Last year we highlighted five extraordinary women in the Pop!Tech community.  Well, the idea was such a good one we decided to do it again.  This week’s Friday Five looks at some of the amazing women that made Pop!Tech 2008 special.

Photo by Kris Krug

HEATHER FLEMING, Catapult Design

Some speakers use animated graphics to make their point; others rely on high-tech demos (or in the case of Kelly Dobson, repurposed home appliances).  True to her spirit of ingenuity, however, Heather Fleming introduced the Pop!Tech audience to the Hippo Project with the help of a naked Barbie.  Fleming, a 2008 Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow, told the audience that she followed what she thought was a straight-forward career path: she got a degree in engineering, dutifully worked for a design firm creating “stuff”, all the while patiently waiting for Martin Fisher to call and offer her job so she could do work that really mattered to her.  She never received that call, so instead she founded Catapult Design, where she’s using her engineering expertise to solve problems for the developing world such as low-cost wind turbines and innovative cookstoves.

Photo: Sheila Kennedy

SHEILA KENNEDY, Portable Light Project

Sheila Kennedy is an architect and associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She was a speaker Pop!Tech ‘07, where she first introduced the Portable Light Project: a non-profit initiative that’s creating new ways to deliver renewable power and light to the developing world by embedding flexible photovoltaic materials, digital electronics and solid state lighting in textiles, enabling people in the developing world to create and own energy harvesting textile blankets, bags and clothing.  I had a chance to catch up with Sheila, see the latest prototype (shown above) and hear the good news: that the Portable Light project was selected as one of 25 laureates in this year’s Tech Awards sponsored by the Tech Museum of Innovation.  (Side note: another one of my favorite projects, the Solar Electric Light Fund, led by two-time Pop!Tech speaker Bob Freling, is also a nominee).

Photo by Kris Krug

MARIAN BANTJES, Artist

I’m not sure how to describe Marian Bantjes.  She’s a graphic designer, an artist, a typographer, a writer … maybe a better word would be a modern day “graphicographer”.  The definition is fitting for one whose work defies convention, for an artistdesignergraphictypographer who brings letters to life, creating as one person described “thoughtful art and artful thought.”  She left the field of graphic design because she “didn’t want to spend her life making landfill.” That’s bad news for landfills, which will most surely never see the beautiful, inspiring and provocative works she does today.

Photo by Kris Krug

SUZANNE SEGGERMAN, Games for Change

Suzanne Seggerman thinks that digital games and teenagers have a lot in common:  both are just growing up and they are often misunderstood.  While 97% percent of all teenagers play video games, contrary to popular belief the two most popular are puzzle and racing games - not violent games as most would assume.  Seggerman is president and co-founder of Games for Change (G4C), an umbrella organization which supports individuals and organizations using digital games for social change. The website is a virtual encyclopedia of games that tackle social issues such as human rights, poverty, environment, global conflict and politics. Games like Peacemaker which challenges players create a workable solution for peace in the Middle East by becoming one of the leaders in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or Food Force, a game that helps players understand the challenges of dispensing emergency aid in war zones. Seggerman is steadfast in her belief that video games can change the world for the better by creating environments that teach young people to see complex social issues from multiple perspectives. 

Photo by Kris Krug

PRITI RADHAKRISHNAN, I-MAK

Priti Radhakrishnan is looking for a fight.  And not just any fight: the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow is a patent lawyer who’s taking on some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies and demanding that they make their drugs affordable to developing nations.  Radhakrishnan is the co-director of I-MAK, a non-profit team of lawyers and scientists working to strengthen patent systems and encourage innovation in new medicines by challenging unsound patent systems globally. I-MAK (which stands for Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge) reviews pharmaceutical patents to strengthen patent examination, and selectively exposes unmerited pharmaceutical patents - which drive up the cost of essential drugs and prevent them from ever being accessible in less developed countries for poor patients. Radhaskrishnan’s team is working to create technical analyses of 100 critical medicines and patents, which will help preempt the granting of unmerited patents, increase accountability and ultimately make lifesaving drugs more affordable.

 (Running notes from Pop!Tech ‘08.  For more posts and the latest release of talks, see the Pop!Tech blog.) 

 photo: Kris Krug

At first glance, David Harrison looks more like a Marine than a linguist. With his carefully cropped crew cut, impeccably tailored shirt and serious, straightforward attitude, he looks like he should be saving combat missions, not cultures.  But perhaps his physical persona is in fact fitting with his life’s mission: to protect and save the endangered languages of the world.  It’s a task that has taken him to some of the most remote corners of the planet, making him an unlikely hero: a protector of languages, a guardian of the spoken word.

