The Foresight and Governance Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center just released a great video Eco-Tour of Second Life which showcases how various groups are using virtual worlds to tackle real world environmental issues.   The video is part of a larger project with the Environmental Protection Agency to explore how computer and video game technologies can be applied to environmental issues. Among the projects featured in the tour:

Eolus One, a virtual world “energy management system” that monitors and manages energy usage in real world buildings via a virtual operations center in Second Life.  is reducing energy consumption in real-world buildings;

SciLands (as in, “Science Lands”), an archipelego of islands for science and technology based organizations, including the UK’s Nanotech Island and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), whose main attraction is a 3D weather visualization map that depicts real world real time weather data.

Green Islands Project, which allows Second Life landowners to offset their virtual world energy consumption.  It’s an interesting project: landowners calculate the energy used by servers to run a “sim” (aka, virtual land areas) and Green Islands Project charges owners (in Linden dollars, the in-world currency) for an equivalent quantity of renewable energy credits (RECs) which it then purchases from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation.

Etopia, an eco village showcasing real world examples of sustainable development, renewable energy,  and organic living including a magnetic levitation train, a wind-solar power generation plant and an aquaculture treatment system.

Second Chance Trees is an island that allows residents to plant trees in Second Life that are then planted in real life.  Eight different endangered rainforest indigenous trees can be purchased for 150 Lindens each; this triggers the planting of an identical species of tree in an endangered region in the real world.

Sixty years after the sale of the first Polaroid instant camera – the iconic camera that captured the imagination of a market by producing finished prints in under a minute – the Polaroid Corporation announced that later this year it will cease making instant film products.  It’s the end of era, but one that most of us probably thought ended years ago.

Science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke once famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  While the Polaroid camera may seem hopelessly old-fashioned today, there was a time when it did indeed seem like magic.

I was reminded of this on a trip last August to Ipuli, a rural village in central Tanzania.  Ipuli is the definition of remote: it’s 15-hour car ride from Dar es Salaam; set in the hills of the central Rift Valley it has no electricity, running water or cars.  I was in Ipuli as part of a Pop!Tech team to document a health-center project and our four-person crew came equipped with the latest hi-tech gear: video cameras, sound booms, high-end digital cameras. 

What garnered the most attention though, was my boxy little Polaroid.  Everywhere I went people followed me, eager to have their picture taken. But they were uninterested in my fancy, expensive Cannon; what they wanted was a picture from what they called the “magic camera.” With it I was able to instantly hand out prints to people, many of  whom lacking household accoutrements like mirrors, had never seen themselves before.

After the first day I was almost out of instant film. I tried to explain to the disappointed villagers the vast superiority of my digital camera: with it, I could take hundreds of pictures, not dozens!  And I could print them out, as many as I liked! And then I could post them on Flickr, and geo-tag them and…. well, you can guess how that conversation ended.  At that point my translator gave me an exasperated look and simply shook his head.

My digital camera was the epitome of high tech sophisticaton, but my Polaroid was magic - it captured a moment, and then created another, more potent one: when someone looked at the white-framed piece of film and saw their face for the very first time.  All without USB cables, electrical plugs, printers or computers.   Magic.

Note: Our usual end of the week gig, the FringeHog Friday Five is back after a brief interruption. My new year’s resolution to travel less worked fabulously until exactly the first week of February, at which point back-to-back road trips derailed the semi-normalcy I was just becoming accustomed to.  But we should be back on schedule.  Almost.

FringeHog Friday Five: Future Bestsellers

I like to think of FringeHog as a mental whiteboard; a space to play with ideas that may not be ready for prime time and a way to indulge my inner writer.  And apparently I’m not the only one: a growing share of bloggers are using their blogs as drafting boards for their upcoming books.  Why blog your book?  Lots of reasons: to mark your intellectual territory; to translate mindshare into market share when the book hits the stores; or in Jeff Howe’s case, to prove your point.

