Monthly Archives: December 2009

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Crowdsourcing FedEx

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mail packageSometimes I think I should have more faith in my own mad ideas. While the UK postal strikes were in full effect earlier in the year, I was kicking around an plan for replacing the increasingly beleaguered Royal Mail with a sort of peer-to-peer localised mail delivery system, which everyone I mentioned it to told me was completely impractical. [image by piermario]

I dare say they were probably right, but it’s still somehow gratifying to see that it’s not so crazy an idea that I’m the only person to have had it – via Global Guerrillas comes a post by a fellow called Chase Saunders in which he describes a similar idea: UsExpress.

I have mental picture of millions of people driving back and forth to work (and other places) over and over again.  It’s almost like Brownian motion.  Even if people rarely took long trips, there would be plenty of this routine, back and forth motion to ship all the packages we could possibly want, if only there were a service that gave a percentage of these drivers the right incentives, information, and infrastructure to hand off the packages at the proper moment. USExpress could be that service.

[…]

If my father took 10 packages, 4 days a week, fifty weeks a year, that would be 120 x 10 x 200 = 240,000 package miles.  How much do you think it costs to pay for a UPS driver to carry and deliver 240,000 package-miles?  Even if we assume an average of 300 packages on board at all times, that’s probably at least a week’s salary, not to mention overhead and benefits.  The difference is, the UPS guy is not going to drive that route unless we pay him (and train him, and buy him a truck, etc.)  But my father is going to drive to work anyway. If the pickup and dropoff locations are close enough to his work and home, why not generate a few hundred — or a few thousand — extra dollars a year?

Sure, there are some flaws to the idea, but Saunders addresses some of the big ones. The major stumbling block would be getting past the largely unfounded institutional trust we have in national mail systems – the trust that parcels won’t be lost, and that they will get to where they’re supposed to go, on neither of which Royal Mail has a flawless record. But such a system might just fill the gap as energy costs soar toward the day that physical delivery becomes obsolete…

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Everybody else is doing a top twenty posts list, so why can’t I?

To infinity and beyond! Or not...There’s no reason at all, as it happens. And believe it or not, I don’t actually look at the site stats for Futurismic very often, as I prefer to judge the material we publish by the feedback it receives. But as the title suggests, everyone’s doing retrospectives of the year at the moment, and it got me to wondering what the twenty most popular URLs on Futurismic have been in 2009. [image by kevinzhengli]

So, for the sake of my curiosity (and perhaps yours too), here’s the rundown. I’ve removed any blog index pages from the list (ie. the homepage/root URL, and the second and third pages of most recent content) so that it deals only with unique pages of real static content and specific categories.

  1. A cure for radiation sickness?
  2. AN EDUCATION OF SCARS by Philip Brewer
  3. Futurismic fiction submission guidelines
  4. Futurismic fiction index
  5. Stephen King, Amazon’s Kindle and the death of publishing as we know it
  6. Where are the sexy computer games? (this one explains the high click-through on the search terms “sexy games”; heck of a bounce rate there, I’m happy to say)
  7. World’s largest nuclear explosion video (a classic post from 2007 that still brings people in on a daily basis… maybe more video of big explosions is the way forward?)
  8. Those hacked climate e-mails: Good scientists, poor conspirators (no prizes for guessing why this one did so well on pageviews…)
  9. Looming digital dark age
  10. 2009 – the year the physical bookstore lays down and dies? (written almost a year ago to the day, and oddly prophetic when read in parallel with Seth Godin’s post from a few days ago)
  11. Futurismic fiction submission form
  12. WiFi flu (another oldie whose popularity holds up well)
  13. Dune roleplayers in Second Life squelched by IP takedown notice
  14. One-way ticket to Mars, redux
  15. Futurismic columns index
  16. Nietzsche on science fiction
  17. Alpha Centauri ’should have an Earth-like planet’ (check the comments for some bizarre Christian nutjobbery)
  18. SPIDER’S MOON by Lavie Tidhar
  19. ‘Ghost’ Photos through Quantum Physics (nothing like vaguely-explained speculative science to rake in the spiritual techgnostic demographic, it seems)
  20. Moore’s Law gets a new lease of life

So, there you have it. It would be interesting to compare these stats to similar data for material read via the RSS feed (which doesn’t show up on Google Analytics because the content is stored on other servers), but sadly I can’t seem to find a way to do that with Feedburner… so we’ll have to do a sort of straw poll!

What was your favourite (or least favourite) post, column or story of 2009 here at Futurismic?

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Homeopapes: journalism by machine

Here’s an interesting piece at Wired UK that picks up the “OMG journalism is dying” ball and runs with it in the direction of automated machine-to-machine and machine-to-person news aggregation:

NewsScope is a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven, trading. Triggered by signals detected by algorithms within vast mountains of real-time data, trading of this kind now accounts for a significant proportion of turnover in the world’s financial centres.

Reuters’ algorithms parse news stories. Then they assign “sentiment scores” to words and phrases. The company argues that its systems are able to do this “faster and more consistently than human operators”.

Millisecond by millisecond, the aim is to calculate “prevailing sentiment” surrounding specific companies, sectors, indices and markets. Untouched by human hand, these measurements of sentiment feed into the pools of raw data that trigger trading strategies.

[…]

Here and there, interesting possibilities are emerging. Earlier this year, at Northwestern University in the US, a group of computer science and journalism students rigged up a programme called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball matches.

Stats Monkey relies upon two key metrics: Game Score (which allows a computer to figure out which team members are influencing the action most significantly) and Win Probability (which analyses the state of a game at any particular moment, and calculates which side is likely to win).

Combining the two, Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated “narrative arcs” to describe the action in a format recognisable as a news story.

