Tag Archives: technology

How the Nerds Helped Obama Win the 2012 Election

26 Nov

The 2012 Presidential Election may be three weeks behind us, but I wanted to highlight this excellent piece by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic titled “When The Nerds Go Marching In.” Alexis goes behind the scenes to get the scoop on the top caliber technology team that was behind Obama’s campaign. Led by campaign technology officer Harper Reed,

The team had elite and, for tech, senior talent — by which I mean that most of them were in their 30s — from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago’s own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe *especially* these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. “I think the Republicans fucked up in the hubris department,” Reed told me. “I know we had the best technology team I’ve ever worked with, but we didn’t know if it would work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened.”

Moreover,

Reed’s team came in as outsiders to the campaign and by most accounts, remained that way. The divisions among the tech, digital, and analytics team never quite got resolved, even if the end product has salved the sore spots that developed over the stressful months. At their worst, in early 2012, the cultural differences between tech and everybody else threatened to derail the whole grand experiment.

By the end, the campaign produced exactly what it should have: a hybrid of the desires of everyone on Obama’s team. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars online, made unprecedented progress in voter targeting, and built everything atop the most stable technical infrastructure of any presidential campaign. To go a step further, I’d even say that this clash of cultures was a good thing: The nerds shook up an ossifying Democratic tech structure and the politicos taught the nerds a thing or two about stress, small-p politics, and the significance of elections.

Above all, Alexis goes behind the scenes to bring the face of the team closer to us, the read. It’s a deeply human story:

If you’re a nerd, Harper Reed is an easy guy to like. He’s brash and funny and smart. He gets you and where you came from. He, too, played with computers when they weren’t cool, and learned to code because he just could not help himself. You could call out nouns, phenomena, and he’d be right there with you: BBS, warez, self-organizing systems, Rails, the quantified self, Singularity. He wrote his first programs at age seven, games that his mom typed into their Apple IIC. He, too, has a memory that all nerds share: Late at night, light from a chunky monitor illuminating his face, fingers flying across a keyboard, he figured something out. 

It’s one of the best pieces I’ve read since the election. Highly, highly recommended.

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Alex Payne: Alone, Together, Technology

20 Nov

This is a must-read personal post by Alex Payne, in which he reflects the influence of technology in his life following a divorce with his wife:

I owe my life to technology.

I first realized it in my early twenties. Everything important around me at the time, I’d found on Craigslist: my girlfriend, my job, my apartment. It was a powerful realization: I could sit down with my laptop and, in a matter of hours or days, change my world in both superficial and fundamental ways.

That was years ago. Technology specializes over time. The life I just finished packing up wasn’t courtesy of Craigslist. It wouldn’t be, now. The modern web has six sites for everything, branded and polished and localized and full of options. House from Redfin. Cars negotiated online before ever walking into a dealership. Wife from OkCupid. Wedding invitations by email. Date-night dinners booked on OpenTable. Fast and friction-free.

I spent four years telling anyone who asked how we met that OkCupid’s matching algorithms must have been off. “We were only a seventysomething percent match, with like a twelve percent chance of being enemies. Guess they need to work some bugs out!” The joke’s on me, of course. I emailed the right person at OkCupid to apologize for the years of disparagement.

I could blame technology. Maybe stitching together a durable life takes physical work, needle callouses.

I think this was the second best line in the piece:

Maybe technology made it all too easy to slide into a life I wasn’t meant to have.

And the best:

I will owe the next part of my life to technology, but I will owe it more to experience.

Amen.

Again, a must-read in its entirety.

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From Eye to iPad: The Technology Behind Paper

8 Nov

FastCompany has a profile of the iPad app Paper (by FiftyThree) and the technology behind it:

What vaulted FiftyThree over a hot pile of math was a major insight gleaned from two dead German scientists named Paul Kubelka and Franz Munk. In 1931, they published a paper called Ein Beitrag zur Optik der Farbanstriche, or “a contribution to the optics of paints,” which showed that this color-space question predated computing by several decades. The paper laid out a “theory of reflectance” with an equation which could model color blending on the physical experience you have with the naked eye. That is, how light is reflected or absorbed by various colors.

