September 2007 Archives

I love the One Laptop Per Child initiative.  It's a lovely blend of technology and worldchanging, and I do believe it is worldchanging given how important computers were to my development (my family got our first when I was three and I was instantly hooked).  Having access to a worldwide web of information from a young age changed my life and perspective on the world, and I look forward to more children having the same opportunity.

Plus the laptop itself?  Super cool.  Jesse Vincent brought one to dinner a few weeks ago and it is terrific.  Adorable and thoughtfull designed.  The screen is bright, the pull cord is clever, and the convertible touch screen is useful.  The keyboard is a bit small (it's intended for children after all) but I'm sure I would adjust to it.  After trying it out I instantly wanted one for notetaking in class, since it is much smaller, lighter, and hardier than my 15" Powerbook.

So I was excited to read in the New York Times that OLPC is taking advantage of people like me in the best possible way:

The marketing program, to be announced today, is called "Give 1 Get 1," in which Americans and Canadians can buy two laptops for $399.

One of the machines will be given to a child in a developing nation, and the other one will be shipped to the purchaser by Christmas. The donated computer is a tax-deductible charitable contribution. The program will run for two weeks, with orders accepted from Nov. 12 to Nov. 26.

Cool!  I can't wait to order one in November, and I am all the more eager because a child will be enjoying the laptop too.  This is a neat little motivation trick, using people's desire for a cool gadget to get a donation.  I hope it is successful!

Goodness, it has been a week since my last post!  Fall quarter started up on Monday, so I have been chipping away at my classes all week.  I'm taking Methods of Psychological Research, Modern American Literature, Environmental Issues & Problems, and Introductory Physics.  Psych research ends a month from now (eek!) so physics will be my hardest course once that's done.

But anyway.  This summer I bought an adorable little red Prius, which I love to bits.  I particularly enjoy the two of the nifty dashboard displays.  One shows you whether the car is using the gas engine, electric motor, both, or neither (such as when coasting downhill). 

The other (pictured to the left, click for huge version) tracks your fuel consumption.  The bar graph provides a readout of miles-per-gallon and power regeneration in 5 minute increments.  The bottom display the average MPG since the last refuel.  

(You can see more views of both displays at this post by Carpundit.)

You already know I am a geek so I have no hesitation in revealing that I find this feature crazy fun.  The energy monitor is a fun logic puzzle as you try to figure out when and why it switches between gas and electric.  Obviously it is not completely random, but the algorithm for the switch is not readily obvious either.

But the especially fun one is the consumption monitor.  It is endlessly amusing for me to sit in the passenger seat and watch how driving style affects MPG and regeneration.

Using the general knowledge that the energy monitor gives you, you can learn to maximize MPG (for example, not accelerating quickly, or using engine braking when going downhill or coming to a stop). 

And unlike most cars, you get almost instant feedback through the consumption monitor.  Instead of calculating an average when you fill up or even just noticing you saved a few cents on gas, you see with five minutes how well you've done. 

When I'm in the passenger seat, the driver and I often (and this is really geeky) cheer when a particularly high MPG pops up due to efficient driving.  I even have a few photos on my camera phone from times when we've hit an especially long run of high MPG.  For example, the photo to the left is from a memorable drive up the 1 from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, where gently rolling hills and my co-pilot's excellent engine braking skills kept the MPG at nearly 100 for over fifteen minutes and regenerated 400Wh!

Artur tells me that there is research showing that constant monitoring of this kind turns activities into a video game.  Any time you can constantly see the effects of your actions in digital form (heart rate monitoring comes to mind,** or calories burned on a treadmill), it becomes a game to adjust your actions and see the effects.

So why am I treading on the lovely Jane MacGonigal's turf on my little literature blog?  One of my "humanity through humanities" interests is the psychology of motivation as seen through literature (see what do bestsellers tell us about society?), particularly the literature of technology (see del.icio.us as a model for social change). 

So you can probably see where I'm going with this: how can this be harnessed for social change?   Yes, you've heard this question from me before, and hopefully you will hear it a lot more.   This seems particularly relevant to environmental concerns, such as the Prius' motivator to save gas. 

From a psychology of motivation perspective, the Prius essentially shortens the time between action and reinforcement.  If you took Psych 101 you probably remember rat studies that explore this idea.*  A rat is placed in a box and tries to perform a maze correctly, receiving a pellet for a correct performance.  If the rat receives a pellet immediately after performing a maze correctly, it will remember the maze better next time.  If the rat receives a pellet a day after performing a maze correctly, the rat doesn't connect the two and the reward has no effect on the maze.  You receive the electrical bill after two months and it isn't connected to that time six weeks ago that you left the lights on when you went away for the weekend, or even all those times you left the lights on when you went out to dinner.

