The new documentary about Woody Allen is a fine portrait of a long creative life. For me the best part was seeing his drawer of ideas. Early in part two of the documentary, Dick Cavett says Woody Allen once told him that he had endless ideas for movies. Cavett was amazed. “It would take me a year to have just one idea! He has many?” But then we see how the trick is done. Cut to Woody’s bedroom. He opens a drawer in his bedstand, takes out a pile of scraps, spreads them out on the bed, and talks about his process.

Woody: This is my collection, all kinds of scraps, written on hotel stationery and whatnot. I’ll ponder these things. I go through this all the time, every time I start a project.

Interviewer: Read me one note.

Woody: A man inherits all the magic tricks of a great magician. That’s all I have there. But I could see a story.

Ideas, for the most part, are just seeds. They’re cheap and plentiful. A man wakes up in the future (Sleeper). The mother of a man’s genius adopted son turns out to be a prostitute (Mighty Aphrodite). Some ideas are better than others, no doubt. But to grow them into something that matters you have to see the story. And then tell the story.

The elmcity project enables curators to create and manage calendar syndication hubs. These were never intended as destination sites, but rather as infrastructure to support what I’m calling attention hubs: newspapers, hyperlocal blogs, chambers of commerce, arts councils. Such organizations often want to build and display a comprehensive community calendar. They always fail to do so because of what I’m calling the Submit Your Event Antipattern, which looks like this:

I want attention hubs to align themselves with syndication hubs, and to give their contributors an alternative to the copy and paste approach to data syndication. But the attention hubs thus far mostly don’t want to participate. So now I’m trying a complementary approach to building networks of calendar feeds.

The elmcity concept is, after all, radically decentralized. So why should central attention hubs be gatekeepers governing the growth of these networks? They shouldn’t! They should be participants, but so should all the contributing sites.

The model I’ve come up with harkens back to the old idea of a webring: a group of sites that declare a shared interest in some topic. So, consider the hub I’ve built for New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region, which includes Keene, various surrounding towns, and (honorarily) Brattleboro, Vermont. The events flowing through this hub are, of course, tagged. Here’s the default URL for music:

http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/MonadnockNH/html?view=music

Here are the sources that are currently feeding into that view:

• Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music
• Fritz Belgian Fries (eventful)
• Inferno (eventful)
• McCue’s (eventful)
• Metropolis Wine Bar (eventful)
• Mole Hill Theatre (facebook)
• Monadnock Folklore Society
• Peterborough Folk Music Society
• Railroad Tavern (eventful)
• The Beacon (eventful)
• The Listening Room at MindFull Books & Ephemera (eventful)
• The Starving Artist (facebook)
• Vermont Jazz Center (facebook)
• Waxy O’Connors (facebook)

These venues represent the music scene in the Monadnock Region, and they have a collective interest in branding and promoting the scene. I’d like to help them do that. So I’ve made a widget-maker that produces a widget they can embed on their sites. Of course it doesn’t only work for the music scene in my region.Here are some other variations on the theme.

• Music in Ann Arbor

• Film in Berkeley

• Technology in Boston

• Performing arts in Houston

• Recreation in Providence

• Fitness in Seattle

• Dance in Virginia’s New River Valley

This will work for any of the hubs featured at elmcity.cloudapp.net. They’re all still in a bootstrap phase. I’ve seeded them with every iCalendar feed I’ve been able to find and categorize. The resulting views capture enough to be interesting and somewhat useful, but they aren’t yet embraced by the organizers of events. If you’re one such organizer, I’d love for you and the others who collectively form the music or arts or sports or tech scene in one of the places I’m targeting to try making and using a calendar webring.

This month’s Long Now talk is Benjamin Barber’s If Mayors Ruled the World. In the talk, which is a warmup for a forthcoming book with the same title, Barber offers an intriguing view of global governance. It won’t arise from a formal coalition among nation states, he argues. Instead it will emerge — indeed already is emerging — as cities form networks and share best practices. Stewart Brand summarizes the argument:

New York City’s “hyperactive” mayor Michael Bloomberg says, “I don’t listen to Washington very much. The difference between my level of government and other levels of government is that action takes place at the city level. While national government at this time is just unable to do anything, the mayors of this country have to deal with the real world.” After 9/11, New York’s police chief sent his best people to Homeland Security to learn about dealing with terrorism threats. After 18 months they reported, “We’re learning nothing in Washington.” They were sent then to twelve other cities — Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, Frankfurt, Rio — and built their own highly effective intelligence network city to city, not through Washington or Interpol.

It’s convergent evolution, Barber suggests. Jam a few million people into a limited space and, no matter which nation owns that territory, you’re dealing with the same social, economic, and environmental problems. Solutions that work in one city are likely to work elsewhere. And cities, unlike nations, can’t kick the can down the road indefinitely. The garbage has to be picked up sooner rather than later.

I’m interested in this notion because I’m working on a city-scale best practice that will, I hope, take root in a few cities and then spread to others.

My sister is writing a report for which she needs facts about the growth of New Jersey’s foreign-born population. She found some numbers at census.gov, and we explored them on a Facebook thread. For my friend Mike Caulfield, who’s writing a textbook called Making Fair Comparisons, the discussion reinforced a lot of what he’s been teaching lately. For me it was a reminder that the dream of straightforward access to canonical facts remains elusive.

I wanted to check my sister’s sources. She gave me this link: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/34000.html. That page says New Jersey’s 2010 population was 8,791,894, of which 20.3% were foreign-born — so we can compute the number of those folks to be 1,784,754.

I never did find the 2000 counterpart to that report. While searching the FactFinder site, though, I found this page where, with further searching within the page — for Geography: New Jersey and “foreign born” — I landed on a report called “SELECTED CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NATIVE AND FOREIGN-BORN POPULATIONS 2010 ACS 1-year estimates” with an ID of S0501. According to it, there were 1,844,581 foreign-born New Jerseyans, or 21% (not 20.3%) of the same 8,791,894 total.

I cited that link in our Facebook discussion, but later was horrified to find that I actually hadn’t. The base URL never changes. If I navigate to a report on foreign-born New Jerseyans, and you navigate to the same report for Texans, or the whole US, it’s the same URL. This is catastrophic if you’re trying to have a discussion informed by canonical citation of source data.

Meanwhile I still hadn’t found the 2000 counterpart to http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/34000.html. Back on the FactFinder site I searched in vain for “SELECTED CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NATIVE AND FOREIGN-BORN POPULATIONS 2000” and for combinations of terms like “foreign-born 2000.” So I searched the web for “foreign-born 2000 census”; both Google and Bing pointed me to http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-34.pdf. From this PDF file I was able to extract New Jersey’s total (8.414,350) and foreign-born (1,476,327) populations in 2000. Now I could complete this table (using, arbitrarily, one of the values I found for 2010 foreign-born):

2000	8,414,340	1,476,327	17.5%
2010	8,791,894	1,784,754	20.3%

Now, finally, we could have the real discussion. Should growth be evaluated in terms of percentages, so (20.3-17.5)/20.3 = 15.7%, or absolute numbers, so (1.784-1.476)/1.476 = 20.9%? It depends, my friend Doug Smith said, on the point you’re trying to make:

When you do the calculation on the growth of the percentages it does not take into account that the total population also grew over the 10 years. So while the percentage of foreign- born people grew by 15.7%, the actual number of foreign-born people in the state grew by 20.3%. If you’re trying to make a case that depends on the total number, like services consumed or potential market size, then you should use the growth of total numbers. If you’re trying to make a case based on percentages, for example the likelihood of encountering a foreign-born individual, then growth based on percentages would be better.

Doug added this intriguing observation:

This small amount of data actually presents a very interesting picture. The total population of NJ grew 4.5% over ten years. During that time, the natural born population grew only 1%, while the foreign-born population grew 21%. This suggests that more than 80% of the population increase over these ten years came as a result of immigration. So, while going from 17.5% foreign-born to 20.3% foreign-born doesn’t seem like much of a change to me, the implications seem huge.