Watching these future atoms start out as neo-bytes is a voyeuristic dream. It’s another example of making the invisible visible: we’re offered a glimpse (although sometimes not a pretty one) into the writer’s thought process.  So if you’re the type of person who shows up to the movies early just to watch the trailers, then this post is for you, because this week’s Friday Five looks at future books-in-the-making.  Will any of these be The Next Big Idea?  You decide.  (Thanks to Bruno G. for the suggestions)

Chris Anderson: FREE (Due out: mid-2008)

In this follow up to The Long Tail, Chris Anderson (editor of Wired) takes a look the many ways to make money by giving things away for free.  The book is aptly titled FREE (subtitles under consideration include: FREE: How companies get rich by charging nothing). Blog posts tagged with the title include a rich assortment of “free” experiments including: music , books and even cars.  Anderson even gets in on the gig himself, with some not-too-shabby free publicity, compliments of this month’s cover story in Wired. 

Charles Leadbeater: We-Think (Due out: March 2008 in the UK)

Charles Leadbeater’s thesis is that “new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work.” Leadbeater puts the theory to the test in his new book, We-Think: The Power of Mass Creativity, which charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning. With the support of his publisher, Leadbeater is releasing the book in its entirety online (prior to formal publication) so that “people can comment upon the text, add to it, disagree with it.” Each chapter is profiled, and next to it a running list of comments by readers. 

Kevin Kelly:  The Technium  (Due Out: ??)

Kevin Kelly describes the Technium as “a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology - one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.” Since November 2004 he’s been blogging about the Technium; his posts are thought-provoking and far-reaching, from Humans are the sex organs of technology to the inevitability of lifelogging, to the four stages in the Internet of things. All explore Kelly’s view of the Technium as an extended face of technology, as a whole system with its own dynamics. It will be interesting to see how he ties these together into a book but in the meantime, watching it unfold from Kelly’s mind reminds me of the television series Lost; the plot is complex and overlapping, often paradoxical and filled with unforgettable narrative.

Jeff Howe: Crowdsourcing (Due out: July 2008)

If veteran writer Charles Leadbeater is the Pro, then first-time author Jeff Howe is the Amateur.  Which makes it all the more interesting to see how the two authors approach the same topic.  What Leadbeater refers to as “We Think”, Howe more descriptively calls “Crowdsourcing.” His book, Crowdsourcing:  Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, is an extension of his June 2006 article in Wired in which he described the rise of mass collaboration as an economic tipping point.  In a nod to the editorial wisdom of crowds, selections of Howe’s book are (also) being released online for review and he promises to publish the “most salient, witty or astute remarks” as an appendix in the final chapter. The first chapter to be released can be found here.

Mobile Novelists: It ws bst f tms, it ws wrst f tms…

In Japan, writing a novel on a blog has become positively passé.   Just in case you missed the story, Japan’s biggest book distributor Tohan recently reported that of the 10 best-selling novels in 2007, five were originally “mobile novels” (”keitai shosetsu” in Japanese) - stories written for downloading on cell phones before being (re)published in book form.  Mobile novels (typically short stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging) have seen explosive growth: in 2003 sales of mobile novels were worth 1.8 billion yen; in 2006 the figure was 9.4 billion. Experts say the growth is due to a change in business models; when Japan’s mobile phone providers starting offering unlimited data for flat monthly rates, sales skyrocketed.  Download sites like Maho no-i-rando have hundreds of thousands of novels listed; increasingly many of those are finding their way into book form, putting the next bestseller, um, under your thumb.

Shai Agassi wants to make the world a better place, one electric car at a time.

As a World Economic Forum ‘Young Global Leader’ he was asked: “what could you do to make the world a better place by 2020?” His answer: take a country off of oil. To do so, he’s engineered a unique collaboration between the country of Israel, a major automaker and his company, Project Better Place. The government of Israel will supply tax incentives to consumers, Renault-Nissan will supply the electric cars and Agassi’s company will provide the batteries and the country-wide infrastructure to recharge the cars.   

