colmmcmullan.net

ted global highlights

2009-09-06T12:34:16Z

so many conversations i've had following ted have involved me adding anecdotes starting with "there was a talk at ted about..." so i've picked out a few personal highlights but these really don't do justice to the breadth and quality of presentations.

rebecca saxe presented her research showing how moral perspective on an event can be changed by firing a magnetic pulse at a particular part of the brain. a scary thought, but thankfully the magnetic pulse is something you would be aware is happening. although, will that always be the case?

90 year old (yes, you read that right, nine zero) elaine morgan is an advocate for the aquatic ape theory, that humans have evolved from ancestors who lived in water. her talk was a fantastic example of always making sure to question assumed truths, lifelong learning and sticking with your passion.

rory sutherland's highly entertaining presentation also encouraged us to question the norm, but this time by thinking about how we create value and how crucial perception is to that. i strongly recommend watching the hilarious diamond shreddies videos used in canada (shreddies that were just 'rotated' from a square to a diamond), the reactions from people are priceless. he also mentioned a (whimsical?) proposal to save money on the railways by hiring supermodels to work on the trains rather than spending millions on engineering faster lines, that way people won't mind if they're slow. along with the laughs, i think he raised a serious point to encourage thinking about what change your work is making and is that the change that's really necessary.

a talk that really resonated with me was dan pink's study of the science of motivation. his claim that the traditional reward based system for motivating employees doesn't work goes against almost every company's policy but is supported by recent examples such as wikipedia or the open source software movement. he suggests an alternative 'operating system for business' based around 3 key employee principles - the urge to direct our own lives (autonomy), the desire to get better at something that matters (mastery) and to be a part of something bigger than ourselves (purpose). sign me up for some of that.

cary fowler has definitely signed up for a job bigger than himself, to create a backup for world agriculture by creating a repository of all the world's seeds (i'm sure you read about the project in wired). in the us in the 1800's there were 7100 named varieties of apples, today there's 300. he describes diversity as options and these options could be crucial in for the future of human food.

and the last talk i want to point out is itay talgam's, who demonstrated alternative types of leadership using clips from conductors in a very entertaining presentation during the final session. i think you'll enjoy the video of that one.

of course, it wouldn't be ted without some live demos. want to power your tv or charging your phone without plugging it in? sure, just ask eric giler about wireless electricity. want to purify drinking water in a handheld flask? michael pritchard has invented that. want glasses that you can adjust yourself? joshua silver has some very low cost, liquid filled lenses that are what you're looking for. want the house from the future? the one where you can know your water and electricity consumption before the bill comes in and remotely control your locks, windows, lights, heating? visit master inventor andy stanford-clark who lives in one.

"the future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed" and it seems ted has more of the future than most.

a massive thank you to ibm and wired for the opportunity to attend ted global by running the competition for a ticket, if they run it again i recommend you enter.

tedglobal competition

2009-07-16T20:29:32Z

wired uk ran a competition to win a ticket to tedglobal. this was my 100 word entry... it won... ! it's fair to say i'm quite excited...

how are technology, entertainment and design creating a smarter planet?

it is a commonly held assumption that to improve our situation we must change our behaviour. not any more.

we can predict disease through patterns in search queries, understand a place by tagging photographs, sense problems in large institutions via email networks, progress science by playing computer games and take a city's pulse through it's mobile phone usage. none of these consequences require explicit action.

desirable devices, smart interfaces and the ability to analyse large datasets in real time are improving how we act, measure and respond. but the best thing is, we're only just getting started...

twends: an experiment in web technology

2009-06-22T00:27:09Z

i've built a simple visualisation of twitter trends which i'm calling twends. like everything else in life, it's in permanent beta.

twitter's trend api can be used to find out what the popular keywords, hashtags or phrases were on a particular day or during a particular week back until 19 November 2008. i've used the option to get the trending terms for a particular day, which provides an almost hour by hour breakdown. i say almost because sometimes there's no data for some hours and sometimes it's not quite on the hour. but it's great data and the output is really only an approximation.

so about that output. it's shaped like a 24 hour analogue clock. so going clockwise around one rotation moves from 00:00 to 23:59 on that day. i've taken the most popular trending terms, ordered them by how long during the day they were trending and filled in a segment of the circle for each part. so the terms that trend all day get a full circle, but something that trends for an hour only gets a slice one 24th of a circle positioned appropriately. the radius of the segment is proportional to the time spent trending so the topics that trended for longer are larger. the colors associate the trend term on the right to the drawn segment on the left and also make it a little colorful because too much grey makes jack a dull boy.

you can click on the trend text on the right to see filter the visual to only that trend and use the 'reset view' link to show them all again. the » link takes you to the actual trending tweets for that day and that term. i'm using the 'since' and 'until' twitter search parameters for that and unfortunately there seems to be a paging limit on results which means older dates don't work. i might have to think of something else.

good data visualisation is a balance between aesthetic beauty and information communication. twends hasn't hit that sweet spot but i've got other ideas i'll be exploring. this was a real jfdi project and was as much about experimenting with nifty web stuffs like jquery, processing.js and google adsense as it was about building a data visualisation piece.