That made me wonder about comparable figures for other states. But the prospect of digging out the numbers from a mishmash of HTML pages and PDF files killed that curiosity. What would help? Let’s give every fact its own home page on the web. The OData is one good way to do that. Imagine census.gov as a web of data. A top-level path might be:

http://odata.census.gov/states

A next-level path might be:

http://odata.census.gov/states/NewJersey

A path to the ACS survey might be:

http://odata.census.gov/states/NewJersey/S0501

By year:

http://odata.census.gov/states/NewJersey/S0501/2010

And finally, paths to individual facts might be:

http://odata.census.gov/states/NewJersey/S0501/2000/ForeignBorn

http://odata.census.gov/states/NewJersey/S0501/2010/ForeignBorn

Nothing’s hidden behind a JavaScript veil or stored in a cookie. The entire web of data is navigable in a standard browser, which displays human-readable Atom feeds if set for human viewing, or raw XML or JSON if used to discover URLs for machine processing. Every URL is a canonical home page for a data set or an individual datum. User-friendly search and navigational tools are built on top of this foundation. Nobody has to deal with raw URLs and feeds. But they’re always available.

I’m not ungrateful for what census.gov (and so many other sites) offer. Any kind of web access to data is infinitely better than no access. But there are better and worse ways to provide access. It’s 2012. We ought to be doing better by now.

I was delighted to read this month’s Milestone column in the Ann Arbor Chronicle. Not only because it features the elmcity calendar syndication service, but also because the Chronicle’s editor, Dave Askins, connects the dots to a larger vision of community information management based on syndication of authoritative sources. Dave makes a seemingly unlikely comparison between the syndication of calendars and of crime reports. He traces a story that was reported by one publication, rewritten and retransmitted by others, and then revised by the original source in a way that wasn’t echoed by the secondaries.

The problem with the approach those organizations take to reporting the “spot news” of crime incidents is that they disconnect the information from its single, authoritative source. And as a result, any update to their original reports would need to be undertaken manually — that is, someone would need to think to do it.

Yes, exactly! Here’s the same thing in the calendar domain. The Knights Chess Club in Keene, NH, meets on Monday evenings. The venue used to be the Best Western hotel. A couple of years ago, the chess club posted that information on its website and also relayed it to our local newspaper, the Keene Sentinel. Sometime later, acting as a proxy for the chess club, I added the same info to one of the calendar feeds that flows into the Keene hub. Then I noticed the event had moved from the Best Western to the E.F. Lane, so I adjusted the event accordingly. Months later, I noticed the listing in the Sentinel. You can guess the punchline: the event was still reported to be at the Best Western! (It has since moved to Langdon Place.)

In the world I imagine and am trying to bootstrap, the chess club itself is the authoritative source for this information. The Sentinel syndicates it from the chess club, as does the chamber of commerce, and the Monadnock Shopper, and What’s Up in the Valley, and any other attention hub that cares about the chess club. When the club updates its info at the source, everybody downstream gets refreshed automatically. Attention hubs compete not by trying to capture the info exclusively, but by “amplifying the signal,” as Dave Askins so nicely puts it, in ways appropriate to their unique editorial missions and capabilities.

Here’s an architectural view of what I have in mind:

Monadnock Arts Alive is a real organization chartered to advance arts and culture in the Monadnock region. It runs an instance of an elmcity hub into which flow calendar feeds from local arts organizations, including the ones shown here.

Monadnock Arts Alive has relationships with the Mariposa Museum, the Sharon Arts Center, the Monadnock Folklore Society, and as few dozen other local arts and culture organizations. It’s appropriate for Arts Alive to merge their calendars into a view that brands them as a collection and “amplifies the signal.” Arts Alive can then retransmit that signal to one or more attention hubs that can leverage the editorial work done by Arts Alive — that is, gathering a set of feeds that represent the local arts scene, and working with sources to refine those feeds.

Attention hubs aren’t restricted by Arts Alive’s choices, though. The Sentinel, the Chamber, or What’s Up in the Valley can use Arts Alive’s combined feed if it suits them. Alternatively they can create their own views that merge some of the feeds on Arts Alive’s list with other feeds not on that list.

What emerges, in theory if not yet in practice, is a pool of sources underlying a network of hubs. In this network sources are always authoritative for their data, as intermediaries are always authoritative for the views of those sources they present. What’s more, all intermediaries can be bypassed. If as an individual I care a lot about a particular source, say the Monadnock Folklore Society, I can subscribe to that calendar directly on my desktop or phone. Similarly, if the Chamber of Commerce has a different idea than Arts Alive about which set of feed best represents the local arts scene, it can go direct to those sources and synthesize its own view.

It’s a very general model. We can, for example, apply it to Dave Askins’ crime reporting example. Police reports aren’t, after all, the only possible authoritative basis for crime reporting. Citizens are another. Major incidents provoke online discussion. That discussion can by aggregated by emergent tags. And it can be filtered by whitelisting particular blogs, Twitter accounts, or other sources according to their reputations. Who establishes those reputations? Attention hubs whose editorial choices define views of reality that subscribers either will or won’t find useful. If you find that an attention hub usefully aggregates citizen chatter you may decide to peer through that lens. If not you can go direct to the sources which, in this model, will always be transparently cataloged by intermediaries.

I’m working the calendar angle because I see it as a way to get a wide variety of people and organizations engaged with this model. But my hope is that they’ll be able to generalize from it, and apply it creatively in other domains.

On certain summer nights in Keene, NH, you can wind the clock back 100 years and experience baseball from another era. Our town hosts an NECBL (New England College Baseball League) team called the Swamp Bats. Their home games, at the high school’s Alumni Field, are like Norman Rockwell paintings come to life. Fans arrive early to set up lawn chairs along the third base line. Between innings children compete in egg-balancing races. A few of the players will end up in the big show, but all of them remind us why baseball is the national pastime.

We like to get out to at least a few games each year. In years past the Bats’ Google Calendar helped remind me to do that. But this year the schedule became a silo. The data is trapped in a web page. It can no longer flow, as it once did, to Keene’s calendar hub or to my personal calendar.

Happily I found a way to liberate that data. So now you can once again see the Swamp Bats calendar here and subscribe to it here. The circumstances and techniques that made this possible are worth exploring.

It turns out that while the Swamp Bats’ own calendar is a data silo, the NECBL’s master calendar does the right thing and complements its HTML view with an iCalendar feed. Crucially the NECBL’s calendar does another right thing: it adopts a consistent naming convention. The titles of events on the calendar look like this:

VM@KS 6:30pm

DW@SM 6:30pm

NB@NG 6:30pm

That’s shorthand for:

Vermont Mountaineers vs Keene Swamp Bats at Keene

Danbury Westerners vs Sanford Mainers at Sanford

New Bedford Bay Sox vs Newport Gulls at Newport

To create an iCalendar feed for Keene home games, I used an iCalendar filter to find “@KS” in the titles of the NECBL feed and produce a new feed with just the matching events.

Since I’ve recently started an elmcity hub for Montpelier Vermont I did the same thing there. Filtering on “@VM” gives a view for the Vermont Mountaineers’ home games that you can see here and subscribe to here.

These maneuvers suggest an interesting twist on the free rider problem. When one person upgrades the quality of an online information source and makes the improved source available to everyone, the free ride everyone can enjoy isn’t a problem at all. It’s a solution.

Last week, for example, I visited Montpelier to speak with a state official about the elmcity project. He described a problem that’s familiar to many parents. His kids are in a sports league; their schedule comes to him formatted as an Excel spreadsheet; he can’t merge that Excel schedule with his personal calendar. So he transcribed the data into Google Calendar. And having done so, he shared it with other parents. That’s a free ride the sports league ought to provide. But in this era of abundant free cloud services, any parent can offer it instead, merely by satisfying a personal need. Web users who become web makers can turn the free rider problem into a solution.