Carolyn Webster-Stratton's Incredible Years program applies the same principle when using logical consequences for children.***  If a child goes outside in winter without a coat, the consequence (being cold) is logical and immediate, therefore reinforcing the lesson that cold weather requires a coat.  But if a child does not study for a spelling test, the consequence (failing the spelling text next week) is logical but not immediate, so the child doesn't connect the failing grade with all those nights spent playing video games instead of studying.  The environment is one big spelling test that we are failing, but the grades likely won't come in until our children's, grandchildren's, or great-grandchildren's generations if we're lucky.  The consequences of not conserving are logical but without a Prius-style display, they are not immediate.

So back to the example of electricity.  What could be done to reduce the period between action and reinforcement?  I picture putting up a Prius-style display in my apartment, perhaps over the living room lightswitch, showing in real time the kilowatts of power my house is using plus averages for the hour, day, week, and month.  I imagine testing out the different combinations of lights that produce the ideal combination of low wattage and light needed for my task, instead of just flipping on all the lights at once.

Surely there could be lots more environmental applications for this.  I hope people smarter than me get around to inventing and implementing them!

* There are lots of examples and of course I don't have a relevant textbook handy, but one good example with pigeons is Fantino, E., & Dunn, M. (1983). The delay-reduction hypothesis: Extension to three-alternative choice.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 9(2), 132-146.
** For example, Larkin, K.T., Zayfert, C., Veltum, L.G., & Abel, J.L. (1992).  Effects of feedback and contingent reinforcement in reducing heart rate response to stress.  Journal of Psychophysiology, 6(2), 119-130.
*** From a therapeutic perspective, see Webster-Stratton, C.  (2007).  Reducing Inappropriate Behaviors: Part 5, Logical Consequences.  In Leader's Guide: School-Age Version (ages 6-12 years), (pp. 639-676). The Incredible Years: Parents, Teachers, and Children Training Series. Seattle: Incredible Years Press.
From a parent/lay perspective, see Webster-Stratton, C.  (2005).  Logical Consequences.  In The Incredible Years (don't have my copy handy for page numbers).  Seattle: Incredible Years Press.

Update, 10/19/07

Artur points to this DEFRA report, which analyzes the effects of feedback on energy consumption.  Here is the beginning of the executive summary:

Most domestic energy use, most of the time, is invisible to the user. Most people
have only a vague idea of how much energy they are using for different purposes
and what sort of difference they could make by changing day-to-day behaviour or
investing in efficiency measures. Hence the importance of feedback in making
energy more visible and more amenable to understanding and control. This
review considers what is known about the effectiveness of feedback to
householders. The focus is on how people change their behaviour, not on the
detail of the technology used. 

He also briefly posted on Radar about technologies that monitor everyday power usage here, and plans a followup on the latest technologies.  I'm looking forward to it!

I'm working on a few more analysis posts at the moment, but I'm also writing an essay for an English class so I'm a little analyzed out!  So just a quick note for today about why I'm analyzing my own bookmarks.

It may seem a little curious to be analyzing my own bookmarks as a way of explicating my "del.icio.us as unconscious identity" thesis.  After all, I should already know my own identity, right?

First, I would feel weird choosing some random person and analyzing the crap out of their bookmarks.  Granted, I will have to do something like that (though probably not with del.icio.us) when writing my thesis/dissertation/whatever, but then it will at least be in a boring dissertation that no one besides my committee will read anyway.  (Well, I've read other peoples' non-boring dissertations and used them in research, but I dare not assign such qualities to my own work.)  Even though nobody read this blog either, at least some poor person won't be Googling their username and come across a whole research project devoted to them.  That would be weird.  Now, if someone volunteered, that would be different... *hint hint to non-existent readership*

Second, I can't say I really know my identity through del.icio.us that well.  This identity was developed unconsciously over the nearly three years I've been using it, and like most college students my identity has developed and changed quite a bit over those three years.  So I'm not looking to support an already-concluded hypothesis when it comes to my identity.  Rather, I'm interested to see what can be objectively revealed through a unique form of analysis.  It's pretty fun, actually.

I'm a big fan of O'Reilly Radar*, always a source for interesting thinking about the Internet.  I found Tim O'Reilly's post today about the semantic web touched a bit close to home.  I am generally a bit reticent to use the term Web 2.0 myself, but Tim's characterization is always unimpeachable!  Here he compares the semantic web and Web 2.0:

But for me, the paradigmatic example of Web 2.0 is Google's Pagerank. Not only did it lead to the biggest financial success story to date, it is the example that makes us think hardest about the true meaning of "collective intelligence." What Larry Page realized was that meaning was already being encoded unconsciously

by web page creators when they linked one page to another. And that understanding that a link was a vote allowed Google to give better search results than people who, up to that time, were just searching the contents of the various documents on the web.

