Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Raspberry Pi’s for the godchildren?

With all wires - Top

Its a tricky one…

I like to buy presents of my godchildren which matter. Its tricky because you don’t want to buy something boring but educational. When I was young my godparents would get me Lego, Chemistry sets and ultimately Technical Lego. This certainly helped my creativity develop.

So whats the modern equivalent of Lego? Something you can buy more of and add to?

Well I thought Raspberry Pi. Yeah, no brainer right?!

But here’s my issue.

I have 2 male godchildren (4 and 6) and 1 female (7).

My natural thought was to get one for the 6yr old, specially because his dad is technical and the child has already shown an amazing comfort with computers. The other male is too young and frankly more interested in super-heroes. So why not the older female?

I don’t know… (and I feel like I’ve had this debate before, so excuse me if you’ve heard it before).

I also didn’t want to buy her pink stuff but she loves it so much. Along while ago I bought her some pink lego and she seemed quite happy with that. Although to be fair I’ve never actually seen play with them. Me being a melding godfather decided one year to buy her a mini telescope, hoping it will foster a little more science in her life. Of course this nothing against the parents, I love them to bits. But my understanding of what a godfather does is to do whats best for the child regardless of how much it drives the parents insane.

So back to the point, why have I not bought her a Raspberry Pi? Is this nasty sexism which I don’t know about? Absolutely not!

I guess I balanced it all in my mind and decided it would be a little unfair to force something like this on her at this stage. Instead I bought her some more Lego but the friends subsection.

What would you do? Am I doing down the godfather title by not giving her what might be good for her? She has godmothers, maybe its the godmothers who gives her what she wants and the godfather who makes the difficult decisions. And I don’t mean that in a sexist way, the godmothers should be making the difficult decisions for the boys, while the godfathers are buying stuff he wants?

Who knows but I am certainly thinking for her birthday, I should find something which crosses over and brings out her geeky side.

Any tips on what, are very welcomed.

I’m hoping the likes of Jasmine Cox, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Rosie Campbell, Rebecca Gregory-Clarke, etc. Can offer some advice on this? I can’t be the only one wondering about this….?

A couple of things people have sent me recently

Been a little quiet recently, mainly due to the season of partying and ending up ill with the flu…

Anyway I’m back…

Ok silly and funny… Thanks Tim Dobson.

Just so Tragic! Thanks Martinrue

Forgot who sent this to me but its a interesting one… How much eye contact, depends on your aim I guess.

Consequence or Inception of connecting people

I saw the below tweet and felt like it needed to be not just retweeted but also blogged…

Help this teacher make a great point to her students about the consequences of social network use. Please RT widely

From Twitter

It says…

I want to illustrate to my junior high students (grade 7-9) how fast a photo can be shared on the internet. Please “Like” and “Share” this image to help me teach caution and discernment to the students in my classes.

Although a great idea and I’m not against teaching and eduction, but its worth pointing out the incredible power this also brings to each and everyone of us. Empowerment should also be taught in the same lesson. Never has there been a way to connect a mass audience at such low cost and such speed. The inception of the internet and social media is a great thing too. And its too easy to teach the negative. The internet and social media isn’t something which should be feared, rather taught how to responsibly participate in.

 

Amazon missing pigeon post?

Amazon has a lot to do before Prime Air’s drones start flying

Forgot to blog about Amazon prime air earlier this week. Amazon plans to deliver some goods via drones/octocopters.

Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is testing unmanned drones to deliver goods to customers, Chief Executive Jeff Bezos says.

The drones, called Octocopters, could deliver packages weighing up to 2.3kg to customers within 30 minutes of them placing the order, he said.

Theres a million reasons why its not going to happen in the next few years but the thing which I believe Amazon have missed is Pigeon post.

Pigeon posts packet switching network is a lot more efficient and could scale way beyond Amazon’s idea of one Octocopter per package. If your going to do it, do it with scale in mind Bezos!

As Nathan Rae posted to tech news today…

Imagine Vanilla Sky on Perceptive Media

There is an example of Perceptive Media which I like to use. Its a bit of a messy example because I’m usually trying to avoid spoiling the plot of Vanilla Sky or Open your eyes. I used it at TedXBristol, to explain why perceptive media can be so incredible. Of course there is spoilers below.