My recent column on smart meters came to the attention of Richard Stallman, who worries about the privacy and surveillance issues I alluded to. In the course of our email discussion a question came up that I’d like to answer but can’t. When a smart meter is utility-owned, rather than DIY like mine, do any of the providers offer choice with respect to the granularity of the data feed that’s phoned home? In theory it would be possible to opt out of a realtime feed and only use the meter to automate the monthly accounting that’s currently still done by a visiting person. I doubt that any utility offers that but I’d like to be proved wrong, and either way it would be nice to know for sure.

Richard, by the way, would like to add the privacy/surveillance issues arising from smart meter deployment to his list of causes, and is looking for someone who wants to lead that charge. If you’re interested and qualified you are welcome to contact him. Here, as I have now learned firsthand, is the protocol. You’ll write to him at rms@gnu.org. You’ll receive an autoreply that begins:

I am not on vacation, but I am at the end of a long time delay. I am located somewhere on Earth, but as far as responding to email is concerned, I appear to be well outside the solar system.

After your message arrives at gnu.org, I will collect it in my next batch of incoming mail, some time within the following 24 hours. I will spend much of the following day reading that batch of mail and will come across your message at some point. If I write a response immediately, it will go out in the next outgoing batch–typically around 24 hours after I collected your message, but occasionally sooner or later than that. Please expect a minimum delay of between 24 and 48 hours in receiving a response to your mail to me.

If a conversation ensues, it will happen on that cycle. This strikes most people as odd. As Jeremy Zawodny once noted, though, Richard Stallman is Getting Things Done. Old School.

A couple of weeks ago all the posts here became invisible. There didn’t seem to be anything I could have done wrong to cause that, so I wrote to the support team at WordPress.com about it. I got a prompt acknowledgement from Erica V. that something was, indeed, wrong. Soon after that she confirmed that the problem was fixed. That left me feeling pretty good about WordPress.com. It’s a free service, after all, I’m only a customer in a rather minimal way: I pay for domain name redirection and for the ability to edit my CSS file. Yet the customer service I received was outstanding.

Then, last week, something else went wrong. The widgets in the right column were getting bumped down by a post that didn’t belong in that column. I tried a few debugging strategies and then wrote to WordPress.com support again. Here was the prompt response from macmanx:

You’re all fixed up now. You had an extra div tag in “Meta-tools for exploring explanations,” but I removed it.

Oops. I know how to validate HTML and should have caught that myself. It’s not something I’d have wanted to bother the support team with. But they didn’t make me feel like a jerk. Again the problem was handled promptly and cheerfully.

You know, we tip for all sorts of services in the physical world, including ones delivered far less capably. Why not tip for excellent online customer service? If there were a tip jar for WordPress.com I’d have used it both times.

Yesterday’s post contains an error so embarrassing that I was briefly tempted to yank the whole thing. But of course That Would Be Wrong. What’s more, the error supports the larger point I was trying to make before I derailed myself.

I was talking about Bret Victor’s notion of explorable explanations, which he illustrates on a page called Ten Brighter Ideas. I’d looked at it before, but when I revisited it yesterday I had trouble believing that the following claim could be true:

If every US household replaced 1 incandescent bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb, we’d save 11.6 TWh (terawatt hours), which is the energy equivalent of 1.5 nuclear reactors or 9.5 coal plants.

Some people intuit what these units and quantities mean. But most of us — me included — don’t. And even experts are prone to error. A few months ago I spotted one such error. A Ph.D. economist wrote an editorial that consistently used billions of barrels of oil rather than, as intended, millions. The column was syndicated to hundreds of newspapers, and so far as I know nobody noticed until I happened to check.

What prompted me to check? My friend Mike Caulfield, who’s been teaching and writing about quantitative literacy, says it’s because in this case I did have some touchstone facts parked in my head, including the number 10 million (roughly) for barrels of oil imported daily to the US.

The reason I’ve been working through a bunch of WolframAlpha exercises lately is that I know I don’t have those touchstones in other areas, and want to develop them. Having worked a few examples about global energy, I thought I’d built up some intuition in that realm. But in this case the intuition that prompted me to check Ten Brigher Ideas was wrong.

When I did check, things went completely off the rails:

If 111 million households each swap out one 75W bulb for a 25W bulb, saving 50W each for 180 hours (i.e. half of each day for a year), we’re looking at 100,000,000 * 50W * 180hr = 999GWh. We’re off by a factor of about 1000.

As Pasi points out in a comment:

Hmm, “half of each day for a year” is not 180 hours, but 365*24/2=4380 hours?

My brain thought days, my fingers wrote hours. I think I’m slightly dsylexic when it comes to units, and so I’m prone to that sort of error. It’s another reason why I use WolframAlpha to check myself. When I do that, I try to take advantage of WolframAlpha’s marvelous ability to automate conversions. For example, during an earlier exercise I needed to visualize the gallon equivalent of the energy released by combustion of one kilogram of gasoline. Normally this would entail looking up the density of gasoline, 0.726 g/cm³, applying that constant, and then converting to gallons. But in WolframAlpha the phrase density of gasoline is meaningful and can be used directly, like so:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i = ( 1 kilogram / density of gasoline ) in gallons

Similarly, here’s what I could have done to check the Ten Brighter Ideas claim:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i = (1/2 year) * 111,000,000 * 50W as TWh

That comes to 24 TWh, which is in the ballpark of the claimed 11.6. Maybe Bret assumed lights are cumulatively on 1/4 of the time, I haven’t checked, but if so that would nail it.

Why didn’t I write the WolframAlpha query that way in the first place? Because, I think, we still expect to do a lot of basic computation ourselves. You want the answer in hours? Put hours in. How many? You can figure that out. But should you?

I think it depends. It’s good to exercise your inboard computer — not only to calculate results but also to store and retrieve certain touchstone values. But it’s also good to delegate calculation, storage, and retrieval to outboard computers that can do these things better than we can — if that delegation can be smooth. WolframAlpha points to one way that can happen, Bret Victor’s simulations point to another.

At the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference in January, Bret Victor gave a brilliant presentation that continues to resonate in the technical community. No programmer could fail to be inspired by Bret’s vision, which he compellingly demonstrated, of a system that makes software abstractions visual, concrete, and directly manipulable. Among the inspired were Eric Maupin and Chris Granger, both of whom quickly came up with their own implementations — in C# and ClojureScript — of the ideas Bret Victor had fleshed out in JavaScript.

Others imagined what the educational value of such a system might, or might not, be. Noting that Bret’s demo “looks like a powerful visualization system,” Mark Guzdial wrote:

The problem is that visualization is about making information immediate and accessible, but learning is about changes in the mind — invisible associations and structures.

Ned Gulley echoed Mark’s concerns. Citing Bret’s 2009 essay Simulation as a Practical Tool — which contains live demos that use simulation to solve a physics word problem — Ned writes:

It’s beautiful! And it works well as long as you don’t want to modify the essential parameters of the problem. But Victor isn’t helping us learn the metatools that he uses to create this environment. To be fair, that wasn’t his goal, but as a user, I feel like I’m locked in a pretty small task box. More to the point, it’s expensive to create these interactive gems, and there’s only one Bret Victor.

Victor’s real power is his ability to rapidly create and deploy these tools. In a twinkling he can size up a task that is worth studying, put a box around it and spin a tool. He does this so effortlessly, with such mesmerizing legerdemain, that we lose sight of this meta-skill. What Victor was really doing in his talk was illustrating the power of tool spinning, the rapid creation of customized, context-sensitive, insight-generating tools. Direct manipulation is good, but the nature of direct manipulation changes with the context, and the context can’t always be anticipated.

My preferred goal is to make tool spinning (and tool sharing) as easy as possible. If tool spinning is easy, if that is the expressive skill that we give our users, then small task boxes aren’t a problem. You can always make more tools.

Don’t use the thing Bret made. Do the thing that Bret does.

Ned’s right about tool-spinning and I’ll come back to that. But first I want to consider Mark Guzdial’s critique, cited by Ned, that interactive simulations don’t help us build the mental muscles we need to reason analytically and symbolically. Indeed not. But Bret doesn’t claim that they do! In Simulation as a Practical Tool he says flatly:

Regardless of how it’s taught, most people will never be comfortable entering this level of abstraction in order to explore the problems of their lives.