Harrison is an author, professor of linguistics at Swathmore College and director of research for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. He says there are some 7000 languages spoken in the world today, which may seem like a lot until we consider that globally linguistic diversity is incredibly uneven. In fact, 83 of the most widely spoken languages account for about 80 percent of the world’s population while the 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world’s people.

In an increasingly culturally homogenous world, why should we care?  Because languages, Harrison says, are more than just a collection of sounds and words; they are “entire conceptual universes of thought.” Collectively, he says, languages represent the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled. Every language reveals some of the secrets of how humans have survived on the planet.

Every 14 days a language disappears.  Languages are much more endangered than species, and are going extinct at a much faster rate.  While 5% of the world’s fish are extinct, 8% of plants; 11% of birds, 18% of mammals - with languages the figure closer to 40%. By 2100 more than half of the world’s languages will become extinct.

from When Languages Die

What’s lost when a language goes extinct?  Harrison says when a language dies the history of a culture vanishes: we lose vital information about the natural world, plants, animals, ecosystems, and cultural traditions. For instance, the Yulik of Alaska have over 99 complex descriptive terms for describing different formations of sea ice, a technology that has aided them in hunting and in surviving in one of the world’s harshest climates, and attuning their culture to be one of the most sensitive instruments to detect the signs of climate change and global warming. We’re facing the “triple threat of extinction“: species and ecosystems are in collapse globally; but knowledge systems about those ecosystems are also in collapse because they’re often contained in small languages that are purely transmitted orally.  

Harrison’s Enduring Voices project focuses on identifying “language hotspots” to prioritize research and save endangered languages (see this previous post).  There are 24 hotspots today, including eastern Siberia, northern Australia, central South America, Oklahoma, and the U.S. Pacific Northwest.   The goal of Enduring Voices is to support indigenous community efforts at language revitalization and maintenance worldwide. Together with colleagues Greg Anderson and National Geographic photographer Chris Rainer, Harrison visits “last speakers” to document their dying languages, sometimes creating the first-ever written records.

The process can be deeply personal. He recalls a quote from one of the last speakers of the Tofa language in Siberia, an aged woman, who reflecting on her mortality, told him: “Soon I will go berry picking. And when I do, I will take my language with me.”

Note: David Harrison’s talk at Pop!Tech has been translated into 33 languages on dotSub.

Running notes from Pop!Tech ‘08.  For more posts, see the Pop!Tech blog.

photo: Kris Krug 

DR. GARY SLUTKIN, CeaseFire

Dr. Gary Slutkin asks: can put violence in the past, like we once did smallpox, by thinking about it differently? 

Specifically, by thinking of urban violence not as a moral or policy issue (that is, what’s “right and wrong”), but as a public health one.  Slutkin suggests that “violence is an infectious disease”; that it operates like a virus, following the same epidemiological patterns as health epidemics such as AIDS and tuberculosis.  He should know: Slutkin is an epidemiologist and physician who spent ten years in Africa on the frontlines of infectious diseases. Today, he’s the Executive Director of the Chicago Center for Violence Prevention. CeaseFire is the Center’s anti-violence campaign uses a public health approach to reducing shootings and killings.

If violence behaves like an epidemic, can it be cured?  Slutkin proposes that at the minimum the spread of violence can be contained (and perhaps halted) by applying the same tactics public health officers use in dealing with disease outbreaks: first: interrupt the transmission; then change social behaviors and norms. CeaseFire employs a team of “violence interrupters” - outreach workers (many of whom are ex-offenders themselves) to personally intervene and stop violent acts in the community on a case-by-case basis. Combined with a vigorous PR campaign, the aim is to ultimately change social norms - in essence, to make violence as socially unacceptable as, say, smoking.

Sound impossible?  Perhaps.  But as he points out, we once thought curing the plague was impossible too.  That was because the cause of the plague was invisible - a bacteria, inside a flea, on a rat.  By identifying the “etiologic agent” (the root cause) and making it visible, we have a better chance at finding a cure.

photo: Kris Krug

ERIK HERSMAN, Ushahidi

Erik Hersman understands the power of “making the invisible visible.”  Hersman is one of Pop!Tech’s first Social Innovation Fellows, and like most social entrepreneurs, his work is a reflection his favorite things: Africa, technology and maps.  Raised in Sudan and Kenya, Hersman is rabid techie, a web developer who writes two tech-related blogs (AfriGdaget and WhiteAfrican) and an avid map collector. He begins his talk by saying that he was born of two cultures, but lives in neither. In reality, his cultural vertigo likely fuels his ability to see opportunity where others see crisis.