that said, i hope you like it at least a little: twends

headphones recommended

2009-06-06T15:08:04Z

i'm not much of a gamer. but the iphone isn't a traditional game device and i don't consider the games i play on it to be traditional games. i'm really enjoying the ones that bring me into a state of flow.

wikipedia describes flow as "the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity." it's a wonderful experience and i hope you've felt it at one time or other.

the two games that have made me aware of this are zen bound and eliss. i introduced a friend of mine to zen bound and a week later he told me how he kept missing his bus stop and while playing eliss on the train to gatwick a week ago i didn't notice we had arrived at the airport and was about a minute from going back to victoria station when i realised i needed to get off the train... that's the kind of immersive mental state these games get you into.

zen bound has a "designed for headphones" splash screen when loading and the picture shown above is taken from the eliss 'how to' screens. both games have beautiful soundtracks and i'm sure the game designers want to make sure you get to hear them clearly. but much more than that, headphone use helps focus your concentration and makes it more likely that you will achieve flow while playing the game - i'm positive that's the real reason.

there's no way to filter the app store for games that recommend headphone use and i'd love to know of any other flowful games or apps available... do you know of any?

wires and magic

2009-03-26T08:28:14Z

about a month ago i attended tinker it's beginner arduino workshop. the arduino is an open source hardware platform aimed at hackers and makers who want a low cost physical computing development environment. i guess i'm one of those people.

my imagination has been captured by the renaissance of paper among techies and when i saw tom taylor's microprinter i knew wanted one. very fortunately, the only way to get one is to build it yourself. so i did.

i managed to get it up and running without much trouble (step by step details are on my project page) but i wanted to build something a bit more. tom designed a morning report so that seemed as good a place as any to start. i pull in my diary for the day from google calendar, the top 10 current trends on twitter, the london weather from yahoo (which i love because it includes sunrise and sunset), a few news headlines from rss feeds and a couple of currency conversion rates from yahoo finance. the original plan was to have it print every morning at 0730 as a kind of alarm but i soon went off that idea... click on the image below to see the large version with readable text.

for christmas i asked for a mir:ror, a product by violet (makers of the nabaztag) who dream of making every object in the world a cobject (connected object). i thought of using the action of placing a nanoztag micro-rabbit on the mir:ror to trigger the printer into action - using one rabbit would print the report and using the other rabbit would print recent twitters. here's a video of that in action...

i created my own lightweight markup to specify different text styles, for instance __this bit__ would make 'this bit' underlined and there's something similar for red text, text width and height and highlight mode. that's all handled by the arduino which then sends the relevant command to turn on and off the particular styles.

so that's where i've got to so far. for anyone interested there's some sample arduino code available on github (of course, the commands are specific to the printer model i have which is the citizen idp-3420), photos on flickr and the video embedded above on vimeo. for anyone thinking of taking on a microprinter project, this wiki is worth checking out to see what other people have done and as mentioned earlier i've put up a project page detailing the initial steps i went through to get it working.

i'd really appreciate your thoughts or suggestions so please tweet me a comment using the link below. my own ideas around it are to continue developing it by making it more permanent; running the arduino standalone from a battery (currently it's powered by usb), wiring it up to a real serial cable (instead of just poking the wires into the printer port) and soldering the circuit onto a smaller board so i can package it all up nicely.

but one thing at a time.

now with comments

2009-03-08T15:14:56Z

you might have noticed that i've been doing a bit of spring cleaning around here ("my, are those new curtains?!"). i thought i might as well add some fun new stuff while i'm at it.

you can now post comments to these articles via twitter using the link at the bottom of each post. clicking the link will bring you to twitter with a prepopulated status message of "@colm http://bit.ly/ArfArf" (where ArfArf is the short code for that particular post).

tweet your message then use the other link to view what other people have been saying. rinse, repeat.

oh and be nice :)

a consequence of doing things right

2009-03-06T00:27:25Z

i was showing a friend flickr's mobile site on the tube yesterday evening and noticed something as we went into a tunnel...

since the whole site is AJAXy and each link is requesting a page part rather than a full page, if a request fails the error is caught by javascript and displays the nice yellow overlay rather than falling back on the (rather ugly) iphone alert boxes.

long wow, flickr has it.

work in progress

2009-03-06T00:27:25Z

i've been getting myself up to speed with the excellent processing. I just figured out how to export to video...

work in progress from Colm McMullan on Vimeo.

instagreader

2009-03-06T00:27:25Z

instapaper rocks and google reader is my feed aggregator of choice (for now).

my 'workflow' was to scan through google reader and open a tab for each article i wanted to actually read. which got pretty annoying because i would often run out of reading time and end up going through each tab one by one clicking 'read later'. that's not very 2009.

to scratch this itch i created a greasemonkey script that adds 'read later' links beside each article title in google reader. now i don't bother opening new tabs from google reader, i just stick everything i want to read straight into instapaper.

go ahead and generate your own instagreader.

sorry about the name. hope you find it useful.

'oh hai wrld' is the new 'hello world'

2009-03-06T00:27:25Z

hello, i'm colm.

perhaps it would have been more appropriate to have just put the title in a tweet. oh well.

maybe blogging is hard.