That’s true for the physics problem Bret solves in that essay, it’s true for the programming challenges he tackles in his CUSEC demo, and it’s also true in all scientific and technological realms. Some people can reason effectively using abstract symbol systems. Most think more concretely and reason best about what they can see, touch, explore, control. What matters in the end is that people can reason effectively, about all sorts of things, especially about the scientific knowledge and technological machinery on which our civilization depends.

In his 2011 essay Explorable Explanations, and the companion demo Ten Brighter Ideas, Bret imagines a world in which public discourse about energy (or health or climate or economics) is facilitated by an explorable explanation that:

• States assumptions, and ties them to supporting data.
• Makes connections among interacting variables.
• Enables the viewer/user to vary assumptions and observe consequences.

An example from Ten Brighter Ideas:

Suppose 100% of US households replaced 1 bulb at random with a compact fluorescent.

This, we learn, would save 11.6TWh per year, which is equivalent to 1.5 nuclear reactors or 9.5 coal plants. The underlined elements — 100% of households, 1 bulb — become sliders you can use to vary these inputs. What if only 20% of households get with the program? If each replaces 5 bulbs, we can get the same 11.6TWh savings.

Wince. (See comments.)

We need robust explorable explanations that state assumptions, link to supporting data, and assemble context that enables us to cross-check assumptions and evaluate consequences.

And we need them everywhere, for everything. Consider, for example, the current debate about fracking. We’re having this conversation because, as Daniel Yergin explains in The Quest, a natural gas revolution has gotten underway pretty recently. There’s a lot of more of it available than was thought, particularly in North America, and we can recover it and burn it a lot more cleanly than the coal that generates so much of our electric power. Are there tradeoffs? Of course, There are always tradeoffs. What cripples us is our inability to evaluate them. We isolate every issue, and then polarize it. Economist Ed Dolan writes

These anti-frackers have a simple solution: ban it.

The pro-frackers, too, have a simple solution: get the government out of the way and drill baby, drill.

The environmental impacts of fracking are a real problem, but one to which neither prohibition nor laissez faire seems a sensible solution. Instead, we should look toward mitigation of impacts using economic tools that have been applied successfully in the case of other environmental harms.

In order to do that, we’ve got to be able to put people in both camps in front of an explorable explanation with a slider that varies how much natural gas we choose to produce, linked to other sliders that vary what we pay, in dollars, lives, and environmental impact, not only for fracking but also for coal production and use, for Middle East wars, and so on.

Where will these tools come from? As Ned Gulley says, they’re expensive to build, and you need a scarce talent Bret Victor to build them. And even then, as we’ve seen here, it’s tricky to get right. Where will the tool-spinning meta-tools come from?

I actually think Bret knows, or at least intuits very well, how we can get there, and I think he has shown the way in his book-length 2006 essay MagicInk. That’s what I meant to write about today, but after an unexpected detour through Ten Brighter Ideas I think I’ll do that another time. Meanwhile if you haven’t read MagicInk I commend it to you.

In Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Douglas Hofstadter (and a crew of talented students) argue that analogy-making is a core characteristic of human intelligence. The book is full of delightful puzzles. One class of puzzle goes like this:

• What is the Ob of Nebraska? (The Platte. Hence the name for these: Ob-Platte puzzles)

• What is the Newark of Delaware?

• What is the Gettysburg of Hawaii?

The authors write:

If one were to ask, “What is the Atlantic City of France?”, a large number of people would undoubtedly answer “Monaco”, even knowing full well that Monaco is not a city inside France, but rather an independent, albeit small, country that is not in France, but borders it (the gambling city within Monaco is Monte Carlo). However, Monaco is world-famous for its casinos, is small enough to be thought of as a city, and like Atlantic City, is located on the sea.

I’m working on an Ob-Platte puzzle that you may be able to me with. It goes like this:

Who is the Andy Morikawa of Ann Arbor?

I’m working on the same puzzle for Berkeley, Boston, Providence, Portland, Seattle, Toronto, and a few other places where I’d like to convene a seminar on community information management. The first of these was held in Blacksburg, Virgina, during my recent visit there, and was successful because Andy Morikawa knew and invited all the right people. The Andy Morikawa of Blacksburg is a fellow at Virginia Tech’s Institute for Policy and Governance, and was until recently the executive director of the Community Foundation of the New River Valley.

Just as Monaco is not actually a city in France, the Andy Morikawa of Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and Providence might or might not be affiliated with the universities in those towns. Another Andy might be an independent community organizer, or a city councilor, or an economic development specialist, or the director of a nonprofit chartered to consolidate and promote cultural arts. He or she will certainly, though, be a well-known connector who has the ability to convene the kinds of folks I want to reach. They’ll come from the public schools, the colleges, the city government, the newspapers and online media, the music and dance scenes, the public library, the hospital, the chamber of commerce, the downtown merchants association, arts and culture nonprofits, social services organizations, sports leagues, environmental groups, and other centers of public life.

Crucially I am not looking for webmasters and IT staffers, but rather for leaders responsible for public engagement. The principles I’ll explain and demonstrate are ones that everyone can understand and apply. Once leaders understand what’s possible they can delegate to staff, but what they’ll delegate is nothing they couldn’t pretty easily do for themselves.

What makes this a tricky problem in social networking is that my best contacts are in the technical world, but I’m trying to reach outside it. That’s why I need an Andy to help me bridge the gap. If you are an Andy, or if you know an Andy, I’d really like to hear from you.

The bedrock principle at the core of the elmcity project is: own your data, syndicate it into contexts that need it. This applies far more broadly than to calendars, but I’m focusing on calendars now because we all still struggle to make sense of various personal, professional, and public timelines, so everyone (I hope) can relate to the challenge and the opportunity.

For the sorts of calendars you see at elmcity.cloudapp.net, which represent schools, libraries, museums, music venues, sports clubs, and other organizations offering schedules of activities to which the public is invited, the application of the principle is as follows. Publish your calendar from a single canonical source as two streams of information. One is an HTML page for people to read and interact with on your own website. The other is an iCalendar (ICS) feed that can syndicate to other sites.

One popular way to publicize events, Facebook, doesn’t fit neatly into this model. For some organizations, a calendar on a Facebook page is the canonical source. I respect the choice to use Facebook in that way, and support it by enabling such calendars to syndicate from Facebook into other contexts. But I don’t recommend the choice.

Consider this link that appears on the Peterborough NH timeline for April 28:

Sat 09:00 AM Childhood Pop-Up Museum Peterborough Historical Society Museum and Archives

It’s nice that this event is able to show up in a public timeline for the Monadnock region, along with events from many other sources. But if you click the link … well, it depends. If you’re logged into Facebook you’ll see the details. Otherwise not.

The Peterborough Historical Society does publish the event on its own site, here it is, but there’s no iCalendar feed on the site. The only machine-readable calendar for the Peterborough Historical Society available on the web is the Society’s Facebook page. And while that page is on the web, it’s only fully available to the subset of the web formed by logged-in Facebook users.

What I want, and what I think everyone who promotes public events should want, is the inverse of that arrangement. I think we should put our public calendars on our own sites. And then, since Facebook is a wonderful tool for socializing our calendars — that is, discussing upcoming events, keeping track of who’s planning to attend — we ought to be able to syndicate from our own calendars into Facebook.

It’s doable, and I’ve prototyped a solution, but in light of an upcoming change in the way Facebook handles API access tokens I’m going to wait for the dust to settle before rolling it out. I’m told there may soon be a new mechanism that will simplify the authentication dance the elmcity service will need to perform in order to make this happen.

Meanwhile, though, I’ve implemented a variant of the idea. On Saturday a favorite local band, Jatoba, will be playing here in Keene at Waxy O’Connor’s. I found the event on the MonadnockNH music calendar, to which it had syndicated from two sources: Eventful.com and Waxy’s own calendar. I’m hoping some friends will want to join me there, and Facebook is a great way to alert them that I’m going. So I posted the event to my Facebook page.

