Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

I go to many conferences, and most of them seem to want to give me a nice canvas bag, and often a shirt as well. Truth is though, I now have a stack of about 20 bags in my closet. I've used some of the bags, typically the backpacks, but when I have so many other bags I don't feel a strong motivation to walk around with a briefcase or laptop bag with a giant sponsor's logo on it, or worse, a collection of 10 logos. No matter how nice the bag is. In addition, even if I got logo-free bags I have no need for 20 of them, but I can't really give away logo covered bags as gifts.

It does get hard to be a privacy advocate when it's easy to think of interesting apps that make use of tracking infrastructure. Here's one.

How often have you wanted to talk to somebody in a car next to you on the road? Consider a system where people could register their licence plate(s) with their cell phone account. Then, if they had done this, you could call a special number on your own cell phone, and enter the numeric part of their licence plate.

This weekend I experienced an air travel policy that I had not seen before and which I found quite shocking. I was flying on United Express (Skywest)'s flight from San Francisco to Calgary. As we waited for the early morning flight, they announced this "weather warn." Visibility was poor in Calgary due to low clouds. Below 0.5 miles they plane would not be allowed to land there. They rated about a 1/3rd chance of this happening, 2/3 chance we would land normally.

I'm in Edmonton. Turns out to be the farthest north I've been on land (53 degrees 37 minutes at the peak) after another turn through the Icefields Parkway, surely one of the most scenic drives on the planet. My 4th time along it, though this time it was a whiteout. Speaking tomorrow at the CIPS ICE conference on privacy, nanotechnology and the future at 10:15.

When I'm having a problem with a company, I try sometimes to remind them of a principle of customer service I worked out when I was running ClariNet. Namely that when a company screws up, it should more than fix the problem, even to the point of losing money (for a while) on that customer. The reason, in brief, is that this does more than make the customer happy with the transaction. It signals in the strongest possible way that the screw-up is a rare event, which makes the customer come back for more.

You've seen the flap recently because a student, to demonstrate the fairly well discussed airport security flaw involving the ease forgeability of boarding passes, created a web site where you could easily create a fake Northwest boarding pass. Congressman Markey even called for the student's arrest, then apologized, but in the meantime the FBI raided his house and took his stuff.

In furtherance of my prior ideas on smart power, I wanted to add another one -- the concept of backup power.

As I wrote before, I want power plugs and jacks to be smart, so they can negotiate how much power the device needs and how much the supply can provide, and then deliver it.

In the 90s, when I had more money, I did some angel investing. One of the companies I invested in, Sierra Sciences was started by an old friend and business associate, Dan Fylstra, who had also founded Personal Software/VisiCorp, the company that sold VisiCalc.

Sierra Sciences was also founded by Bill Andrews, who had done important work on Telomeres at Geron. Together, we hoped to follow promising leads on now to safely lengthen the telomere.

In thinking about how to reduce the cost of bringing fiber to everybody (particulaly for block-area-networks built by neighbours) I have started wondering if we could build a robot that is able to traverse utility poles by crawling along wires -- either power, phone or cable-TV wires. The robot would unspool fiber optic cable behind it and deploy wire-ties to keep it attached. Human beings would still have to eventually climb the poles and install taps or junctions and secure these items, but their job would be much easier.

Over 15 years ago I proposed that USENET support the concept of "replacing" an article (which would mean updating it in place, so people who had already read it would not see it again) in addition to superseding an article, which presented the article as new to those who read it before, but not in both versions to those who hadn't. Never did get that into the standard, but now it's time to beg for it in USENET's successor, RSS and cousins.

I recently read how airline cabins are getting more and more grotty of late. This is due to having fewer cleaning staff on hand, shorter turnaround times for cleaning, and passengers now bringing aboard more of their own food. This got me thinking on how we might improve the airline seatback.

I'm enjoying the new version of Battlestar Galactica. Unlike the original, which was cheezy space opera, this show is the best SF show on TV. Yes, I watched the original when I was 18. I knew it was terrible (and full of bad science) but in the 70s TV SF was extremely rare, and often even worse.

