How to find lost things!

In my endless rambles across the web I came across this cute little reference from a "findologist" calling himself Professor Solomon (well it seems he was featured on Good Morning America...!??!).
Funnily enough what he writes is in accord with my personal findings. Although I must confess to some digressions:
First - as a rule of thumb if I don't find something after three minutes of thought I turn to my wife!!! If you follow that rule (which I am sure many people are familiar with) it will lead to success 8 out of 10 times. Its a gender thing, women are just better at multitasking and usually more thorough - so they perform better at this kind of hyper threaded thought process that also requires meticulous execution.
Another technique that I use is Reverse Stream of Consciousness where I sort of meditate and try to reverse my actions and/or sayings in time. In doing that I usually am aided by both visualization (i.e. - close my eyes and see it) and strong use of exact phrase or word contexts (e.g. - I ask the person who is was talking to to repeat the exact phrase they said to me and that usually evokes similar memories or thoughts)


MC

Chloe !

Terribly late - but here it is: we have given birth to our second daughter Chloe a couple of weeks ago. We are all well, except for the sleeping part ;(
I find it hard to say that it seems all i have been told by my parents and others about children seems to be true:

• Its a very tough 24/7 job


• the kids love you but take you for granted and give you hell


• The second one is much more than twice the work!!!


• Your retire from this job only at the morgue

It got me thinking about what is it in raising the kids that is so hard. My current theory has to do with the fact that although raising them is very rewarding there is no compatibility between the resources that they require to the utility/output they give. If you think of it in terms of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs you realise that what you give is (especially in early years) at the lower levels and what you get back is at higher ones. This IMHO create some of the discrepancy that we sometimes feel after 1.5Hrs of holding someone in your arms at 4AM.

In other situations in life you can see that for people to function well there need to be some correlation between these inputs and outputs -that is the reason that it is very difficult to write blog posts at 2AM but fairly easy to play ultimate until 23:30 or dance until daylight.

Well as my computer has crashed I currently don't have a photo - but will add one soon!

MC

So now I have a new photo!

Almost famous! (I knew her when...)

As I am reading through the November issue of Scientific American I come across a short blurb about a new method for attaching carbon nano tubes to electrical circuits...and who is the chief researcher leading the team? No other than Dr. Yael Hanein one of my class mates form uni. Of course I was aware of her work at the Tel Aviv University Nano center but SciAm! that is pretty darn close to being on the cover of Fortune ;) I still have some photos from the good old days that can prove that I knew her when..
At any rate a slightly more detailed account can be found here, and her homepage that also links to many of the very interesting stuff done at the Nano center is here.
MC

Someone is going to make a lot of $$ here (or: why haven't MMOVSG taken off?)

If you ask yourself what are the real basic needs or killerapps that people will probably spend money on endlessly no matter what, you will probably narrow it down to something like : gambling, sex, sports, shopping (on a slightly different note - my good friend Gil once quoted his father's saying allegedly a relic of the communist era- "there are three things people can look at tirelessly: flowing water, dancing flames... and someone else working ;)

I have been troubled for quite some time with the question of the seemingly underserved market for online-virtual-multiuser-sex/porn (MMOVSG - Massively Multiuser Online Virtual Sex Games). With the massive popularity of "2D porn", the emergence of VW and MMO's and the ever increasing sensitization thresholds one would imagine that this would take off????

Yeah - there are some beginnings like RedLightCenter a lot of talk about sex in SL center (see this for some funny updates) but by and large there has yet to surface any major adult industry player and move in on this market. A good MMOVSG site (is that an oxymoron?) to see the current state of the industry would be this place.

so here are some thoughts:

• Geography 1 - this will happen in Japan - no doubt! Why - first they are really into technology, gadgets and all that, they are way up there on the social networking thing and because of cultural idiosyncrasies porn is absolutely mainstream there (when I was working there i was initially shocked to see serious adult business men in the subway in rush hour browsing through kiddie anime porn - and i mean this in the best of ways;)




• Geography 2 - Japan - obviously 3D visualization technology is not up to par with real live video. In the Japanese market there is already a great abundance of adult anime (called Hentai or Adult Manga) so they are already used to consume non-realistic forms of adult entertainment. I read somewhere that the Hentai adult market is 200Billion Yen (~1.8B$). I think that was a 2006 number.




• First wave?: although some MMOVSG's are already out there it is reasonable to assume that the first wave of mass adoption would be in single user applications that will mimic the conventional adult entertainment experience. As always web killerapps seem to be based on taking something that is already working great and just transforming it into a new venue/level and not changing the rules of the game totally. That being said - the ability to customize the experience and share it with others is probably a really strong incentive that, over time and with market education will drive users here.




