Posts by matt

Jerome Groopman writes in The New Yorker about Maja Matarić and the quest to create robots that can help people through therapy. Assistive robots are nothing new; Japan’s aging population has been using this technology for years. But Groopman focuses on the social and emotional components of these advancements, and on efforts to enable robots to understand people:

Glancing at the robot, Mary lifted a magazine from the top of the pile and guided it into a rack on top of the shelf. As soon as the magazine was in place, the robot emitted a beep. During the next few minutes, Mary moved each magazine, one by one, to the rack. Gradually, she increased her pace, and the beeps from the robot came faster. Mary began to laugh.

She turned and looked squarely at the robot. With a sly smile, she moved her weak arm toward the remaining magazines on the desk and mimed putting one into the rack. She then stuck her tongue out at the machine.

Matarić said, “She is cheating. She is totally thrilled, because she thinks she cheated the robot.” The robot, though, was on to the game. A reflective white band that Mary wore on her leg allowed the robot to follow her movements. A thin motion sensor attached to her sleeve transmitted Mary’s gestures to the robot, so that it knew almost instantly whether she was raising her arm and in what motion. A sensor in the rack signalled the robot when a magazine was properly placed, and the robot communicated with Mary only when she performed the task correctly.

Although the task lasted about an hour, the novelty of the interaction did not seem to wane. In a debriefing after the study, Mary said, “When I’m at home, my husband is useless. He just says, ‘Do it.’ I much prefer the robot to my husband.”

The article takes an interesting turn when Groopman considers the ethics of this technology:

Thirty years ago, [MIT professor Sherry] Turkle began studying the impact of sophisticated technologies, including virtual-reality computer games and robots, on emotional development in children and social relationships among adults. “I am not a Luddite,” Turkle said. “But there is no upside to being socialized by a robot.” Based on her observation of groups of different ages, Turkle has found that “children and the elderly start to relate to the object as a person. They begin to love it, and nurture it, and feel they have to attend to the robot’s inner state.” With this attachment and projection of their emotions, Turkle says, people begin to seek reciprocity, wanting the robot to care for them. “We were wired through evolution to feel that when something looks us in the eye, then someone is at home in it.”

Robots, Turkle argues, risk distorting the meaning of relationships, the bonds of love, and the types of emotional accommodation required to form authentic human attachments.

In a chat about the article, Groopman ties the matter to the expanding use of remote-controlled drones in warfare.

Apocalyptic visions involving robots tend to focus on what they’ll do to us. It’s interesting that the first real anxieties about this relationship concern what we do with them. Will we become too emotionally invested? Will we become too distant from the ethical reality of taking human lives?

And I wonder, do Sherry Turkle’s concerns extend to things like pets and the Sims?

We talk about college, we talk about media, we talk about industries in general, now here’s an interesting window into the church. Because of course, if everyone else is coping with the consequences of the digitization of aspects of their worlds, why should the clergy be exempt?

Televangelism has been around much longer than I have. But it remains a very particular type of worship, looked upon by old-school churchgoers as lowbrow, lazy, sensationalistic, stuffed with cheap visual thrills. In other words, they regard it much the same way “serious” media consumers tend to regard television generally.

Digivangelism, on the other hand, could be something altogether different. Much like the rest of the Internet, it can go in two directions – more vulgar and shallow than the worst televised atrocity, or even more genuine and fervent than the communal physical worship experience. In his essay, “In Defense of Virtual Church,” Pastor Douglas Estes is clearly aiming for the latter, but seems to strike many believers in the comments as merely making a case for the former.

Estes specializes in one manifestation of the virtual church, perhaps the most obvious. As far as I can tell, he’s most concerned with the concept of church in virtual worlds (like Second Life), which I find a little disappointing. But he’s acquired at least one really thoughtful critic, who’s promising to take on these ideas in a four-part series called “In Defense of Physical Community.” As you might expect, Nicholas Carr gets name-dropped in part one, but I have high hopes he’ll go beyond that in parts two through four:

• The Cultural Implications of the Internet
• The Physical Limitations of the Internet
• The Ecclesiological and Scriptural Implications of Online Church

I think this is a fascinating conversation. It’s another front in the high-church/low-church wars that are still raging over the Internet and its effects on our culture. But this time it’s actually about church! When people refer to old-school journalists as a “priesthood,” they’re employing a droll metaphor. In this context, when someone talks about the priesthood, they’re for real.

