I’ve recently spent a lot of my time at the MIT Media Lab focused on WellWatch, a software project which recently got covered by Reuters. The issues surrounding natural gas drilling (particularly for Marcellus shale) are getting more and more attention in the national news and I think we will reach a point where legislators will have to step in and stop the hydrofracking and other irresponsible practices of Big Gas.
WellWatch is an exploration of how community information databases can be structured and the potential advantages of using platforms that are open-source and promote crowdsourcing, such as MediaWiki of Wikipedia fame. We are currently running a Semantic MediaWiki installation of over 1.36 million pages, so we’ve had to deal with some of the scalability issues surrounding SMW. We’re running memcached and I found several columns related to the semantic triples that didn’t have indexes on them, so I was able to improve performance there. Setting $wgAntiLockFlags = ALF_NO_LINK_LOCK | ALF_NO_BLOCK_LOCK improved our page loading speeds significantly.
While the wiki itself is obviously in PHP, we have a smart layer of automation software written in Python that handles the data about natural gas wells from across the country. Then we use OpenLayers and a Web Feature Service (WFS) to allow our visitors to browse the wells spatially.
We’re now working to address some of the usability issues that our users are encountering with MediaWiki. We love the ability for anyone to edit the pages, but we’re working a largely rural population with limited computer/Internet experience so we also need to make things more obvious and less reliant on previous knowledge about how wikis normally work.
Here are some interesting or delicious foods that I saw while in Asia. I look forward to returning there to eat again soon, hopefully at one of the $0.25 street stalls!
Street food in Kowloon, Hong Kong
Beautiful fish hung up in Ko Pha Ngan
Making mango sticky rice in Chiang Mai
Delicious vegetarian Pad Thai made in Chiang Mai, Thailand
I will be teaching a one and a half hour class at MIT on Friday with Claudia Gold entitled “How To Travel Around The World.” The class is part of MIT’s Independent Activities Period during January and we’re teaching through ESG. More information at the course information page.
“How To Travel Around The World”
Claudia Gold, Matthew Gordon
MIT IAP Event
January 28, 2011
Room 24-619, 12-1:30 PM
We’re often told that we should be travel consultants, so come get free advice! Whether you want to backpack and beach-hop through exotic southeast Asia or learn to speak Spanish while exploring Roman ruins, we can help you do it more easily and authentically for less money.
“What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I’m a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.”
I spent a year traveling around the world and I found many sources of information that were invaluable in helping me decide where to go and how to travel. As I start to plan a future trip, I figured it would be a perfect opportunity to share the sources that I’ve found most helpful.
Rick Steves
Rick Steves is an open-minded and charismatic travel writer who prepares unbelievably useful travel guides. I particularly like that his books include detailed walking tours of sites that he considers to be important such as Pompeii. He’s also not afraid to give strong opinions about where he thinks you should and should not visit during your travels, which is completely different from a series like Lonely Planet. In fact, he has been criticized for his recommendations that travelers avoid Geneva and Zurich because they are boring cities. He went on to say “Bordeaux must mean “boredom” in some ancient language. Athens is a smoggy mix of cement, traffic noise and tourists. Cornwall is a minefield of tourist traps. Andorra is just a big Spanish-speaking Radio Shack. Thessaloniki deserves its place in the Bible but not in a guidebook.” That takes chutzpah!
He wrote a book called Rick Steves’ Europe 101: History and Art for the Traveler which has to be one of the best general guides to Europe that the prospective traveler could read. It walks the reader through thousands of years of history and points out where you can go to actually see the most important works from every time period. I’ll never forget the book’s appendix, which covers thirty-two millenia of history in six pages. I wish that there had been some course in school that covered so many years of history in such a succinct and easy to reference format. I’m glad I took AP Art History because that was the best historical overview that I got in high school.
The Man in Seat Sixty-One Seat61 specializes in providing traveler’s with information about how to get to destinations all across the world using trains, buses, and other forms of land transportation. It proved to be invaluable while booking tickets and planning the voyage. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way because a studio is currently making a movie about the creator of the site, The Man in Seat Sixty-One. I like their pictures and descriptions of the insides of the different trains as well as their general advice on the best ways to travel.
Travelfish Travelfish focuses on helping backpackers explore southeast Asia. I read through a lot of their articles to get a better impression of the little towns in Thailand, Laos, and Malaysia and I also used their guest house reviews while deciding where I should stay.
This weekend is the Music Hack Day at Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge. I am working on an RFID card reader that makes music using a Maple (an Arduino-like microcontroller) and Max/MSP.