• I/O devices...!: I have been saying for a while that the whole VR thing is highly dependant on input and output devices that will enhance the experience and transform it from a cool game into highly believable experience. Nowhere is this true as here - obviously the sexual experience is something that derives from visceral emotions/senses and not from enlightened thought so the more sensory inputs you've got working for you the better. Some people have decided to bud this field of adult remote sensory stimulation "TeleDildonics" (fancy that on your business card). I would start just by taking a look at Kyle Machulis' site slashdong



• I/O 2: beyond the "specialized" devices that i mention above, obviously stuff like 3D cameras and VR goggles with HD quality will probably be a big boost to the space of VR and of course to this area as well (I know of a few companies that allegedly work on the 3D one of which is my friend's Eldar MantisVision...)



• Pornnovation - A great place to look at if you are thinking seriously about this field is Arse Elektronika - THE conference about innovation dealing with digital media, robotics, the web and adult entertainment.



• A perfect fake - this is an amazing (really) and disturbing 60 min documentary directed by Marc de Guerre about the myth of the search for the perfect human drone/fake. Of course it focuses on the female figure and touches on adult entertainment but also airs some interesting views from academia and such - really a must see!

Some last thoughts on a slightly different note:

I have long held the opinion that loud music, violent movies and porn are great avenues for venting violent thoughts and have lobbied for opening up the Internet connections of our neighboring countries to stuff like that with the thought that if you are watching BayWatch you will not go to war. Some time ago my good friend (and serious economist and novo Zionist) Yoav found some interesting corroborating evidence for that...see here in his blog ;)



MC

VR, vision and sense of self

A couple of days ago I received a post from a team mate (its in Hebrew so I wo'nt bother with it). It basically talks about two separate experiments that were carried out in Europe and deal with recreating rigorously "out of body" experiences for tested subjects by using sensory inputs from video cameras to their eyes in which they see themselves. These were both part of the latest Science issue but the two originals can be found at the UCL Neurology institute and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Laussane. ostensibly what both researchers demonstrated was that projecting people with images of themselves from the back in real time, while conflicting physical sensory inputs (touch) to their bodies, created a perception of being outside ones own body.
As an anecdotal side note - about 10 years ago while at a government research facility and dealing with stereo vision I had pondered seriously on the implications of manipulating the points of view of our eyes and what effect that might have on our perception. My concept was somewhat different and basically talked about using the same video camera feed but with one "eye" set to normal and the other changing perspectives. I hypothesized that as long as the two images were towards the front of the subject (such that when she moves to her "real" front both eyes get closer to the far wall) she will retain her sense of balance and self. I expected that once this relation was broken (say one camera was 90 degrees to the other, or pointed backwards) our consciousness would break down and our sense of self localization could suffer. Unfortunately this was not part of the agenda at the time and I never returned to it. I wonder if some of the neuroscientists looking into this field could take on this experiment...
At any rate out of body experiences connect directly to the issue of self and the connection of our physical and mental existence as a unified pair. This has been something revisited by many philosophers theologists, cognitive scientists and even physicists over the years and seems to be a critical hub of both social science, brain and neurology, physics and artificial intelligence and a hotly debated issue these days.

MC

First win for the Israeli Junior Ultimate National team in EUC07

So I have been absent for quite a while - the pressures of moving to a new house, some reserve duty in the army and just the increasing load of working on my new venture have caused a leave of absence...but I just had to jump in with the breaking news:
The Israeli Junior National Ultimate Frisbee team (of which I was one of the coaches together with Chen, Tomer, Asaf and our ever energetic Dori) have nailed down their first victory over the Estonian squad!!!!!
A really exciting event - this being only their second international tournament after world's last year (here is a cool vid from WJUC06).
Way to go guys!!
Look here for updates on our site's front page

p.s. - expect some real news form our HL team website soon
MC

Zoe's Ahh moment!

Last night the funniest thing happened - I came home around 18:30 so I could see Zoe before she goes to sleep. As usual I take off my "work" cloths and prepare to slip into something more comfortable. Zoe comes over to me with my just taken off shoes and says "Daddy, LALA" (which are shoes in her lingo). So I smile and say " yes these are my shoes, maybe you want to put them in my room?" and she shrugs me off...

Later she comes over with my just taken off socks (!@!@) "daddy - BAYIM" (again similar to socks in Hebrew) and I reply "yeah - why don't you put them in the laundry" shrugs me off again....

THEN I tell her "you know these are my pretty shoes - now daddy wants to put on his slippers" - what does she do?....