Following the post-election violence that engulfed Kenya earlier this year, Hersman and fellow Kenyan bloggers created Ushahidi (the name  means “testimony” in Swahili), a website that allows users to report incidents of violence via a mobile phone text message or email.  Reports were posted to a map, creating a near-real time record of events throughout the country.   (MB note: I first wrote about Ushahidi here).

Part of the brilliance of Ushahidi is that gives voice to the myriad of stories that would otherwise be missed by the mainstream press, but its ultimate aim is more than simply a platform for citizen jpurnalism- the goal is to crowdsource crisis information. With funding from grants and a prize money from a handful of prestigious awards (including NetSquared and Knight-Batten), the plan is to build Ushahidi into a free, open source mapping tool that acts as not only as an archive, but also as an early warning system, detecting crises before they happen.

photo: Kris Krug

ERIC DAWSON, Peace Games

Slutkin and Hersman suggest that violence is not only a disease, but one that can be visualized and mapped in real time.  But the question remains: how can it be stopped from beginning in the first place?  Eric Dawson, another Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow, has an idea: teach kids “peacemaking” as a skill.  Dawson starts his talk with some sobering statistics - American children today will have witnessed 100,000 acts of violence on television before they enter the sixth grade.  His organization, Peace Games, offers a K-8 curriculum that teaches kids how to become not just victims or witnesses of violence, but peacemakers who are able to diffuse it.  The underlying theory is that violence is a learned behavior that, gone unchecked, can lead to greater acts of violence. In contrast, Dawson thinks that the skills of peacemaking can also be learned.  His goal is to have Peace Games taught as an integral part of the curriculum, alongside math and science.And it seems to be working: he says that schools that use Peace Games see a 60% reduction in violence and a 75% increase in socially peaceful behavior.

Note: these are running notes from Pop!Tech ‘08; for more posts, see the Pop!Tech blog.  I stopped liveblogging conferences (for why, see In Praise of Slow Blogging); however, I’ll have more complete (and perhaps coherent) reflections up this week. 

FRANK WARREN, curator of the world’s secrets 

Frank Warren collects secrets.  One day he printed up a few hundred self-addressed postcards, handed them out to strangers in Washington, DC and asked them to send him their secrets.  Four years and 250,000 secrets later, what started out as a community art project has turned into a hobby, a vocation and ultimately, a profession.  Of the thousand or so cards he receives each week, Frank posts a handful to his blog, PostSecret.  The blog is voyeuristically addicting; the secrets are painful, funny and profound.

While many of the secrets expose past deeds, some reveal hidden desires.  In December 2006, Frank posted this card:

Soon after, he received this email:

Sent: Sunday, December 3, 2006 8:22 AM

This Saturday evening I will be waiting for you too. This invitation does not mean that I want to do anything or talk during the movie. But when the darkness leaves the theatre, perhaps we will look into each other’s eyes, smile, decide to get a cup of coffee and share a conversation over what we just saw.

-waiting with a white hat

That email led to the creation of a PostSecret fan site called The White Hat People, which encourages people going to the movies alone to wear a white hat, and thus meet each other.   

PostSecret hits a collective nerve because it represents the paradox of the digital age: the ability to be publicly anonymous. (Or anonymously public. You choose.)  By revealing our innermost secrets to the world’s largest audience, it offers an opaque veil for the truth: one that is both staunchly impersonal and profoundly intimate. As a public confessional, perhaps Post Secret offers relief, if not absolution, by releasing people from the shackles of secrecy.

LAURA WATERS HINSON, on “radical forgiveness”

Imagine that you have a secret to confess. Now imagine that your confession is very public, and very personal. And that your crime isn’t cheating on your spouse, but that you killed your neighbor?  That you chopped off his hands and feet, until he slowly bled to death in front of you.

Is there an arena to talk about - and seek forgiveness from - such unimaginable crimes? That’s the basis of As We Forgive, a groundbreaking documentary film by Student Academy Award Winner Laura Waters Hinson that explores the human capacity for forgiveness in the most extraordinary of circumstances - the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide. 

In 1994, over the course of one hundred days nearly 800,000 Tutsis were killed by the Hutu militia and sympathizers, making the Rwanda tragedy one of the most horrific genocides in history.  As the country slowly edged toward peace and rebuilding, the new government was faced with an overwhelming backlog of genocide cases. Approximately 120,000 genocidaires were crammed into Rwanda’s prisons; it was estimated that it would take 100+ years to prosecute all of the cases.  In 2003, in an effort to decongest the prisons and promote reconciliation, President Paul Kagame ordered the release of some 40,000 prisoners back into the community.

