of a tontine blessed  by the unexpected death of two or three of its members.

…

The twentieth century was  an heroic enterprise, but it left us in the dark, feeling our way  towards a locked door.

…

Dust lay over the swimming pool, an overnight veil disturbed by the feeble movements of a waterlogged  fruit fly, struggling against the meniscus that gripped its wings  in a mirror harder than glass.

…

Ten feet from my kerbside table the limousines moved on towards  the Palais des Festivals between the lines of police and security men.  Helicopters circled the Palm Beach headland, waiting to land at the heliport, like paramilitary gunships about to strafe the beachside  crowds. Their white-suited passengers, faces masked by huge shades,  stared down with the gaze of gangster generals in a Central American  republic surveying a popular uprising. An armada of yachts and motor  cruisers strained at their anchors two hundred yards from the beach,  so heavily freighted with bodyguards and television equipment that  they seemed to raise the sea.

iFun

May 20

lindsayrgwattUncategorized discovery, iphone, itunes, Music, recommendations Comments Off

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying a little experiment and it’s worked quite well. In my own truly nerdy way, I’ve been ranking almost every some I listen to on my iPhone/iPod and listening to each song until the very end.

Why? Well, now I’ve got a list of my favourite, most listened-to songs. This gives me the ability to do a couple of cool things:

1) I’ve set up my iPhone so that it only contains the most recent 150 songs I’ve bought plus any song that is at least four stars. Now, when I’m on the go, I only listen to new and/or good music

2) I also use Apple’s Genius feature a lot on my iPhone. It’s fascinating to see what pops up as a recommendation. Some of my songs consistently cluster together whereas others bridge distinct genres. It’s almost become a game to figure out which songs can create the best playlists.

This experience is totally different from using Genius on my laptop. I have 10x more music on my laptop, so the Genius playlists are much more homogenous; it’s only on my iPhone where I see a bit of serendipity.

3) I’ve also created a playlist of songs that are rated at least four stars but haven’t been listened to for 90 days. It’s like coming home to an old friend (just kidding)

4) I’ve another playlist of songs sorted by play count. It’s a quick and dirty way to guarantee that I can find a song that I know I’ll like

There is one downfall to this experiment: if a tune doesn’t get four stars quickly, it is doomed to be unlistened forever. Assuming my tastes don’t shift (an unlikely assumption) this should be fine, but I’d like to think I can re-discover my older music or allow albums to grow on me over time.

I’ll have to set up the next experiment to work on that…

Travellin’ Man

Apr 21

lindsayrgwattRandom, Uncategorized customs, driving, maps Comments Off

Yesterday I had to drive up to the border to renew my visa.  (For technical reasons, you need to apply from outside the country and I’m too cheap to fly).  It was one helluva drive: 658.6 miles (or 1,060 km for my metric friends).

This got me wondering: if I had only gone one way, where could I have made it to?  Fortunately, the interpipes are here to answer this.

According to Google Maps, I wouldn’t have made Chicago, but would be in Fort Wayne right now.  I would have blown past Detroit and gone all the way to Flint.  If I was feeling Appalachian, I could have almost made it Knoxville, Tennessee.  If I’d wanted a some Southern comfort, I could have gone down to Myrtle Beach.

Alternatively, I could have headed north to North Bay or Jonquiere (where, I’ve been told by my bro, the cheapest house in Canada is available for $4,000 – caveat emptor).  Alternatively, I could be on the Bay of Fundy today, feasting on fish & chips.

Here’s the rough map:

Here are a few random things I learned on the trip:

• If you turn on the maps on your iPhone and drive fast you can actually see your location move.  I do not condone this and only found out by accident.  Definitely do not try this and claim you heard it from me.
• The Customs Service only got the new photos of Barack Obama about three weeks ago; they’re still waiting for a Biden (next time you’re at the border, glance behind the agents – there are always photos of the President & VP plus possibly a cameo by the Secretary of Homeland Security).  However, they don’t show a Cheney in his place; it’s a vacant frame waiting to be filled.
• Hitting blinding rain just outside the city after thirteen hours in a car is not fun.

Boom & Bust

Apr 14

lindsayrgwattUncategorized debt, deflation, depressions, Economics, fisher Comments Off

Way back in 1933, Irving Fisher outlined what it took to make a depression or recession really nasty.  In a nutshell: too much debt, followed by deflation that is brought on by everyone selling to reduce their debt.  This creates a vicious cycle where you can sell everything you have but you still can’t cover your debt – and therefore you either go bankrupt or need a bailout.  Sound familiar?

You can read it all in his paper “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions” [pdf].  (Note that economics paper from that era are quite approachable, unlike now)

There’s a fascinating tidbit in this paper where he reflects on the preponderance of scandals to come to light during these scandals:

The public psychology of going into debt for gain passes through several more or less distinct phases:
(a) The lure of big prospective dividends or gains in income in the remote future;
(b) The hope of selling at a profit, and realizing a capital gain in the immediate future;
(c) The vogue of reckless promotions, taking advantage of the habituation of the public to great expectations;
(d) The development of downright fraud, imposing on a public which had grown credulous and gullible.
When it is too late the dupes discover scandals like the Hatry, Krueger, and Insull scandals.  At least one book has been written to prove that crises are due to frauds of clever promoters.  But probably these frauds could never have become so great without the original starters of real opportunities to invest lucratively.  There is probably always a very real basis for the “new era” psychology before it runs away with its victim.  This was certainly the case before 1929.

