hello.

The students in my Understanding Networks class had a short assignment this past week, to run a couple dozen traceroutes, and do visualizations with the results.  A few interesting points came out of it.

Alejandro Kaufmann did traces mostly on Asian sites, and noticed that many of the traces followed old colonial lines: traces to Hong Kong and India tended to go through British routers, and traces to Vietnam tended to go through French, for example. Not sure if this is coincidence or a result of their telcos still working together, but it was an interesting trend.

Zach Taylor did two maps of traces to the top 50 internet sites. He ran the same traces from home and from the network at NYU, and not surprisingly, there’s a lot of clustering at the outset, as the traces went outward from his provider or NYU. In the NYU map, you can see some load balancing as the traces split across NYU’s various gateway routers, then clear rivers of traffic as they head out through the tier 1 providers, AT&T and Level3.

Zach’s map of the top 500 sites (warning: it’s big) is the most interesting though. More data reveals more patterns, and you can clearly see the AT&T and Level3 rivers of traffic in the 500 trace. I’m surprised at how much of the traffic is along the Level3 river, because I didn’t think they owned as much wire and fiber infrastructure as AT&T, Sprint, or some of the other tier 1 providers.  But I guess owning the crossroads can be more valuable than owning the roads.

Now I want to see the same 500-trace exercise done from several points, and aggregated in one big map!

Strategy & Business magazine has an interesting article on the shan zhai manufacturers in China at the moment. It’s the first business press article I’ve seen in the US that takes a relatively balanced approach to reporting on them.  It’s worth a read, as it’s a trend that’s already affecting business, particularly the electronics business. It suggests a new approach to economic recovery as well, one based on small companies well-networked with each other.

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Given how pervasive the idea of planned obsolescence is, I’m always on the lookout for counterexamples — cases where a company actually wants you to fix what you bought from them, and keep it longer, rather than just replacing it wholesale. Nicolas Villar from Microsoft Research (and co-chair of this year’s recent TEI conference) sent me the example below, a PDF of instructions on a toy helicopter he bought that actually explains how to repair it. Granted, many of the instructions involve “spare part kit available separately,” but even that is a small step forward.  Let’s see more like this:

Repair instructions

Thanks to Nic for the link.

There’s a new report out from the Social Science Research Council’s Information Technology and International Cooperation program, “Civil Technologies: The Values of Nonprofit ICT Use,” by Ken Jordan and Mark Surman with funding from the Ford Foundation. This report is the last in a series of three major reports on the Internet, governance and civil society that were published by the ITIC program.

The report “explores exemplary instances of nonprofit ICT adoption by civil society groups from around the world, and draws attention to ways the values of civil society are reinforced and extended through their use of digital tools. It is informed by eleven interviews exploring the specific ICT implementations that had a significant, positive impact on the operations of civil society groups. These include: Advocacy Project eHomemakers.net (Malaysia), Fantsuam Foundation (Nigeria), Front Line Defenders (Ireland), Brian Fitzgerald, Greenpeace, Interfaith Project, The Center for a New American Dream, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Planned Parenthood, Ruckus Society, St. Christopher House (Canada). The report is available for download at the Social Science Research Council site.

Technorati Tags: cities, design, environment, infrastructures, networks, sociology

Doors always has some interesting links on design and social innovation. They cover sustainability, health care, social justice, economics, all staring from a design point of view.

Technorati Tags: art, design, social justice, healthcare

Grameen Bank started out as a micro-credit organization in Bangladesh, making small loans to poor women so that they could start businesses. They proved that very small loans paid back regularly in small amounts could make a huge difference. From their website:

“Grameen Foundation USA is empowering the world’s poorest people to lift themselves out of poverty with dignity through access to financial services and to information.

“The Grameen Technology Center is working to eliminate poverty by leveraging the power of microcredit and technology.”

Technorati Tags: development, environment, networks

Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs blog dedicated to subjects stemming from his book of the same name. He and other bloggers report on various social/technology items here.

Technorati Tags: cities, design, infrastructures, location systems, mobile telephony, networked objects, networks, psychology, sociology

The O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference was great. Met many interesting people, saw lots of good presentations, collected lots of good links. Followng are a few notes. I’ll expand on this over time, as I digest everything.

Chris Heathcote’s presentation, “35 Ways to Find your Location” was the last one I went to. It was great. An overview of location methods and technologies. Very practical, gave the big picture tather than delving into any one technology in depth. From his presentation, you could easily begin to research on your own. Check out the slideshow.

Raffi Krikorian’s collecting links to interesting physical computing and hardware hacking projects, both lower-level tech details and higher-level overall descriptions. Send him some links. He gave a great presentation last year on Internet0, but I missed his tutorial on getting started with microcontrollers this year, sadly.

Tomas Krag gave a good presentation on Wireless Networks as a Low-Cost, Decentralized Alternative for the Developing World. Among other things, he talked very frankly and practically about the limitations of tech volunteer work in the developing world. What he’s up to is worth following, and participating in however you can. He and his company are doing a “Wireless Roadshow to teach local technology NGOs how wireless technologies can be used to bring Internet and intranet connectivity to those parts of the world not included in the plans of the commercial telecommunications companies.”

He also showed a nifty and very small wireless mesh router, a cube about 3 inches on a side. Check out also wire.less.dk, the company he’s associated with.

Joichi Ito, Mimi Ito, Howard Rheingold, Scott Fischer and Dana Boyd gave a great panel on “What Happens to Social Networks in the Untethered Wilds“. They highlighted trends in social behavior resulting from and influenced by cell phone applications. I loved especially the examples Mimi gave, talking about intimate communications and small group communications over text and picturephone. Loved the “New Haircut” shot. Hope they put the presentation files online.

We followed on their ideas in a panel from ITP, “Socially Mobile: Experiments in Social Software Applications using Mobile Phones“. Michele Chang,
Dennis Crowley, Elizabeth Goodman, Alex Rainert, and Shawn Van Every all did a good job presenting their work. Thanks to Alex for putting the slides all in one place.

ITP alums Lili Cheng and Sean Kelly did a presentation on Wallop and other work coming out of the Social Computing group at Microsoft research. Lili covered the history of the social computing group really well, and gave great context and setup for Wallop, an environment they’re working on which maps and organizes relationships between you and the people you care about, through emails, photos, shared work, and other documents.

Rael Dornfest’s Mobile Hacks session was mighty geeky, and a lot of fun. Made me want to upgrade my phone to play with Bluetooth, and with the app that identifies the cell tower you’re connected to.

Priya Prakash’s presentation, “Project Miljul“, was a very nice introduction to how to listen to the people you’re designing for. It’s an essential lesson for all designers. She presented her own observations in several cities in India in very anecdotal and approachable session.

Marc Smith’s keynote address, Catalyzing Collective Action on the Net rocked. Some great notes on why summary visualization of online group dynamics is important, how it gives you the flavor of a group before you enter, and much more.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, cities, design, infrastructures, networks, open source, philosophy, sensors, sociology