She replies "Ahh" and then proceeds on her own to take my shoes to the bedroom, take the socks to the laundry room and comes back with my Crocs (which are my slippers)

MC

Privacy: AOL and Google...tid bits

Reading in TC about AOL's move to help the RIAA track down private users that transfer "illegal" content through their AOL accounts reminded me of the lengths that some of these big boys will go to in order to continue in their losing DRM battle. On a slightly similar note here is an interesting "Google conspiracy" clip that i found at Go2Web2 - a worth while web2.0 blog by fellow blogger and Israeli Orly Yakuel

MC

Microsoft Surface vs. SapceTime - real implementation of 'cool" UI

So there is quite a lot of buzz around the unveiling of several new UI related products - the MS Surface computer and the new SpaceTime 3D search engine/browser (see the links to TechCrunch posts). As far as UI goes the concept of enhancing the GUI with 3D graphics and intuitive interfaces has been around for quite a while. Take a look at BumpTop or the great UI in the Moxi set-top-box. Not surprisingly MS Research had a long time 3D desktop project which was probably the pre cursor to some of the new stuff. As I said in the past - cool 3D UI is limited in its usability due to I/O issues - this is what will make the difference between really useful products and eye candy. With all the deep rooted "issues" we all have with MS - the surface computer is a real breakthrough in the paradigm as it combines 3D with natural input techniques to render (what looks like) a superior UX. I wonder if there are any plans to incorporate more 3D input beyond the multi touch screen. Something like a 3D pen (see Epos) could add depth to the experience...



MC

Vertical model of VW?

So I'd like to share some thoughts about how I imagine the vertical of VW might evolve from its current fragmented form. Right now it seems that most VW (I am talking about "free from" VW and not WoW style) have adapted the following structure:

• Endusers – like in everyday life people consume services and goods in the form of entertainment, education, shopping, leisure etc. They also interact socially.


• Infrastructure and service providers – these could be stores, data centers, media outlets, financial services, project integrators (like ESC), marketers (like Centric ) retailers etc. Out of these some are extensions of larger RW brands and some are local "in world".


• World "owners" – these are the entities making the rules and deciding upon the theme, content and so on. At this point in time they are key players that drive the industry forward with new ideas and concepts.


• Platforms - providers of the basic engines behind the experience (like Forterra, SL, BigWorld and so on)

Obviously some of the current VW have a few of these functions merged (i.e. – SL is both platform and world owner and as such didn’t need someone to build their world at day one). As this is an emerging vertical there is still very little clarity as to where it might go. This will also depend on VW going towards Metaverse style models that are all inclusive environments or limited functionality theme specific outlets (like MTV Virtual Laguna Beach).

After several talks to people in the industry my current thoughts are somewhere along these lines:

• Platforms are the most challenging technically and suffer the most form lack of interoperability. They take a long time to develop, witching costs are high and are investment intensive. For these reasons I foresee this as one of the places more likely to see the big names (Google, MS) so future consolidation and/or standardization is a probable outcome. With that in mind it is safe to assume that better tools for rapid deployment will lower the technical barriers to creating VW in the future.


• Service and infrastructure - right now this is a really segmented area, with some businesses just small time and others large brands. This sector could split up into two where the bottom is basic infrastructure (financial, V real estate, security, IT and so on) and on top of it a myriad of retail or consumer businesses. At the end of the day if these worlds are going to scale up most of the basic service providers need to consolidate and be big names that can support large scale operations. Moreover, leveraging their RW brand trust (say like banks or insurance) will make it easier to attract heavy clients in VW as well.


• Integrators - integrators and world builders today thrive on the fact that platforms are not easy to use and thus this function is critical for players who are not technology companies (MTV, BBC, WalMart). They make much less sense in a world where big players offer wide range services, interoperability is better and platforms are more ubiquitous. Current vertical players (like ESC or Chung) will either consolidate or shrink.
  
• World owners - right now they are the driving force (have the crazy ideas) in a wider perspective there is a very strong survivability bias - some will be big and others disappear or remain niche players. Here again big names might come up.
  

In moving from niche to global mass market VW will need to adapt their verticals to be coherent within the larger scheme of things and within RW sensibility.

