Brain Lint

All of a sudden, the Boston area is lousy with teams creating web-based applications to allow people to review all kinds of products based on not only the quality of the product itself, but various facets of the corporate social responsibility shown by the manufacturers of the product as well.

Listed by order in which I heard about them

1. Buy it like you mean it (non-profit) covers the full spectrum of corporate responsibility from the environment to labor relations. The content is generated by the community, and they allow consumers to weight the different areas so the site can offer tailored scores based on ones interests. Looks like their current plan is depth-first, so the community’s focus is specifically on the chocolate industry.
2. IzzitGreen (for-profit) Consumer-created reviews on products and services specifically focused on (as you might expect from the name) environmentally friendly products.
3. Zeer (for-profit) More consumer related content. This one seems focused more on does it taste good/work well/good for me type reviews than the others. Impressive population of product images and names, they stated this was a “core competency” of theirs in their presentation at the last webinno conference.
4. Citizen’s Market (non-profit). Seems very similar to buy it like you mean it, but with a broader focus. Looks to be the newest of the group (heard about them on the Boston ruby group list where they’re looking for volunteer programmers) Strangely enough, the founder of buy it like you mean it is an adviser of Citizens Market

I think these are all great ideas, especially the ones focused on the global impacts of the products. I just wonder how much room there is in the market for all of these operations to succeed.

I got a kick out of a quote from the NYT magazine article on up and coming F1 race driver Lewis Hamilton. He moved to Geneva for “tax reasons” and so the author mentions that Geneva seems like a tough place to live for a single young man.

“I wouldn’t say I have much of a life here,” he said. “You can’t have millions of people come over. Who do you invite?” He went on: “I can’t just wake up on Sunday morning and go golfing with my dad and my uncle. I have to get up really early here and fly over to England for the day, and then come back. So that’s more traveling.”

I guess that’s tough, moving to evade taxes and then having to fly your private jet over to play golf with your family. boo hoo.

A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune of sitting in on lecture of a scientific visualization class* at Tufts at which Ben Fry, creator of many great works of visualizations that can even be called information art as well as the visualization toolkit, Processing, was guest speaking. The talk was great, spanning lots of work and interesting commentary.

Some notes:

• Ben showed quite a bit of his previous work - some of it would be familiar to readers of his book, Visualizing Data.
• Showed off some of his work that has appeared in movies, highlighting the fact that he is asked to add rows of standard grey computer buttons to his work because it doesn’t look “real” otherwise.
• Talked about some experience teaching classes, particularly the challenges of classes with mixtures of cs students and artists. Making CS students do projects more artsy and artists do more interactive, technical work can be interesting. He showed off some examples of student work. (One cool student project asked a set of Nobel laureates what type of pets they had. Quite a few found time to respond and the results are here.)

• The coolest demos were of some of the work he’d done for Oblong Industries (Not a lot of information online now- here’s one cnet article)- they have a working Minority Report-style gesture interface that allows one to control a computer with hand movements. Paired with the right interface, this looks to make light work of navigating through vast amounts of multidimensional data. Ben showed some videos, along with a demo (running on his macbook pro w/o the fancy hardware it was still really cool).

* I’d been asking for a class like this to be offered several times while I as still working on my degree at Tufts, but to no avail. Of course it’s offered right after I graduate!

I keep reading about the death of (physical) newspapers. We subscribe to the NY Times on Sundays, and haven’t gotten our paper 3 of the last 4 weekends. It’s like they’re trying to nail their own coffin shut.

This week and recieved this troubling (forwarded) email that was for profiling on the basis of age and ethnic backround. It listed a whole bunch of terrorist attacks visited upon Americans, ending each instance with “by Muslim male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40.” at the end of this screed, this gem appears:

And Now:
For the award winning
Act of Stupidity
Of all times the People of America want to elect, to the most Powerful position on the face of the Planet –
The Presidency of the United states of America

A Muslim
Male
Extremist
Between
the ages
of 17 and 40.

Really? I think the most basic research would show that Barack Obama is indisputably 46 years old! Oh yeah, and he’s not a Muslim. And only an extremist if you think transparent government and access to health insurance for all Americans as extreme.

Are there really people in this country that are this stupid? That’s just really sad.

An article in today’s New York times “When a Populist Stance Meets a Complex Issue” left me a little disappointed in the the Obama campaign. The article talks primarily about American trade in beef and automobiles with Korea and other east Asian natious.

The campaign has come out against a free trade agreement with South Korea for what I think are some pretty dumb reasons (there may well be better a rationale hiding somewhere). First up is trade in automobiles. Newsflash: Koreans don’t buy a lot of American cars. The Korean government taxes engines by displacement size for all vehicles (not just imports) to discourage large gas guzzling vehicles. Korean automakers produce (and sell lots of) cars with small engines, responding to these regulations appropriately, as European and Japanese manufacturers do by importing small engined cars (which their home markets probably strongly incent as well).

