Lift12, Development, Redevelopment: Steve Song [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces prochains jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Steve Song‘s talk — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

lift12 1100300.jpg

Mobile access in South Africa looks great from a distance, but isn’t that wonderful once you zoom in. Zimbabwe: same thing, good coverage along big highways, but kind of crap elsewhere.

Other issue: it’s actually very expensive. Upto 50% or more of their income on mobile services. steph-note: did I get that right?

That raises the cost of innovation. Less resilience: single point of failure.

Internet infrastructure vs. telephone infrastructure.

1999: better computer through more refined computer power. At the same time, Page and Brin are improving computing by multiplying commodity PCs (superfluous computing, redundancy).

Similar: scaffolding in the US (minimal, calculated, each rod can support x weight) and in Uganda, Ethiopia (steph-note: and India)… doesn’t matter what the individual quality of the sticks are.

Copper is too expensive as a commodity. Wireless access. Not very expensive. Ubiquitous. Wifi devices will surpass mobile phones in numbers this year.

Many routers run on open source software => hack the device. Inside, but also outside. You can send a signal really far by attaching an empty can to the antenna.

Get a bunch of smart hackers together. Make it simple. Plug an ordinary phone into a wireless wifi network. Needed an analog telephony adaptor. Hence the MeshPotato was born. Not your average wifi device! Tougher, power surge resistant, can be powered by wind, solar, etc.

  • open source
  • open hardware
  • faster
  • cheaper

In practice? Device needs to be outside. Mesh network. No towers involved.

East Timor: monopoly telco, so MeshPotato used to create an alternate, cheaper, network.

South Africa: used to bring the internet 40km away from where it was.

Plumbing manufacturer in Johannesburg: cheaper solution deployed throughout the company to keep everyone in touch.

Photosynth: takes multiple photos to create a higher-resolution one. No reason we couldn’t do this with wifi.

Laurent: if one node of the MeshPotato network gets connected to the internet, the whole local network gets connected.

Lift12, People vs. Technology: Stefana Broadbent [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces prochains jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Gordan Savicic‘s talk — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

Three girls in a row on a sofa with laptops on their knees: most people find this a bit distressful and emblematic of our times, they’re not engaging with one another. But put them in front of a desk, everyone finds that normal.

Stefana Broadbent Lift12

Attention is a limited resource, it’s true. We’ve built a huge amount of institutions that do not much else than control attention. Schools, cubicles, factories… Ensure the attention is focused on the task at hand. Attention, productivity, isolation? Is that how it works?

Same thing at home. Dinner table. We also have techniques to control attention. Where you seat people, where you put the food… We also do it when we lay out our furniture.

The kind of sofa setup that is familiar to us today (facing each other, etc) appeared in homes around the beginning of the industrial revolution, when work had moved out from the home. As work moved out, the home was privatized, it became a place of refuge, focused on emotions, on leisure.

Things that belong in and out of the home changed over the years, and the last 100 years a lot has moved out (food processing, clothes making, illness and death, production, waste…). What moved in? Washing, playing, socialising, child rearing, leisure…

This has an impact on how the house is designed. Big living area, less services areas. House blueprints and prototypes. For example, the kitchen merges into the living space. The only “work” going on in the house is ensuring the solidarity between the house members. Excludes the outside!

What happens when technology enters the home? The TV fits beautifully. Even with a big screen. It’s a social device, you watch it together. No room for individual interaction with TV. But actually, the whole family watching TV at the same time doesn’t really happen much. But the placing of the TV gives this illusion. Same with the Wii.

Where do people position their devices? In public and private spaces in the home?

Shared: TV/radio. Private: PC. Preserving the private space.

Interesting: what happens when a single woman in a studio with lots of devices has a child and moves into a bigger flat? Re-planning device isolation.

Another thing that happens is that devices become smaller.

Device usage of young homeless people: no different than that of “homeful” people of the same age group. (Watching football for example.)

The big social change that is happening is that there are fewer and fewer situations in which we are accepting the social control of our attention. All these expectations about control of attention are causing friction, at work, in couples, in homes.

The little suburban boxes have been creating the isolation. Bringing wired technology in the homes is actually opening them up.

Lift12, Technology vs. People: Gordan Savicic, Digital 2.0 Suicide [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces prochains jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Gordan Savicic‘s talk — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

Are we the slaves of our online presences?

