Life & Research Notes

It was a whirlwind five day trip, including 24 hours of travel each way. I had excellent colleagues and travel companions in Dave, Amanda, Jaewoo, and John. We managed to cover a lot of ground in a short time, both with the engineers and researchers at Samsung, and in our explorations of the city and the DMZ.

Yet I seem to be having trouble putting together any interesting commentary or reflection on Seoul. I can say that in some places, like among the students, shoppers and partiers in Insadon and Dongdaemun, the electricity and newness felt very much like Tokyo. And at other times, wandering the backalleys and outdoor markets, or watching the motorbikers carry impossibly bulky loads through crowded streets, I recalled the chaos of Bangkok and Saigon. Then there were those experiences absolutely unique to Korea, like the outdoor performance that Dave and I stumbled on, some blend of Taiko and the circus, with young women jumping and singing and drumming, and older men leaving the circle of spectators to dance drunkenly around in the center. Throughout the first two days we were also working, giving talks and a workshop at Samsung and meeting with engineers. It was a busy few days. The jetlag didn’t help.

One of many markets.

Some sort of food, hard to know what, probably spicy.

We happened to be in the right part of town at the right time…

A labor rights rally demonstration was happening…

Riot police were out in force. Hundreds of police sat in buses or on the street on their riot shields, smoking cigarettes, listening to music on their headphones, waiting for the rally to move outside its designated area. We heard later that it did. We’re told Korean police like to use tear gas.

Sometimes it is fun to be a tourist.

Amanda found out about this show at the modern art museum.

Jaewoo overordered. It looks nice here, but got messy really fast.

Approaching the DMZ.

That’s all we could see of the DMZ.

Dave and Amanda in Dongdaemun.

Samsung has tight security.

Advertisements of a comedy show

Insadon was hip.

More please.

Reminds me of a book I read as a kid.

The aftermath of the Samsung dinner.

Yesterday during a sponsorship-related lunch with the New York Times Company I was lucky enough to be seated across from General Counsel and Vice President Kenneth Richieri. I mentioned to him my interest in this social contract system, and he had a a number of noteworthy tips from his legal and finance experience. Among them, he mentioned an organization called the ISDA that publishes and maintains a very important document called the the ISDA Master Agreement. This agreement is the standardized template contract used in OTC derivative trading. Universal acceptance of this contract vastly reduces transaction costs for traders, resulting in increased market efficiency. From their site:

The ISDA Master Agreement, the authoritative contract widely used by industry participants, represents a milestone achievement because it has established international contractual standards governing privately negotiated derivatives transactions that reduce legal uncertainty and allow for reduction of credit risk through netting of contractual obligations.

After reading up on finance to get most of my terminology straight, I’m renewing my interest in these sorts of streamlined contracts. How can we take what ISDA has done for derivatives and apply it to the diverse and dynamic contracts and agreements used by individuals and small businesses? There are technical and design issues of course, but fundamentally much of the challenge lies in the crafting of a trusted, accepted organization.

Tomorrow the PLW will begin full-blown, fast-paced coverage of the 2006 SIGGRAPH conference. Takashi has put together an excellent new site, PLWire, to showcase the footage, images and contacts we make there. John’s urging us to avoid text and just go with images, video and links. Luis seems all set to get some awesome footage, though as of yesterday he was working through some MPEG-2 codec issues with the group’s new camera. PLWire will go live tomorrow.

It so happens that my parents are also coming in tomorrow, so it’s going to be a busy week for me balancing the conference and the family time. Then later next week Jenn and I are heading down to meet them and the rest of my mom’s side of the family in Ocean City, New Jersey for a little beach vacation. Armed with her board and stoked from a decent session last weekend with Danny, Jenn is hoping Jersey will actually have some waves. I guess like the rest of the east coast surfing population we’re going to have to hope for a storm swell.

In this week’s New Yorker John Cassidy has a thoughtful review of Chris Anderson’s just published Long Tail. Among a few well-argued criticisms, I was particularly struck by Cassidy’s dissection of Anderson’s repeated reliance on certain major corporations as his supporting examples, such as Google, Amazon, iTunes, eBay, Netflix, or MySpace. These few large companies are the major “aggregators” in the long tail economy. They dominate.

