(Please be aware that some ChatRoulette links may contain mature content.)

Dear me. All those folks doing naughty things on ChatRoulette, secure in their Net-anonymity, may suddenly meet a rude awakening: Chat Roulette Map, a new Google Maps mash-up, maps users’ chat image to their location, based on IP address. Last week, it also showed users’ ip addresses.

Note that Chat Roulette Map has just added a new pop-up window when you first load the page:

Welcome To Chat Roulette Map
(snip)
We’d like to advise maine.edu to stop using
student’s names in their hostnames.

We’ve decided, at least for the time being, to
hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable
information was found in some entries.

No, you think? It’ll be interesting to see how this warning window evolves over the next few weeks.

We have a continuing interest in alternative energy sources and other green technologies. I’m intrigued by this article at phys.org on new solar-based fuel cell technology coming out from MIT chemist Dan Nocera. Why it’s cool:

With one bottle of drinking water and four hours of sunlight, MIT chemist Dan Nocera claims that he can produce 30 KWh of electricity, which is enough to power an entire household in the developing world. With about three gallons of river water, he could satisfy the daily energy needs of a large American home. The key to these claims is a new, affordable catalyst that uses solar electricity to split water and generate hydrogen.

Nocera’s new company, Cambridge-based Sun Catalytix, recently received funding through the new ARPA-E agency that was created by the US government to promote the development of advanced energy technologies. Take a look:

Some time ago I wrote about reports of books being replaced by electronic devices for academic reading. My take was that this kind of techno-utopianism will not improve the quality of education because the current crop of devices is not designed for active reading. This hypothesis was put the test recently at Princeton and four other universities. At Princeton, 53 students in three courses participated in an experiment where they were asked to use a Kindle device for course-work related reading. Results reported by the Daily Princetonian indicate that while the amount of in-course printing dropped by about 50%, students complained about a variety of limitations of using these devices for course work. Not surprisingly,

…users said they often found its design ill-suited for class readings. Students and faculty participating in the program said it was difficult to highlight and annotate PDF files and to use the folder structure intended to organize documents, according to University surveys. The inability to quickly navigate between documents and view two or more documents at the same time also frustrated users.

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Hillary Mason of bit.ly wrote a nice summary of some key issues raised in the recent Search in Social Media 2010 workshop. (For other commentary, see Daniel Tunkelang”s post and our pre-workshop comments.) Hillary asked several important questions, that break out into two main topics: what and how can we compute from social data on one hand, and what are the implications of those computations. Aspects such as computing relevance, how to architect social search engines, and how to represent users’ information needs in appropriate ways all represent the what and how category. We can be sure that adequate  engineering solutions will be found these problems.

The second topic, however, is more problematic because it deals more with the impact that technology has on the individual and on society, rather than about technology per se.

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I had fun watching the Superbowl, and it was interesting to see a great defense contain a great offense. It was also fun to explain what was going on (on the field) to some attendees of our CIS2010 workshop who were more familiar with the other football. I hope they enjoyed it too!  But of course the Superbowl is not (only?) about football: there is the half-time show, and the ads. The most striking thing about the halftime show was that The Who are still sort of functional as a musical group. Who would have thunk it?

Some of the ads, however, have me a bit worried. In particular, there were two — the Audi and the Google — that triggered the latent George Orwell in me. Is it really a good idea (no matter how tongue in cheek) that the government have the power to coerce individuals’ behavior as shown in the Audi ad? While I am all for recycling, the mere premise that recycling should be motivated by threat rather than incentive strikes me as both perverse and subversive of our rights.  I guess I am not the only one with a negative reaction: Jeffery Goldberg calls it Gorewellian, while an eco-energy blog laments the Nazi allusions and the disservice to the green cause.

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Panos Ipeirotis recently wrote about the confusing state of affairs with respect to intellectual property at his University. In some sense, this is ironic, since the whole point of a University is to produce intellectual property. But I suppose the question isn’t really one of production, but rather of distribution and of consumption. It’s clear that the faculty and students who develop the ideas should own (i.e., receive credit for) those ideas. But once an idea is published, how it gets used is a different story.

With others (e.g., Christopher Browne) I have often wondered why a public university (or a private one that receives significant federal funding for research) has any rights to patent the results of its research. After all, government employees are not allowed to patent the results of their work done for the government; why should government-funded work at universities be different?

Furthermore, does it matter to a University to hold patents, particularly software patents?

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I’ve been doing a bit of thinking lately about search engines, algorithmic openness, and spammers.  I suppose this was all prompted by a blog post recently on the Meaning of Open: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html

In this post, it is claimed that openness is good: open systems, open source, open data.  This claim is held forth as true…for everything except for search algorithms.   In the case of algorithms, the secret sauce must be kept exactly that: secret.  Spammers would otherwise have too much power.

That claim makes me want to play around with a little thought experiment.  What if the search algorithm were indeed fully open?  What if everyone in the world knew exactly how rankings were done, and could modify their web pages so as to adapt themselves to whatever the ranking function is.  In short, what if everyone were number one?  Continue Reading

The recent earthquake in Haiti has attracted attention from Twitter users and researchers. Twitter has been used to collect donations, to contact people on the ground, to coordinate relief efforts, etc. Recently, U. Colorado’s EPIC Group proposed a hash-tag-based syntax on top of Twitter messages to help automate the parsing of actionable messages, and to do so effectively and reliably. This is a noble effort, but as Manas Tungare points out, the proposed syntax is too complex for its intended users, who have more pressing issues than dealing with hash tags.

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PARC hosted an NSF-funded workshop devoted to Technology Mediated Social Participation. This was an invitation-only workshop, coupled with a public panel discussion at the PARC Forum yesterday.

All around us, technology-mediated social participation has been harnessed for remarkable social benefits. New thrusts in basic research and engineering are likely to move beyond existing socio-technical media to produce new participatory systems spanning people, computation, communication and action. These developments could produce profound transformations in health care, community safety, disaster response, life-long learning, business innovation, energy sustainability, environmental protection, and other spheres of important national priorities.

The goal of the workshop is to foster a discussion of these topics, including:

Theoretical integration; Shareable Infrastructure, ethics, and protections; Social capital, social intelligence, and effective action; Design to motivate participation; Graduate Training; and – Unique challenges for government use of social media.

The panel consisted of Ben Shneiderman (U. Maryland), Amy Bruckman (Georgia Tech), Bernardo Huberman (HP Labs), and  Cameron Marlow (Facebook). Panelists argued that “it is our responsibility to shape the conversations on social media” (Ben), that “We want to build technology to enable communities to police themselves” (Cameron), and “Different spaces need different rules” (Amy).

Meanwhile, in Old Europe…

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People have been trying to harness wave energy for decades, and of course more traditional – and more destructive – hydroelectric projects like dams provide power to hundreds of millions of people. Now, researchers at the University of Michigan are creating a system for fish-friendly power generation from slow-moving water currents in rivers or oceans – and it’s not that expensive; about a third the cost of cheap solar. Here’s the story:

Slow-moving ocean and river currents could be a new, reliable and affordable alternative energy source. A University of Michigan engineer has made a machine that works like a fish to turn potentially destructive vibrations in fluid flows into clean, renewable power.

The machine is called VIVACE. A paper on it is published in the current issue of the quarterly Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering.

VIVACE is the first known device that could harness energy from most of the water currents around the globe because it works in flows moving slower than 2 knots (about 2 miles per hour.) Most of the Earth’s currents are slower than 3 knots. Turbines and water mills need an average of 5 or 6 knots to operate efficiently.

Click through for more details. Visit the story online for video (Flash or QuickTime).
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