And so, it seems to me that Pagerank illustrates the fundamental difference between the approaches of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. The Semantic Web sees meaning as something that needs to be added to documents so that computers can act intelligently about them. Web 2.0 seeks to discover the ways that meaning has already been implicitly encoded by the way people use documents and digital objects, and then to extract that meaning, often by statistical means by studying large aggregates of related documents.

My basic research methodology uses literary analysis to extract the implicit meaning "encoded by the way people use documents and digital object," as Tim puts it.  By this measure I am terribly Web 2.0 aren't I?  Ha, just kidding.  But really if it weren't for Web 2.0 I wouldn't be writing what I am today, and this article speaks quite clearly to the reason for that.  Give it a read!

* Admittedly I am biased because I play copyeditor and partner-in-crime for Artur!

There is a super neat tool called del.icio.us direc.tor, which provides an AJAX interface for browsing your del.icio.us tags.  (I guess I will switch over to delicious when the new version is released, but I am kind of attached to the dots!)  One interesting thing is that when you browse a tag, it shows related tags and then allows you to browse bookmarks with both tags.  These combinations of tags can be sort of interesting, so I thought I'd show a few examples from my own bookmarks.  Here's the first one.

Let's look at a tag I use pretty frequently, "jewish."  Now, you can glean a few things about me from this view.  First, compare this tag to other tags around it.  With 67 bookmarks, it's pretty clear that I find a lot of sites that fit the category of Jewish to be important enough to save them for future reference.  In other words, it's probably safe to say that Judaism is important to me, or even that Jewishness is an important part of my identity.  And that is pretty accurate!

But perhaps a more interesting point of analysis is how this tag overlaps with others.  The list of sub-tags is pretty diverse.  First, there are a number of travel destinations (poland, stockholm, travel) and my two home cities (seattle and sf).  You could say that being involved in Jewish life is something I'm involved with both home and away, a fact supported if you look at the bookmarks and see synagogues to attend while traveling.   Second, there are some seemingly tangential and secular topics, such as comics, laugh (i.e., things that makes me laugh), law, and news.  So you could guess that Judaism is something that pervades all spheres of my daily life.  Third, it's interesting to note how little overlap there is between "jewish" and "israel," only one tag out of israel's 20 (seen on the left).  Perhaps a comment on how Israel has become a less important facet of modern Jewish life?  After all, one of the original motivations of the Reform movement was to deemphasize messianic Israel in the liturgy (Wikipedia has a bit on this).  Perhaps here you can judge how that has trickled down to a modern progressive Jew, which from my bookmarks you might term an interest in Israel that is largely separate from religious practice.

To support this last point, compare this tag to another one frequently used, "cute."  Yes, I am the kind of girl who tags cute pictures to look at when she has a bad day.  But  never mind that, comparing is our task here!  As you can see, this has been used almost as frequently as jewish, at 43 (vs. 69) uses.  But instead of the multiple overlaps like with "jewish," it has only one, with two bookmarks also tagged "blog."  (I bet you can guess one, if not the other!)  So while I am interested on keeping up on the latest in cuteness, you can't really say that cuteness pervades every sphere of my life like Judaism does.  I certainly wish it did though!

The neat part is although you can tease out parts of my identity from this, I didn't intend to present this in the first place!  All I did was bookmark sites I wanted to refer to later on, and over a few years this little picture of me emerged.  I'd love to find more tools to help create pictures of identity like this.

So there is my first bit of using del.icio.us direc.tor to do a little literary identity analysis.  I have a few more examples saved up, but I'll maybe do those another day.  All this analysis has made me hungry for dinner already!

One of my favorite questions when using literature as a lens is: what can be said about a society that values this text?  So with the arrival of Sunday's New York Times bestsellers list, I am curious what can be said about a society that made these books bestsellers.  Let's take a look at the top 10.

