The title refers to The Maths, people! Get your minds out of the gutter for once, will you? Jeez!

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Jon Udell is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on “Rethinking the community calendar.”

He begins by projecting the Berkman Web page for this event. He says it should be doing two things. First, it should enable humans visiting the event to get info. Second, it should make the data available to other calendars. There is an RSS feed on the page, but the machine-readable data in it does not include calendar info. The calendar info is there, but as mere text, not marked up as data. RSS feeds tend to be used to syndicate content, not data.

Jon takes blogs as an example of how syndicated feeds work. There are blog sites like WordPress or Userland that publish blogs. There are services that aggregate the feeds from the publishers; they’re registries. And there are tools that let users subscribe to feeds. The feed that you publish is your authoritative representation of yourself. (Dave Winer’s Userland fits into all three, Jon points out.)

iCalendar is the RSS of calendars, Jon says. We’ve had this standard for 10 years. Fairly recently, you can publish right out of your calendar. So, Jon envisions an analogue to the blogging ecosystem that has syndication hubs for calendar information. The publishers are sites like eventful, eventbrite, and Google Calendar. Subscribers might be community calendars, events calendars, etc. Jon is especially excited about individuals publishing events.

There are already about 50 hubs. Most are geographic, but some are topical. Jon is writing for Azure (Microsoft’s cloud server), but it’s open source. Jon points to a Stanford page that has an ical feed. Then he shows what the hub looks like. The hub is not designed primarily for end user access, although it provides an html view. The hub Stanford is using (InMenlo) happens to use Google calendar as a way to display its aggregated data feeds.

For Jon, this app is a demonstration of some what he calls the Elmcity Principles:

1. Data has structure

2. It can be transformed. E.g., into a human-readable form, or into another data format.

3. It can be syndicated.

Jon then applies this to calendar info. iCal provides a structure. It can be transformed int XML, HTML, etc. But, he points out, the transformations aren’t necessarily reversible. E.g., it can be very hard to go from the Web view back into iCal. This is hard for many people to understand, he says.

He points to Jeannette Wing‘s manifesto [pdf]: “To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability.” (‘Computational thinking’ as a phrase has marketing challenges, Jon remarks wryly.) Educators are feeling around the edges of this idea. E.g., Phil Libin said, in an interview with Jon, that the public needs to understand one-way encryption because it’s a fundamental concept.

Jon’s local high school publishes its calendar as a pdf file. Jon would like it to be in a transformable data format. More important, he’d like the high school to be teaching his children computational thinking. There are missing concepts:

• Structured data can be represented in many ways

• Some reps are best for people, other for computers

• Machine-friendly data can syndicate without loss of fidelity

• Data feeds and items have unique names (urls)

• Urls enable “small pieces loosely joined”

• Urls pass data by reference, rather than by value. Jon doesn’t think “digital natives” intuit this.

• I should be the authoritative, controlling source of my data

So, why is this hard? We haven’t evolved biological intutions about what happens online. E.g., in the real world, at some point in our development we get the concept of constant volume: Pour a glass into a larger glass and it’s the same value. There are fundamental concepts in the online world that are non-intuitive that we ought to be teaching.

Jon sees ical hubs as an example of, and a prototype of, some of these concepts, and an opportunity to help educate the public about them.

For example, Jon says, that using the syndication model, a scientist could be publishing on her site that about which she is an authoritative source, and publish it as a feed that gets syndicated into publishers and conversations. Because she can control that data, she can show the effect it has had.

Likewise, you could publish a book review and syndicate it to various e-library sources.

Likewise, we’ve acted as if the gov’t holds data that we demand, without realizing that we’re the soure of much of that data.

“Ultimately, this all goes to the broader theme of identity,” Jon says. Can we look for opportunities for ourselves to be the authoritative sources?

Q: Do you see a common pedagogy for approaching science, government, etc.?
A I think there are a handful of common principles.

Q: 100 yrs ago someone might have said citizens need to be conversant with how electricity works. But that shifted to a small number of people. Likewise for the pubsub and RSS models…
A: Yes, this is one of the breakthroughs of Facebook: It’s not hitting me over the head with “subscribe” buttons.

Q: How do the halves of your talk go together: The need for cal hubs and the need for computational thinking skills? What about our use of calendars demonstrates that need?
A: My local newspaper would love to have a comprehensive view of what’s going on in the community. Papers fail at this because the architecture of the solution is flawed: a central database with a single owner, and contributors bringing their facts to the database. …
A: But we’re using the old tools because the tools are simple. It’s easy to print out the HS calendar pdf. It’s not because of a lack of comprehension…

Q: (1) Ten yrs ago, the HS principle didn’t know what a pdf was, didn’t know how to post a blog, etc. (2) Why not scrape calendar info off of sites…
A: It’s being tried.

