imran*

Category: Uncategorized

  • The Ersatz Constellations

    image from oscarlhermitte.com

    Constellations are a kind of necessary pareidolia, concentrating infinity into a human-scale narrative. The Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese and Arabs all sought to make sense of the world by projecting their cultures onto the heavens and their narratives still permeate our culture.

    Our recently born near-constellation of robots – Hubble, Spitzer, Fermi and Kepler – have furnished us with a hi-def and precise understanding of the cosmos. But the retreat of the night sky, driven by our 24-7 artificially-lit civilisation, has robbed us of the imagination to create a contemporary astral mythology and project our newly globalised culture onto the heavens.

    Two years ago, Oscar Lhermitte’s Urban Stargazing project, sought to create artificial constellations above urban London, observable only at night. Lhermitte’s twelve new constellations were in reality lights strung from high cables, but at a glance provided Londoners with new mythologies – The Guitar, The Irish Giant and The V2.

    image from oscarlhermitte.com

    Lhermitte’s project requires significant construction and obstruction and is as much about zoning laws and planning permission as the creation of playful mythology. Perhaps the urban constellation is poised to become more commonplace…

    At TED 2012 last year, Vijay Kumar demonstrated his Autonomous Agile Aerial Robots, swarms of small drones designed to sense each other and fly in close formation and just last month, thirty similar quadrocopters were used to create acrassly commercial Star Trek constellation floating above Tower Bridge.

    image from pbs.twimg.com

    If we come from “the dense nuclei flung from the wombs of stars” and London is our new cradle of the ersatz constellation, what myths and stories will follow?

  • Uniqlo Calendar…

    Lovely…

  • Longevity, Life Services and the Cloud

    At Orange, my R&D group oriented its work around the notion of “life services” in which customers would find daily utility. As the web approaches its 7000th day, life services have come to mean something very different to me…

    October 1999: I signed up for a Hotmail account in order to use MSN Messenger.

    January 2002: I purchased imran@ali.name as my primary email address, after ICANN’s launch of .name

    July 2003: In eight years, I’ve listened to 81874 songs at Last.fm.

    September 2003: I’ve transacted 128 times on eBay since joining.

    July 2004: In seven years, I’ve accumulated bookmarked 3452 links at Delicious.

    February 2004: I joined Flickr after a demo from Stuart Butterfield in the corridors of ETech04.

    December 2006: I joined Facebook on 26th – also Twitter as its 35853th user, after being told by @foe I was behind the curve 🙂

    July 2007: Dopplr tells me I’ve spent 377 days and 250’000 miles travelling between 51 cities since July 1994.

    January 2010: Since joining as the 33574th user of Foursquare I’ve checked into various places a total of 616 times.

    Are life services better conceived of as those who’s longevity you can depend on, decade-after-decade?

    As enterprises place source code into escrow, should citizens demand that personal data be similarly protected throughout the lifetime of individuals, not organisations? Should we be masters of our own domain? What would a language of design patterns for longevity look like? Could we finally accept DRM as an anti-pattern?

    If we are to submit to the Cloud (database as a service), we need to ensure our electronic engrams have an afterlife. Visit sites like venyu.com/colocation/ to know more about the cloud and dedicated servers.

  • Shamim Arra {1939 – 2011}

    Last Saturday morning, I awoke to the heartbreaking news that my aunty Shamim, had passed away suddenly in Karachi.

    Amongst our extended family, my parents – two of the eldest – are seen as role models to their siblings and cousins. But Aunty Shamim was where my mother, her first cousin, looked for her own inspiration; and she was certainly an inspirational woman.

    Though she was only briefly married and had no children of her own, as a school teacher for more than four decades, she was a mother to thousands. Impacting and influencing many generations of Karachi schoolchildren as well as instilling in her own nieces and nephews, a love for the pursuit of knowledge.

    image from farm6.static.flickr.com

    More remarkably – Aunty Shamim was the first of our family to gain a university education; the second was my Mum, also a schoolteacher. To be a woman, university educated, in Pakistan, in the 1950s made Aunty Shamim truly a pioneer, but her humility meant she never saw this as remarkable or unique.