I’m currently working on a few startup ideas and doing freelance work for a variety of clients. I helped out with the finishing stages of some software for an interactive exhibit called Voices for the Lake at ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center / Leahy Center for Lake Champlain. I was working with Charles Palen from Boston Productions, which was a coincidence because I’ve been using advice he posted on the Internet to learn about using Red5, a Flash streaming server.
I’ve been automating the management of products across different online marketplaces such as Yahoo’s store, Google product feed, Sears, buy.com, and Amazon for another client. The client, Big Skinny, is known for their unbelievably thin wallets. I like chatting with the CEO about his experiences running companies while writing a framework for data extraction and manipulation.
I’m also working on a startup composed of engineers, musicians, and other talented folks from MIT, Berklee, and the greater Boston area. We’re looking to connect musicians and their fans, so stay tuned at SoundHub.TV
Lots of projects going on!
The summer has been great. The tomato festival where I ate over a hundred types of tomatoes stands out as a highlight and so does a trip to New York City to see friends. This was the first summer that I had a CSA and I loved the experience of having different vegetables as the season wore on. We were also able to drive out to the farm to pick our own, which made for a fantastic picnic. I chose Red Fire Farm and it has proven to be a solid choice.
Here is a video from the talk that I gave as part of Difra Inc. at TEDxBoston. It was a great chance to speak to people about the CAD automation software that I’ve been working on this year. The portion of the talk where we went into the most technical detail was unfortunately abbreviated by accident, but it turned out well and it was a pleasure to participate. The event was fantastic and I really enjoyed the other talks and connecting with people in the audience. Everyone was filled with questions and curiosity, in true TED spirit :)
Matthew Gordon, Claudia Gold, and Lynwood Walker as their talk about digital fabrication of homes began at TEDxBoston 2010
Matthew Gordon showing wooden pieces cut by laser for Difra Inc. at TEDxBoston 2010. Larger pieces like these serve as the building block for homes constructed by Difra Inc.
Check out this video of the software that I’ve been making to create wooden frames for houses. The software converts the model of the house into all of the pieces required for actually building it, including window frames, support beams, and doors. It’s an interesting way to use my background in automation software to provide affordable and sustainable housing.
I’ve learned a lot about CAD automation and laser cutting while working on this project.
I have spent a lot of time contemplating sustainable homes and communities recently. The monotony and wastefulness of suburban neighborhoods filled with single-family box homes has always weighed on me. I dream of a different future where people live in unique structures that reflect their needs and encourage interaction with others.
I was delighted to come across a short article in Worldchanging called “De-Industrializing the City” which focuses on how we have been sold a future full of complex machines that do ecologically stupid things to solve problems in our cities that should instead be solved by better planning.
I recommend you read the article in full because it gets right to the point, but I’d like to share the opening quote from Bjarke Ingels:
Engineering without engines. We should use contemporary technology and computation capacity to make our buildings independent of machinery. Building services today are essentially mechanical compensations for the fact that buildings are bad for what they are designed for—human life. Therefore we pump air around, illuminate dark spaces with electric lights, and heat and cool the spaces in order to make them livable. The result is boring boxes with big energy bills. If we moved the qualities out of the machine room and back into architecture’s inherent attributes, we’d make more interesting buildings and more sustainable cities.
“We did not lose the battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks.”
I am constantly amazed that people will argue against healthcare reform in the United States on the basis that it will lead to rationing. Is it not clear that we are already rationing healthcare based on arcane, arbitrary, and morally irrelevant rules such as pre-existing conditions and the size of a person’s bank account?
This article explains the obvious absurdity of the current rationing system:
A report issued by the Department of Health and Human Services indicates the current health insurance system “leaves millions behind” due to coverage denial practices.
The report, issued Tuesday, cites a recent national survey showing 12.6 million non-elderly adults – 36 percent of those who tried to buy insurance on the private market – were deemed ineligible for coverage by insurance agencies. Many of the denied patients had cancer. According to the survey, insurance companies either charged a higher premium or refused to cover the condition.
Another survey cited in the report found one in 10 people with cancer said they could not get health coverage, and 6 percent said they lost their coverage because of their diagnosis.
“The insurance company practice of denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions is not confined to serious diseases,” HHS officials said. “Even minor problems such as hay fever could trigger prohibitive responses.”
An insurer could charge high premiums, deny coverage or set a restriction such as denying any respiratory disease coverage to a person with hay fever, according to the report.
The study also found that some insurance companies respond to an expensive condition such as cancer by initiating a thorough review of the patient’s health insurance application. If the insurer discovers that any medical condition, regardless of how minor, was not reported on the application, it could revoke coverage retroactively for the patient and possibly all members of the patient’s family, the report said. That practice is known as rescission.
Companies can do this even if the condition found is not related to the expensive condition or if the person wasn’t aware of the condition at the time. At least one company encouraged employees to revoke sick people’s health coverage through rescissions, the report said.