The resulting news stories read surprisingly well. If we assume that the underlying data is accurate, there’s little to prevent newspapers from using similar techniques to report a wide range of sporting events.

The first knee-jerk question here is “can (or should) we trust those algorithms to remain uncorrupted? How easy would it be for such a system to create news that wasn’t true, or that spun the truth in a particular direction?”

The instant counterargument would be to ask how much more prone to corruption and error an automated system would be compared to the existing human-based systems… all trust needs to be earned, after all, and (speaking for myself) I’ve little trust in the worldview of any media outlet when viewed in isolation. I aggregate my incoming news already through a bunch of semi-manual processes and routines; would something that removes the drudgery of that be inherently bad, or does the risk lie in our laziness and subconscious gravitation toward echo-chambers of our own ideas? Is there any such thing as objective news (at least about anything that really matters, a category which I feel sports doesn’t really occupy)?

All this talk of truth, trust and objective realities puts me in mind of Philip K Dick – more specifically “If There Were No Benny Cemoli”, with its homeopapes churning out news of a planetary adversary who may or may not actually exist. Can anyone recommend more stories that deal with similar themes?

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New year, old genre: is it time for science fiction to die?

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gravestoneWhile the rest of us were stuffing ourselves with food and alcohol, editor Jetse de Vries was bashing out an essay* re-examining a refrain that’s been heard a few times in the last year or so: is written science fiction dying, is that a good thing, and if not, what should (or could) be done to save it? [image by timparkinson]

Regular readers (or those who know Jetse already) will be quite right to suspect that it’s another variation on his suggestion that science fiction needs to reacquire relevance by not only highlighting the big issues of the day but examining potential solutions to them, rather than revelling on post-apocalyptic gloom. But that’s a massive oversimplification of a fairly wide-ranging essay, so take twenty minutes to read the whole thing – while you may not agree with all of his points, there’s a lot of sound thinking and food for thought in there. Here’s some snips from the conclusion:

SF doesn’t want to (try to) tackle today problems. It just wants to highlight them, exaggerate them into apocalyptic disasters and let the world go down the drain in five hundred different ways. SF is very good at imaging how civilisation (or the world in general) ends: if it only used part of that imagination thinking about solving an actual problem it might have had some more respect from the world at large.

So let’s call it what it is: a failure of the imagination. Yes, quote me on it: ‘most written SF today suffers from a failure of the imagination’. It’s lazy, it avoids doing the hard work.

[…]

In short, SF should get off its arse, be totally open to outside influences and other cultures, and get involved with proactive thinking, proudly using science, about the near future.

Previous discussions (including some right here) around these points have highlighted the sharp division of opinion they create. I still find myself somewhat on the fence with respect to “optimistic” science fiction (in that I’d very much like to see more of it, but have no wish to see the demise of the darker flavours), but Jetse’s points about science fiction’s WASPish makeup, plus its perplexing resistance to taking creative risks and breaking with established tradition, hold a great deal of water for me.

That said, I still find myself thinking that the problem is one of imprecise nomenclature; given that it’s still almost impossible to get any three people to agree on a useful working definition of science fiction, maybe we should give up defending the ragged and patchwork flag of a territory whose citizens long since underwent a diaspora into the continent of the cultural mainstream.

[ * To be fair, and knowing Jetse, I fully suspect he did some eating and drinking over the holidays as well… indeed, probably a lot of drinking. 😉 ]

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Fighting back against the advertising overload

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behind the billboardsSo, welcome back! Did you have a good holiday? I did… though the season comes with its share of annoyances, and if you’re anything like me you’ll be a happy human if you never see a perfume or aftershave advert again for as long as you live.

But pity the Los Anglelinos for a moment, because at least you can turn off (or away from) the glare of television advertising. Not so with the spreading crop of digital billboards; the LA Times reports on the efforts of local residents to combat the 24-hour lightbath they provide, most of which involve questioning the legality of the permits acquired by the billboard companies [via @Ballardian, who in turn got it from @BLDGBLOG].

Sadly, I suspect the protesting residents will end up looking like King Canute over the long haul. But I also fully expect we will see digital signage become a target for activist hacker types, as speculatively predicted by Lauren Beukes in her recent near-future post-cyberpunk novel Moxyland (which I reviewed for Strange Horizons a little while back, and heartily recommend to readers who enjoy the sort of fiction we publish here at Futurismic). Everything Can And Will be Hacked, after all… and digital advertising media offer all sorts of new and cunning opportunities for a smart adbuster or subcultural counterpropagandist.

Naturally, the billboard companies will push back hard against their opponents (and I’d fully expect legal grey areas to be colonised by both sides of the fight). But there’s one company that makes its money through advertising that doesn’t seem too worried about people trying to prevent ads intruding on them. That company is Google (of course), who’ve cheerily announced that they’re unconcerned about people building ad-block extensions for their Chrome browser… and that they suspect ad-blocking will actually save online advertising as a business model by a sort of Darwinian selection process [via SlashDot]. Says Google engineering director Linus Upson:

“It’s unlikely that ad blockers will get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising needs to get less annoying.

“There will always be some group of people who want to block ads for personal reasons. But if we do a good job on the advertising side, people won’t want to block ads. People will find them actually useful.

“I think there will be a nice equilibrium. If people get too aggressive with ads, then ad blockers will become more popular and companies will get less aggressive with ads. The market will sort itself.”

An unfashionable faith in market forces, there, but I rather suspect it’ll be vindicated in the long run. And hey, let’s be positive – maybe the arrival of ubiquitous augmented reality will spell the end of ugly billboards, digital or otherwise. Who’s gonna build them once it’s easy to ensure you never see them? [image by Omar Omar]