Tin Foil Hat Brigade, Episode I

This is deep in conspiracy theory land; much deeper than I usually explore. I admit that up front, and this should probably be taken more as a bit of humor than anything else. But, nevertheless, there are a two strands I'd like to tie together.

The US Government is very interested in a field that they call "Human Terrain Mapping" (wikipedia, BAA #1, BAA #2 as examples), which is basically understanding the pulse of the street: what people are thinking, their moods, and so forth. There's a strong anthropology / sociology component to it, as well as some psychology. One of the crucial things in doing this well is, I believe, a lot of current information about people's moods. There's a huge amount of interest from organizations such as DARPA in mining things like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook to get at mood and sentiment at a population level. There's also interest from high-frequency traders in seeing if this information can be used to do stock market trades. So, this is not exactly just an academic issue.

One of the standard problems here is getting the data. The "firehose" from Twitter costs around $30K a month; Facebook has never offered it, as far as I know. I have no problems with them selling this data; both of these are private companies, trying to make a profit. (Although, as a researcher, I'd love to get a "big" dataset from them.)

Continuing to use Twitter and Facebook as examples, both of these companies were relatively cheap to start up: maybe on the order of $200 million of so. I think they are both even cash-flow positive now. Especially in the world of military systems, $200 million is a total steal. A good spy satellite is easily $1-5 billion.

Now, to put on my tin-foil hat. I wouldn't be surprised if a three-letter agency (CIA, NSA, NRO) supplied meaningful amounts of capitol to one or more of these organizations, in exchange for real-time access to the data. It would have been a very cheap investment for an amazing data stream.

Here's the other thread I want to pull in to this discussion. Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) have been going to some extents to avoid opening up their books. For instance, here, a moderately complex attempt to get around SEC regulations. What tweaked my thinking was Felix's comment, "Facebook seems to be going out of its way to avoid public scrutiny."

What if there is a $250M hole in the books that roughly says "CIA?"

Not that it's stopped me from using Facebook.

iPad Dry Erase Markers

I've not been crazy about iPhone / iPad stylii. It didn't seem right. Then, I saw this post, and it was immediately obvious why the stylii didn't work. I've made a slight change to his design: use a metal body pen. This means that the wire is no longer needed.

Supplies:

• Sharpie "King Size" Permanent Marker (~$2.50 at Blick)
• 1.5" x .25" piece of conductive foam (see Note below)
• Pair of pliers
• Pair of sissors

Instructions:

1. Using the pliers, pull out the existing nib / point. (This is a bit messy)
2. Let the pen sit, uncapped, for several days. There's a piece of felt that holds the bulk of the ink, and this needs to dry out
3. With the sissors, cut a piece of conductive foam to size
4. Push the foam into the body of the pen.
5. Done!

Note: There might be something in doubling over the piece of conductive foam (cut it to 3" x .25", fold in half) I used a "dense" foam, but it still feels a little soft in day-to-day use.

Also, if you don't have conductive foam, drop me a note. I have a huge sheet of it that I'm not going to use, and we can work out some sort of trade.

Pages for the iPad

Some random thoughts about Pages for the iPad:

• I can't figure out how to make a document in landscape orientation in Pages iPad itself. I don't think it's possible, actually.


• But, Pages does support it. You have to do something like this:
• Create a document on the desktop that's in the format you want (landscape, weird paper size, etc.)
  
• Mail it to you iPad
  
• Open it in Pages


It's not the most elegant process, but it does seem to work.

I think I'm really waiting for something like InDesign for the iPad. I think it will come eventually, but it will be a while.

Wikipedia Vandalism

Let's think for a moment about Diane Arbus. One of the premier photographers of the middle of the twentieth century, her photographs of "others:" insane, marginalized, different opened up an entirely new way of looking at photography and how we view photography as art.

Talented, yes. But let's face it, when you're getting pictures of your new-born baby, she's second from the bottom of the list. (The very bottom of the list remains reserved for Joel-Peter Witkin, examples here, here, and here) Unless of course, you're Gloria Vanderbilt, looking for a picture of your new-born son.



And so, Diane Arbus. Baby Photographer. Of course, the son ends up being a little famous himself. I really, really, really want to edit his wikipedia entry to have that photograph of him as the main picture. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure the copyrights on the Arbus piece keep me from doing it. But maybe someone isn't quite as ethical as me.

Random Thoughts: Visas and RaVis

1. Visas

I'm applying for a visa to the Russian Federation. One of the questions they ask on the visa application is to list all of the countries you've visited in the past 10 years and the years you visited them. This is a non-trivial question for me.

2. RaVis

This is a textbook example of everything that's wrong with open source software. And probably a perfect example of Conway's Law. It's mainly developed by the UN (yes, that UN). I have an import line like this:

import org.un.cava.birdeye.ravis.graphLayout.visual.edgeRenderers.BaseEdgeRenderer

Yeah. Right.

3. RaVis, Part II

Because this took me literally all morning to figure out. Here's how you add nodes to an existing RaVis graph:

// I'm using XML-formatted objects, as per the example code.
var o : XML = new XML("");

// What none of the postings tell you is that you need to
// create the new node on the vgraph (view), not the model
// graph. The vgraph will automatically create the model
// nodes for you.

var n1 : IVisualNode = vgraph.createNode(null, o);

// I'm using an existing node as the second part of the link
var n2 : IVisualNode = graph.nodeByStringId("1").vnode;

// Then, again in the view, link the two nodes together.
// The vgraph will create the edge in the model for you
var ive : IVisualEdge = vgraph.linkNodes(n1, n2);

// If you have MXML edgeLabelRenderers, you'll need to add
// data to the model and view Edge object. (Oddly, the model
// linkNodes takes an object parameter. But the view does not.)
o = new XML("")
ive.data = ive.edge.data = o;

// With this code, you don't have to do something like
// vgraph.graph = graph or a vgraph.draw. It just happens

Hopefully this will help someone else...

Frequent Flying

One thing I've noticed is that when I've been at one of the high levels of frequent flyer is milage inflation. Basically, if you sneeze on a flight, management will send you 1,000 extra miles.

For instance, I took a recent trip to the Raleigh-Durham area. My routing had me flying 5145 "real" miles (including the 500 mile minimum). But, I ended up getting 22,631 miles for the trip. Or roughly four time more miles than I flew. The bulk of this was a 10,000 mile "loyalty" reward, but there was still 6,486 miles in various "Class" and "Elite" bonuses.

All this is a further reminder that I've never, ever, EVER been able to use frequent flyer miles on myself.

Society For Undergrounding

This falls into the "Morally Acceptable Business Plan" bucket.

The Society for Undergrounding is a non-profit organization with the purpose of promoting tourism and photography around the world. We give grants to areas of natural beauty, historical importance, or unique views for the purpose of burying overhead wires that would otherwise make tourist snapshots significantly less pretty, or require a good deal of Photoshopping to remove.

We primarily work on the basis of voluntary donations from tourists and photographers, as well as donations from photography industry. We also can serve as an escrow-type agency for a region that might want to undertake an undergrounding operation, but want a neutral party to help negotiate with utilities and mediate between potential competitors.

Regional grants are, of course, done for that particular region. Otherwise, we accept proposals from anyone, and evaluate the opportunity based on the cost of the undergrounding, the expected number of pictures.

[ugh. I just checked, and "undergroundingsociety.org" is available. This means that I probably a) have to buy it, and b) put up a plausible website there.]