There’s an ugly name for industries that are controlled by three or four big firms: oligopolies. A few decades ago, these lumbering creatures were easy to spot…. Today, thanks to globalization, deregulation, and technological progress, many of the twentieth century behemoths have fallen by the wayside. But don’t assume that giant, exploitative firms are a thing of the past.

Cassidy has well articulated a point that has bothered me about Anderson’s work since I first started following it. He focuses narrowly on media consumption, and in particular consumption via these behemoth centralized distributors. Anderson’s long tail world is consumer paradise, brimming with Wired-style techno-optimism. But of course technology itself is not necessarily good, and is simply a provocation for change. It can induce good, evil, or neither, just something in between. The article got me thinking about these new tech oligopolies, how much I depend on them yet how much I distrust them. It’s not a good situation.

This past weekend I threw together an update to Kate and Annie’s Clickback project from the January Organic Marketing build-a-thon. I wrote it in ruby/rails, using acts_as_authenticated and acts_as_attachment, plus a couple of newer features like RJS, as well as Geoffrey Grossenbach’s sparklines package.

Like Kate and Annie’s original, the system provides a mechanism by which viewers can offer feedback on advertisements via a simple +/- voting system. Each vote then affects the likelihood of that ad subsequently displaying for that publisher. This feedback option is a simple but fundamentally different idea, and it makes sense from the media consumer, publisher and advertiser perspectives. Advertisers get feedback from consumers, and through the feedback their ads naturally tend to display on pages where they are most positively received. The plus/minus scores act as a fitness measure for each ad within a particular publisher space. Site owners and publishers ensure that only the most relevant ads appear on their site, not via some hip premier system, but collectively by the community members themselves. Finally, individual consumers and viewers see the ads that are likely the most relevant to their own interests, and they have a chance to participate in the ad selection process.

Inspired by Google’s AdSense, I designed the inclusion code for publishers to be extremely simple. Including an ad is as easy as signing up and then inserting a short snippet javascript customized to use the publisher’s id. The viewers do the rest.

<script type="text/javascript">
clickback_ad_publisher = "brent";
clickback_ad_width = 728;
clickback_ad_height = 90;
clickback_ad_channel ="";
clickback_frame_border = 1;
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://panoramic.media.mit.edu:3000/show_ads.js" >
</script>

A short 5 hour red-eye (or “shut-eye” according to JetBlue) from Oakland to Boston, and suddenly I’m back here at the lab, tired and spacey, definitely worse for wear. Annie is now really gone, her desk all cleared out. Kelly’s is almost cleared as well, and Burak is gradually removing his things and setting up a a workspace at home. This school year is coming to a close. The new students arrive next week, which gives Amber and me only a little bit of time to rearrange the office like we’ve been discussing with John. We also have a Simplicity lab workshop tomorrow afternoon at the faculty club, and I should be preparing my short presentation for that right now.

It’s always surreal taking a red-eye, not really sleeping enough to delineate the experience of being where you were yesterday from being where you are today, and not being awake enough to be able to logically separate the two. Yesterday I was barefoot on the sun-heated street admiring Jenn’s new surfboard, a used but quite lovely Santa Cruz 6′6″ epoxy that she aquired in trade for her previous cruddy board. Then this morning I found myself groggy and sullen on a red line train packed with Boston commuters reading the free Metro paper. I expected to jump right back into things, but I should be more realistic and give myself a buffer day.

Day two of spring break is quickly coming to an end. Tomorrow a posse of media labbers head out to Cape Cod for the SIMPLICITY consortium meeting. We’ll be meeting with lab sponsors, giving presentations and workshops, and hearing some talks from type designer Matthew Carter and designer/creator Ze Frank among others.

I’ll also mention that I did the event’s t-shirt design, which I hope goes over well with everyone:

On Tuesday after the event Jenn and I are heading from there out to visit her friends on Martha’s Vineyard. It’ll be a nice few days, and then I have to get back to work.