Then I realized it was silly for me, or anyone, to have to retype data that’s available in machine-readable form. So I’ve expanded the elmcity service’s Add to calendar mechanism. Options were formerly Add to Google Calendar, Add to Hotmail Calendar, and Add to iCal (for generic iCalendar clients). Now there’s also Add to Facebook. When you see an event on an elmcity timeline that you’d like to socialize, it’s now just two clicks to pluck it from the timeline and announce it to your Facebook friends. It’s kinda cool, and it’s a nice warmup for the wholesale syndication I’m planning to do later.

Ownership of data and services based on data are separable concerns, and it’s crucial that we begin learning how to separate them. In this case the owner of the data about Jatoba’s appearance at Waxy O’Connor’s is Waxy O’Connor’s.

(An aside: You might argue that the owner of that data is really Jatoba, and that Waxy O’Connor’s could be syndicating from Jatoba’s site. That’s true. You might also argue that Waxy O’Connor’s doesn’t really own its calendar, Google does. That’s true too. Waxy O’Connor’s has no more of a contractual relationship with Google than it might with Facebook. But Waxy O’Connor’s does have a contractual relationship with its site provider, and that contract could include provision of a calendar service that puts Waxy O’Connor’s in charge of its own data. Likewise for Jatoba.)

(Another aside: Eventful and Waxy’s do not agree on the start time for Jatoba’s appearance. This is not uncommon. Eventful says 8PM, Waxy’s says 9PM. I’m going at 9PM because I regard Waxy’s as the more authoritative source in this case. I’m not sure where Eventful got its information, but if it were syndicating from Waxy’s or from Jatoba then we wouldn’t see this temporal drift.)

What Facebook can bring to the table, if we look at it the right way, is a service based on data owned by Waxy O’Connor’s — or by Jatoba. It’s the service, again, of socialization: announcing an event to a group, discussing the event with the group. Music promotion is interesting in that there are three ways that socialization might happen. A band might want to do it, and/or a venue, and/or a fan.

So, for example, an event that was syndicated from Waxy O’Connor’s site (or from Jatoba’s site, or from both), might want to be injected into a Waxy O’Connor’s Facebook Page, and/or a Jatoba Facebook Page, and/or the personal Facebook page of a fan like me. The latter option is available now. The former ones are coming soon.

If you keep a calendar on a Facebook Page, and wish to regard it as the authoritative source for the events on that calendar, then you can use the elmcity service to synthesize an iCalendar feed from that Facebook Page for use elsewhere. But what if you want things the other way around? That’s the question that came up during Saturday’s workshop¹. Several folks asked whether calendars they maintain authoritatively elsewhere can syndicate into Facebook. It’s something I’ve been meaning to enable, so I looked into it today.

I’ve mocked up a simple mechanism that you’d use to identify an iCalendar feed and a Facebook Page that you control, and then tell the elmcity service it’s allowed to inject events from the iCalendar feed into your Facebook Page. My notion was that you’d only need to use this mechanism once, to hook things up. Thereafter the elmcity service would sync the iCalendar feed to the Facebook Page on some regular schedule.

In order to do that, though, the elmcity service would need to hold onto the access token that it got from Facebook. The needed permissions are: manage_pages (so the elmcity service can update the Facebook Page), create_event (so it can create events on the Facebook Page), and offline_access (so the elmcity service can keep updating the Facebook Page without asking you). The last of these, offline_access, is a very powerful privilege, arguably too powerful, and sure enough it’s going away in a few weeks.

What I think this means is that it will still be possible to sync from an iCalendar feed to a Facebook Page, but that the owner of the Facebook Page will need to be notified periodically (every 60 days, it seems) to reauthorize the service that does the synchronization. Have I got that right? If so it’ll be awkward, but I won’t really be able to complain. I agree that users should periodically review the powers they’ve granted to third-party apps and services.

¹ Here’s the template for the workshop. If you’d like one to happen in your city or town, and if you’re somebody who can bring the right group of community leaders into the room, I’d like to hear from you.

On Thursday I visited Gardner Campbell’s class. For me it was a chance to try to convey, to students who are mainly not on the engineering track, some key intuitions that arise from the architecture of the web. At one point I invited them to summon a grain of sand into existence, name it uniquely, cast it onto the web, and wait for search engines to notice.

At least one student, lisskane, tried the experiment. She wrote:

I’m going to completely admit that before this class I knew absolutely nothing about the WWW and Internet infrastructure. And honestly, it still confuses me. Who knew that the web and the Internet were different things? I thought they were simply interchangeable words, synonyms that could be looked up on Microsoft word. But they are different and when to my surprise when I click on Internet, there are no synonyms for it. It is it’s own thing. Which brings us to what Jon Udell was saying in class. When it comes to the World Wide Web, our imagination is our only limit. We decide what we want to make. Who we want to share it with and what we want it to mean. Take words for example.  Dackolupatoni: when you Google that, nothing comes up. But here is our experiment. Let’s search it in a few hours and probably this will come up. Which is recursion. And then that person can be linked to this. And it goes on and on. Now isn’t that cool?

It sure is! Unfortunately for lisskane her grain of sand, dackolupatoni, has not yet fully awakened. Bing finds a tweet I posted yesterday. But neither Bing nor Google, as of Saturday morning, has yet made lisskane’s experiment in discovery and recursion come alive. This pains me. I want her to see it happen. But I realize I forgot to mention something. This power to cast grains of sand into the virtual world and than awaken them is a power that grows as you exercise it. Mine, after many years, is strong. Hers is nascent. But thanks to another wonderful property of the web I can share some of my power with her. So, Google and Bing, please awaken lisskane’s grain of sand.

Today I met a university instructor who works in the area of materials science and engineering. She is also a guitarist and a maker of guitars. These interests combine in the following way. Her students work on projects that involve, for example, curing of finishes on instrument-grade wood. Then they travel to the factory of a leading guitar manufacturer where they present their findings to engineers and designers. During their on-site visit they stay not at a hotel, but a rented vacation home where the bond that forms among students lucky enough to have this experience is strengthened by the shared living arrangement.

The university knows about this activity, it’s been written up on the website. What the university doesn’t know, it seems, is that this instructor has been unable to land any funding to support these trips. For five years she and a collaborator from another school have paid for travel and lodging — their own and the students’ — out of their own pockets. Which, in her case, is more than a bit of a stretch.

What do you do when you hear a story like this?

• Rail against a system that does not recognize or support some of its truest heroes.
• Point her to Kickstarter.
• Celebrate the human spirit.
• Give her a hug.

I’m going to skip a) because life’s too short and it’s boring. b) Done. c) Done. d) Flubbed my chance but I hope to fix that.

In A tale of two dams I proposed using a tag, WestStDamKeene, to coordinate public discourse about a decision we need to make here in Keene, NH. Should we repair the Ashuelot River Dam on West Street, or remove it?

On the day I wrote that post, it was the only document on the web containing the 14-character string WestStDamKeene. A few months later I mentioned it again in Awakened grains of sand¹, which considers what we can do when we invent names that are unique to the web — and that can be found by searching for them.
So now a Google or Bing search would find two documents on the web containing the tag WestStDamKeene.

Yesterday I tried that again and was delighted to find a number of results, notably from two local organizations deeply involved in the decision about the dam: the City of Keene [Google, Bing] and the Keene Sentinel [Google, Bing].

Among the links that turn up in a general search for WestStDamKeene is this pointer to minute 40 of the two-hour city council meeting on Oct 6, 2011, when discussion of agenda item F begins. That happens because the title of item F is Ashuelot River (West Street) Dam (onlinetag: weststdamkeene) – Department of Public Works.

This makes me very happy! The City explains:

The City of Keene has embarked on a new online initiative to streamline information sharing with the citizens of Keene. The City will be “tagging” certain projects or initiatives that have generated a significant amount of community interest. This initiative will be a collaborative effort with the Keene Sentinel, which will be applying the same tag to their articles. The tag assigned by the City can be used to search all online content associated with the item through the search engine of your choice.