Today, computers store color as three values: one for red, green and blue, also known as RGB channels. But the Kubelka-Munk model had at least six values for each color, including reflection and absorption values for each of the RGB colors. “While the appearance of a color on a screen can be described in three dimensions, the blending of color actually is happening in a six dimensional space,” explains Georg Petschnigg, FiftyThree’s cofounder and CEO. The Kubelka-Munk paper had allowed the team to translate an aesthetic problem into a mathematical framework.

 Moving from a three-dimensional color-space to six dimensions was the difference between old drab color-mixing and absolute realism. “What creates the shades you see between paints is this interplay of absorption and reflection,” says Petschnigg. “Compare red nail polish to red ink: both are red, but the nail polish will be visible on black paper because it reflects light. The ink won’t be, because it absorbs light.”

Paper is one of the most beautiful apps on the iPad. I highly recommend getting it (the basic version is free) if you don’t have it.

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Jack Dorsey, Charlie Chaplin of Technologists

31 Oct

I love this Wall Street Journal profile of Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square. The Journal likens him to Charlie Chaplin of technologists, and based on what I’ve read about him, the analogy seems apt:

[Jack Dorsey] works standing up at an immaculate, clutter-free table in the center of the wide-open office, typing alone on his iPad, easily accessible to colleagues who can informally sidle up and ask him questions. His daily uniform includes dainty Repetto shoes from France (because, as he recently tweeted, they are “light” and “graceful”) and special open-collared shirts, the provenance of which he refuses to identify (“halfway between a Nehru and a priest’s collar,” as he describes them). This allows him to convey enough formality for meetings, yet frees him from the constriction of wearing ties. He encourages midday strolls outside Square’s offices as a means of inspiration. He leads groups of employees on exploratory excursions to museums or across the Golden Gate Bridge.

A man of widely varied interests, Dorsey is a genuine eccentric—not a mere collector of affectations. He treats his obsessions more as callings than as hobbies. When young, he studied botanical illustration under the tutelage of a master at the Missouri Botanical Garden, gazing for hours at the contours of gingko leaves. He later became fascinated by bespoke denim and enrolled in fashion design classes. Perhaps most bizarrely, he devoted himself for a solid year to the art of massage therapy, after dealing with sore wrists from too much coding. “I was ready to do massage for the rest of my life,” he says. “I tried to convince a nightclub owner in St. Louis to let me give people chair massages at the edge of the dance floor, wearing all white clothes and white clogs. He thought it was a terrible idea, so I went back to programming.” To protect his wrists, he trained himself to type in Dvorak—a keyboard alignment that is ergonomically superior to Qwerty.

Dorsey delves deeply and intensely into whatever piques his curiosity, on the theory that innovation happens when disparate thoughts mesh. “It’s important to demystify the term. Innovation is just reinvention and rethinking. I don’t think there’s anything truly, organically new in this world. It’s just mash-ups of all these things that provide different perspectives—that allow you to think in a completely different way, which allows you to work in a different way.”

One of the most fascinating men in Tech, I appreciate Dorsey’s curatorial ability:

Thus he carefully curates the cultural intake of his employees, in hopes that unfamiliar concepts might be distilled into something new. It’s why he screens films: Modern Times for its economy of expression; Bullitt for its stark, empty compositions; Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory for its depiction of a company that packages delight and surprise.

In a prominent spot near Square’s welcome lobby stands a communal bookshelf where employees place reading material for their colleagues to peruse and borrow. Most titles lining the shelves cover subjects you might expect at a high-flying tech startup: inspirational CEO biographies, trend-gazing futurist tomes and guides to effective management technique. And then there are books placed on the shelf by Dorsey. He offers up Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers—an explication of the Japanese concept of serendipitous beauty. He suggests Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea for its concision. (Papa Hemingway might have thrived under Twitter’s 140-character constraint.)

Read the whole thing.

Jack Dorsey

Having redefined the communications and payments industries, Dorsey wants to tackle health next. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with. It’s bound to be brilliant.

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The Embarrassment of the BlackBerry

18 Oct

This New York Times piece on users dissatisfied with their BlackBerry phones is largely anecdotal; nevertheless, I enjoyed it (the quotes were hilarious).