It is vapid and unproductive for critics to claim that healthcare reform will lead to rationing because any limited resource is going to have to be rationed somehow. In fact, introductory economics classes typically begin with a discussion about how resource allocation is necessary in a world of inherently scarce resources. This need to allocate resources is used to introduce the concept of the free market (ie. lets allocate based solely on supply and demand). It is ironic then that the conservatives are arguing that healthcare is going to be rationed under reform proposals when conservative economic theory is rooted in this idea that everything must be rationed.
There’s also the fact that the current healthcare bills don’t have a public option, an opt-in to medicare for older people, or most of the other hallmarks of progressive healthcare reform. Since the current bill seeks to expand health insurance coverage by mandating insurance and providing subsidies to the private insurance companies instead, where do these conservatives think this (supposedly new) rationing will come from? Won’t care be rationed almost as it is now except that insurance companies will be less able to deny coverage based on health, family history, and wealth? It sure sounds like more equal rationing to me, although we should really get the profit-driven insurance companies out of our healthcare completely.
In These Times recently featured an interview with Melody Petersen about the pharmaceutical industry where she made several great points. The entire interview is worth reading, but here are a few quotes that stood out.
Two-thirds of men, women and children in the United States take at least one prescription drug. And children in the United States are three times more likely to take anti-depressants and psychiatric drugs as children in Europe. We spend at least $300 billion a year on prescription drugs. That is about twice what we spend on higher education.
Thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the drug companies. The federal government has collected billions of dollars from the industry to settle charges of illegal marketing. But the drug companies just raise their prices, so they can pay out half a billion dollars on lawsuits, and continue doing exactly what they have been doing. It’s an endless cycle. I think some of the top pharmaceutical executives should face criminal charges, so they would think twice about allowing these fraudulent practices.
Do you know of another industrial country that does not negotiate with drug companies for better prices?
The United States is the only country in the world that allows the drug companies to charge whatever they want.
You write that there are two pharmaceutical lobbyists for every member of Congress. What are they doing on Capitol Hill?
The pharmaceutical industry fights against any measure that threatens its profits. Present law gives the drug companies a 20-year patent on each drug. During that time, they have a monopoly in the market. They can charge whatever they want for that drug. They have fought against any measure to allow more reasonable drug prices.
That last quote brings us full circle to my point earlier about the deeply flawed intellectual property laws in this country. It’s particularly unpleasant to see how our capitalist-driven morality has led to a situation where large pharmaceutical companies control medicine even though they clearly put profit before health and innovation.
It is difficult to know the best way to make a positive impact on the world. We spread our beliefs through our conversations and, hopefully, through our work as well. I often contemplate going to law school because it would be so meaningful to be able to influence the rules of our society.
Intellectual property law has become particularly contentious. Technology companies are in an arms race to accrue such large portfolios of patents that their competitors are unable to compete or sue them based on other patents. A recent New York Times article used the following graphic to depict the lawsuit mayhem that has erupted in the mobile device space.
The New York Times article was written in response to the news that Apple has threatened to sue HTC, Motorola, and other mobile device companies for infringing on iPhone-related intellectual property. Apple acts as if they invented the touchscreen phone and they are trying to intimidate rival companies from including features like multitouch and gestures on their devices in the United States. I find this sort of behavior to be slimy, selfish, and short-sighted. It makes me seriously doubt that I would purchase another iPhone in the future, even if it happens to be the best phone for my needs at the time. I’d rather buy from a rival handset maker like HTC or Palm that is trying to improve upon recent ideas instead of using threats and lawyers to stop innovation from happening.
The Copyright Clause (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) of the Constitution empowers the United States Congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” I believe that there is a logical basis for this and I would expect software and “business method” patents to exist for this purpose. In practice, however, people seem to think that they should be able to patent ideas so that they can own them forever, completely control how they are used, and get rich quickly by licensing them. This certainly was not what the founding fathers had in mind when they instituted copyrights “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.”
Additionally, notice how the Copyright Clause states that copyrights should be for “limited times.” In one of the most disastrous Supreme Court decisions that I can remember, the court ruled in Eldred v. Ashcroft that there was no limit to the number of times Congress could extend the lengths of existing copyrights. This means that Congress can effectively make copyrights last forever in spite of the language of the Constitution which clearly indicates that they must have “limited times.” This means that older works are not becoming part of the public domain, where we are all free to use them, even though many of them are out-of-print and no one is making money off of them anyway.
In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn’t find it profitable to keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn’t know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world’s libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark. (the NYTimes)
It’s going to be worth the fight to make sure that important ideas aren’t locked up for the rest of time.
