There are 10,060 frames of video in Michael Jackson's 5 min 35 sec nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. The White Glove Tracking project (W.G.T.) is an effort to isolate just the white glove from this moment in pop-culture history. Rather then write unnecessarily complex code to find the glove in every frame of the video I am asking for the assistance of 10,060 individual internet users to simply click and drag a box around the glove in one frame.

Help us out! It's a surprisingly addictive process. Get started loggin' frames.

Big thanks to Eyebeam and Rhizome for the support!

Getting the average use data out of PK and getting the data into Google Maps was pretty simple. What turned out to be challenging was working with the US Government's zip code boundary lat/lon data which is in a completely weird format. It's just a lot less user friendly than it could (should?) be. One could imagine that public data (which this zip code boundary information is) could be a lot more accessible. This seems to be a trend I've observed with most of the public data I've worked with now.

The project is based on the idea that observing behavior is often the impetus for changing behavior. For instance, there's lots of anecdotal evidence that cars with MPG computers encourage drivers to drive more efficiently because they learn the driving behaviors that lead to more gas consumption and those that lead to less. Similarly, the first step for changing your financial behavior is to track your income and expenses (i.e. keep a budget). This process almost always illuminates areas where your spending can be reigned in because you see things that were invisible to you before you started recording that information. The point is that measurable, comparable feedback on behavior can change behavior.

The ideal solution for an electric consumption monitoring tool is probably to install a physical device that monitors your electric use real-time in your home or work place. However, such a device would likely be expensive (or at least cost more than $0). Personal Kyoto, however, is really the same thing — it just works with more course data supplied by your monthly electric bill and via the web instead of a physical device. It does have the benefit of being completely free though.

I've already become pretty hardcore about sniffing out vampire loads (seceretly always-on devices such as TVs, stereos, charging devices, etc) and replacing the few remaining incandecent bulbs I have at home. The results seem to be showing in my decreasing monthly average usage. If you're a New Yorker interested in reducing your energy use (and/or the money you spend on your electric bill) do check out Personal Kyoto yourself and get that average use metric heading south. If you're a software developer and are interested in working to bring PK to your city, send me an email (ben [dot] engebreth [at] gmail [dot] com).

Update/Note: I forgot to thank Mike Frumin for contributing his technical knowledge to the project as well as a few significant conceptual points. Thanks Mike.

While a fellow can work on whatever projects he or she is interested in, the lab's (and Eyebeam's) themes as of late have been leaning towards (1) Energy, Technology and Sustainability and (2) Urban research, urban interventions and media in public space.

Speaking of Energy, Technology and Sustainability, look for my next project, Personal Kyoto, in the next couple of weeks.

Of course, LA has been a bitter-sweet kinda town for me in the past, but this trip was just fantastic and really, really made LA feel wonderful. It's probably the distance (in both miles and minutes) from that city that allows me to feel that way, but I really loved being there and (almost) everything about it. I can still deal without the traffic (and that's not an insignificant element of one's life in LA) but the city and the goings on within it were nothing but super-cool. In large part it's just due to having good pals out in that part of the world and the ability to get to see them all in a short amount of time (not to mention hangin' with the super-cool GRLers). It was like concentrated fun.

At the same time, LA made NYC seem new again when I got back. The season's changing probably had a little to do with it as well, but it's just nice to see the city again after being away from it for the longest period of time since I moved here last year. Nice to be back, but I still need to catch up on the lost sleep I missed while I was away.

Honestly, I developed SlashLinks because I wanted to put my del.icio.us links on my website in a fashion similar to the way del.icio.us displays them with the functionality of tags and archives (all intuitively navigable by URL). So, that's what I have now. My most recent links are at /links, my link archive is at /links/archive, and my links indexed by tag are at /links/tags.