    She experienced some significant heartaches and disappointment throughout her life, but her poise, elegance, wisdom and warmth starved any resentment. In another life, I imagined her as a UNICEF ambassador or Pakistan's Minister for Education.

    It is fitting that she left us as she always wished she would – on her feet, independent and without becoming a burden.

    You were never a burden Phupho Shamim, you were our privilege.

    —

    The photo above was taken at Karachi's Clifton beach in January 1988 – from the left: aunty, my mum and her mother, my nani. Here's another of Mum and Aunty at the same spot, as teenagers.

  • Countering The Machines Of Loving Grace

    "It's not the effect of technology on society, on economics, on religion, on war, on culture – etcetera – on art, it's that everything now is existing in technology as the new host of life. It's the price we pay for the pursuit of our technological happiness…"

    Godfrey Reggio, director of Naqoyqatsi

    The recent broadcast of Adam Curtis' All Watched over By Machines Of Loving Grace sought to explore how our post-digital culture has "distorted and simplified our view of the world around us". Curtis' hypothesis was sound and – more than a decade after the modern web's birth – a timely and healthy reflection on the implications of a planetary computing organism.

    image from berglondon.com

    Though I've been a great admirer of his previous works, notably The Power Of Nightmares, this recent piece seemed to be intellectually random at best, cutting and pasting from recent history to contrive a conspiratorial narrative that didn't really hold up to scrutiny.

    Indeed, the series was widely criticised; breathtaking technique, but thin on expertise and insight. Indeed, Curtis' very methods have been cheekily parodied as The Loving Trap. Incidentally, Richard Brautigan's poem, from which Curtis' film draws its title, speculated about a post-cybernetic utopia where technology had enabled humanity to occupy a world free of labour.

    What did stand out from Curtis' essay, was the notion that humanity is increasingly seen as just another component within overlapping ecospheres and 'systems'. I took this as the singular insight of the series and indeed it may have been enlightening to hear arguments that humanity is indeed exceptional and we should be comfortable with this superiority.

    —

    Where Curtis fixated on drawing an implausible line from Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan to hippy communes, Richard Dawkins, holistic ecosystems and Congolese mineral conflicts, there is actually a burgeoning body of research and expertise that provides some fascinating insights into our anxieties about post-digital life…

    If Curtis' hypothesis took in even a fraction of the perspective these kinds of thinkers, the result may have been a clearer exposition of the dystopian dependencies and dangers of humanity mediated by machines.

    Sadly, though All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace came across as a stylistic and masterful piece of editing and filmmaking, it masks a core of ignorance and misdirection. 

  • Your To-Do list is going to KILL YOU!

    If you have an ever-expanding to-do list -  then you're failing to
    understand your mortality. That's right, your cherished, life-affirming
    task list is ultimately a pathway to your own death!

    Let me explain…

    Years ago, my good friend Rich Gibson and I were thinking about design principles for software that reflects who you are, what he called an "Internet of Values"
    – in essence, applications and services that allowed you to articulate
    your values (not your tastes) and helped you stay true to them using
    intelligent feedback loop; a to-do list is at heart an articulation of
    our life's goals – whether immediate or long-range.

    Here's how Rich explains it…

    "When you put a thing on your to-do list, you are
    making a commitment to do it," he says to me. "Meaning you aren't going
    to do some other things." He pauses. "So you have to choose between
    those things. Now, why do you have to choose?"

    I think about this for a second. "Because your time is limited?" I venture hopefully.

    "BECAUSE YOU ARE GOING TO F*CKING DIE," he responds.

    Rich goes on to suggest that…

    "one's to-do list, in whatever form, is ultimately a skull on the desk, a memento mori, a reminder that our time here really is limited and we ought to make the most of it, in as much as the list is also meant to be a tool for helping one actually do so"

    The reasoning may be morbid, but it's certainly thought provoking.
    Indeed, just last month, celebrated Italian author Umberto Eco debuted
    a new exhibition about the place 'lists' hold in our culture and noted
    in an interview with Der Spiegel that…

    "…how, as a human being, does one face infinity? through lists, through catalogs, through collections.."

    Eco suggests that lists and collections ultimately embody the ways
    in which we think about death and are intrinsic to our culture. Rich is
    however more pragmatic and goes on to suggest a 'Someday' or 'Maybe'
    list for lingering tasks and hazier goals which should perhaps never be
    part of to-do lists anyway.

