S06E06 of Connection Problem: Road tripping (Part 2)
Hi there,
Welcome to the Climate Action edition. It’s been a week of climate! climate! climate! around the world. The UN had a summit (full of bizarre speeches), the German government passed a sad MVCP (minimal viable climate package) that’s all small-small mini actions that I don’t expect will have a meaningful impact. Meaningful, here, meaning of course massive, which is what we need by now.
The climate strikes continue, which is good, and just like last week we’re on a train-ferry-train combo that takes long, but is quite comfortable and beautiful. It is, just to be brutally honest, also a serious trade-off in terms of velocity: I had to take an extra day off to make this happen, during work crunch time, so this isn’t trivial. We’ll have to figure out ways to move faster without fossil fuel powered planes I guess. Until we do, this was a very worthwhile experiment and experience.
Also, I’m a day late posting this one - forgive me. It’s been a few days of intense workshops interspersed with client calls and other things I had to wrap up. So I’m typing this one the train again, wind turbines all around in the fields. This is a future I enjoy very much: I know many people don’t like these turbines. For me, they kind of flood me with a sense of it’s going to be ok.
By the way, it feels very strange leaving the UK just a month before Brexit day. The next time I'll come back this might be a very different country, and getting here might be a lot harder than it was now.
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If you'd like to work with me or bounce ideas, let's have a chat.
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OpenDoTT
OpenDoTT is a PhD programme from the University of Dundee and Mozilla to explore how to build a more open, secure, and trustworthy Internet of Things.
I’m an industry PhD supervisor for the OpenDoTT fellows, and in a two-day workshop the supervisors and the fellows and the rest of the team all got together to plan the next three years. (ThingsCon is a training partner for the program.) What an amazing group of smart, dedicated researchers. All of whom could, hands down, already be out there working on amazing projects. Digging deeper through this PhD will surely equip them to do that even better in the long term. In related notes, Mozilla just announced their new cohort of fellows. A fine group indeed! You can find the OpenDoTT fellows interspersed in this list.
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Scotland
Since M and I are both involved in this program, we did this trip as a family. Flexible daycare spots were booked, workshop slots carefully planned to buffer any unforeseen toddler related emergencies. But also, we spent the leading weekend up North of Dundee near the Cairngorms national park, which I hadn’t been to on previous trips to Scotland. What a beautiful little slice of the world.
Also, the (still kinda-sorta new) V&A Dundee is neat. It’s not just a great building on a waterfront that desperately needed one; it also understands its role as “the living room of Dundee”, which is quite lovely. It’s a good space to hang out: inviting, beautiful, spacious, friendly. Oh, and like most museums in the UK, it’s free. As I can’t repeat often enough: More countries should do this.
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Just put a mic in it
I skimmed Amazon’s announcements of new hardware and was… kinda dumbfounded? It was both boring and a little odd. Just things with microphones on them? Just an giant attempt at Alexa-fying of our physical surroundings that seems less than inspired, and also frankly not like there was a masterplan. Glasses with mic, lamps with mic speakers with mic, a mic to plug into the wall… this feels more like throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. A/B testing at scale. It’s very Amazon, but not in a good way. (And at the risk of getting stoned, tarred and feathered: I actually do think that Amazon does a lot of things great, and just wish they also started treating and paying their workers much better.) This looked just a little lame. But then again, I’m barely the target group for this, we try to keep as many mics out of our house as possible.
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The tyranny of metrics
Via Alexandra, I found this quote about how metrics can be very influential-yet-useless or even harmful. Picking the wrong things to measure and then really sticking to the results is of course a total recipe for disaster, yet it's done all the time. The book goes straight on the reading list.
Image: Alexandra DS
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Machine learning for the masses
I just learned about RunwayML, a graphical interface that bundles a bunch of open source machine learning tools into a package that’s super easy to use. As in, drag & drop style ease of use. And instead of having to deal with all the server-side installations and managing your own computing resources, Runway allows you to simple run things on Runway’s servers remotely for a small fee. It’s brilliant; better, more accessible tooling really unlocks creative uses of technologies in ways that barely anything else does. I love this.
If you don’t hear back from me, I’m probably absorbed by generating machine learning images based on text input and then piping them right into style transfer models.
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What can a technologist do about climate change?
Interesting article by Bret Victor.
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Seed banks for skills?
Or rather, seed banks for skilled people - do we need them? Concretely, should governments employ experts in the type if skills that are largely useless now but might be hugely important for resilience going forward? Like running/maintaining/constructing mills, or forges, or other technologies that would work without electricity and could be instrumental in re-building infrastructure. In other words, something akin to a library or seed bank, but for skills? When we visited a working traditional mill it struck me that it runs completely without electricity. Hopefully we won’t need to be able to do that going forward, but if in doubt I’d say: Let’s make sure we know how to…?
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If you’d like to work with me or have a chat to explore collaborations, let’s chat!
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Currently reading: Four Futures (Peter Frase), Lost Japan (Alex Kerr), Caliban’s War (James S. A. Corey)
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What's next?
Alas I had to cancel my trip to Hubweek, which I’m bummed about and where I have to thank the team for being so understanding. Life logistics got in the way.
But in October, I’ll be speaking at the FES event “digital capitalism”, on smart cities. They have a killer line-up, too. Then in November, Tech Care in Copenhagen.
On that note I’ll drop the proverbial 🎤, and I hope you’ll enjoy a lovely weekend.
Yours truly,
Peter
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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight firm. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that explores fair, responsible, and human-centric technologies for IoT and beyond. Peter was a Mozilla Fellow (2018-19) and is currently an Edgeryders fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
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Images my own, unless otherwise noted.