The original show began with Pactrick Macnee narrating an opening "There are those who believe that life here, began out there, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians..." They sought the lost tribe of Earth, and in a truly abyssmal sequel finally came to 1980 Earth, which was of course technologically backward compared to them and unable to help in their fight.

This idea was a common one in science fiction of the 20th century. It was frequent in written SF, and Star Trek twice took it up. In one 60s episode, the Enterprise met Sargon, who claimed to have sewn most of the humanoid races. Spock states this meshes with Vulcan history, but another character says that Humans appear to have evolved on Earth. A later episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation reverses this, and Picard follows clues left in DNA to discover the common ancestry of all the humanoids.

Back in the 60s and 70s, when Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek were written, you could get away with this plot. It had a romantic appeal. While there was tons of evidence, as even Star Trek of the 60s knew, that humans were from Earth, we had not come to the 90s and the DNA sequencer. Today we know we share 25% of our DNA with cabbages. We're descended from a long line in the fossil record that goes back a billion years. If life on this planet was seeded from other planets, it was over a billion years ago. It certainly wasn't during the lifetime of Humanity, and nor were all the animals also seeded here at the same time as we were unless the aliens who did it deliberately created a fake fossil record.

(Of course creationists try very hard to make the case that this could be true, but they don't even remotely succeed. If you think they do have a point, you may want to stop reading. You can read on for more SF theory though.)

My Canon cameras have a variety of ways you can change their settings to certain specialty ones. You can set a manual white balance. You can set an exposure compensation for regular exposures or flash (to make it dimmer or brighter than the camera calculates it should be.) You can change various shooting parameters (saturation etc.) and how the images will be stored (raw or not, large/medium/small etc.) You can of course switch (this time with a physical dial) from manual exposure to various automatic and semi-automatic exposure modes.

People are always looking for location aware services for their mobile devices, including local info. But frankly the UIs on small mobile devices often are poor. When you are on a cell phone, voice to a smart person is the interface you often want.

So here's a possible location aware service. Let people register as a "local expert" for various coordinates. That's probably folks who live in a neighbourhood or know it very well. They would then, using a presence system on their own phone or computer, declare when they are available to take calls about that location.

Just on the heels of my prior post on the bad math often found around alternative energy, I see a Google Blog post on Google's solar installation. It claims Google with save money with their 1.6 megawatt solar installation.

Last week I wrote about how the 800 number you get on the web page should be special and understand your context and how frustrating it is to get an 800 number from the Contact-Us page on a web site and then be taken through a series of menus that are a waste of time for somebody who was just at the web site.

While the best thing to do is to get an eCRM system which connects the user with a session fully informed about what they were doing on the web, that's expensive. However, a few more thoughts have come to me.

I think it's important that we stop burning petrofuels or indeed any fuels and get energy from better sources.

But there's a disturbing phenomenon I have seen from people who believe the same thing too much. They want to believe so much, they forget their math. (Or I may be being charitable. Some of them, trying too hard to sell an idea or a product, may be deliberately forgetting their math.)

I see this over and over again in articles about photovoltaic solar, wind and other forms of power. They suggest you could put in a PV panel array for $20,000, have it provide you with $1,000 worth of electicity per year and thus "pay for itself" in 20 years. Again and again I see people take a series of payments that happen over a long time and just divide the total by the monthly or annual amount.

When you call most companies today, you get a complex "IVR" (menu with speech or touch-tone commands.) In many cases the IVR offers you a variety of customer service functions which can be done far more easily on the web site. And indeed, the prompts usually tell you to visit the web site to do such things.

However, have we all not shouted, "I am already at your damned web site, I would not be calling you to do those things!"

Every driver of a regular car knows this frustration well. You're behind a big SUV or Minivan and you can no longer see what's happening ahead of you, the way you can with ordinary cars. This is not simply because the ordinary cars are shorter, it's because you can see through the windows of the ordinary car -- they are at your level.

We should all be disturbed by the story of a man who was questioned and missed his flight because he spoke on his cell phone in Tamil. Some paranoid thought it was suspicious, reported it, and so the guy gets pulled and misses his flight.

This is not the first time. People have been treated as suspicious for speaking in all sorts of languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Urdo or just being Arabs or Sikhs. Sometimes it's been a lot worse than just missing your flight.