Futurismic

So, d’you remember us mentioning the TubeSat company back in summer? Y’know, the outfit from whom you can buy a one-shot tubular satellite from for only US$8,000 - the people at H+ Magazine gave them a good grilling last month, too.

Well, Warren Ellis certainly noticed, and he’s now in this month’s issue of Wired UK, begging for money with which to launch his own death ray.

So if you fancy arming the High Curmudgeon of comics with Terrible Implements of Space-borne Pain and Death, you know what to do – though I dare say he’d just as rather you bought some of his books. If, however, you’d rather fund a slightly more peaceful TubeSat deployment, you might be interested in taking a look at Drake Pool’s “Space Now” Kickstarter project.

Drake emailed earlier this week to say that he spotted the TubeSat story here at Futurismic a few months back, and it inspired him to get a project together. Not surprisingly, he can’t just rustle up eight grand out of nowhere, so he’s doing a crowdsourced microfunding drive whereby you can buy small chunks of the available payload space. And he doesn’t really mind what you do with it, though he suggests using the capability to broadcast a signal to a particular geographical section of the planet:

… in polar orbit the satellite will cover a vast amount of the earth’s surface. This means you will be able to broadcast your message to a geographically relevant region of the planet. With the power of mathematics, we can determine where the satellite will be at a given time. Think of the possibilities!

• Say hello to your friend in Sweden!
• Play 80s speed metal for people in Australia!
• Send your PGP key to Spies in China!

I’m sure there is hundreds of things you can do with this. I can’t wait to see.

I’m sure playing 80s speed metal at people who aren’t expecting it qualifies as a “cruel and unusual punishment”in some countries… but hey, that’s your lookout. Drake suggests you could also send very small objects up on the satellite, so if there’s somethign lurking around the house (or even your body) that you feel deserves to go out in the ultimate blaze of glory and burn up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, dig it out and get clicking.

Whether you decide to invest or not, kudos to Drake for going that one step further than the rest of us who just thought “wow, what could you do with one of those?” and forgot about it. That’s the entreprenurial spirit, right there.

As much as things may be tough in the States right now, at least you can all get a good laugh watching the UK slide towards becoming a pseudo-totalitarian panopticon state. [image by JapanBlack]

Via Cheryl Morgan comes news of the latest iteration of our enthusiastically participatory society of snoops and spies – crowdsourced CCTV crimespotting, with fabulous monetary prizes to be won!

The cameras’ owners will pay a fee to have users watch the footage. The scheme, Internet Eyes, is being promoted as a game and is expected to go “live” next month with a test run in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Subscribers will be able to register free and will be given up to four cameras to monitor.

Eventually the consortium behind the idea hopes to have internet users around the world focused on Britain’s 4.2 million security cameras, waiting to see and report a crime in return for cash prizes.

[...]

Subscribers will try to collect points by monitoring cameras in real time. If they see anything suspicious, they will click a button to send a still picture and text message to the camera’s owner.

The owner will then send a feedback e-mail to the person reporting the incident, indicating whether there has been a crime or suspected crime.

Users will be awarded one point for spotting a suspected crime and three if they see an actual crime. They can also lose points if the camera operator decides that the alert was not a crime.

Good grief… it’s much like the crowdsourced surveillance of the US border with Mexico, only with cash incentives. And the thing is, recent research suggests that cash incentives are actually counterproductive in situations where our ethical stance plays a part [via TechDirt]:

… incentives affect what our actions signal, whether we’re being self-interested or civic-minded, manipulated or trusted, and they can imply—sometimes wrongly—what motivates us. Fines or public rebukes that appeal to our moral sentiments by signaling social disapproval (think of littering) can be highly effective. But incentives go wrong when they offend or diminish our ethical sensibilities.

This does not mean it’s impossible to appeal to self-interested and ethical motivations at the same time—just that efforts to do so often fail. Ideally, policies support socially valued ends not only by harnessing self-interest but also by encouraging public-spiritedness. The small tax on plastic grocery bags enacted in Ireland in 2002 that resulted in their virtual elimination appears to have had such an effect. It punished offenders monetarily while conveying a moral message. Carrying a plastic bag joined wearing a fur coat in the gallery of antisocial anachronisms.

However, no one in the upper echelons of the business and gubernatorial spheres seems to have taken any notice of this, or of any of the other psychological research of the last few decades that has continually flagged up the same problem… I guess that a clear conscience is no suitable incentive for removing one’s own pre-existing incentives package. Go figure.