American car makers, on the other hand try to push their large-engined gas guzzlers and are penalized by these engine displacement taxes. Instead of adjusting to the market conditions compain about nontarrif barriers.

“You can say that people in Korea don’t like American cars, but then you have to say why in nearby places people do seem to like them,” Mr. Goolsbee said. He added, “The Koreans have designed a system that will prevent competition from a segment of the market that is different from what they produce, and that is a nontariff barrier.”

Really - I think they’ve designed a market that is appropriate to meet the demands of a world dealing with the effects of global warming and rising energy costs. Perhaps if American carmakers acted accordingly, they could compete in these much saner regulatory environments then here in America.

The article also mentions beef production. If the US isn’t willing to test more widely for mad cow, then why should these nations agree to import beef again. In 2004 a farm in Kansas asked for permission to test its cows for mad cow so that it could export them to Japan, and was denied

The department refused, saying such testing would “imply a consumer safety aspect that is not scientifically warranted.” American consumer groups were apoplectic, but the beef industry which did not want to be pressured to spend $25 or so testing every animal applauded the move. Creekstone is still suing the Agriculture Department for the right to test.

So American producers won’t (in the case of the car industry) or can’t (in the case of this Kansas beef producer) change in the face of reasonable obstacles to trade. Other nations can, and the American government cries about it, and now the Obama campaign is spouting the same nonsence.

Terrific.

Update:

I was thinking about ths some more today, and these failures to compete abroad are failures at home. If we had a truly safe food supply for all Americans, instead of the potemkin system in place now, then no nation would refuse to buy our food.  If we had a government that would disincent large vehicles, then American car companies might finally learn how to make small cars that don’t suck and be able to sell them to Americans at home who currently buy little Japanese cars, as well as legions of people abroad.

I love this interactive graph showing the margin of victory in each of the primary states for Clinton and Obama. It blends a histogram with labeled blocks to really effectively illustrate the data. The animation between different views of the data puts it over the top.

Just saw on the Times web site that Defense Secretary Gates accuses Myanmar of “Criminal Neglect” because they won’t allow the four ships dispatched by the Navy to participate in the relief efforts, which would include helicoptering supplies to survivors in the transportation-challenged delta.

Hop in the not-so wayback machine to Hurricane Katrina. The US refused all sorts of aid offers from foreign governments in the aftermath.  According to this article in the Washington Post, 54 of 77 offers from Canada, Israel and Britain were refused, including offers for much needed search and rescue teams.

Put in that light, one might even describe our response to Katrina as criminal neglect. On the other hand, if the US was hesitant to accept so many offers of aid, perhaps we can understand why the rulers of a closed society might do the same.

I went to the third installment of Ignite Boston this evening. It’s a series of five-minute lightning talks on various technical talks, along with a couple of upsized keynotes. My (partial) recap:

• The most illuminating talk for me was by Jonathan Zdziarski on security on the iPhone ecosystem. Turns out using the iPhone is a huge security risk because people are actively hacking on the iPhone but not disclosing their hacks because Apple will fix them. This makes it really easy to get data off a stolen iPhone. Scarier still is that if your iPhone breaks, and you turn it in for a new one under warranty, then the person who buys your old one refurbished has a pretty good chance of recovering your data. Pretty scary stuff, and downright outrageous that Apple doesn’t do a better job of wiping the memory under those circumstances. See Jonathon’s site for more information.
• Jesse Vincent had a good rant on the parallel between sharecropping and Web 2.0 sites. Its your data and your time, but their property, tools and profit…
• Juhan Sonin talked about design tenets for beautiful design. Is putting together an online collection of them on wikia somewhere, but I don’t have the url handy. There’s an earlier draft of the presentation on flickr.
• Alexander Wissner-Gross presented co2stats.com which aims to (precisely) calculate the co2 emissions of a web site based on its location and the location of its users (eg, having lots of browsers from West Virginia = lots of coal burning). They’ll “automatically” buy carbon offsets for you so you can advertise your site as green, but I’m still not convinced carbon offsets mean anything. Lots of money pouring in there, but not a lot of proof what works and what doesn’t and for how long.

Kristi and I joined forces as team “puppy nappers” for yesterday’s scavenger hunt race around Boston. I think we ended up somwhere in the middle of the pack after a couple of hours running around Boston’s south end, Harvard Square, and searching for a clown in the Public garden. It was a good (if tiring) time.

I was disappointed at the beginning of the day when they announced that the race had raised $350 for a local AIDS group that had provided volunteers. The race had 250 teams at $86 a team, so that’s $21,500 in revenue. While not run as a fundraiser, that’s a pretty poor showing. That aside, this thing is a huge cash cow. There’s a whole raft of sponsors that surely covered all the prizes and gift bags and then some so their only expenses are salary. It was hard to say who was an employee vs. a volunteer, but the number is probably no more than 6, more likely 4 or so. Not a bad gig if you can get it, as they say.