I remember when I watched Vanilla Sky for the first time, there was a scene which seemed to give me chills or something like a deja vu. I felt like I knew the scene so well, like I’d been there or seen it before. How is this possible? A film I’ve never seen before and a place I’ve never been before? Well in the film you are led to believe they are using parts of Tom Cruises memory to make him feel comfortable with whats going on.

One such scene is a image from his memory. An image of the Bob Dylan album – Free wheelin.

That image comes from flicking through my fathers LP collection when young. I’m not even sure if he still has it or not but something somewhere in my brain is that image. When I saw that image again build up in a similar way, something triggered my brains pulses to say you have seen this before. I call it a deja vu but I’m not certain what it is. Something pulled that image out of my memory and front and center in my mind.

There is something about Vanilla Sky and ultimately Open your eyes which seems to trigger memories beyond just mine.

It was amazing to hear Jason Silva on London Real talking about Vanilla Sky. Although Jason is an excitable character, his observations about storytelling and the affect of the movie is spot on.

Great storyteller can do amazing things.

They craft magic, the surreal and the impossible in our minds through simply words, images or sound. They weave a world which is for a brief moment believable.

Its a little bit of cold reading, great communication skills, excellent storytelling and a number of other things. Perceptive Media enables the great storytellers to do what they do best but on a broadcast sized audience.

Linked data on youtube?

Triples on youtube?

I thought I’d try writing some RDF/Turtle as I see it on youtube.

<http://youtu.be/jP6kzKygaOs>
dc:title "Jason Silva on London Real talks about Vanilla Sky";
dc:publisher "London Real";
dc:subject [
  dc:subject "Vanilla Sky"
  dc:type "Film" imdb:homepage <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259711/>
  tmdb:homepage <http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1903-vanilla-sky>
  ]
cities:city "London".

Kind of reminds me of when people started hacking Triples into Flickr by using Machine tags. Still its interesting to see Youtube adding the ability to add a triple in a nice clean way (if its a well used ontology of course)

Those old race fears come back to haunt online dating

09.WhatSay.Self.SW.WDC.28nov05

I’ve been meaning to write about race and dating for a while. Originally I was going to write for Singleblackmale but I’m not really bringing anything new to the party except my own thoughts.

Racism is not gone, not by a long shot. In the online world the xenophobia runs riot.

If you need evidence of this, I’d point you at the now classic OkCupid’s Trend about Race Affects The Messages You Get. Then a more recently thanks to Tim Dobson, some more uncomfortable racial preferences.

Its worth pointing out that like most online dating data, we (not just me) grab on to it in lei of anything else. The last one Are you Interested? Could be seen as a poor/bad attempt to get their name out in an already crowded field. To be honest I had only heard of Are you interested? In passing and never actually tried it or installed it. I was surprised they hadn’t gone for rui.com instead.

Here’s the upshot…

Despite an increase in interracial marriages and birth of multiracial babies, one study revealed that racism is still a factor when looking for love online.Kevin Lewis, a sociologist at University of California San Diego, analyzed messages sent by over 120,000 users on dating site, OkCupid, finding racial prejudice affects dating decisions. According to Lewis’ research, all users falling within the site’s five largest racial categories (black, white, Asian, Latino, Indian) were more likely to initiate contact with users from their same racial background.“Most men (except black men) are unlikely to initiate contact with black women, all men (including Asian men) are unlikely to reply to Asian women, and although women from all racial backgrounds tend to initiate contact with men from the same background, women from all racial backgrounds also disproportionately reply to white men,”

Now you can pretend or not acknowledge these facts but trust me as someone who has emailed quite a few people in the past, there is something about the replies you don’t get. That silence even when you connect really well on many levels. Of course its not simply one kind of person, it just happens if your males and black, you will get less replies.

This is why I find the data really interesting as its response rates. You can craft an algorithm which connects people in what ever way but their reply rate will say so much more.

However saying all this, something else is at play…

Lewis also found that people were more willing to reply to a user of a different race after that person initiated contact. Furthermore, they were more likely to start a conversation with a user of a different race after that interaction.Lewis said one qualifying factor for this could be simple preemptive discrimination. In other words, users are less likely to initiate contact with a person of another race because they’re not sure that person will be interested in them.“Part of the reason site users, and especially minority site users, do not express interest in individuals from a different racial background is because they anticipate — based on a lifetime of experiences with racism — that individuals from a different background will not be interested in them.”