The Catholic in me – the boy who led his high school’s worship team, who carried around a copy of the Catechism to reference in doctrinal debates – is also dying to see how this turns out. I can imagine a journalism that consistently uses the best aspects of the Web to deliver a deeper understanding than any form of journalism we’ve seen to date. And I can sort of squint my eyes and picture a spiritual experience online that stirred me more than the scent of wood and holy water, the thumbing of an ashen cross onto my forehead, a whispered “Peace be with you.” I’ve had spiritual experiences online before, but I’ve never seen what I would call an online church. For a lover of the Internet and its potential, the possibility is deeply exciting.

I’ll collect three observations. The first is from Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times Magazine:

I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones.

The second from grumblebee’s Ask MetaFilter comment:

One can get by in our culture without problem-solving, so why bother with it? By get by, I mean that one can make a good living, have a big house, kids, etc. without having to solve intellectual problems.

And — most important — one can be a “smart person” (as our culture defines it) without solving problems. Most people want to be smart. They want to be seen as smart by others. Our culture sends a really strong message to them, which is “memorize a lot of facts and you’ll be smart.” My guess is most people think they ARE doing rigorous problem solving when they see something that needs to be done and have to search through their mental database to find the right fact or the right formula. I guess this IS a kind of problem solving, but it’s the easiest kind. It’s similar to solving a problem by searching on google until you find the answer.

Those two are percolating in my mind alongside this, from Tim just now:

It turns out that social networks are actually terrible places to try to send a message en masse. At some point, they stopped being a high-function version of your email address book, and became a kind of low-power broadcast antenna. It might be a great station, but it’s static-y, there’s too much filler, and it’s all too easy to drive out of range.

The proliferation of small facts can short-circuit a more profound understanding. (Of course this is the pattern I’d find here, right?) But what do we do with this, exactly? Especially in domains like social networking. How do we build systems that enable higher-order intelligence to thrive?

(See also “The intelligence pyramid.”)

I don’t think this Mary Poppins mashup is pitch-perfect. But I do think it’s wonderful:

From Video-Remixes.

1. Start this Delrious time-lapse video of clouds in San Francisco, then immediately pause it to let it buffer and lower the volume to mute. (Nothing against His Boy Elroy, who provides the original score. I actually used that music in a movie of my own once.)

2. Press play on this song from Jason Kanakis and His Coalition of the Unwilling.

3. Start the Delrious video. Full-screen it, if you swing that way.

Two great tastes that taste great together. Delrious discovered via Towleroad and Kanakis via Aurgasm.

Among the coolest perspectives I’ve gotten to observe while working for the Knight Foundation this summer have been those of the program directors. These are the folks who make grants in the Foundation’s 26 geographic communities across the US, each of whom is analogous to the primary grant officer of a local foundation.

They have a different angle from most other community leaders. Unlike heads of nonprofits or companies, their main responsibilities aren’t executive. Unlike politicians, they’re not really responsible for allocating a budget to satisfy various constituencies. Unlike VCs, they don’t seek ROI in money or influence. Instead, their mission is to find the most promising vectors for investment in a community – the individuals or organizations whom, if given a boost, might really begin boosting others – and fund them. Only they don’t just fund their grantees, they also advise them, cultivate them, promote them, and help them form key relationships. Most of the program director’s work actually isn’t about giving money, it’s about ensuring the money they give has a maximum impact.

This week, Knight announced a grant in Wichita, Kansas, that to my mind reflects the best sort of realization of this mission. An outsized component of Wichita’s economy has been aviation manufacturing, which can leave the city subject to cyclical downturns. So Wichita State University created the Center of Innovation for Biomaterials in Orthopedic Research to take the facilities and know-how spent on making plane parts out of composite materials and develop that expertise into making medical devices, a market which continues to consume an ever-growing slice of US GDP. Knight’s gift of $2.1 million will help this transformation along.

That’s the background. The interesting story is what Anne Corriston, Knight’s program director in Wichita, did to accomplish this grant:

Mike Good, a key project planner and the director of business operations at Via Christi Research, said Wichita owes a debt to Corriston, who persuaded her board to give Wichita the grant.

Good said Corriston spent months studying hundreds of pages of documents on the project. She even took a five-week class [!!!] offered at WSU’s National Institute for Aviation Research, offered to non-science people studying composites.

“She wrote a better analysis of our business plan than did the people we hired to write an analysis of our business plan,” Good said.

I just think this is awesome. I feel like I end up in a lot of meetings where an ambitious vision to accomplish real social change turns into a plan to, um, start a Ning network. It’s way too rare that someone says, “I want to transform my city, so I’m going to take a five-week course on aviation composites!”