You could swap out “Madoff, Leland, and Dreier” for “Hatry, Krueger, and Insull” and this could pretty much be 2009, not 1929.

There is a bit of sunshine here: we can rest assured that we’re not the first to go through something like this (and I’m sure my great-grandkids will go through this too) and therefore we’ll get through it.  The bigger question is: can this sort of thing even be avoided in the first place, or is it just human nature?

Ice Age Conversations

Apr 04

lindsayrgwattUncategorized Comments Off

This weekend my bro put me onto a new site – Arts & Letters Daily.  It’s basically intellectual brain candy: every day they cull what they perceive as ‘the best’ from a variety of newspapers and serve it up to you.

I was struck today by an article about which words have been around since the Ice Age.  Researchers in the U.K. have been working on determining which words were likely used by our ancient predecessors.  Their conclusion: “I”, “who”, “thou”, “two”, “three” and “five”.

What struck me about the article, though, was that the author’s tried to use their model to predict which words are most likely to disappear from English in the future.  Top of the list: “throw”, “stick”, “dirty”, “guts” and “squeeze”.  They do so by calculating the linguisitic history of words and essentially determining how rapidly the words have changed from common ancestors.

However, I couldn’t help but wonder how their model would account for the pace of change of technology.  Think about it: until the 1500s, few people could read.  In the mid-1800s, newspapers became mass media and now everyone is literate and surrounded by the written word: the web, newspapers, books, magazines, ads, etc.  Does this proliferation of media actually make it less likely that words will change?  Will it freeze our language as is and make it more likely that humans 10,000 years in the future will be able to converse with us?

Or will something else keep our language dynamic?  Maybe globalization will lead to us all speaking a balkanized English where each country’s native tongue

Mobile Tech 4 Social Change

Feb 21

lindsayrgwattUncategorized m4change, mobile technology Comments Off

I’m at the Mobile Tech 4 Social Change barcamp. Here are some notes on what’s going on:

The keynote is by Harvard’s Ethan Zuckerman. Via Skype. We won-the mobile phone is the most powerful tool for democracy in the developing world.

Driven by U.S. phones and tariffs catching up to Japan and also Kenya-where you do your banking and possibly job.

Opportunities for activists: mobile phones make it easy to mobilize. Three years ago 5,000 people wore black and stood outside the U.S. embassy-and no one knows who organized it. Now seeing government shut down SMS part of network: Cambodia before elections, for three years in Ethiopia. Chinese government is now sending out SMS to tell people not to go to protests.

These protests work because they manifest our social networks. People protest as their friend invited them, not because organizer invited 20k people.

Not the only tool: in Africa the best tool is FM radio. Real power is combining mobile with it. In Ghana, people who see electoral fraud and call talk radio via mobile-data is then public and electoral commission must investigate. In Congo, people can submit questions to government officials on radio show via SMS. For instance, women text in and ask if soldiers are allowed to command their houses-and Defence Minister can say ‘no’ and whole country here’s answer.

Frequently found that users don’t have same behaviour as designers. Nokia has wasted a lot of time giving N95s to create citiZen journalists-who them don’t use the phone or can’t get interviews using a phone.

Interesting project: Ushahidi. Crowdsource crisis info. Worked really well in Kenya, but struggling in Congo as people don’t have similar technological sophistication. Also did not have anyone actually run the project in the DMC-were using server from South Africa.

I led a session on Mobile 4 Health. I didn’t get to write down too much, but here are some thoughts:

For health: need to check out what google is doing via SMS in Kenya. Free calls amongst doctors in Ethiopia.

Need to look at Rwanda for innovative health care. MTN for phone coverage-3G. Fiber across Kigali!  University of Washington for weight loss flower (PDF).

UPDATE: Here are links to a bunch of related medical studies:

• SEXINFO: A Sexual Health Text Messaging Service for San Franscisco Youth
• Mobile phone text messaging cna help young people manage asthma
• College smoking cessation using cell phone text messaging
• Do you smoke after txt? (pdf)
• Participatory design of a text messaging scheduling system to support young people with diabetes
• Patients’ Engagement with “Sweet Talk” – A Text Messaging Support System for Young People with Diabetes

I Resolve To…

Jan 03

lindsayrgwattUncategorized goals, personal Comments Off

It’s that time of year for New Year’s resolutions so I thought I’d share mine with the world.  I didn’t have any resolutions last year and it bothered me – while I got a lot done last year, there wasn’t the same satisfaction that comes from achieving your goals (if I ever have a therapist, I suspect we’ll be discussing this one day).  Here are this year’s resolutions, grouped around a couple of themes:

Food

Fitness

Tech

Personal

Other

Subway Graffiti

Aug 14

lindsayrgwattUncategorized Comments Off

I was waiting for the subway in the (overheated) 1st Ave L train station when I saw this ad:

Yes, it’s been totally defaced, but honestly, I like the new version much better than the original.  In fact, one of the pleasures of living in NYC is the quality of graffiti - particularly people who deface ads.  Through some odd coincidence, we not only have the best copywriters and graphic designers in the country, we also seem to have people who just know perfectly how to turn an ad into a source of ridicule.  Wait, maybe it’s not a coincidence…