The data were reading from the dating sites is the instant reply rates. As I was saying no one likes being rejected specially on the grounds of race, theres a self censorship or lack of confidence to put yourself through the pain again. However if you do its more likely to work out better than you imagined.

So although the reply rates are bad for certain races such as black people, and it seems hopeless sometimes. I would urge people to keep going. Its a bit of a numbers game and this is once again another reason why the free online dating sites win out over the top of paid dating sites. You need time and its no fun sinking more and more money and your attention into something which isn’t going well.

Keep going…!

3 Online dating revelations

TechCrunch Disrupt Europe: Berlin 2013 (Day 2)

A few things have come out in the open recently which I thought I’d share…

  1. Bill Dobbie is stepping down as chief executive of online dating company Cupid following a year which has seen its share price slump amid allegations it used fake messages to attract subscribers.
    Cupid is not OkCupid first up and being based in the UK, you can imagine the pressure which Cupid.com are under. No surprise the CEO stood down.
  2. A Florida woman has filed a $1.5 billion class-action lawsuit against online dating site Match.com, alleging the website allowed photos of her and thousands of others to be used illegally to create phony profiles intended to dupe romantic hopefuls out of money.
    The website “conspired with criminals operating from locations including Internet cafes in Nigeria, Ghana and Russia” who created fake profiles for romance “scams,” according to the lawsuit which was filed last week.The suit also says that Match.com, owned by media mogul Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, was aware of the fake profiles as the company approves, edits and posts each profile.
  3. The “hook-up” app market is booming. Tinder is ruling the roost while everyone tries to catch up and cash in on the hookup market. Maybe they should have a look at my presentation and dating idea from 2009! Rad, CEO of Tinder recently spoke at Techcrunch Distrupt conference.

    Rad said he couldn’t share user counts, but he did reveal that the app sees 3.5 million matches and 350 million swipes a day. (About 30 percent of those are the right swipes that indicate interest.) And the app has seen 30 billion swipes and 300 million matches total.

Looking vs Dates

Well this looks good… HBO getting in on the modern dating action.

The new trailer opens with Patrick having high hopes for his new life in a brand-new city: “It’s San Francisco. It shouldn’t be so hard to meet cool people in this town.”

It dives deeper into Patrick’s idealistic view of finding love in the City by the Bay, with him attempting to find his soulmate via dating websites and Instagram filters. From the looks of things, it seems Patrick — who’s had one long-term boyfriend his entire life, it’s revealed in the trailer — may be finding love.

Wonder how it compares to Channel4’s Dates? From the trailer, less cinemantic and more real?

 

You limit your imagination by what you know

Elon Musk

I’ve been catching up on my instapaper and liking the interview with Elon Musk by Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson compares and singles out Elon Musk and Steve Jobs as serial disrupter’s.

It is no surprise, then, that Musk has often been referred to of late as “the next Steve Jobs.” The comparison I want to make between them, however, is not just in the diversity and scale of their achievements. It’s also in their thought processes. I see in them a mental trait that is incredibly rare, a trait that has made me a huge admirer of both men, and of their creations.

So what is their unique brand of genius? Here’s how I think of it: system-level design thinking powered by extraordinary conviction. Each of those italicized phrases is critical.

I like what Chris picks out in them both. Although not a fan of Steve Jobs choices and direction later with media and computing. I do respect his brilliance of thought. Elon is frankly the tony stark of the real world. I can’t say enough about his achievements and I’m sure many more are to come.

I love the way he thinks… as he gets going in this paragraph about the spaceX.

“What I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn’t be able to get through the day,” he said. “But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive.” Reasoning by analogy would be someone in 1900 thinking that the way to get faster transport was to breed stronger horses. You limit your imagination to a simple extension of what you already know. That is not how the world changes.

What is there not to love? Its a good interview and full of good observations.

Well here’s some passing words to think about…

Dream big! Don’t focus on making money! Work for an idea that’s bigger than you are! Broaden your mind! Embrace thinking from outside disciplines! Expose yourself to the world’s most inspiring designs and designers! Make things as simple as they can be (and no simpler)! Immerse yourself in science and leading-edge technologies! Don’t be limited by what’s gone before! Play with radical outside-the-box future possibilities and keep playing until you find something really big that you believe in!