It’s an interesting partnership, but the real innovation is the business model behind it.  Project Better Place is looking to change the way cars are paid for, taking a page from the playbook of mobile phone   companies, which operate cell phone towers and provide coverage to subscribers.  In a similar way Project Better Place plans to offer consumers a subscription-based ownership model for their cars, linking vehicle owners into the Electric Recharge Grid, a nationwide network of charging spots and battery-exchange systems that Agassi calls a “virtual oil field.”  Owners will pay a monthly fee for expected mileage, eliminating the uncertainty of fluctuating gas prices.  Combined with the government’s tax incentives, the goal is to make electric cars less expensive than gasoline-based cars, rolling out 100,000 of them by 2010. 

It’s a vision not only for the future of the car, but for a country.  According to Project Better Place’s website, if the rollout is successful it would position Israel as the first industrialized country to ‘end the stranglehold of oil on its economy’; Agassi describes it as “Israel’s Apollo Mission.”  He’s an evangelist to be sure, but he’s gaining converts. To spread the word about the possibilities of an oil-free transportation future, Project Better Future solicits ideas and support via registered users on its website.  Members offer suggestions about everything from design (”make the batteries open source”,” use solar film on the roof of the car”) to marketing.

At this recent talk at DLD, Agassi explained his motivation for starting Project Better Place was a finding a way to merge his two passions, climate change and peace in the Middle East.  As he sees it, if you could take Israel - a chaotic country - and create a replicable, oil-free model there, you’d have a shot at changing the world.  

One of the best things about LIFT is that the organizers are fanatical about getting the videos from the conference up within hours.  Some 80 videos are now up here.

If you have time to watch just one, make it Paul Barnett. With flair, humor and lots of hand-waving for “technology joy”, Barnett compares his work as Creative Director at Electronic Arts to the history of cinema and Vegas casinos. Really.  

Note: These are running notes for LIFT ‘08; for more complete blog coverage check out the official LIFT Conference blog or LunchOverIP. 

Genevieve Bell says that people on average tell “between 6 -20 lies per day”. 

Which of course makes me think: what have lied about today?  Well, I told my 3-year old nephew that if he didn’t finish his yogurt that he’d never play professional football (although the truth is that his genetic disposition will likely be the primary cause of his future career disappointment, rather than the vanilla yogurt).  I also told him that the batteries of his Lion King reader book had died.  This was a total lie, because in fact I removed a battery when the bugger was in the bathroom, rendering the book mute (although in my own defense, I truly feel this was a lie necessary to protect the both of us, as I was afraid of what I’d do if I heard the “Circle of Life” song one more time today).  And I told my mother I was relaxing and taking the day off of work (yeah, right). Ok, so that’s three lies.  According to Bell’s stats, it looks like I’m below average. I suppose for once I should be glad I’m not an over-achiever.

Bell, an anthropologist at Intel, conducted research to explore the role that lies and secrets play in our digital lives.   She starts her talk by admitting that she lied to Yahoo about her birthday.  Not a cardinal sin of course, but it did have consequences: she had forgotten her Flickr login and since she couldn’t remember her fictitious birthday, she was unable to retrieve her password and was locked out of Yahoo and other online accounts.

It turns out lying is more common than we think.  Bell says a UK survey revealed that 45% of mobile phone owners admitted to having lied about their whereabouts via text messages.  Cornell research showed that 100% of online daters have lied (usually about height or weight).  The rest of us lie for a variety of reasons: 40% to conceal misbehavior, 14% to keep our own social world ticking over; 9% to increase popularity.

The point is that lies - and its cousin, secrets - are a natural and integral part of life, and that we have constructed various social and cultural responses to them.  Lying on the witness stand is perjury, but telling a secret to one’s lawyer is perfectly legal, and in fact protected.  While most religions proscribe that lying is bad, secrets are a different story.  Secrets, Bell assets, cement relationships; paradoxically, they create trust: forms of “secret” or sacred knowledge are deeply rooted in our cultural, religious and political systems.