Facebook’s physical manifestation, serverfarm in Prineville. Uses energy, needs to be protected…

How many friends on Facebook? not all friends: business contacts, random people met in a bar… Project an avatar image of themselves.

When you try to shut down your Facebook account, you’re told your friends are going to miss you (as if you were actually going to lose their friendship) — then you have to fill in a questionnaire, explain why you’re leaving… Facebook has a response for every reason you give… Hard to deactivate!

Created an easy solution: the web 2.0 suicide machine. It actually cleanly cuts all connections, changes your password, etc etc — you’re sure you can’t go back.

“Unfriending”: word of the year in 2009!

In Rotterdam, they set up a web 2.0 suicide night. Including a memorial page. Facebook banned their servers. That led to catchy titles in the press, like “Facebook killed the suicide machine”. They got a cease and desist letter: aren’t allowed to scrape content or use somebody else’s credentials. Consulted a lawyer: actually, they never agreed to the ToS, it’s actually the user breaching the ToS…

Reclaim your data! Their example: a small group of people actually managed to create quite a big disturbance to reclaim theirs.

Make love, not spam!

Lift12, Technology vs. People: Anaïs Saint-Jude, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces prochains jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of  Anaïs Saint-Jude‘s talk — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

Anaïs Saint-Jude

Robert Musil. Unfinished book upon his death.

Overload? The feeling is not new. Early 20th century already… what about before? Actually, since ancient times. What’s interesting is that it is always experienced as something new and particular to one’s own era.

Plato in Phaedrus: if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember. Ecclesiastes, Seneca, Descartes, Diderot… They all bemoaned the uselessness and overload created by writing or books, things we consider “normal” today — but sometimes same criticism as what we see today for our new technologies.

Diderot: driving itch for the Encyclopédie!

How many books can we read? 4680 in a lifetime (a book a week all your life).

We aren’t the first to experience information overload. It’s part of the human condition.

We always perceive our environment as overly complex.

Let’s look at early modern period information overload. 16th-17th century. Similarities with today.

  • copernican revolution
  • discovery of the New World
  • recovery of ancient texts
  • printing press
  • correspondance networks

Instead of being perceived as something negative, information overload can perceive it as a driving force for new innovations.

Théophraste Renaudot (1585-1653) was a doctor. Identified a need => 2 innovations:

  • Conferences (1633-1642)
  • Gazette (1631-1915 first French weekly newspaper!)

He was making use of the established correspondance networks for news distribution. It’s wrong to say “social networks have just started”…

16th-17th century, the merchant network started to shift to an intellectual correspondance network, centered on France rather than Venice. Forefathers and mothers of our blogs and tweets…

Similar issues as what we see with tweets today: sparking distress, sources are more or less reliable, etc…

Correspondance networks created social groups, collected and diffused information, created public opinion, were and instrument of cultural change, and illiterate people participated as the news was then passed on orally. steph-note: see the parallels?

Athanasius Kircher (1602) — had about 760 correspondants, mainly scientists, all over the world. Voltaire’s correspondance map is also impressive (though, note, most of them are between Geneva and Paris. Not only for people far away, but also people close by.)

Information overload has always existed and is part of the human condition, generative force for innovation. Correspondance networks are not new either, they use the tools of their time.

Le lever de Voltaire by Jean Hubert: painting, you see Voltaire barely getting dressed and already dictating a letter — we’re not the first to check our e-mails first thing in the morning!

Lift12, Technology vs. People: JP Rangaswami [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces prochains jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of JP Rangaswami‘s talk — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

lift12 1100288.jpg

So, is technology good or bad?

We need to think about the reasons this technology exists. For a long time, two drives to create new technology:

  • Flying? Perceived need.
  • Velcro? Observation.

Interesting: cooking as pre-digestion or external stomach. Cooked food allows us to have a relatively small stomach for our size.  => wish to speed up evolution.

Technology: we need to evaluate it in context — e.g. Cocaine toothache pills, dentists recommending which brand to smoke..

We’re not leaving enough time to evaluate the impact of technologies.

Interesting: medicine has gone from customer-centric (holistic) to product-centric (treating the illness). Not that much progress with cancer.

We should not just be thinking the technology we have, but about the technology we do not develop. What we choose not to do is also important.

Technology is also pioneering: e.g. Foursquare, mapping the digital world. Pioneers are sometimes ridiculed, or pay with their life (Marie Curie). Innovation seen as positive today did not come without criticism and bad things happening.