Q: Howard Rheingold is working on a book on digital literacy. And it can be difficult to the spidering/scraping because the sites haven’t bought into that.

Q: At the W3C we used to make the same sorts of pleas, e.g., separate content from data. People would push back that people won’t do it for themselves; we have to give them the tools. The kids today don’t know html. There hasn’t been a new literacy. Is it a marketplace issue? I.e., if you make it easy to use the tools, people will use them.

A: The end game (Jon hopes): when you’re born you’re given a cryptographic key to a cloud service, and that’s where your stuff goes. You control it and assert policy over it. Born with a personal data store.

Q: What are the limitations of ElmCity scaling? How can ical scale with all the language, infinite subjects, etc.?
A: The same way the Web scales.
Q: How tied is it to Azure?
A: The way a Google app is tied to the Google app engine.

Q: How do you keep loops from forming? I.e., someone re-syndicates…
A: Ical has an idea of a unique id for an event. The data being passed by reference is “uniquely minimal.”

Q: What determines the authoritative event?
A: The hub is a registry of feeds. It’s curated by someone who has authority to decide which feeds to include.

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At a meeting about the possibility of making some data available, Patrick Yott of Northeastern suggested that instead of looking for a killer app that uses the data, we ought to be talking about a killer carrot. A killer app attracts users. A killer carrot attracts those who enable killer apps.

There’s only one hit on “killer carrot” at Google in anything like Patrick’s sense, and it’s from Anonymous Coward.

Killer carrots live!

(It reminds me a bit of a witticism I heard a year or two at a conference, and that I blogged at the time: “Sure there’s a way to herd cats,” someone said. “Move their food.”)

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Erred watching is like bird watching: You get excitedly happy when you spot a new, rare error message.

I’ve spotted two in the past twenty-four hours.

One was a problem with PDAnet (which turned out to be trivial to solve) that put a line into the Console for which there were zero Google hits: “CDaemonCon 2 exits”

This morning, my Mac refused to boot. Instead of showing me a gray apple on a gray background, it displayed a circle with a line through it (“prohibitory sign”) on the gray background. It did this even when I tried to boot from an external disk. Apple seems to think this is a software problem, although I would have thought that it would have booted from the external disk. But maybe there’s something wrong with the external one.

Anyway, I’m very excited to have spotted these two rarities in their native habitats. Of course, when I have to reinstall all my software and realize all the stuff I had not backed up, I may be warbling a different tune. (It’s a new machine supplied by work, and I have been keeping all my files in the cloud. I think.)

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Rebecca MacKinnon argues forcefully in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that merely funding circumvention tools is not enough if the State Department really wants to support Internet freedom around the world. Circumvention tools enable citizens to get around government censorship of the Net, but these tools are often imperfect, carry their own risks, and require more than average technical skill. Meanwhile, Rebecca argues, there are many threats to Internet freedom other than government blocking of access fo Web sites. She writes:

A range of fast-evolving technical problems requires an array of solutions. Activists around the world need technical assistance and training in order to fight cyber-attacks more effectively. We need more coordination between human rights activists, technology companies and policy makers just to understand the problems, and how they can be expected to evolve in the next few years.

What\\\’s more, existing research indicates that many of the problems aren\\\’t technical, but rather political, legal, regulatory and even social. Other obstacles to free expression are probably best addressed by the private sector: Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be urged to adhere to business practices that maximize the safety of activists using their platforms.

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Ann Hunt is describing Primal‘s ability to let people create what she calls “idiosyncratic ontologies.” It wants to let two people have differing tags and ontologies about the same objects, and see the shared and social point of view. From the Primal site: “The Primal Semantics API helps users find material of interest in a larger collection of information. It organizes responses into hierarchies of concepts, with broad topics leading to more specific ones.” Ann stresses that it’s cool to bring together individual points of view and semantic networks.

Bob Smith of ISYS Search Software says that most people don’t find what they’re looking for on Google the first time they search. Google is an ad company, not a search company, so “you shouldn’t buy your next search service from an ad company.” Today, we need search everywhere, for everything. Bob then pitches us on Isys.

Brian Cheek of TigerLogic says he’s in the search enhancement business. Links make problems for searches, he says. Google instant preview helps a little, he says, if it’s for a site you’ve been to already. He focuses on YoLink, which provides more intelligent searching and browsing within particular domains. It’s a browser add-on that’s available for incorporation into apps by developers. YoLink mines links, extracting content from them based on your key terms. You can check-of the returns of interest and publish them directly into a Google Doc or tweet them. You can explore a set of links without having to browse to each of them.