So what does this have to do with our digital lives?  If lies and secrets abound in the “real” world, online they positively flourish. Bells says lies about location, context, intent and identity (physical appearance, aspirations, demography, status and standing) are all possible, sometimes even required, in the context of our digital lives.  For instance, MySpace restricts access to those 14 years old and up; there are a surprising percentage of MySpace users who claim to be over 100. The question is: are information/communication technologies (and related applications and services) succeeding in part because they facilitate our lying ways?  Or are our lies and secrets are necessary to keep us ‘safe’?

Lies and secrets online are not only commonplace, they’re sometimes celebrated: the website PostSecret is a gallery of “secrets” that people have sent in via postcard, letter, etc.  (side note: PS is one of the most addictively voyeuristic sites online; it’s the 14^th most popular website and has spawned a book and community meetups).

Bell quotes James Katz, saying we’re “entering an arms race of digital deception” - that for every device that provides “truth”, another channel or device emerges that facilitates deception: cell phone tracking technology can reveal your whereabouts, but services like MobileAlibi can create a fictitious back story about why you were there (and who you were with). A newer generation of technologies have even greater potential to tell the “truth” unbidden: lie-detection algorithms on text messages and emails, GPS trackers and more.  Bell’s talk is fascinating; like most provocative speakers she raises more questions than answers, but they’re intriguing ones: is technology creating or mitigating truthiness? How are our cultural ideals and practices - something as basic and “moral” as truth telling - changing as we interact with technology?

Note: these are running notes for LIFT ‘08.  For more complete blog coverage, check out the official LIFT Conference blog or LunchOverIP.

François Grey is the Head of IT Communications at CERN, the Switzerland-based research center most widely known as the birthplace of the web and home to the world’s largest scientific instrument, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In addition to smashing participles and looking for new ones, when the LHC begins operations later this year, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually.  To analyze the mountains of the data the project will rely on the LHC Grid, a globally distributed network of computers. The approach is similar to that used by SETI @ Home which taps into the spare computing power of millions of volunteer computers to download and analyze radio telescope data in search of extraterrestrial life. The idea is catching on: Grey says today there are dozens of distributed computing projects in fields such as molecular biology, climatology and particle physics; the Sony PS3 is pre-loaded with software to enable it to connect with Folding@Home, aStanford-based project that’s studying protein folding.

A unique culture has evolved around distributed computing projects, creating tight-knit communities of volunteers.  To incentivize participation projects like SETI give volunteers “credits” for donating computing time; individuals and teams self-organize and compete to donate the most hours.  Message boards act as a social networking site for volunteers and individual profiles make participation in the project personal: Matthew Tine (aka Stainmaster) is a 32-year old Australian who has been a SETI@home member since 2000 and has to date donated over 18,000 hours of CPU time.

Grey says is science taking the distributed network concept one step further, from volunteer computing to “volunteer thinking”.  As he describes it: a new generation of projects is emerging that taps into not only the computers, but the brains of the volunteers, inviting them to analyze scientific data online: cataloguing galaxies, scouring microscope images, or mapping out remote regions.  For instance, Galaxy Zoo taps armchair astronomers to help scientists classify galaxies by looking at images and identifying whether it’s a spiral or an elliptical galaxy.  Using legions of people is not only efficient, it’s also more effective: collectively human brains are better than computers at pattern recognition, and algorithms would invariably throw out the “unusual, weird or wonderful” patterns that would attract the attention of a curious human.

Herbaria at Home is using a similar crowd-sourcing approach digitize and document the world’s largest collections of herbarium specimens; another project, AfricaMap seeks to create more accurate cartographic maps of Africa by asking volunteers to look at satellite images over the African continent and search for roads, bridges, human settlements, rivers, agriculture fields, etc.

Distributed computing has spawned distributed thinking, a trend Grey calls “citizen cyberscience”, or philanthropic crowdsourcing. It’s a fascinating concept and one that could mobilize an army of amateur scientists into service.

 The speakers are great, the networking is casual and unpretentious. But what really ties the LIFT experience together is the cheese.  Specifically: the Thursday night fondue, a LIFT tradition that this year reached epic proportions as organizers managed the super-human feat of hosting for 600 people. Yes, that’s one big bowl of cheese. 