MC

Ultimate frisbee, Net Generation and alternative forms of governance

Hokay
So as part of my never ending ultimate frisbee political endeavors I have been part of an ongoing discussion about the future of the sport in Israel (as board member of Flow -Israeli Flying Disc Association). Part of my ongoing struggle is transforming the way the sport here is played and viewed by its own participants. I wont delve into that too much just to say that one emerging theme has been that of how the sport is governed. For those unfamiliar with the sport (shame on you!) one of the main cornerstones around which proponents focus is Spirit Of The Game - which basically means that people take it upon themselves to treat each other fairly and respectfully and thus the rules are built around self refereeing. This has created a sort of "outcast" or "alternative" feel to the community. So when governance is talked about there is always the conflict between the "power to the people" crowd who don't want structure and want to leave the players responsible for everything - and the classic hierarchical structures that most of us (yours truly amongst them) feel are critical for advancing forward.
So...well I have started to think and look around and see what other forms of governance are available apart from classical delegative hierarchical democracy.
Thinking about the current trends in the business arena, especially the internet and new media one starts to think how the principles of coopetition and distributed co creation could impact how we do things here. Most of the material that I have come across deal either with commercial coopetition in which business entities have a vested interest in gaining traction for new technology, breaking some R&D barrier or pushing standards. In these cases they usually create a consortium or NPO or even a JV and usually declare their IPR to others, reveal some of their future plans and so on. Other instances of non classical structures often occur in international relations context (like the UN, EPI and others) some interesting thoughts on this type of interaction can be found here. In these instances national entities (which are hierarchical in and of themselves) interact as peers to try and govern hypernational issues.
Another interesting example is TakingItGlobal - a youth founded and centred NPO that encourages youth participation in political, social and environmental issues. TIG works through education programs created by its members in cooperation with partner organizations and has a heavy emphasis on web based participation.
It would seem that most of these forms of peer cooperation examples put an emphasis on deliberative process as opposed to a bargaining one. That is - instead of a bunch of disparate entities bargaining over the outcome as viewed from their perspectives, deliberation requires that prior to decision making the problems are well understood and articulated and clear metrics for the success of the process are put forth and agreed upon by the parties. This is in line with current thought regarding win/win or integrative negotiations as opposed to distributive negotiations.
What can be learned? Well it seems that no one has come up with a complete alternative to some sort of power delegation. This might have to do with the fact that deliberative processes are by their nature long. They lend themselves to important non urgent issues but fail with urgent matters need to be dealt with (think "in battle" or "in game" situations).

I would argue that the advent of connectivity and IT has not really changed the basic premise of governance - sometimes a decision needs to be made quickly and this means that very few people can be involved. Technology will however narrow the gap of applicable situations for using collaborative processes. Employing technologies like web polls, wiki's, forums and such will allow us to manage the collaboration across a wide audience and with shorter cycle times. Take a look at what the UPA is doing with the Ultimate Revolution - a strategic planning process with a heavy emphasis on member participation based on web enabled forums and data collections, as well as conventional meetings. The process chart lets you see how they have chosen to mix traditional with new.
So can we manage things differently? I believe there is much room for inclusion of new approaches into current thinking and mitigate some of the principal-agent issues that classic governance suffers from.

This needs to be done with caution - not every aspect can be freely translated into these type of processes and some aspects will not stand much to gain. The most probable areas for incorporating collaboration are:

• Strategic planning
• Rule evolution
• Fund raising
• Event planning
• League moderation
• Knowledge base creation
• Community reach out

One caveat that needs to be dealt with is the loss of "experts". Many times in collaborative processes there is equal weight put on each contributor. This means that more often than not popular views get acknowledged rather than views based on hardcore expertise (this problem arises with search engines like Google that rank according to popularity...). The UPA took care of this by manually putting in various expert groups and or decision milestones where management will be involved. This works well for a strategic issue that deserves detailed attention and planning. If we want to move a step further and create many other semi self governed processes we will need to devise an expert ranking system that will moderate the process effectively while still allowing the man on the street to push change ahead.
I will try to followup on this issue with David Barkan - who has been consulting the UPA in their process (as well as being a long time player/coach/prophet and friend of Flow...)
MC

3D I/O as VW enabler

For the past couple of months I have been pondering the issue of VW mainstream penetration as a 3D extension or hull of the WWW.

In the recent VW2007 in NYC, IBM rep was talking extensively about the 3Dnet - what he/they see as the future metaverse like internet.

So beyond the SF connotations what is really the key issue that might drive this development? Personally I feel that I/O devices are THE critical missing link in our 3D experience (of course things like BW, MIPS interop and so on are also not there yet). These devices were basically not even touched upon at VW and in a local gaming conference I attended, and are only lightly touched upon in the blogging community as far as I can see.

The 3D information revolution is mainly based on the premise that our brain processes 3D data faster and more efficiently than 2D as it has honed these skills over many years of evolution(very similar to the way color adds a lot to our image processing abilities such as depth perception, object recognition and so forth). That basically means that the optimal pre-processing of visual information requires that it be rendered in REAL 3D.
The problem is that the current 3D is a mere 2D projection of 3D objects and does not allow our brain to use the information in its fullest (e.g. - two eyes don't really have different perspectives, small head movements do not change the point of view and so on). I argue that when devices allowing REAL3D experience become more wide spread we will be able to harness the power of this revolution. I am talking about devices like haptic gloves and VR goggles and in the future probably brain implants.
The current state of such devices is that they are not there yet as far as price point, performance and usability (some early examples: PureDepth, Icuiti). They will undoubtedly debut in medical/military/research applications or in high end gaming platforms - but as the price/performance mix changes such offerings will become household favorites (just like WiFi, broadband, MP3's and cellphones). A recent article in SciAm featured two extreme high end devices aimed and the radiology field (read $50K a pop!) but it is not far reaching to think that at the rate we are going now we will have such CE devices gaining popular acceptability within the next ten years.