So I think I've fairly transparently integrated SlashLinks into my blog -- which was the goal. I've also set up a vanilla instance of SlashLinks here to illustrate how it works out of the box. Since the core links, archive, and tags pages are styled via CSS, you can relatively easily change up the look of these core pages to get it to look like you want. If someone wanted to use SlashLinks as a stand alone link blog they might might style the site like this for example.

SlashLinks uses a bit of the ole AJAX to keep up-to-date with del.icio.us. When someone views your links (and after a user-defined check interval), SlashLinks will query del.icio.us via the API and grab your new links if you have any. If you do, the links will drop into the page without a reload. I think it's kinda cool. So to keep up-to-date all you (or your readers) have to do is view the links page every once and a while. Alternatively, you can log in to the SlashLinks configuration page and manually update.

There's a couple of examples of sites using SlashLinks at the project site. Hopefully there will be more sites added in the future.

But on the non-trivial side of things (finally something is coming to me), the Eyebeam OpenLab has released some really cool projects in the last week or two. Mike put out his super-cool Ogle and Evan released De Touch. The former is a tool for grabbing 3D images from games/programs (like printscreen, but for 3D) and the latter is a webapp that "explores the manipulation of the human form." (i.e. it undoes what touch-up artists do to photos before we see them on the front cover of magazines). I've got my del.icio.us based project coming out in (hopefully) the next week, so be prepared. I've got to follow in some enormously successful footsteps.....not that I'm anxious about it. Ok, yes I am.

Los Angeles, CA
Palm Springs, CA
Denver, CO
Columbus, OH
Louisville, KY
Boston, MA
New York, NY
Washington, DC
Copperhill, TN

Crap! I didn't go anywhere this year. Most of those places I hit because I moved! I was just thinking that I need to plan some interesting trips this year. Doesn't have to be too crazy or too far (though I really'd like to get out of the states again eventually -- just for a trip I mean). I think my travel goals for this year will include visiting Philadelphia and Montreal. I think I can get a bus to both places relatively easily and cheap. This is exactly when a car would be handy though.

The thesis of the essay is that complex systems abound in nature and our ability to understand them is inadequate. The conclusion that he seems to draw from this is that complex systems (the environment, in particular) should be left to do their complex system thing -- that things will take care of themselves in ways that we cannot forsee. What he's implying is that complex systems have some sort of self-equilibrating mechanism, and I think he's right to a degree. Over certain time scales something like climate can be considered an observable measure that implies equilibrium. But instead of talking about equilibrium and the conditions that lead to and support that equilibrium, Chrichton talks about complexity in a way that makes it sound like the universe has no order and that complexity is really a non-science for all of it's predictive power.

One of the tenants of chaotic systems (or complex systems -- they're the same thing) is that they have sensitive dependence on initial conditions (i.e. small changes in input can yield large changes in output) and Chrichton admirably notes this in the essay. Weather is a complex system where this logic should be applied. Weather is extremely sensitive and can appear almost random at times. Climate (defined as a long term average of weather) is more stable precisely because it averages out the seemingly random elements of weather.

Something that Chrichton gets wrong is the ability to control chaotic systems. It is absolutely true that chaos and complexity can be controlled, though maybe for Chrichton's approval I'll use the term managed (I'd like to say control here actually, because in a scientific and engineering sense it can exactly mean manage). It can't be controlled in the way that you can control an airplane or a rocket, you can't guide it wherever you want to (except when you can), but you can keep some systems from spiraling away toward some undesirable extreme. It's not always possible and it's certainly not always easy, however, complexity does not preclude control of complex systems. Chrichton mentions the stock market as an example of a complex system that can not be controlled, and he's wrong. The stock market could be controlled if we had access to a gigantic pile of money. We could manipulate the price of a stock to move it any direction we wanted when we wanted. Of course that's not the way to make money in the stock market. The stock market is chaotic in reality because we do not know what the millions of inputs (individuals with smaller sums of money betting on certain stocks) are into the system with exact (or even approximate) specificity. Therefore the system behaves like a complex system because any attempts to model it have large errors in input and as we know an error in input can lead to large errors in output. The stock market can't be controlled for practical reasons not theoretical ones (though the SEC exists in part to make sure that fraudulent attempts to control the market at a micro-cap level are not allowed).