Note: these are running notes LIFT ‘08.  For more complete blog coverage, check out the official LIFT conference blog or LunchOverIP.

On the outside, Kevin Warwick looks like your typical middle-aged, mild-mannered Brit. On the inside, however, he’s jacked his body up with most of the technology you’d find in your living room.  His experiments with neural implants, RFID sensors and robotic arms have earned him the title of the world’s first cyborg. 

Kevin’s theory is simple: as human beings, we have very limited senses - just five to be exact, and none of them particularly noteworthy.  Collectively, dogs, cats and bats outweigh us from a sensory perspective.  But why should we be satisfied with the genetic equivalent of second-place?  Why not use technology to extend our senses, to give us super-sonic hearing or ‘bionic’ eyesight?

For both ethical and legal reasons (”I’d never get permission for a test group”) Warwick has conducted his “cyborg” experiments on himself and his wife.  In the first, he implanted a tiny RFID tag into his arm which, connected to his computer, allowed him to control the doors and lights in his lab as well as operate a robotic arm some 5000km away.  In effect, his arm had its own IP address.  Another experiment extended his sensory range, in essence giving him an extra sonar sense: blindfolded he could “sense” (like a bat) when an object came close to him, just from the impulses in his arm.

In a later experiment, Warwick connected (via another set of implants) both his and his wife’s nervous systems: when he moved his hand, she felt the impulses, creating a nascent form of telegraphic communication between their nervous systems. He cautions that these are early-stage experiments, that it will be decades before brain-to-brain communication becomes a reality.  But the question is out there: what happens when it does?

As usual, Kevin captivates the audience - he’s funny, articulate and completely engaging.  Perhaps it’s his guy-next-door persona that makes the message all the more potent: maybe cyborgs of the future will look less like the Terminator and more like Mr. Rodgers.

I’ve heard Kevin speak before, and was grateful for the opportunity to spend the day with him last year in his lab at University of Reading, where he is a professor of cybernetics.  The hype around him abounds, but while he likes to play the cyborg, my sense is that his real passion is improving the human condition.  The possibilities of super-sonic senses may sound narcissistic, but side-effects of the research (ie, a cure for Parkinson’s disease) are anything but.  To cure neurological disorders or repair damaged or severed limbs (of which there are record numbers of in returning war veterans) we need to come to grips - both scientifically and culturally - with a new concept of what the human body, indeed a human being, can be.  

 LIFT ‘08 opens with a keynote from Bruce Sterling, which ends up a being a cross between a disappointment and an annoyance.  He starts with the “prediction” that nothing much will happen in 2008, that the year will basically be “crappy” and then proceeds to read (from his notes) a beautifully-written and entertaining but completely off-the-wall essay reflecting on the possible ‘futures’ of French Prime Minister Sarkozy and his new wife.

In general, I’m as much a Sterling fan as the next person (well, truth be told, maybe less so.  I don’t normally read science fiction and I never could get behind the concept “blogjects”).  But I’ve heard him give some absolutely fabulous speeches, and there’s rarely a column that I miss. 

Perhaps the plethora of speaking invitations has given Sterling the idea he has a free pass to get up on stage and say whatever he wants, whether it’s appropriate to the audience or not.   One had the impression that the extent of his preparation for LIFT was swigging down a latte and saying “let’s see, today’s Thursday… I’m in Europe… it’s a conference about the future…. I’ll say 2008 will be a crappy year and gossip about the French prime minister.”  But perhaps I’m not being fair: maybe that speech was meant for a different conference and he just forgot what day it was.

If I had come to LIFT to hear Sterling speak, I would have been hugely disappointed.  But thankfully, LIFT is about more than big-name speakers.  In contrast to other conferences that are filled with speaking “whales” LIFT guarantees a fair share of surprises - smaller names (and egos), but big ideas.  And most importantly, it delivers on that promise.  The fabulous thing about LIFT is that one can easily shake off a bad keynote, settle in and wait for real show to begin.