Ever have trouble thinking up character names for your fiction?

Gareth L Powell takes the quick route of simply opening his spam email folder and looking at the pre-randomised names in the “From” field, but Robin Sloan (who we mentioned in passing when talking about new publishing business models) went into a little more in depth: he ran a bunch of Google AdWords campaigns to find the name people were most interested in reading about.

Here’s what I did:

• Created a campaign attached to a bundle of search terms: mystery, detective story, sherlock holmes, noir, and more like those.
• Came up with a whole set of names, basically wide variations on a theme. One was my original pick, but I liked all of them. Then, I created an ad for each one, all with the same body text but each with a different name swapped in for the headline.
• Allocated a small budget ($40, to be exact) and kicked off the campaign. And wow there are a lot of people searching for stuff on Google. Over the span of 24 hours, my ads made about 100,000 impressions.

Sounds a bit like a very convoluted form of displacement activity, no? Well, Sloan’s aware of that, but it’s part of his overall writing philosophy:

… okay, I’ll be honest. This was mostly just an excuse to try a new tool. Any nerd will tell you that tools can provide their own intrinsic rewards. There’s an aspect of exploration to it, too: you’re pressing out into new tool-territory, learning about what you can and can’t do.

This little AdWords test is a first step. Mechanical Turk might be next. I mean, imagine — this is the sci-fi extrapolation — imagine highlighting a block of text, choosing a menu item called Test the way you’d choose Spellcheck today, and when you do, a little timer appears next to it. Five minutes later, ding — the timer goes off and you have the results right there, floating over the text. Aggregated feedback from an anonymous swarm of readers: “I stumbled here,” “this variation works better,” “this line rings false.”

That might sound naive — it’s definitely oversimplified — but I think there might be something useful lurking in this particular tool-territory.

Crowd-sourced micro-fragment beta-reading… for some reason, my brain wants to rebel against the idea (because it doesn’t fit into the pre-established set of writer behaviours, I guess), but that’s probably as good a sign as any that it might actually work. [via GalleyCat]

One could be cynical and assume that Sloan performed the AdWords experiment as much for the potential publicity as for practical purposes, but if that’s the case, hey – it’s worked, hasn’t it? Writers have never really had the same opportunity as visual artists or musicians to experiment publically with methodologies up until now… maybe this sort of “performance writing” will fill that PR void we were talking about before? Nothing gets a link passed around as effectively as novelty.

Nobody expected Twitter to be as useful as it’s turned out to be. Maybe this will work, too. National Public Radio has a story about The Extraordinaires, which is not a 60s British spy show but a social-media enterprise that encourages brief bursts of volunteerism.

Through The Extraordinaries, you might be able to use your smart phone — while waiting in the dentist’s office or standing in the Dept. of Motor Vehicles line — to:

• translate a foreign-language document into English

• add identifying tags to photos and videos for a museum

• give advice to a college applicant

During your lunch break you could snap a picture of a pothole that needs patching and zap it to the proper authorities. You could report a dying elm to the parks-and-recreation department or spot a rare woodpecker for the Audubon Society.

“This is an organization that changes the paradigm,” says Jacob Colker, 26, co-founder of the San Francisco-based Extraordinaries. “We hope people might look differently at that ride on the bus and not just play video games.”

Skepticism is healthy, too, of course. I’m still on crowdsourcing 101, myself, but unintended consequences can sometimes be positive.

[What are you doing? by wharman]

It’s not been mentioned much on this side of the pond, but I imagine Stateside readers will have already heard about the US soldier allegedly “sold” to a militant Afghani clan by local-level insurgents. Here’s hoping he gets hauled out of there sooner rather than later. [image by Soldier's Media Centre]

John Robb points out the marked difference in military networking that this sort of action represents; the Haqqanis are leveraging an entrepreneurial instinct in their local supporters, a sort of monetized and crowdsourced insurgency that relies less on having a standing army and more on rewarding local people for doing things your way.

As Fourth Generation Warfare becomes increasingly prevalent, perhaps the military forces of the West should take a page or two from the playbooks of their opponents – maybe wallets and billfolds are better targets than hearts and minds. After all, if your country is being torn apart economically by a war you don’t understand, who are you going to support – the alien invaders with expensive military hardware who blow a lot of stuff up in the name of political concepts that you don’t fully understand, or the guys who reward you for easily accomplished favours on your home turf?