Crickets biggest betting scandal figured out by somebody who had all the time in the world to look at hours and hours of tape (and connect the dots…).

Unintended consequences of banning technology (ie, Pakistan and YouTube).

How Target Figured Out Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before her Dad Did.

Sometimes technology is not to accelerate things, but to slow them down (e.g. qwerty — steph-note: wasn’t that a myth? need to check.)

Look at things holistically: pioneers exist, unintended consequences.

Development of the suburbs. Positives and negatives coming out — was television created to produce a generation of couch potatoes? Unintended consequence. Was Google created to “make us dumb”?

Online interactions to augment offline interactions, but from the outside, fear that online is replacing offline.

Photo rescue project. People giving their time and skill to help save other people’s memories.

Mermaid.

Technology itself is not good or bad, it is the engagement of humans that decides that. We still get to choose good or bad.

Every economic era has its peculiar abundances and scarcities. Hyperconnectivity is our abundance. How can we create business value from this abundance? What does it mean to have pressure on attention?

Cat Adoption: c'est parti! [fr]

[en] I'm looking to adopt two cats, kittens or adults. Should be near Lausanne so I can meet them first, get along well, go outdoors and be sociable (they will be hanging out at eclau during the day-time, where there are people).

Me voici donc rentrée d’Inde. Mission de mon retour: trouver deux chats à adopter. Oui, deux. Bien avant la mort de Bagha, j’avais décidé que “la prochaine fois” je prendrais deux chats. Je trouve ça sympa, deux chats.

Du vivant de Bagha, vu son âge et son caractère, ce n’était pas vraiment envisageable de prendre un deuxième chat.

Je suis donc à la recherche de deux chats. Chatons, adultes, j’avoue que cela m’importe relativement peu. Qu’est-ce qui est important?

  • qu’ils s’entendent bien (donc typiquement je cherche des situations genre “doivent impérativement être adoptés ensemble”)
  • qu’ils sortent
  • qu’ils soient bien socialisés et peu craintifs: ils passeront du temps à l’eclau où il y a du monde, même si c’est assez calme (je vis dans le même immeuble)
  • que je puisse faire connaissance des félins en question avant de me décider, donc pas trop loin de Lausanne!

Ils seront bien entendu soignés aux petits oignons: pas gâtés (je suis plutôt stricte côté friandises etc) mais câlinés, soignés, bonne nourriture (véto-approved) et excellent vétérinaire. Et maîtresse un peu hypocondriaque, ce qui a un avantage: aucun risque je laisse des situations se détériorer avant d’aller consulter.

Ce n’est pas si facile, comme démarche. C’est en fait la première fois que je me mets en quête d’un chat à adopter. Mon premier chat, Flam, était le chaton unique de la portée suivante chez mes voisins, une fois que j’avais reçu le feu vert parental pour avoir un chat. Le deuxième, Bagha, que vous connaissez bien, a fait le trajet Inde-Suisse suite à un concours de circonstances impliquant un déménagement en Angleterre et de longs mois passés à vivre avec sa première famille. Tous deux sort morts de leur belle mort, Flam à 16 ans, Bagha à 14.

Toute mamy à chats que je suis, je n’ai donc pas eu beaucoup de chats.

J’ai décidé que je parlerais de ma recherche autour de moi, et que je ferais également un saut à Sainte-Catherine d’ici une semaine ou deux si rien ne se présentait. (La semaine prochaine c’est Lift, et deux semaines plus tard le module 4 de la formation SAWI, après ça se dégage.)

Ce matin, j’ai fait un saut sur Anibis et j’ai assez vite décidé de faire une croix sur les petites annonces. Lire les annonces, ça me déchire entre “je veux adopter tous les chats qui me passent sous le nez” et “j’ai peur de faire un erreur lors de mon choix”. Impossible de choisir quoi que ce soit. Typique.

Donc, soit il y a dans mon réseau des chats ou chatons à donner dans les semaines à venir, soit je vais au refuge.

Je sais qu’une des racines de ma crainte d’erreur a à voir avec le fait que j’ai probablement encore à accepter que je ne trouverai pas un autre Bagha. Adopter un autre chat (même deux), ce ne sera pas retrouver Bagha. Je suis encore triste. C’est normal, en fait: être prête à reprendre un ou plusieurs compagnons félins, c’est une étape du deuil.

Back From India [en]

[fr] Je suis rentrée d'Inde!

I’m not good at transitions, at changes of life rhythm.