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I had the honor of making very brief opening remarks at the State Departments Tech@State twitter Civil Society 2.0 unconference on Friday hosted by the World Bank. The room was full of people using tech to help others around the world. Heres roughly = I dont have my notes what I said:

For no obvious reason, over the past couple of weeks, two things keep coming to mind.

First, Ive found myself thinking about the first time I touched the keyboard of my own computer. It was a Kay Pro II, so it must have been in the early 1980s. I was a humanities major, but as soon as I saw a green letter show up on the tiny screen, I was fascinated. I knew it wasnt mechanical, of course, so I knew that between the key press and the glowing letter, there was logic. I was fascinated by how logic could make things happen in the real world.

Second, a question has come up a couple of times [most recently in correspondence with AKMA]: Is the Net showing us something new about ourselves, or something old? After all, the world of the Net is very weird when compared to what were used to. We think of it as a space, but its geography is bizarre: e.g., a link is a door that lets you enter a room and then vanishes behind you. If this new world is so bizarre, why have we embraced it so quickly and thoroughly?

Now, Im going to guess that we in this room believe that the Net is something new and important on the order of the printing press, or maybe fire. It works by lowering hurdles. First, it lowers the hurdles to creating new things, because we can turn logic into reality. You could do that with computers, but with the Net, we can build things together, and what we build is more easily public. Second, the Net lowers the hurdles to connecting with one another.

And, what is it that we each want to do when we wake up in the morning? Create and connect.

The Net, at its best, liberates us from old restrictions so that we can more easily do that which we have always longed to do, and that which is the best of being human: creating and connecting. Thats why this very new technology feels so familiar.

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The military is trying to devise policies to govern how our service people use social networking sites, according to a story by Julian Barnes in the LA Times. The article implies the Pentagon accepts that military folks are going to use these sites, and there may even be some good that will come from it, but the military is concerned about security. At the moment, the Marines have banned accessing Facebook, MySpace and Twitter from government computers, to make sure there’s bandwidth for more pressing military needs.

Not that anyone asked, but it seems to me that the military would do best by treating social networking site simply as another place service people will be gathering, just like in coffee shops, living rooms, and bars, and should therefore be training them in the use of social networking sites, with clear penalties for violating security guidelines. Which may be exactly what the military policy is heading toward.

[Tags: military social_networking_sites social_media sns ]

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During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had a peculiar interest in two topics just about no one should or does care about: Drivers for unexpected output devices, and bigpixels. These interests were piqued by my place of employment. I worked at Interleaf, an early innovator in electronic publishing. Back in the day, we had to write our own drivers for the rare and expensive high-resolution printers able to show off the high-res, proportionally printed, typeset-quality, text ‘n’ graphic output our software was able to create. So, I naturally used to care about odd output devices — e.g., eventually our software was used to print low-res codes on soda cans — and output composed of huge pixels.

Therefore, I was delighted to read in the Boston Globe about Artaic, a company that uses a computer to translate images into robotically-created mosaics. It’s got it all: An unusual output device that uses macro-scale pixels.

Yay.

[Tags: interleaf pixels hardware_drivers mosaic ted_acworth ]

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The AP has announced it is going to use an automated system to monitor the use of AP content on the Web, looking for copyright violations. The empire is fighting back. From the press release:

The Associated Press Board of Directors today directed The Associated Press to create a news registry that will tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use. The system will register key identifying information about each piece of content that AP distributes as well as the terms of use of that content, and employ a built-in beacon to notify AP about how the content is used.

I think there are three possible broad-stroke outcomes:

1. The AP takes an enlightened and generous view of copyright protection and its terms of use, encouraging people to link to and cite its stories, and saving its angry face for commercial thieves, wholesale infringers, and other scum. The AP remains a major source of news, fulfills the social mission of the newspapers who are its members, and our culture is better off for it.

2. The AP’s automated system is set on a hair trigger. The AP protects its copyright so well that no one ever hears from it again.

3. The AP acts inconsistently. It sends scary letters to teenagers who copy three paragraphs about the Jonas Brothers and sics lawyers on a professor teaching a course on media studies. No one understands what the AP is doing, so we all get scared and hate it.

To start with, it’d be great if the AP’s copyright warnings didn’t just tell people what they can’t do, but also told them what they can do, and encouraged us to re-use the material as much as possible. On the other hand, since one of the aims of the new system (according to the press release) is to facilitate the use of pay walls, I expect we’ll see more of the AP’s content making itself irrelevant.

[Tags: ap media journalism free copyright copyleft everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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