And it adds:

As you collaborate with others online to discuss City projects, you are welcome to tag your posts, emails, articles, etc. with the same tags. For example, if you belong to a Keene neighborhood group, and you have information to share regarding the West Street Dam project on the group’s Facebook page, make sure to include “weststdamkeene” in your post. Your post will then appear in a Web search alongside City and Sentinel tagged content.

If others follow that advice and join in, my happiness will increase.

¹ Cliff Gerrish’s poetic response to Awakened Grains of Sand also made me very happy.

In recent years I’ve had increasing trouble with cold fingers. In winter I’ve gone from warmer gloves to mittens to expedition mittens. After even brief exposure to the cold, the circulation in my fingers shuts down and they go scarily white. On winter hikes I carry chemical handwarmers not just for comfort but as an emergency measure, because if anything went wrong and I had to stop moving I’d be highly vulnerable to frostbite.

Finally I learned that the condition has a name: Raynaud’s syndrome. The Mayo Clinic says it’s more a nuisance than a liability, and I guess that’s true, but lately it’s gotten to be a real nuisance. Even indoors, during winter, I’ll realize that my hands are ice cold, and have to run hot water on them in order to resume typing on the keyboard or playing guitar.

I read that some folks have had success with biofeedback so I decided to give it a try. Raynaud’s is just an autonomic nervous response. The shutdown of circulation to hands and feet may be necessary in a survival situation, but with Raynaud’s it happens unnecessarily and inappropriately. The idea of biofeedback is that you can train yourself not to do that.

So I got one of these. It’s nothing special, just a thermometer with a sensor you tape to your finger. You look at the number and try to make it go up.

The first few times I tried nothing happened. The baseline, for me, seems to be room temperature, which in winter might only be mid-60s. I couldn’t budge from that. Then, one day, after about 15 minutes, I gained a tenth of a degree. Then another. Then a degree. Then another. And suddenly the temp was shooting up. In about five minutes it went from 67 to 94.

This wasn’t replicable. Sometimes I’d get that dramatic response, sometimes nothing at all. And it didn’t seem very practical because you can’t do anything else, you have to watch the readout — this is biofeedback, after all.

Eventually I noticed that if I placed my opposite hand — that is, the one without the thermometer — someplace warm, like on my neck, then I could sometimes trigger the warming response in the other hand. So that’s my current best strategy. When I notice my hands feeling cold indoors, I’ll take a “measurement” by placing one hand lightly on the side of my neck. Often I can get both hands to warm up by doing that.

I think the thermometer was useful mainly to prove to myself that the relaxation response is controllable. And that it’s binary, or so it seems to me, by which I mean that for the most part it either happens or it doesn’t. And that some kind of feedback is needed to produce the warming effect I want. Direct self-measurement (i.e. touching my neck) seems to work well enough, and that’s nice because it’s something I can easily do while working.

I’m getting OK results indoors, but still not having much luck outdoors. Now that I know the syndrome isn’t just something that happens to me, though, but rather something I’m doing to myself, I think I might eventually be able to back off from the arctic mittens on days other people are wearing light gloves or nothing.

As I build out calendar hubs for various cities, I’ve begun to develop a scorecard that shows which civic institutions do, or don’t, offer iCalendar feeds that make their public calendars available to their city’s hub. Here’s the scorecard for the current set of featured hubs. It illustrates what I’ve been saying about how the future of community information management is unevenly distributed. If you’re curious about how your city would stack up, it’s easy to find out. Just visit the websites of the institutions shown in the top row, look for the Calendar or Events link, and then look for an iCal link. If you find one for most categories then your city is (at least with respect to public calendars) thinking like the web.

¹ Feeds not easily discoverable, and not valid, but can be made to work.
² Ann Arbor’s public schools are exemplary.
³ Only the Dorchester facility.
⁴ Missing most activities.

It’s been a while since I hung up my spurs as a columnist, and lately I’ve been missing the opportunity to write regularly for a venue other than this blog. So when Mike Barton asked me to contribute to Wired’s Cloudline I said yes. I’m calling the column The Personal Cloud and it’ll run most Fridays. Last week was the introduction, this week I explore what Phil Windley and his crew are doing to help realize Doc Searls’ vision of a Live Web.

The URL for the series is http://www.wired.com/cloudline/tag/the-personal-cloud, and the corresponding RSS feed is http://www.wired.com/cloudline/tag/the-personal-cloud/feed.

In yesterday’s Keene Sentinel guest editorial, YES: Press for more domestic oil, Andrew Morriss consistently misreports oil production figures. Saudi Arabia: 8.1 billion barrels/day; Russia: 10.4 billion; America: 7.9 billion; Iran: 3.7 billion. Those numbers struck me as wrong by orders of magnitude. So I consulted my favorite online scientific fact-checking tool: WolframAlpha.

Q: What is 7.9 billion barrels of oil in dollars? A: $1.05 trillion.

In other words, if we were to convert our daily production to dollars we could pay off the national debt in 15 days. (Real answer: 41 years.)

Q: What is 7.9 billion barrels in gallons? A: 330 billion gallons.

In other words, America’s daily oil production is 4 times the volume of oil transported worldwide in a year. (Real answer: 2.5 times the volume of one of the largest supertankers.)

Q: What is the energy equivalent of 7.9 billion barrels of oil in BTU? A: 45 quadrillion BTU.

In other words, America’s daily oil production is almost half of the total energy consumed by the US in 2001. (Real answer: 1/1000 of that amount.)

What Andrew Morriss meant to write — four times — was million, not billion. Doing that once might be a typo. Doing it four times makes me question his energy literacy.

Now to be fair, most of us — myself included — are not engineers or scientists. We don’t regularly deal with large numbers, and we don’t intuitively grasp relationships among the quantities, prices, and energy content of the various sources that might power our civilization. But we can’t afford to be illiterate (and innumerate) on the topic of energy. The future of the economy, the environment, and of world politics all hinge on our ability to reason about those relationships. Fortunately there is now a tool that can help us all do that more effectively. WolframAlpha isn’t just a boutique search engine. It’s a compendium of scientific knowledge mated to a scientific calculator that understands questions in plain English. And it frames the answers in ways that make sense to everybody. I commend it to Andrew Morriss, to fact-checkers at the Sentinel, and to readers. For more examples of how WolframAlpha can help us reason about energy, see http://delicious.com/judell/energyliteracy.

As we increasingly augment our minds I sometimes pause to reflect on the trade-offs we are making. What powers does the unaugmented mind possess? What do we give up when we outsource our memories to the collective electronic mind? In Dilemma of a Cyborg Carina Chocano writes:

For everything that’s gained by our ability to store and maintain more information than ever before, something is lost that has to do with texture, context and association. The science journalist Joshua Foer, author of “Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything,” said in a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts that people once “invested in their memories, they cultivated them. They studiously furnished their minds. They remembered. Today, of course, we’ve got books and computers and smartphones to hold our memories for us. We’ve outsourced our memories to external devices. The result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small, forgotten thing as evidence that they’re failing us altogether.” As we store more and more of what makes us us outside of ourselves, he said, “we’ve forgotten how to remember.”

The mnemonic techniques rediscovered in Moonwalking with Einstein were first popularized by Cicero. You bind memories to images, and then you bind the images to a path through the rooms and hallways of a “memory palace.”

Here’s another technique that isn’t so well known. I attribute it to Carlton Fisk by way of a story I heard from the baseball writer Roger Angell. Somewhere in the 2000s, Angell asked Fisk to reflect on what had most altered the game of baseball since his playing days. The salaries? The drugs?

No. The game-changer, Fisk said, was instant replay. His game-winning 1975 home run is one of most-remembered moments in all of sports. The video of that event is one of the most-watched clips. You might think that Carlton Fisk has seen that clip a million times. But in fact, he told Roger Angell, he never watches it. That’s because he doesn’t want to overwrite the original memory, which is his alone, recorded from a point of view that was his alone, with a memory we all share that was recorded by a camera up in the stands.