And then there’s this other fantastic part of the work of someone like Anne – this years-long discipline of putting pieces into place until things start to fall together. If you look at most of the grants Anne has arranged in Wichita, they seem earnest and straightforward – grants to tutor kids at the local Boys and Girls Club in reading and the sciences, grants to put in place a comprehensive elementary-through-college science and engineering curriculum – but not revolutionary. It’s only when you start to connect the dots – a few more kids in physics class, a few of whom might try out engineering in college, a couple of whom might end up working for CIBOR – that the patient, year-by-year process of transformation begins to show itself.

And if you find that little bit of pattern recognition sweet, you might share my love for this little narrative detail Anne posted after the grant was announced:

I actually learned about composites when I was a kid, but didn’t know what I was learning. My dad built a sailplane in our garage while I was growing up. He bought plans and over a number of years, with help from his flying buddies, many of whom were engineers at Cessna and Beech, built the fuselage and wings.

He used fiberglass and epoxy glue to create part of the wings so they’d be lightweight. When the epoxy dried, the fiberglass was much more durable with the hardened resin on it. That’s composites.

Dad is 75 now and building another plane. This time it’s a Tailwind in their basement. And yes, he’s still making stuff out of composites. I wasn’t aware of it until I started telling my parents about the grant I’d been working on while having Sunday dinner with them. That’s when Dad went down to his basement and brought up a little part he’d made from carbon fiber and resin.

Dad’s hobby plane in the garage plants the seeds of a $2 million grant. A butterfly flaps its wings.

I always wonder what my outmoded taboos and curmudgeon-triggers will be. As I grow older, what paranoias or prejudices will make young folks roll their eyes the way I tend to roll mine at Nicholas Carr and Maggie Gallagher?

I might just have come across one. I was reading the latest Washington Monthly story roiling the blogosphere – College for $99 a Month. The story notes the arrival of super-cheap online intro courses students can take for college credit (the title’s not a hypothetical), positing that this heralds the beginning of the newspaper crisis era for academia.

I caught myself going into full-on curmudgeon mode – No online learning program can match a good, old-fashioned stint at a real college! Then I reflected on the fact that my undergrad experience – four years living on campus at a private college far from home – was already pretty specialized. Even more specialized than, for example, sitting down each morning to read your (shudder) printed newspaper.

I can imagine all sorts of ways in which cheap college can be a wonderful thing. But my curmudgeon reflex keeps tugging me back to the unintended consequences, the questions of what we’ll lose. So this is what it feels like.

I’m not sure whether our political moment really is more polarized than it has been in the past. But boy, does it feel corrosive. Mothers are crying at the prospect of the President might speak to their children. People are sniffing everywhere for hints of racism.

I’ve been wondering quite a bit recently how democratic dialogue is supposed to occur in a situation like this. We can’t talk to each other. How on earth are we supposed to handle self-governance?

Because I think in media, I’ve been craving a documentary project on this topic. I want to hear people of all political stripes address the topic of how we practice democracy when everyone assumes everyone else is acting in bad faith. Here’s how this looks in my head:

It’s a website. A wall of videos, and an assignment: Find a collaborator, someone whose political views contradict your own. You’re given a set of questions that might help foster a productive conversation. You and your collaborator interview each other about this topic – our polarization – and how we fight it. The full video of both interviews is posted. Creative Commons, natch. Anyone who’d like can edit their own version.

After we retired the Atari, my brother bequeathed me his Commodore 64 and his collection of 5.25″ floppies. Few of the disks had proper labels. Here and there you could make out a word crummily penciled onto an aging sticker. I dimly understood that most of the set had been copied from copies of software owned by my brother’s friends, but mostly, I just knew that they were mine now.

Far too much of my childhood was spent methodically inserting floppy after floppy and uttering the magic words that would reveal its secrets: LOAD "$",8,1

A jumble of code would cascade onto the blue screen, the processor would begin to whir, and after a few minutes, more often than not, it would groan and cough and settle to a halt. This meant the disk had been corrupted.

But every now and then, I’d slip in a disk and something marvelous would occur: inside the computer I could hear a stirring accelerating into flight, the cursor on the screen would disappear, the field of blue would change to black or white, and a program would begin.
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I think I forgot to post this a month or so ago when I couldn’t stop listening to it. Some genius had the amazing idea to remove the backing vocals from all the tracks on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. The result is kind of breathtaking, especially “God Only Knows”:

The difficulty and the peculiarity of these vocal lines can get obscured in the full versions. Just listen to the fugue section of that song. Man.

And of course, “Sloop John B,” my other favorite song from Pet Sounds:

(MetaFilterrific.)