    Both Rich and Eco offer fascinating and thought provoking
    perspectives on otherwise innocuous cultural artifacts. Indeed,
    Twitter's recent launch of its Lists feature hews close to Eco's notion of cultural curation – lists as 'playlists of people'.

    I'd like to think that future to-do list application could sense and
    interpret my goals, subtly helping me to differentiate between Submit Knight Foundation proposal and Visit Tokyo as 'to-do' and 'someday' tasks….could software that sensed or guessed at our values, ultimately help us rediscover them?

    Read more at We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die and The Skull On Your Desk.

  • Leaving Mobile Messaging 2.0

    Mm2 After two years, two editors and 140-ish posts, I'll be stepping back from my role as a contributing writer to Corante's Mobile Messaging 2.0.

    The first couple of years for MM2 were a sponsored curation of thought leadership and conversation around mobility. As my first paying gig as a professional writer, I learned a great deal in terms of discipline, leads, brevity and the economics of digital publishing, as well as the distributed camaraderie of working with other writers such as Ewan Spence and Debi Jones…all things which helped secure my contributing role at Giga Omni Media's Web Worker Daily.

    Sadly, my work at MM2 will fade away as the site transitions towards being an automated aggregator, rather than curator of original content. I haven't decided whether to republish my MM2 contributions, blended here with my personal blog, or to host an MM2-branded site for posterity.

    In the meantime – onto ventures new 🙂

  • The North’s Digital Spring – ‘ThinkingFuturesonicbTWEENLSxDigital’

    The five great cities of the North are buzzing with conferences and festivals as we close out the Spring and head into Summer…

    • 11 – 12th June: Liverpool plays host to this year's bTWEEN, previously held in Manchester and Bradford.
    • 19 – 21st June: Sheffield's third BarCamp rounds out the Digital Spring.

    Lsx09 There's been a little controversy at the overlapping schedules and content – but personally, I think it's cool. Every city's conference or festival has something unique to offer…Manchester's music, Newcastle's ingest of global speakers, Leeds' student show and grassrootsy content, bTWEEN's media focus and Sheffield's newly minted Digital Campus. But the overlaps might actually be helpful as speakers like Stowe Boyd can commit to a few weeks touring across the North and various events, the same way ETech and SxSW's proximity make for a productive conference season in the US.

    Ian Forrester is encouraging LSx, Futuresonic, TD and bTWEEN to coordinate more closely next year, so there's great potential to cross-promote and synchronise where we can.

    Katie Lips, in her own unique fashion, is attempting to bring some harmony, between TD and Futuresonic in particular, by running a Tech Bus Tour between both conferences (via Leeds!)

    2010 already looks like a promising year as FutureEverything spools up and LSx seeks to merge with Live At Leeds…now where will bTWEEN end up in '010?

  • ETech Day One… (rough notes)

    Saul Griffith – Energy Literacy, IoV!

    Your Cellphone Is Your Controller – megaphone, making digital signage interactice http://www.playmegaphone.com/

    Eric Rodenback onstage from Stamen Design walking through various visualisations from Stamen’s portfolio – oakland crime maps, london olympics travel times and property/cummuting vectors

    Sun’s chief gaming officer – gamers are raising gamers…it’s not a new market, 40 years old!
    server tech is designer ‘per game’ not built for scale or sustainability. Darkstar, game and client agnostic. Is sun the marlgest MMO operator through their work on Wall Street? project wonderland, virtual worlds for collaboration, help the video game industry grow, leverage standards – remove barriers for new content and experience to emerge, since people play games on their consoles and cellphones, and even ifyou have problems with your cellphone, you can get Cell Phone Repair Hamilton to help you with this.

    multitouch displays in the real world, elizabeth f. churchill from yahoo research; how do you provode serendipity, encoutering and peripheral participation..window shopping in physical and virtual spaces, browsing and reading, talking, showing, responding to camera – similar to iCom project from MIT. is there something in a mashup between matt webb’s glancing and a closed bonjour-like network?

    coffee with matt biddulph and brianbehldehoff – travel ppl?