Switzerland to India and back is a big transition, and not because of the temperature gap. Everyone knows there is a huge difference in culture and lifestyle between these two places of mine.

But there might be an added twist. I don’t know if it’s personal to me, or if it’s something others experience while navigating between India and “The West”. When I’m in Switzerland, my life in India seems very very far away. It feels unreal, almost fictional, or like it’s somebody else who is there when I’m there, not really me.

Pune Tulsi Baug 2012 11.jpg

What about when I am in India? India feels very normal. Switzerland is very far away, and my life “at home” also fades away into some degree un “unrealness”, but with a different quality. Put side-by-side 35 years in Switzerland and 1 year in India, I guess it explains it.

(Come to think of it, my time in India is adding up: 11 months + 6 weeks + 5 weeks + 5 weeks + 2 weeks + 6 weeks… we’re approaching a year and a half end-to-end.)

Put simply, I feel there is a rift between me-in-India and me-in-Switzerland. I’m not exactly sure what it means or how to deal with it. I’m almost sure, though, that it does have something to do with the very strong feelings I have about India and Indian culture when I’m not there. It doesn’t mean I’d like to go and live there for good, or even for an extended period. But sometimes I feel a bit like I’m caught up in a one-way love story with the place.

Anyway, here I am in the plane, typing this during the hour-long layover in Frankfurt (thankfully they don’t make us get off the plane). I did not plan my time in India exceedingly well (more about that in a bit), but I did plan my return well: I have 5 full days with no serious work commitments so that I can “land” in peace, and then I ease back into my work life by attending the Lift Conference. Most of my work stuff is currently under control, either because I dealt with it before I left, or because I stayed on top while I was traveling (blogs like the Ebookers Travel Blog and the Paper.li still need an editor even when I’m in India, right?). So, I’m happy with myself about that bit.

What I’m less happy about is how I approached my time in India — but thankfully, the stress I got myself in led to an important realization. You see, my now-annual India retreat is my big chunk of downtime for the year. So I spend all year thinking “oh, when I’m in India, I’ll do… all sorts of things”. Examples of things I planned to do in India:

  • read a huge amount of books
  • write a lot (fiction and for the blog… you can see how well that turned out ;-))
  • put all my photos online, and catch up with the backlog
  • work on my Hindi
  • see a long list of people
  • eat a long list of things
  • learn many more Indian recipes from Nisha
  • do a long list of India-specific things.

What happened with that is that when I arrived in Pune, I started feeling very stressed. There was actually humanly not enough time for me to do everything I had unrealistically put in the “when I’m in India…” box. I understood this during the return journey from Mahabaleshwar, so early enough in my trip, thankfully. I started writing down the list of everything I expected myself to do, and quickly understood why I was feeling so stressed. As I couldn’t extend my time in India (specifically Pune!) I started chopping things off the list. It helped a lot. For my second week in Pune, at the end of my stay, I actually decided to plan my time a little (as much as India allowed) and everything went much better. I’ve learned for next year: diving in without any structure is not a good idea when there are things I actually want to do!

Sometime during the last weeks, I read this article on the absence of work-life balance: there are always piles of things we “wish we had time for” but in practice, even when we do have time for them, we don’t do them. We’re fooling ourselves. I need to think more about this, because I spend a lot of time trying to make more space for things I think I want to do, and failing quite a bit.

So, I didn’t read much this year. I read American Gods. That’s pretty much it. And as you can see, I didn’t write any blog posts (well, barely). However, I did quite a good job on the photos, including catching up with some of last year’s. I saw almost all the people I wanted to see, bought enough stuff to bring back to get me into trouble at the airport (Kuwait Airways: 7kg hand luggage and 20kg in the hold… even though they didn’t enforce the 7kg hand luggage limit on the way to India — I hate it when airlines are not consistent).

I think I had a really nice time. I had some adventures, which I tweeted about when they happened. Come to think of it, maybe this is one of the reasons I blogged less? I had an Indian SIM card with data, which meant that I pretty much stayed connected on Facebook and Twitter and Path. Aside from that, I have to say that having a local phone number and data connection made my life a thousand times easier (think: suspicious-looking rickshaw-driver and Google Maps, for example).