Most skeptics usually point to the fact that text comprehension and searching does not lend itself to 3D....I beg to differ!
Text is not only about reading. Most of what we do with text is search and arrange textual items within various contexts - like lookup something, schedule an appointment, edit a post and so on. To that end it is quite probably that 3D interfaces will drastically change the way we go about these tasks. just look at MSresearch demo to think about what could be next (and there are many others.
The reason that text is such is that it is the only form of information that is formally learned and not hardwired into our brain like say - recognizing faces. Thus text evolved together with the technology that we invented to make it (chisel - feather - fountain pen - ballpen - printing press -writing machine - computer - T9...).One has to wonder what type of text abstraction could be formed when 3D reading and writing is freely available....could we invent a new way to write and read that utilizes 3D?
MC

Overfeaturing

So over featuring has been dubbed one of the big nono's or failure factors of many startups and is a talked about issue with current product evolution in CE and consumer SW. Just a funny article/concept that reminded me of that and how bad things taken to extreme could be funny. Case in point is the Swiss Army Knife $1200 godzilla. Read a funny user report.

MC

DRM - knowledge as an economic good and hierarchies in media PART ONE

So this post started as something about DRM and intellectual property a week ago but became too long...so I decided to break it down into two parts. Here is the first:
Last week there was some uproar at Digg concerning the BluRay crack code (part of the DRM scheme they are using) and the site's moderation and deletion of posts and user accounts of people who posted it. Many of the threads concerned take the F-U approach towards the RIAA and corporate America.
One more interesting and balanced post that touched upon the issue of laws as part of the underpinnings of our society and also called for proactive approaches and for people to try and suggest solutions for the issues.
Obviously this issue revolves around two critical themes - freedom of speech and intellectual property rights. Though most people tend to focus on the first i would like to look a little of the IPR issue (an easy overview of IPR can be found .
So essentially what is the big deal with IPR? Well it turns out that the crux here is the fact that ideas or knowledge are a special case of "good" in the economic sense. Why are they special - well mostly due to the fact that they can be copied without end, and if i give you my IPR i am not left with less, and also that once you expose someone to your IPR you cannot take it back. This creates a situation where (at least according to common schools of thought) if an open economy is left to its own accord there will be very little incentive for people to create any new knowledge since they spend huge resources on creating them but cannot reap the rewards.
so the classical view was to give the creators some sort of limited monopoly for using the idea and keeping other people from using it (hence patents, copy rights and trade marks).
The main problem is that the rate at which the law and big corporations have been able to adapt to the new digital economy and information age is too slow. The result is that some entities receive unreasonable IP rights that grant them say patents over doing square roots, while others (especially so in the media industry) are helpless against piracy and digital redistribution of their material.
So to the point at hand - media. Let's review the issue again. some people seem to feel that no matter what type of media we are talking about - the solution should basically be scrap DRM and let all digicontent be free...hmm. So what would be the incentive to create it in the first place?
Some more advanced ideas talk about empowering the artists by cutting the publishers out of the loop. This is already being done by some sites offering direct PayPal donations to artists. one of the things people are missing here (IMHO) is the fact if we have learned anything form the web2.0 revolution is that quality content is hard to come by and difficult to create. Taking an idea from Wikinomics: the three cornerstones of p2p, non-hierarchical co creation are:

• Object of creation is information or culture - puts low threshold on participation
• Work needs to be divisible into small chunks - so people can contribute with small effort
• Cost of re-assembly and editing needs to be low

So how does this apply here? Well obviously not all media is the same! I shuffled these ideas around a bit and suggest looking at the problem using the following filters (this approach is by no means perfect - but I will see how this pans out):

• ease of creation (what equipment is needed, how deep is the skill set, funds, need of concurrent effort vs. time deferred effort, division of labor and editing)
• criticallity of the human brain in analyzing the media (sensory inputs, cognitive vs. visceral digestion, sensitivity to distortion)
• ease of distribution (bandwidth, QoS, device and system requirements)

[ I borrow here the terminology of visceral from cognitive sciences. Namely from Donald Norman's Emotional Design]

What is the outcome? Well considering that IPR is worth the effort only when the creation is of high quality (read: not MySpace junk, not just funny flicks on YouTube or silly photos on Flicker) here is my take on it:

Text:

• Creation -written media is the easiest kind to create. It requires only thought and research (this can take years of course), but the tools of production are these days basically a simple laptop. And owing to the nature of the effort there is no real need for concurrency (e.g. - no need for 20 people to be in the same room to do this). Granted editorial effort is needed here - but at the end of the day all you need is a wiki SW or some other text editor and time - the general scope of the creation can be agreed upon and every person can be allocated a part of the work.
• Brain -our understating of written language is 100% cognitive (it requires higher brain functions to interpret the symbols and create the meaning) we are very insensitive to distortion. as an example think of the following: I can very easily read text in any font, probably in font sizes 6-50, in two languages (that's all I know), on the laptop, newspaper, small paperback, billboard, piece of paper and so on.
• Distribution -The distribution of such media is very easy - in compresses well and can be sent in small installments and easily recombined. It is mostly device agnostic

The end result is that media in the form of text lends itself to low cost creation and distribution schemes and as such will tolerate considerable distortion and changes along the way. This is evident in the fact that some blogs or community based projects are gaining respectability as a real information source (whether news, literary or analysis).

Photos and graphic art:

• Creation - high quality media of this kind requires usually more sophisticated equipment (say good quality camera, high end computer, knowledge of art, sophisticated SW, maybe lighting equipment etc.) It might also require you use a model, travel places, test out stuff and spend resources. To effectively collaborate on such a project is also quite more difficult - it is hard to create a common understanding of the general scope and look and feel of the output (the equivalent of table of content) and all people involved need to have all their technical tid bits solved (compatible SW, same viewing settings and so on). The editor of such an effort is not just changing wording and cut'n'pasting - he is literally changing your art! Concurrency might be an issue what with models, assistants, props and so forth
• Brain - our brain is much more critical in analyzing photos - we very quickly discern poor technical quality, loss of resolution, digitization artifacts and the limits of our I/O devices in contrast and color saturation and so on. Also images are not processed completely within our cognitive brain. Some of the information goes through a complicated (and yet not fully understood) mechanism that is not completely conscious - we react on this visceral level to various types of stimuli like symbols, colors, faces, general tone and so on. This part of the experience is sensitive to small changes and to the creators ability to master these facets.
• Distribution - such media requires high storage capacities, more robust transmission schemes and are somewhat device dependant (e.g. cellphone vs. TV).

So there are less large scale digital creations in this space than in text based media - thus far.

Music - well this is probably the media that started it all (with Napster). Lets look at the details:

• Creation - high quality music usually requires some special SW and/or HW (music editing SW, musical instruments, microphones, studio and so on). It also necessitates deep fundamental knowledge on how to create music. Again it is not as easy to form a skeletal structure that collaborators can use to understand how the piece should sound - so chopping up the creation is not as easily achieved. Many times concurrency of several people is needed (sound engineer, musicians)
• Brain - we interpret music very much at a subconscious level. This means that subtle differences in the music itself change the way we listen to it drastically. Also production quality (noise, balance, distortions, jitter and other artifacts) can disturb the listener in a big way.
• Distribution - serious disc space is needed, high quality compression schemes (that means R&D effort), good bandwidth and quality of service for streaming applications.

So yeah - co-created free music is possible (mainly electronic/remix), but has limits and will usually suffer form lack of resources

Video/Multimedia/Gaming - well this is no doubt the holy grail! It is basically the Photo/graphic arts/music multiplied by say 200,000 (the number of frames in a feature length film?):

• Creation - high quality requires not only serious SW and HW but also deep knowledge of all aspects of film creation since every frame counts and any problems with directing, continuity, lighting, sound or whatever are difficult to control or edit out in post processing. One usually needs tens of people concurrently to manage such a task. Although division of labor is possible it usually works within closely knit units that have deep understanding of the need and the technicalities. Over all a lengthy and extremely costly endeavor. Just to think of this in real world examples - most high quality feature films that we have learned to expect cost hundreds of millions of dollars - most of which is CGI time! World class games like WoW cost tens of millions of dollars to create!
• Brain - obviously this is the most sensitive form of media since it not only encompasses all the others but the sheer size of the data and the interconnectedness nature make these creations very sensitive to distortion and quality issues (notice how easy it is to realize you are watching a B movie just from seeing a couple of seconds...)
• Distribution - high capacity, high BW, jitter and timing issues - what more could you ask for?

Just to get everyone on the same page here - the first feature length film (I know of) to be produced and marketed virally is FourEyedMonsters which, although is highly credited and interesting is hardly at the level one expects from a tier one blockbuster.

So what is the conclusion i draw from this? Despite the advent of web2.0 and advancements in easy to use and accessible tools for collaboration and creation of media genuine high quality creations become increasingly difficult to produce as the media is more complex. IMHO any way you dice it Mission Impossible III level films cannot be made with low budgets and by sparse teams of loosely coupled individuals, and this will probably remain true for quite some time to come. So why is a large and loud group of people so disrespectful to the need of the creators to recoup their development effort and funds by exercising their legitimate right to protect their IPR (whether through DRM or other means)?