1	A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, by Khaled Hosseini. (Riverhead, $25.95.) A friendship between two women in Afghanistan against the backdrop of 30 years of war.
2	THE WHEEL OF DARKNESS, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. (Warner, $25.99.) A Tibetan abbot asks the F.B.I. agent Aloysius Pendergast to help recover a stolen relic with evil powers.
3	BONES TO ASHES, by Kathy Reichs. (Scribner, $25.95.) The forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan is asked to examine the skeleton of a young girl in Canada, where, many years ago, her best friend disappeared.
4	DARK POSSESSION, by Christine Feehan. (Berkley, $24.95.) A Seattle counselor for battered women is wooed by a shape-shifter in Brazil; the 18th Carpathian novel.
5	THE ELVES OF CINTRA, by Terry Brooks. (Del Rey/Ballantine, $26.95.) The second volume of the Genesis of Shannara series is set in postapocalyptic Seattle.
6	TREE OF SMOKE, by Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) The Vietnam War in the experience of military intelligence officers. First Chapter
7	* PLAY DIRTY, by Sandra Brown. (Simon & Schuster, $26.95.) A disgraced N.F.L. quarterback struggles to remake his life.
8	HEARTSICK, by Chelsea Cain. (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95.) A detective obsesses over the beautiful, sadistic serial killer who nearly tortured him to death.
9	THE QUICKIE, by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) A police officer's attempt to get back at her husband goes dangerously awry.
10	SONGS WITHOUT WORDS, by Ann Packer. (Knopf, $24.95.) The relationship between two old friends is shaken when the daughter of one of them attempts suicide. First Chapter

I notice two basic themes emerge:

• The story of a relationship between two people
• The story of someone trying to get something done
  

Now, this is pretty broad, of course.  But it speaks to a trick that political communication scholars have known for a while: it's much easier to get people involved with a really good personal story than with a general call to action. 

There are two aspects to this.  One, people can be engaged by the story of an individual affected by a community problem.  Current bestseller A Thousand Splendid Suns is an example of this; Dave Eggers' What Is the What is another recent example.  Second, reading about someone doing something can make you want to do something too.  I'm sure everyone can remember an example of that.  I admit I was overcome with wanting to be a dancer after seeing Center Stage, which if nothing else shows the text in question doesn't even have to be very good to have an effect.  I also remember a lovely little film that the Jewish Family Service of Seattle shows new volunteers, which inspired me to assist in the many ways they help the community.

I feel like the second phenomenon is more recognizable but less utilized.  And really, it is a bit more intuitive, isn't it?  If you read a powerful story about someone who needs help, you want to help but don't know how.  If you read a powerful story about someone helping those in need, you want to help and now know a way, or at least have someone else to support.  These stories give people a means to action, instead of just a call to it.  I wish more organizations would partner with talented artists to put more of these stories into mainstream culture. 

Personally, I hope I can someday use my writing skills to give people a means to act for social change, and I hope I can find an organization to partner with and find a story to tell.  Hmm, this seems like a non-profit waiting to happen!

I woke up this morning thinking about the curious way community is created through del.icio.us.  I think that most people, myself included, join del.icio.us as a way to manage their own bookmarks.  But in the act of managing your own bookmarks, you contribute to a knowledgebase of thousands of bookmarks as well as a network of semantic structures.  So through a personal act, you contribute to the society of del.icio.us users.  You don't have to do anything special, and you likely never think, hey, I'll bookmark this so maybe someone else can find it.  But that's exactly what happens anyway.

Part of my commitment to humanity through humanities involves using knowledge about humanity gained through literature to promote social change.  So I can't help but think this model could be useful for more than just bookmarks.  It's often difficult to convince people to promote social change when it requires a task that does not directly benefit them--really, this is the theory behind incentive systems such as tax-deductible donations and NPR totebags.  So how can we harness this model where doing something for yourself simultaneously promotes the community?

One of my favorite web tools by far is del.icio.us.  I started using it back in 2004 so I could access my bookmarks from anywhere, but what held my interest is tagging.  Oh, how I love to tag.  Like any good comparativist the only thing I love more than categorization is redefining categorization.  Really, anything that plays with the boundaries of semantics?  It makes me all tingly.*

And so it's no surprise that lately I have been thinking about the identity performance of del.icio.us users.  Because with del.icio.us, particularly before the advent of private tagging, you can't just access your bookmarks from anywhere.  Anyone can access your bookmarks from anywhere.  Not only is it public, but it's also social: you can see every other user's bookmarks, and your semantic structure is integrated with others' through those bookmarks.  I find it fascinating to click through on a popular bookmark and see all the different tags used.

With public bookmarking, you are presenting an identity, whether you think about it or not.  And with social bookmarking, that identity is inextricably linked with the identities presented by other users.

I'll expand on those two points a bit later.  Now I am tired and off to bed!

* I should point out that I'm in the new delicious preview, and it really expands on this by making tagging and viewing (a la del.icio.us director) much more flexible.  I am in love.  I am sure I will have more to write about that before long.