All posts by Paul Raven

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Bughunting in the city’s software

Ah, internet serendipity – a few days after my post about SeeClickFix and systems for crowdsourcing bugfixes in the urban system*, Adam “Speedbird” Greenfield posts about improving “frameworks for citizen responsiveness” [via Chairman Bruce]:

So how would you close the loop? How would you arrange things so that the originator, other members of the public, the city bureaucracy itself and other interested parties are all notified that the issue has been identified and is being dealt with? How might we identify the specific individuals or teams tasked with responding to the issue, allow people to track the status of issues they’re reported, and ensure that observed best practices and lessons learned are gathered in a resolution database?

In a talk I heard him give a few months back, technology entrepreneur Jyri Engeström suggested stealing a page from the practice of software development as a way of addressing shared problem spaces more generally. He pointed out that, during his time at Google, employees turned the tools developed to track open issues in software under development toward other domains of common experience, like the shuttle buses the company provides to haul them back and forth between San Francisco and Mountain View.

When hassles arose with the bus service, employees treated them just like they would known issues in some application they were working on: they entered their complaints into an existing bug tracker, which provided each case with a unique identifier, a space to characterize it more fully…and perhaps most importantly, the name of a party responsible for closing out the ticket.

The general insight Jyri derived from his experience got me to thinking. An issue-tracking board for cities? Something visual and Web-friendly, that’s simultaneously citizen-facing and bureaucracy-facing? Heck, that begins to sound like a pretty neat way to address the problems with systems like 311 and FixMyStreet.

Seems pretty logical (and pretty much what SeeClickFix are aiming towards, albeit a lot more fully featured and comprehensive). That said, the system relies on the same sort of user tenacity that any big collective project requires: making it easier to see where pressure needs to be applied still requires that the pressure to be applied, if you see what I mean, and maybe it’s naive to hope that the majority of citizens will care enough to get involved (because the vast majority of, say, Ubuntu users, certainly don’t bother doing much beyond turning up and asking n00b questions that five minutes of searching would solve for them**). Then again, lowering barriers to participation, so on and so forth… maybe if it’s done right, people would use it.

Or perhaps this is the natural outcome of geeks developing ideas for the wider world: they’re gonna be geeky ideas, and geeky ideas don’t always float the boats of everyone else. Is Greenfield’s framework just another case of everything looking like a nail when you’re well-versed in hammer deployment?

[ * “… crowdsourcing bugfixes in the urban system…” Yeah, I know, I felt awful typing it, but there’s no less pretentious way of saying the same thing without using another two dozen words, so Web2.0 speak was the only way out. I blame the future. ]

[ ** I fully include myself under this admittedly damning and sweeping indictment. ]

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Foreign Accent Syndrome

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Strange things are afoot in the language centres of our brains. Just the other week, we had the story of the Croatian teenager who woke from a coma unable to speak her native language, but mysteriously fluent in German. Slightly more mundane (but still pretty weird) is Foreign Accent Syndrome, wherein traumas and/or triggers unknown cause the afflicted person to speak their native tongue in a seemingly foreign accent.

So much we don’t understand about that cauliflower of grey meat…

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Another high-frequency trading software theft allegation

Remember the story about the guy who’d allegedly “stolen” (more accurately, downloaded a copy of) the Goldman-Sachs automated trading algorithm software? Well, now a young banker formerly employed by Societe Generale is accused of a very similar crime.

There’ll probably be plenty more incidents like this as time goes by: copying code is a pretty easy thing to do (even if avoiding detection isn’t) and the temptation of an investment-bank-level income is surely enough to justify the attempt to someone with a big enough greed-on (which is presumably a given in the industry in question). If only some egalitarian copyleftist hacker type would pilfer those algos and post ’em to Wikileaks… the anger and frustration of investment bankers would be reward enough for me, had I the pertinent skills. Hell, I think I could probably even ride out the entire jail term with a shit-eating grin on my face.

Interesting side-note: stealing this sort of software is illegal, even though the software itself may be considered to provide an illegal advantage to its owners.

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Davis asks Lethem about Dick

H+ Magazine puts out some interesting content, even if you don’t consider yourself a transhumanist: here’s Erik “Techgnosis” Davis interviewing Jonathan Lethem about science fiction legend Philip K Dick:

For people familiar with Dick‘s personal experiences, his biography and his temperament, the ironies in that are deep and bitter and complicated. You inevitably think: if he‘d been alive, he would‘ve screwed this up. He would‘ve found some way to make it impossible that he could be treated with such simple reverence, because he was so distrustful of any form of institutional authority. He had a particularly deep, bitter and twisted suspiciousness about traditional literary authority and about academia. And frankly, to some extent, it‘s academia that‘s driven his acceptance in a canon.

When I was a kid and I discovered Philip K. Dick, I felt that I‘d made this kind of soul mate contact with his work. It‘s a defining experience, and it feels like it‘s innate. For me, that experience was absolutely bound up in finding these books that were out of print. The books almost seemed like fictional artifacts. I couldn‘t believe there was such a writer. I still remember thinking his name seemed weird or that his titles seemed preposterous to me. It was like a secret reality unfolding in my life.

Of course, H+ is as H+ does, and the Singularity gets a little look-in. However, Lethem isn’t convinced that our technologies are changing us as much as we think they are:

My best guess about such matters is that each technological transformation, up to and perhaps including the Singularity, is going to work itself out vis-à-vis “the human” according to the deep principles of all media. Defined in its largest sense, as including things like cinema, theory, drugs, computing, moving type, music, etcetera, media is utterly consciousness-transforming in ways we can no longer competently examine, given how deeply they‘ve pervaded and altered the collective and individual consciousness that would be the only possible method for making that judgment. And yet -— we still feel so utterly human to ourselves, and the proof is in the anthropomorphic homeliness that pervades the ostensibly exalted “media” in return. We humanize them, shame them, colonize and debunk them with our persistent modes of sex and neurosis and community and commerce. We turn them into advertisements for ourselves, rather than opportunities for shedding ourselves. At least so far.

Well worth a read.