MC

OSINT, Google and the USPTO

So we are familiar with the USPTO...
Traditionally searching it is a nightmare since the interface is so bad and no real effort to facilitate searching has been done.
So along comes Google and creates the mostly wonderful patent search engine. A sigh of relief? Somewhat but not really. For some reason they have decided not to do the most obvious thing: create a really good solution to this mostly not very difficult problem.
Patents are a quite limited and structured form of data. They are limited in numbers, are mostly text, have set internal structure and self reference already built in. This would be a classic case where OSINT with its various application of data mining and classification combined with stronger semantic engine and new forms of graphic representations.
Some examples of what I am talking about can be found in the the ever changing space of specialized search engines that pop up in the web2.0 sphere. Take a look at Mooter and Axioma for a couple of examples.
So what do I propose? Here are some ideas that come to mind (not exhaustive by any means):

• Use tags, labels and color coding for critical information (like author, assignees etc.)
• Create visualizations of datasets (e.g. all patents by author and what fields they are in, what space is a certain company involved in)
• highlight interconnects (who cites this patent? what field are they applying this in?)
• "People reading this patent also read..."

Of course putting in the provisionals is also key...and maybe integrating PCT...

I am admittedly not familiar with professional grade patent search tools but from what I hear they also lack these features and depend on hard work, deep knowledge of the database and material and luck...

Why has this not happened?

MC

Photos!

So I received some critical comments form friends - saying the blog is too serious and no fun to read and I should add photos - so I did.

The permanent photo on the main page is of Zoe eating a Popsicle!

The one above is of myself and my co-captain Yoav during a tourney in April (ultimate frisbee!) we are so serious!!! (visit our website) Photo taken by Hannah.

I will make an effort to be more lively in the future!

MC

Mortality - is there hope...?

A colleague's father just past away a while ago. I believe he was 55 or so... it brought back some of my own thoughts in the past couple of years on the issue of mortality.
I guess a few things came together for me in a loud wakeup call:

I began to notice that my dad was not able to function his usual...getting tired quickly and needing my help with some physical stuff

My own health, although still great is not what it used to be... feeling my younger self slip away.

My 47 year old brother had some health issues - they were all benign..but still

Reading Eli Weisel's Night - especially the part where he talks about his father's dying moments and the emotional torment that he felt was the darkest part of his Holocaust abyss

But most of all I think it was the birth of my first daughter - Zoe. It was really a revelation and an incredible experience in many ways (I am sure every parent knows what I'm talking about) but it also brought a new sense to time - children are wonderful yet frightening metrics for our own demise and to the passing of time. Since they change so noticeably you begin to feel time flowing by. It also made me realize that no matter how good I feel now, how cool I might think I am Zoe will never really know me as I perceive myself to be at this point. For her I will be a 50 something old man most of his life behind him!

Of course everyone thinks of mortality, and this is not the first time by any means for me (my mother still recalls how at the age of eight I screamed from the shower saying something like "we are all gonna die - you, dad and me") but i think that having children changes everything including your view of life and death. For me it sort of symbolizes the beginning of the end.

Obviously this issue has occupied many minds ever since the dawn of man...and I wonder where exactly are we going with this. Reading some of the recent issues of Scientific American and other papers on robotics and AI it seems there are some converging trends in Nanotech Biotech and computing that will eventually change the way we live and the way we die.

Some of these advancements have to do with health issues like fighting cancer, anti aging, nerve repair or organ regeneration - but the interesting part for me is reading about augmented brain technology and the fact that we are not very far away from being able to engage not only in turbo charging our memory but maybe in actual mind uploading so what will the outcome be? The consequences of robbing man kind of mortality are of course not clear. Probably, at least for non religious crowd, the real issue lies with the continuity of consciousness (a la immortality test) and assume linear causality (unlike quantum immortality). Obviously the mere physical reincarnation is, by most accounts meaningless (popularized by motion pictures like Island and AeonFlux ). One wonders what would unending existence type of scenario do to the structure of so called humanity. Some accounts talk about stagnation and lack of any motivation others tend to look at the outcome as engineered heaven while yet others argue that existence that cannot be terminated will inevitably lead to misery as the conscious entity will not be able to commit willful suicide in cases where it no longer desires to continue an unwanted existence.

ultimately it seems that humans' philosophy that consciousness is what separates man from animals will be our demise. With that kind of definition it seems more than plausible that artificial entities with sufficient memory space, computing power and probably parallel processing and self referencing will very soon be able to be effectively self aware and will thus be effectively human under these terms (see Hans Moravec and The Singularity Institute for some data). Beyond that point we will need to face the very difficult questions of what constitutes life and death and re-examine our consciousness based theories. It might turn out that multiple consciousness and mind connectedness scenarios where an abstract conscious entity of super human intelligence and infinite existence come to "life". In fact proponents of this school of thought believe that web2.0 with its massive collaboration and co creation abilities is the beginning of such an occurrence. No doubt we are at an Archimedian point. Will we all be part of one big virtual entity (like Gaia ), will we be able to live multiple co-existence lives in virtual domains.