I might or might not write about these in more detail at some point, but just to give you an idea:

  • a day trip to Mahabaleshwar with a bunch of scientists
  • frogs in the kitchen in Kerala
  • swimming in the Arabian sea, both in my clothes (Kerala) and in my swimsuit (Goa)
  • many days of rice and sambar and fish/chicken curry (very nice but a little repetitive for me!)
  • trying to teach a bunch of Hindi-speaking Delhi guys a French song
  • huge piles of seafood
  • being climbed all over by a two-year-old in the train (I was not in the mood)
  • drinking 80-rupee masala chay (in a teapot, probably justifies the price)
  • a whole afternoon/evening of listening to students in Western classical music perform (very nice and completely unexpected!)
  • car encounter with a roadside tree-stump (nobody hurt but the car)
  • a very long day trip to a waterfall which turned out to be dry (food not included
  • unexpectedly really liking Goa (large quantities of seafood helped, so did the Portuguese architecture)
  • things turning out all right when I didn’t expect them to
  • experimenting the 2×2 sleeper bus: one berth, 1m80 by 1m20, me, and some unknown Indian guy (more horrified than me, probably)
  • no major stomach issues! yay!

Of course, aside from the adventures, there was also things like eating lovely food, discovering new Hindi music, spending time with nice people (old friends and new acquaintances), taking lots of photos, relaxing, enjoying the warmth (specially when Siberia decided to move to Lausanne). I think I had a really nice time and am coming back relaxed and refreshed (once I’ve got over the jet lag and lack of sleep from travel).

Losing Credit [en]

[fr] De plus en plus, quand je partage un article intéressant sur Twitter ou Facebook, j'ai complètement perdu la trace de comment j'y suis arrivé. Ça m'embête, parce que je trouve important de donner un "retour d'ascenseur" (si petit soit-il) à ceux qui enrichissent mes lectures.

I have about 20 tabs open in Chrome with articles to read. And then, I have a scary number of links stacked away in Instapaper and (OMG how will I retrieve them all) many more in my Twitter favorites.

My sources for reading this day? My facebook news stream, Twitter, Tumblr, the odd e-mail from my Dad (he’s the one who pointed me to the BBC piece on the Ugly Indians of Bangalore — check out my post about them — amongst other things). I’ve signed up for Summify and though I have barely set it up, I find good reading in the daily e-mail summary it sends me. I can also see that Flipboard is going to become a source of choice for me once I’m back in Switzerland and have normal data access on my phone. And of course, once I’m reading an article, I click interesting links in it and often find other interesting articles in the traditional “related” links at the end.

Once I’m reading an article, I post snippets I find relevant to Digital Crumble, and depending on how interesting the article is, post it to Twitter, Facebook, or Climb to the Stars.

Why am I telling you all this?

I believe it’s important to give credit to those who point me to stuff interesting enough that I want to point others to it. The traditional “hat tip” or “via” mention. But I’m finding it more and more difficult to remember how I got to a particular page or article. Actually, most of the time, by the time I’m ready to reshare something, I have no clue how I arrived there.

This happened in the good old days of blogging as only king of online self-expression, of course, but less, I think. Our sources were more limited. Concentrated in one place, the aggregator. Shared by less people, in a more “personal” way (how much personal expression is there in tweet that merely states the title of an article and gives you the link?). When I click an article in my Facebook newsfeed, I don’t often pay attention to who shared it. It’s just there.

So, I wish my open tabs had some way of remembering where they came from. That, actually, is one of the reasons I like using Twitter on my phone, because the links are opened in the same application, and when I go back I see exactly which tweet I clicked the link from. Sadly, sharing snippets to Tumblr (something that’s important to me) does not exactly work well inside the mobile Twitter app.

Is anybody working on this? Is this an issue you care about too? I’d love to hear about it.

Mais qu'est-ce qui se passe? [fr]

[en] What makes the blogger fall off the wagon? Stress. Nothing bad, just a lot of things to deal with right now. Will be back soon!

C’est fragile, la routine. Vous bloguez tous les jours pendant un moment, et paf!, quelque chose vous fait tomber du train.

Quelque chose?

Le stress.

Eh oui, c’est tout bête. Il se passe un truc pas prévu, le stress grimpe, les articles ne s’écrivent pas.

Pas pour rien que ma mission pour 2012 s’intitule “moins de travail, plus de temps pour faire mes trucs”.

Bref, tout va bien, je suis un peu prise dans le tourbillon des choses à boucler (les valises ça attendra la semaine prochaine) avant de partir en Inde pour six semaines.

Bientôt des articles ici, de nouveau. Promis. Mais oui.