    http://www.connotea.org/tag/etechbrain

    bumped into raffi!

    tap is the new click – dan saffer – wii, iphone, MBA, PS3 – generally touchscreen or freeform, do u need a gest UI (not for heavy data input), reliance on physical and visual feedback http://www.designinggesturalinterfaces.com/samples/interactivegestures_ch1.pdf

    lunch with nokia guy, mckinsey and also brian the airline software guy

    green nano and the holy grail R. Stanley Williams, HP Senior Fellow. climate modellers need a zetaflop computer, that’s be the size of paris and the world’s biggest polluter! maybe exaflop by 2018 (using all current tricks)? but zettaflop will require a diff way to compute. the human brain is 100m gigaflops at 10W – computing can be more efficient! photonics and nanoswitches will hybridise with silocon to increase performance without volume and power.  multiple nanowire layers could create dense synaptic computers

    sufficiently uable platform will attract porn – then activism

    rise of user generated swiftboating, planespotting the tunisian president on google earth, raise the social cost of censorship (blocking removes cute cats too!) http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/ – Censor the web by keywords, URLs, DNS and IPs http://map.opennet.net/

    http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/

    bahrain-y land distribution by emailed PDF – understanding who owns what land

    twittering – put up my free alla website’ if im not out from the cops within 6 hours http://twitter.com/alaa

    100m sub-saharan phones – cant overstate importance of phones as a light platform for activism and blogging

    china can’t afford to block gmail, skype and MMOGs – how will OLPC impact?

    lolcats are a strange problem – limited mostly to the US and europe – how can u use this kinda virality. dont build tools for activistm, theywont use them. ethanzuckerman.com/blog

    http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/2008/03/cute_cat_theory_of_web_activis.html

    is there a dimension for innovation that amateurs can apply in robotics – the minimum UAV project! sticking with a 2d problem (stabilisation done) made with lego windows mobile GPS, camera, WAN for navigation, imaging and text commands for MMS! diydrones.com

    temporal resolution rather than high rsolution – ‘ground truth’ – plane crashed in federal lab at berkely national lab. now have a homeland security record!

    using ms flightsim to program GPS paths into the flight computer! use it to find parking spots in SD! shaed UAV missions? good for dull, dirty and dangerous jobs – like traffic copters, agriculture, ground truth in disaster areas

    my daughter’s DNA – clinical data, literature, knowledge bases, experts, dna sequences, primers, services, software!

    software tools usable bymany more, an interpretive engine for individual patient findings, integrative diagnostics, cholesterol plus sequence data? engage the patient or parent as partners – educate, enable and emply!

    Ed and Jimmy at Exhibit Hall reception

    After Hours Disney Party – ABC and Disney executives, Lost HD, interactive lounge, demos. Looking up primaries on public displays. Bumped into EFF Danny and Eric Rodenback, Olympic project and London office.

    EFF fundraiser honoring Mitchell Baker – turned and dumped flyer on table she was standing at!

    http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/03/etech-tuesday-morning-keynotes.html

  • About Me…

    { this is a test page ONLY! }

    Like a neurotic superhero, I have many identities…

    • One of the founding partners of Carbon Imagineering, the emerging technologies think tank and product hothouse behind Fingertip, mee:view, Believr and Personomii…we’re building the next generation of consumer internet applications…
    • (Formerly, Deputy Director of Technology Research at Orange UK and part of the team that established Freeserve’s R&D unit and Wanadoo’s Research & Innovation division – each providing intelligence on emerging technologies, consumer trends and innovation strategy)…
    • One of the founders of Rich Gibson’s Internet of Values initiative…
    • A board director for bmedi@, helping grow West Yorkshire’s new media ecosphere…
    • About to join enterprise news startup Ensembli as a non-executive director…
    • A programme consultant and blogger for O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony brand and an occasional contributor to O’ReillyGMT…
    • (A former writer and commentator for TechCrunch UK)…
    • A contributing writer for Corante’s Mobile Messaging 2.0…
    • Bootstrapped OpenCoffee Leeds and BarCamp Leeds…
    • A sometime graphic designer and software developer…

    …but really, I’m a dreamer – fascinated by the transformative potential of world-changing ideas, people and technologies 🙂