We can’t do away with instant replay, nor do we want to. But it’s worth remembering how to experience life, even when we know it’s being recorded externally, as if the only cameras are the ones in our heads.

The other day Tim Bray tweeted a Google+ item entitled Geeks and repetitive tasks along with the comment: “Geeks win, eventually.”

Here’s the chart posted on Google+ by Bruno Oliveira:

A couple of things bothered me about this. First, there’s the adversarial tone. The subtext is a favorite geek quotation:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

That gem is often attributed to Gandhi. Wikiquote disputes that and finds a close variant in Nicholas Klein’s 1918 speech to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Either way it’s the story of a persistent underdog overcoming an oppressor.

In geek ideology the oppressors are pointy-haired bosses and clueless users. Geeks believe (correctly) that clueless users can’t imagine, never mind implement, automated improvements to repetitive manual chores. The chart divides the world into geeks and non-geeks, and it portrays software-assisted process improvement as a contest that geeks eventually win. This Manichean worldview is unhelpful.

But the chart also fails to capture the reality of repetition and automation in the realm of information systems. Here’s an alternative world view that I choose to imagine and strive to create:

In this view of the world, tasks that involve data manipulation (as so many modern chores do) are undertaken by teams. There is an infinite supply of manual chores. Everybody tackles them. Ideally there is one member of the team I call the toolsmith. Working shoulder to shoulder with the team, the toolsmith spots an opportunity to automate some piece of the work, writes some code, deploys it, observes how it gets used (or doesn’t get used), assesses its impact (or lack of impact), and then iterates on the code. Meanwhile the toolsmith keeps working alongside the team, chipping away at the never-ending and always-evolving list of manual chores, looking for more opportunities to automate, and exploiting them in an incremental and collaborative way.

Software-assisted automation of repetitive work isn’t an event, it’s a process. And if you see it as a contest with winners and losers you are, in my view, doing it wrong.

Before my podcast went AWOL I had been meaning to interview Toby Considine about his efforts to mesh schedules for things with schedules for people, and to define Internet calendaring extensions for that purpose. So when Phil Windley wrote to ask me how I thought calendaring might relate to the personal event networks he wants to bootstrap, I suggested that we ask Toby on an episode of Phil’s Technometria podcast.

Phil, I suspect, is actually one of five identical quintuplets. One teaches at BYU. Another runs a startup called Kynetx. A couple of others take care of family, church, and political matters. Finally there’s the one who does a podcast and also serves as executive producer of ITConversations. I don’t think I could handle being a quintuplet but it’s lucky for all of us that Phil can!

It was a real pleasure to meet Toby and learn about his comprehensive vision for a world in which our buildings, our cars, and our energy grid work with us, appearing as the intelligent agents that science fiction always encouraged us to imagine. One of his favorite examples involves a meeting room that’s scheduled for a 9AM meeting. A really intelligent system wouldn’t start heating or cooling the room at 9AM, it would start sooner. How much sooner? That would depend on the number of people attending.

Orchestrating that kind of dance requires the sort of loosely-coupled event-driven programming at the heart of the Kynetx technology that Phil is creating. Toby is layering that orchestration on top of existing Internet standards: iCalendar (for events), vCard (for resources), LDAP (for directory services). I love that approach for two reasons. First, I’m forever being reminded that we have barely scratched the surface of what might be accomplished with these existing standards if we really put them to use. Second, I violently agree with Toby that automated systems need to build on the standards that people actually use.

Toby chairs the OASIS Web Services Calendar Technical Committee and is an editor of the WS-Calendar specification. If standards whose names begin with WS- give you the heebie-jeebies, take a deep breath. I guess at some point there will be a SOAP profile for WS-Calendar but for now it’s a straightforward set of iCalendar extensions that define intervals, sequences, and relationships.

The web succeeds, in part, because its atomic particle — the hyperlink — can be manipulated both by automated systems and by people. When systems use hyperlinks it’s called RESTful web services. When people do it’s called emailing links. We tend to forget how profoundly the dual nature of the hyperlink binds the web together.

The hyperlink is atomic with respect to location. It says where. The fundamental particle of calendaring — iCalendar’s VEVENT — is atomic with respect to time. It says when. To me it makes perfect sense that smart buildings and energy microgrids will schedule their interactions with us in the same way that we schedule dentist appointments and soccer games.

As I build out the elmcity network, launching calendar hubs in towns and cities around the country, I’ve been gathering examples of excellent web thinking. In Ann Arbor’s public schools are thinking like the web I noted that the schools in that town — and most particularly the Slauson Middle School — are Doing It Right with respect to online calendars. How, I wondered, does that happen? How does a middle school figure out a solution that eludes most universities, theaters, city governments, nightclubs, museums, and other organizations with calendars of interest to the public?

It’s not technology. Slauson Middle School is using the same web services (in this case, Google Calendar) available to everyone.

It’s not budget. The web services required for this solution are free.

It’s a way of thinking. I wrote to Slauson’s principal, Chris Curtis, to congratulate him on the excellent example his school is setting, and to identify the thinker responsible. That thinker turns out to be Chris Curtis himself. And it’s no accident that the implementation pattern on display at Slauson is also evident at Pioneer High. Chris did the same thing there before coming to Slauson.

Now I am not an educator, I only watch from the sidelines. But to me the K-12 “computer skills” curriculum seems uniformed by the kinds of core principles that will make students effective in a web-augmented world. So I asked Chris:

What you’ve done at Pioneer and now Slauson builds on an important conceptual foundation. Do you think that K-12 education could build that foundation?

Here’s what he said:

I agree with the notion that the basic principles of computer science should be generalized more broadly across the curriculum. In many ways, teaching computer and technology skills courses absent a meaningful application of them is ineffective and silly. We wouldn’t teach driver’s education and not let students drive. We don’t teach a “pencil skills class” in which we learn the skills for using this technology tool without an immediate opportunity to apply the skills and then begin to consider and explore the many ways that the pencil and writing change how we organize, perceive, and interact with our world.

This issue gets at the heart of the challenge of technology and education. Often the world seems to divide into separate interest areas: those interested in technology and those interested in education. The result is often to send the technology nerds to a room and make them teach technology and send the other teachers to their rooms and let them teach. In order to be effective at integrating technology into the instructional environment there has to be a merger between a technology interest and and educational interest, within the same person. The awareness of what is possible via technology resources and the desire to perform educational functions can lead to the educator realizing that a task could be done differently, more efficiently, more effectively, with more precision, or in some other manner improved.

Of course the schism that separates technologists from educators also affects practitioners of all kinds. In his most recent essay, Bret Victor meditates on this point:

My piano teacher played the piano. Like, all the time. He had to; it’s not easy to make a living as a musician. Between tours, his band played restaurants, bars, weddings, anywhere they could get a gig. He chose this life because he loved music, and when he taught music, he was teaching what he did. In that way, his teaching was honest.

…

Back in high school, I was taught differential equations by a working engineer. He spent his days at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and for whatever reason, chose to spend his evenings at the local community college. Differential equations wasn’t some abstract arcana to him. It was his bread-and-butter, and he apparently found it important enough to share.

…

My information theory professor would teach me information theory in the morning, and then spend the afternoon furthering the field. Sure, what she taught was somewhat elementary by her standards, but she was well aware that this elementary theory was the foundation on which her life’s research was built. It showed, and it stayed with me.

…

Real teaching is not about transferring “the material”, as if knowledge were some sort of mass-produced commodity that ships from Amazon. Real teaching is about conveying a way of thinking. How can a teacher convey a way of thinking when he doesn’t genuinely think that way?

I’m preoccupied with a related question. The way of thinking that I most want to convey is web thinking. Which is, by definition, openly available to anyone who wants to learn. Schools everywhere can observe and emulate what Chris Curtis is doing at Slauson. In so doing they can become practitioners in the way that Chris is. Their students might then see them as practitioners and learn from their examples.