For our purposes here complexity means that we can't control weather, but we can control climate (and conversely, we can fuck up climate). The key, going back to the sensitive dependence line, is to keep the system's inputs within the boundaries of conditions that support the desired behavior. Meaning, quite simply, don't change your inputs too significantly or you will overtax the equilibrium mechanism that handles these (relatively) small deviations. That's the key to controlling complex systems, correct the inputs while the deviations are small, before they become large and unfixable. This is what ecosystems do. This is why they are important. They are resilient to change, but not infinitely so. There are many inputs for climate which need to stay within certain bounds, but there is at least one input in particular that humans are perturbing to ranges outside of modern historical norms. The question is how far we can push it before we exceed the system's equilibrating capacity. The corollary question is what new behavior results from leaving equilibrium. This is really where the complexity question comes into play because we really don't have a basis for knowing what might happen if we leave our current equilibrium, but we know that large change is possible. This is, to me, the case for managing the problem. Let's not push ourselves out of a comfortable equilibrium into an unknown system.

While I agree with Chrichton's disapproval of using fear as a motivator and see the observation about civilization naturally moving toward de-carbonization very optimistically (though I question the speed at which we are doing so and the economic penalty we pay for moving too slowly), I take issue with the essay's science by analogy approach to persuasion and his heavy use of media distilled science to support his conclusions. But in the end, Chrichton's main fault is that he misapplies elements of complexity theory to justify a why bother attitude and to nearly demonize the scientific process. To think that scientists are working with linear frameworks for the behavior of complex systems and only science fiction writers are privy to the non-linear way of things is truly ridiculous.

So, what's the motivator for humans to do this? Well, they get paid for it of course. And this is where I start to speculate because I haven't yet had time to look into exactly how the system works beyond what I've already mentioned, but the speculation is kind of fun. Anyway, we I know they get paid for answers. But while some answers are pretty black and white (like the example I just sited about the human being in the picture or not), some answers are subjective and others are just simply approximations. I'm wondering if the system could handle those type of questions/problems through a voting type method. Like maybe you could instead ask if that photo contains an attractive person or ask what that person's weight is judging just from the photo. That starts to be a really cool system with some really cool -- dare I say it -- Wisdom of Crowds type potential.

One of the issues though is the latency of the response. It's an asynchronous system meaning that you put in a request and then you check back for an answer later (presumably through another web service request). However, I would think the amount of money you set for satisfactory answers would determine the latency. If you ask whether or not a human is in a specified photo and offer $20 for an answer I would think you'd get one far faster than if you offered 3 cents. I wonder how close you could get to a realtime system if you used outrageous rewards for simple problems? I wonder if there's an adequate pricing/latency point somewhere in the middle?

So it's some potentially cool new technology (courtesy of a Bookstore let's not forget!). I'll look into it more tomorrow and see if any of my speculations have any component in reality.

I've also reconsidered the idea of archiving my links. Since linking to another site is like voting for it when it comes to search engines, I decided that I hold my own opinions (links) in higher regard than someone else's so why not archive the links and make that vote actually count. I haven't finished setting that up yet, but I'm working on it. I don't really like the MT archiving plugin, so I'm just trying to work with del.icio.us directly to pull my links out and write an archive based on what's over there. Oh, and the links on the sidebar now contain the extended description that del.icio.us allows but that I had previously disregarded.

I'm heading up to Boston on Friday for the very cool Startup School thing that Paul Graham is putting on. I'm gonna stay at Jeff's place Friday and then catch the speakers on Saturday. Then I'll speed back to NYC to see Elina who's getting into town for a little visit before she moves off to Finland. I guess it'll be a semi-busy weekend.