The cultural divide between BlackBerry loyalists and everyone else has only grown more extreme over the last year as companies that previously issued employees BlackBerrys — and only BlackBerrys — have started surrendering to employee demands for iPhones and Android-powered smartphones.

Goldman Sachs recently gave its employees the option to use an iPhone. Covington & Burling, a major law firm, did the same at the urging of associates. Even the White House, which used the BlackBerry for security reasons, recently started supporting the iPhone. (Some staff members suspect that decision was influenced by President Obama, who now prefers his iPad for national security briefings. A spokesman for the White House declined to comment.)

Out in the world, the insults continue. Victoria Gossage, a 28-year-old hedge fund marketer, said she recently attended a work retreat at Piping Rock Club, an upscale country club in Locust Valley, N.Y., and asked the concierge for a phone charger. “First he said, ‘Sure.’ Then he saw my phone and — in this disgusted tone — said, ‘Oh no, no, not for that.’ ”

This was a very good dissenting comment:

Like people, one device can’t do everything we need. I use a Blackberry Torch for writing very quickly in full typo-free sentences and paragraphs. I use it to move text to and from legal documents. I write and send poetry and plays on it. I have created hundreds of macros to speed the typing of words and phrases. It’s also one of my phones. It does all of these things very very welll. I have an iPhone, which is terrific for many things, one of which is definitely not writing at length. I have an iPad for other terrific things. I am lucky to have a choice and to be able to afford it. If someone made fun of me for using my Blackberry, I would react as I would if they criticized my shirt or choice of coffee. I’m often on the Blackberry phone while using the iPhone. I have two hands. I use them both.

I was a BlackBerry user for about a year and a half. The biggest malaise was the Internet Browser, which took ages to load a webpage. The iPhone I have now is light years away from the BlackBerry device I used to own.

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On Slowing Down

31 Dec

Some startling statistics about our obsession with technology:

The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

That’s from an op-ed “The Joy of Quiet” by Pico Iyer, who also notes that there are hotels that cite lack of access to internet and television as a selling point:

I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

In 2011, I’ve had the chance to unwind and go internet-free for a few days (at least several independent occasions). One of my resolutions for the coming year is to have more days where I unwind and slow down.

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Predicting the Future of Computing

8 Dec

The New York Times has a fascinating interactive post on where you, the reader, can submit snippets on what you expect to happen in the field of computer in the near (and distant) future.

Here are some predictions I see, as of current viewing (readers can vote the prediction up or down in terms of when they think the event will happen):

2015: The price and availability of computers will be such that more than half of the world’s people will have one.

2017: Mobile web browsing on phones surpasses desktop browsing.

2019: Irrefutable evidence will show that computers consistently make more accurate diagnoses than specialists in all branches of medicine, including psychiatry.

2023:  The most common forms of cancer will be treated with a personalized therapy based on genetic sequencing. A patient’s therapy will be retargeted every six months as a result of resequencing the cancer to track its inevitable evolution.

2029: Your entire medical history from birth till death will be collectively combined in one universal system and available to all your different doctors.

2035: Most people will own and use a Personal Life Recorder which will store full video and audio of their daily lives. This will be a fully searchable archive that will radically augment a person’s effective memory.

2041: Cash will become illegal, replaced with electric currency. [Bizarre prediction!]

2071: Humans will be able to implant their dogs’ brains with a neurological device such that the images of what the dog is thinking appear on a special contact lens the dog owner is wearing.

2106: Medical advances will permit the first human to live for a period of 200 years or more.

2154: Humans will become so integrated with electronics that more people will die from computer viruses in a year than from biological viruses.

2180: Old knowledge will not have to be learned; only new knowledge will need to be created. Learning will become obsolete. All known knowledge will be contained on a super computer. Individuals can download all known knowledge pertaining to any subject directly to the brain as desired.

2225: Artificial Intelligence is awarded full citizenship.

2283: Abundance happens. Digital and physical sciences produce abundance so great that wealth becomes meaningless as a difference between people.

2416: Thought-based communication surpasses spoken and typed communication.

What do you think is the coolest prediction from above? Which one is unlikely to happen in the next 400 years?