They were free, but many remained prisoners of unending guilt and shame.  A number of religious organizations (including Prison Fellowship, which is featured in the film) have established “reconciliation programs” in an attempt to reintegrate murderers with their communities. As We Forgive explores this concept of “radical forgiveness” through the stories of two women who come face to face with the men who murdered their families, and are asked to forgive them.

Rwanda has pledged never to forget the genocide; memorials scatter the country, including this rural church (pictured above) in which 10,000 people were slaughtered.  The bodies of the victims were left in place as they died, and today the skulls and bones of the victims remain on display as a visible testament to the horror that engulfed the country.

But is forgiveness possible?  This is the backdrop to Laura’s talk at Pop!Tech: as she takes the stage she notes that “In 1994,all that was abundant in Rwanda was scarce. The scarcities were too many to count - trust, security, hope, peace … and people.”

While not everyone agrees that Rwanda has embraced forgiveness, As We Forgive is a haunting, provocative and ultimately inspiring film that asks the question: in an age of conflict, what does justice really mean?

Running Notes from SXSW ‘08; for more blog coverage check out: the SXSW Interactive Community Blog.

If you’re over the age of 35, don’t bother reading the rest of this post. 

Why? Because what follows will likely be incomprehensible to you in the same way that portable, pocket-sized wireless telephones once seemed like objects of science fiction to a generation before you. In short, you’re not going to get it, and you’ll likely finish reading this post feeling like you don’t understand anything about web 2.0, or technology in general, and that the future is passing you by.  Which is likely true.

That said, if you want to know what your kids will be doing for the rest of the online lives, read on.

One of the highlights of SXSW Interactive was the panel PMOG: The Web as a Play Field.  PMOG stands for “Passively Multiplayer Online Game”; according to game designer Merci Hammon, PMOG “transforms the existing topography of the internet into a game world for players to vandalize, annotate, and curate.”  Huh? In short, it’s a new online game that turns the web into a game world. What that means in a practical sense is that players download a plug-in for their Firefox web browser.  In the vernacular of game designers and Navy fighter pilots, the plug-in installs what’s known as a Heads Up Display (HUD); the rest of us might think of it as a dashboard or toolbar. With the HUD turned on, players can leave “gifts” for one another on regular websites.

The catch, of course, is the definition of “gift”.  If the player is an Ally, you might wander onto your favorite website and find that they left you a crate filled with tools (tools being generally useful and as such, appreciated).  If the player is a Rival, however, you may find a mine that will explode in your face.  Not to worry, though: you can retaliate by planting a “St. Nick” for your rival, which causes his next mine not to work.  

There are two main differences between PMOG and other multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft or Everquest.  The first (and key) difference is that PMOG is played asynchronously, meaning you don’t need to be online at the same time as other players to participate.  You also don’t need to be in the same space: because PMOG uses the entire web as the game world, players don’t have to download (or play on) a separate platform. There’s no Second Life-type of world: PMOG simply creates an additional layer onto the existing architecture of the web.

All of this means that if you can’t spare a few dozen hours a week to play World of Warcraft, you can turn your everyday web surfing into a game (says CEO Justin Hall: “We’re building a game that’s actually LESS popular on the weekends”). To keep track of who’s winning, players earn “datapoints” (the game currency) just from regular browsing - every unique URL you visit is worth two datapoints.  In addition to gifting crates and exploding mines to other players, you can also go on player-designed missions which lead you on virtual tours of related sites (for example, the “Tech News Tour” mission includes visits to Engadget, Gizmodo, Digg and Slashdot). The goal, says Hammon, is to encourage people to broaden their experience with the Internet by exploring places they’ve never been on the web. A little like StumbleUpon, part of PMOG’s attraction is the fun of discovery and serendipity (although one could easily imagine a later version in which advertisers create sponsored missions that give users some “reward” for completing them).

If all this sounds simply like fun and games, think again. Aside from being interestingly quirky and original, the basic premise of PMOG could change the way we interact with the web and with each other while online.  Today we experience the web in a distinctly anti-social way: we surf alone, interacting with content, not people. But the ability to leave metaphorical “crates” and “mines” allows us to annotate the web in a very personal way and then share that experience with others. 