Whatever the future of mortality is I just want to end with a little story that my thesis advisor told me about Lev Landau (who was his doctoral advisor back in the good old days):

So Lev is sitting some really cold afternoon with Ginsburg in the Moscow Academy debating some issue in statistical mechanics. Ginsburg says something like "....but this is an extremely improbable outcome. It is like saying that this fireplace will spontaneously transform itself on the quantum level to a beautiful girl!" So Landau pauses for a second, then smiles and says: "that is true - but if that does happen the chances that she will have cloths on are REALLY zero!!"

So whatever it is, I hope the girls don't have cloths on!

MC

Race, gender and the future of intelligence

Came across this article by Malcolm Gladwell that was published 10 years ago in The New Yorker. Funnily enough this relates to a subject that has troubled me somewhat for many years, namely what is the origin of some of the seemingly strong ethnic or gender differences that we see around us. Unfortunately this indeed is a subject that most people find to be taboo. I have not run a search on Gladwell's sources (he doesn't reference them in great detail...) but indeed his argument is interesting, compelling and at least he gets some of this stuff into the open. Of course some heated subjects were not covered there and are somewhat not not in line with his argument, namely - what account for the big discrepancy in scholastic achievement between ethnic groups. Personally I subscribe to the theory that these differences probably stem mostly form the socioeconomic setting of our current time where white people have on the average better resources and an easier path to learning than some other minorities like African - Americans or Latin Americans. The same goes for women. Probably the strongest hint in that direction (at least in my mind) is the fact that if we look back in history many of the past scholastic achievements were made by non whites (mostly in the far and middle east).
This of course does not rule out the option that there is some ethnic or gender based difference. maybe there is some serious research in this subject matter - not sure.
I have recently read some material on William Shockley (Nobel laureate physicist - father of the transistor). It turns out he was an advocate of Eugenics and even donated sperm to a high IQ sperm bank. This issue is of course highly debatable (I am personally not even sure what my own thoughts on the matter are!!!) and has given rise to many new areas of thought in Bioethics (some of which centered around the great effort of the Human Genome Project to research moral issues surrounding their work).
And if all this is'nt complicated enough - I have been bouncing some thoughts in my head (more in another post) relating to human brain augmentation and surrounding subjects. I wonder how the clash of the Transhumanist movement (that advocates human augmentation towards a better future) with the Singularitans and proponents of superintelligent A.I. will pan out. Are man and machine the same?
I wish I was intelligent enough and had some more time to research all this.

MC

Book report - 10 years late

Ok - i am ashamed... I have only just recently read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I came across it at a conference i went to in NYC (VW2007 ) It really is a great book. I am not a hard core SF reader but this one was indeed a good read: fast paced and full of mindful action that pushes the reader into thought about how technology and human culture interact. The amazing part is that it was written between 88-94 or so before the big internet boom - yet its' depiction of future events is quite insightful still.
one interesting aspect was his talk about the possibility of a hard coded "machine language" in humans (i wont spoil further) at any rate researching the matter further i cam across some interesting concepts: Bicameralism seems to be the original theory that uses this line of reasoning to try and explain the origins of Consciousness. Although there are quite a few missing parts in this theory and many opposers i still think it is quite mind provoking. I wonder how it might tie in with Hoffshtader's ( the seminal work GEB and others) into the mathematical origins of consciousness and other similar works. There seems to be some obvious connection between complexity (be it societal or internally within our brain) and self awareness. This also resonates with a book i read quite a while ago (meaning i forgot most of...) Schrödinger's What is Life?. Am trying to look into this subject more deeply. Will report if i find anythng of interest.

MC

3D for the masses?

Came across this new interesting startup Fotowoosh. Basically these are guys from CMU that I have come across before (look here ) who use something they call "geometrical contexting" to create 3D images from (supposedly) any single image. Indeed it's quite cool - but I wonder what the real value of such technology is since, from consumer level perspective it only works well on well defined shapes and lacks the fine structure. More notably it seems to distort humans - which probabaly make the most part of private familial photo collections (notice that in their demo there is one shot of a street with a man on the sidewalk...) so I am unclear as to their lasting merit.
Here is the TechCrunch link.

MC

Launch

After years of silence - I venture into the Blogosphere...probabaly not a memorable occasion for most.
MC