If you have a New York Times account, you can submit your own predictions. You can vote up/down predictions without an account. It’s a fascinating experiment!

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Peter Thiel on Technology, Science, Politics

4 Oct

Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, in his piece, “The End of the Future,” offers excellent food-for-thought regarding technology, science, innovation, politics, and the economy.

The state of true science is the key to knowing whether something is truly rotten in the United States. But any such assessment encounters an immediate and almost insuperable challenge. Who can speak about the true health of the ever-expanding universe of human knowledge, given how complex, esoteric, and specialized the many scientific and technological fields have become? When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields?

Not so sure about this statement. Nuclear engineering remains a strong major at Georgia Tech, for example:

 One cannot in good conscience encourage an undergraduate in 2011 to study nuclear engineering as a career. 

On the big pharmaceutical companies today:

In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one-third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and a half.

I think this is Thiel’s most important point in the piece.  Read it carefully:

If meaningful scientific and technological progress occurs, then we reasonably would expect greater economic prosperity (though this may be offset by other factors). And also in reverse: If economic gains, as measured by certain key indicators, have been limited or nonexistent, then perhaps so has scientific and technological progress. Therefore, to the extent that economic growth is easier to quantify than scientific or technological progress, economic numbers will contain indirect but important clues to our larger investigation.

The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled. To a first approximation, the progress in computers and the failure in energy appear to have roughly canceled each other out. Like Alice in the Red Queen’s race, we (and our computers) have been forced to run faster and faster to stay in the same place.

One interesting anecdote, in which Thiel quotes from the 1967 bestseller The American Challenge by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber:

In 30 years America will be a post-industrial society. . . . There will be only four work days a week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation. With weekends and holidays this makes 147 work days a year and 218 free days a year. All this within a single generation.

And what does Thiel really think of John Maynard Keynes?

The most common name for a misplaced emphasis on macroeconomic policy is “Keynesianism.” Despite his brilliance, John Maynard Keynes was always a bit of a fraud, and there is always a bit of clever trickery in massive fiscal stimulus and the related printing of paper money. 

And I strongly agree with Thiel here. It’s a shame how science and engineering get passed over by our politicians:

Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects.

Where will the United States be in a year? In five years? In ten?

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(via Tyler Cowen)

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Technology’s Gang of Four

3 Oct

From The London Review of Books, we have this gem:

This spring, the billionaire Eric Schmidt announced that there were only four really significant technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, the company he had until recently been running. People believed him. What distinguished his new ‘gang of four’ from the generation it had superseded – companies like Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco, which mostly exist to sell gizmos and gadgets and innumerable hours of expensive support services to corporate clients – was that the newcomers sold their products and services to ordinary people. Since there are more ordinary people in the world than there are businesses, and since there’s nothing that ordinary people don’t want or need, or can’t be persuaded they want or need when it flashes up alluringly on their screens, the money to be made from them is virtually limitless…

Very interesting analogy from the real Gang of Four to technology companies. Do you agree?

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The Origin of Cyberspace

18 Jun

William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer, is credited with coining the term cyberspace.

In the recent issue of Paris Review, he reveals how he came about the term:

Gibson: I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them—it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.

The only computers I’d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman’s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.

Interviewer: And you knew at that point you had your arena?

Gibson: I sensed that it would more than meet my requirements, and I knew that there were all sorts of things I could do there that I hadn’t even been able to imagine yet. But what was more important at that point, in terms of my practical needs, was to name it something cool, because it was never going to work unless it had a really good name. So the first thing I did was sit down with a yellow pad and a Sharpie and start scribbling—infospace, dataspace. I think I got cyberspace on the third try, and I thought, Oh, that’s a really weird word. I liked the way it felt in the mouth—I thought it sounded like it meant something while still being essentially hollow… I made up a whole bunch of things that happened in cyberspace, or what you could call cyberspace, and so I filled in my empty neologism. But because the world came along with its real cyberspace, very little of that stuff lasted. What lasted was the neologism

I love how Gibson describes the enlightenment: the feeling in the mouth, as though he is synesthetic.

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Hat tip for this post: Paul Kedrosky.

Related: how Haruki Murakami became a writer. 

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