As I said in the beginning of this post, many people will look at PMOG and see at best another online game and at worst, yet another way to waste time at work. But what it really offers is a glimpse of the future: what the Web can, should and truly is meant to be: a social universe where content and people co-exist - if not in perfect harmony, then at least with a cache of St. Nicks.

 In a few hours I’ll be doing a session at SXSW ‘08 called The Futurist’s Sandbox: Scenarios for Social Technologies in 2025, with my colleagues Wayne Pethrick, Jamais Casico, Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan. As the title suggests, we’re presenting four “experiential” scenarios that explore how social technologies might evolve over the next few decades.  What are experential scenarios? They’re scenarios that engage the audience in the narrative of the future story; as such they’re much more interesting to tell (and watch) and give you a hands-on feel for what the future might look like, rather than a written story in which you’re left to imagine the details in your head. Since we have the last session of the conference and I fully intend to go directly from there to the nearest party, here’s a sneak peak at my scenario, called Can You See Me Now?

As information technologies continue to propagate the world, the electronic exhaust of our click stream is generating unprecedented amounts of metadata.  Rather than a useless by-product however, metadata is a valuable resource, an untapped gold mine of previously invisible patterns, intentions and relationships.  How can we recycle and repurpose metadata to expose the hidden layers of connections between people, objects and environments? In the future will we use metadata judiciously, or will we create a world of information obesity?  How will social technolgies instantiate themselves in a world scaffolded by metadata?  Maybe they’ll look something like this:

The Unauthorized Lifelog of Cory Doctorow, Volumes 1 - 6 (pre-release, March 2025)

Turn objects into Blogjects with DNA Markers, customizable with your DNA

The new bling: iCandy contact lens stream up to 5000 info channels directly to your eye

The Emotional Forecast

Protect yourself against anger mobs with Anger Away!

More notes on the session and descriptions of all the scenarios will be up soon.  Many, many thanks to Pinkergreen Design for creating the above future artifacts!

 Running notes from SXSW ‘08; for more blog coverage check out the SXSW Community Blog.

Journalist Dan Pink (widely known for his best-seller A Whole New Mind) says the market for manga (Japanese for comic book) offers two important lessons for American media businesses.  

Pink spent a year in Tokyo studying both the culture and business of manga, where it is “staggeringly ubiquitous”: 22 percent of all printed material in Japan is in manga; volumes the size of phone books are sold as weeklies in retail outlets, bookstores carry acres of it.  It sits at the epicenter of what he calls the “Manga Industrial Complex” influencing every other form of media and entertainment from anime to video games to television. 

But despite its ubiquity, the manga industry is experiencing a slow but steady decline. How the industry is dealing with this offers two specific lessons for American media companies. The first concerns the business model which underpins the industry.  He tells the story of his first visit to a comic-book market in Tokyo, which drew tens of thousands of fans.  But the fans weren’t there to buy manga produced by mainstream companies, they were they buying fan-created, self-published manga, known as “dojinshi.”

Dojinshi often feature copyrighted characters and material; amateur writers riff on established works, remixing the plots and characters, and creating new storylines (for instance a series called BLEACH centers around the chaste relationship of the main characters, but dojinshi versions feature the characters hooking up).  How do fans repurpose copyrighted material without drawing legal fire?  Via an unwritten, implicit agreement between dojinshi writers and established media companies, what Pink refers to as “anmoku no ryokai” (literally: “agreement or understanding”).

Why?  Why would media companies look the other way to clear-cut violations of copyright law?  In essence, it’s a symbiotic relationship: by ceding some control of their material to dojinshi writers, media companies get 1) customer care (doinjinshi drives sales of original material) 2) a talent market for new, emerging writers and 3) free market research (dojinshi sales are indicators of trends in original series).  The short version is: involving the fans and ceding control is actually GOOD for business.

The second lesson for US media companies: manga is a huge missing genre in the US that can help revive an ailing industry.  Manga is spreading globally: there are manga cafes in Paris, manga-versions of Shakespeare for sale in England, and US sales have increased from $65 million in 2003 to $200 million in 2006 (see Pink’s Wired article “Japan, Ink”).

Pink’s new book “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Book You’ll Ever Need” capitalizes on this opening in the American market.  It’s the first business book (in America) written as a graphic novel; it’s “plot” centers on six lessons to succeed in the workplace.

Intuitively, the concept makes sense: IMO 95% of all business books are too long, needlessly over-complicating points to achieve an acceptable industry-standard word count.   It will be interesting to see how the American market will respond to manga-style business books.   The answer, hopefully, will be in the next episode.

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.