I would be delighted if the elmcity project could help bootstrap that virtuous cycle.

John Ochsendorf, who teaches civil and environmental engineering and architecture at MIT, cares about ancient construction methods and the forgotten knowledge they embodied: rammed-earth walls, braided-fiber suspension bridges, Gothic cathedrals. In an enlightening lunchtime talk a couple of years ago he reviewed what these ancient builders knew and could still teach us if we were willing to learn.

Dave Winer’s Why apps are not the future reminded me of that. The ancient construction method we are forgetting, in this case, is linking. We had already started to forget back in 2004. Then, writing for InfoWorld, I argued that rich Internet apps needed to learn what web apps always knew: RESTful design that exposes internal state as links. Kevin Lynch, who was then chief software architect of Macromedia, accepted the challenge and showed how a Flash app could behave that way.

But while you can bolt RESTful design and linking onto a rich Internet app, or a phone app, these principles aren’t built in. So apps are inherently less open to the sort of lightweight service composition that I’ve championed for a decade, ever since the LibraryLookup project showed me just how easily and powerfully a humble hyperlink can connect two otherwise separate information silos.

The point about service composition and linking is so obvious that we often fail to notice it. Yesterday I booked a hotel in Chicago for an upcoming conference. The organizer sent me an email containing this link for hotel booking:

http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/chidm-chicago-marriott/?toDate=1/22/12&groupCode=GROUPCODE&fromDate=1/20/12&app=resvlink

When I followed the link I landed in Marriot’s service with context appropriate to my status as an attendee. Nobody at Marriott specifically designed that capability. It’s just something that’s possible because the site works RESTfully, exposing its state as links that people can hand around.

Now to be honest, you have to be a geek-minded person — like the guy who invited me to this conference — to recognize and exploit this possibility. Most people don’t expect things to work this way, and most web designers don’t try to encourage that expectation.

My fear with rich Internet apps, and now phone apps, is that they tend to obscure an important lesson we never learned well enough in the first place.

It’s been a busy month for rogue plumber Harry Tuttle. When last heard from, he was deploying a filter to fix broken iCalendar feeds served up by the University of Michigan. His next assignment was at Rice University, where the downloadable sports schedules are available only in CSV (comma-separated values) format. Here are the instructions for how to get one of those CSV files into Outloook:

1. Select the File / Import and Export… Menu option.
2. Select “Import from another program or file” and click Next.
3. Select “Comma Separated Values (Windows)” and click Next.
4. Find the desired CSV file and select “Do not import duplicate items” and click Next.
5. Select Calendar and click Next.
6. The next window will have a title that says ‘The following actions will be performed:’ above an option to ‘Import “(filename).csv” into folder: Calendar.’
7. Check that box and and click on ‘Import “(filename).csv” into folder: Calendar’ From there, click and drag needed fields from the left window into the right window. Its fairly self-explanatory, but the basic corresponding fields are below: SUBJECT to Subject START_DATE to Start Date START_TIME to Start Time END_TIME to End Time DESCRIPTION to Description LOCATION to Location

It’s hard to believe any Outlook user has ever followed those instructions. And if you’re using a calendar other than Outlook, you’re on your own.

So I asked Harry to make a filter that turns those CSV files into iCalendar feeds. It’s specific to that particular format for now, but as we find other examples in the wild we’ll generalize accordingly.

My next challenge involved feed categorization. I’m finding pockets of excellence in various places around the country. As I mentioned last month, the Slauson Middle School in Ann Arbor is one of them. Its calendar looks like a single feed, but is actually a merged set of 11 distinct Google Calendars, including one for Slauson clubs, several for Slauson sports, and one for Slauson’s upcoming Chicago trip.

As curator of Ann Arbor’s community hub I was thrilled to see this kind of self-categorization. It enables me to merge Slauson’s sports and music events with other sports and music events in Ann Arbor. But if it’s rare to find a public calendar in machine-readable iCalendar format, which it unfortunately is, it’s even rarer to find a set of machine-readable public calendars that can be syndicated by category.

I asked Harry to weigh in on this problem too. He’s a do-it-yourself guy who doesn’t like to wait for Central Services to take care of things. “If the sources aren’t providing you with the categories you need,” he said, “maybe we can create them ourselves.” Next thing you know, he’d whipped up a filter that selects subsets of iCalendar feeds by keyword and/or time.

Here’s one example of how I’m using it. Vinology, a restaurant and wine bar in Ann Arbor, publishes upcoming events using a Google Calendar. The feed from that calendar mixes two different kinds of events: restaurant business (Happy Hour) and a jazz schedule (Meri Slaven trio). I’d like to select just the jazz events for Ann Arbor’s music and jazz views.

Harry’s filter solves this problem. Actually, it solves it in two different ways. The first way is to filter Vinology’s feed for events where the SUMMARY or DESCRIPTION fields contain the keyword jazz. The second way is to filter the feed for events that happen after 8PM. Either of these methods produces the jazz-categorized iCalendar feed that Vinology might someday create for itself.

Harry’s filter also solves a related problem. The Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive is, as the name suggests, a venue for both art exhibits and film showings. The calendar is, happily, available as an iCalendar feed. Unhappily it mixes art exhibits with film showings and I couldn’t find any times or keywords that would reliably separate the two streams. But then I found a keyword that would. The BAM/PFA website’s URLs look like http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/faulders_bamscape) and http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/clouzot). And those same URLs appear in the iCalendar feed. So Harry enhanced the filter to look for those boldedkeywords in the URL field of iCalendar events. Now the BAM/PFA’s film series shows up where it belongs, in the film category of the Berkeley hub.

Senator Ted Stevens got it right. The Internet really is a series of tubes. When they don’t fit together quite the way you need them to, Harry Tuttle can sometimes help.

As we saw last week, the future of community-scale calendaring is already here in some cases but isn’t yet evenly distributed. Consider the Seattle Aquarium’s public calendar. As curator of Seattle’s elmcity hub I’ve found four iCalendar feeds for the Aquarium:

1. An Eventful venue. (iCal feed.)

2. An Upcoming venue. (iCal feed.)

3. A Facebook Page. (iCal feed.)

4. The Aquarium’s own calendar page. (iCal feed.)

If you visit #4, the Aquarium’s calendar page, you’ll see that it does offer an Export as iCalendar link. So why isn’t that link hot here? Because it’s only wired to JavaScript code that imports a snapshot of the data into a calendar program. No URL points directly to the data. That means people can’t subscribe to the feed — and neither can the Seattle hub.

If the Aquarium were truly thinking like the web it would offer its calendar as a first-class web resource addressed by an iCalendar URL. Even better, it would offer one such URL for each view of the calendar page: Educators, Family / Kids, Members Only, Out and About, Speaker Series, Special Events, Summer Camps, Volunteer Orientation.

Since those views aren’t available as feeds I had to fall back to the other three sources. At first I merged all three to create the aquarium view of the Seattle hub. When I compared the results of the merge, though, something didn’t cross-check. An event called Marine Mammal Talk, which showed up in the Upcoming feed, wasn’t in the Eventful or Facebook feeds or on the Aquarium’s own page. Yet Upcoming’s Marine Mammal Talk page says this event was discovered by the Upcoming Robot, has occurred 498 times already, and will occur 77 more times. What’s up with that?

I searched the Aquarium’s site and found the event. Here are the details:

Tue, 15 Nov, 2011 2:43 PM – 2:43 PM

Three weekends of special activities all about the Aquarium’s Marine Mammals – Otters, Harbor Seals & Fur Seals. Join us for special talks, demonstrations and hands-on activities.

Fees: Included with regular Aquarium Admission

Calendar: Programs & Events Calendar

Category: Special Events

Repeats: Weekly on Sunday, Friday, Saturday until 4/24/2011

You can see why the Upcoming Robot was confused. The event’s date is given as Tue 15 Nov 2011. But its recurrence rule says that the last recurrence was back in April of this year.

Of course this fragment of text doesn’t really specify a date or a recurrence rule. The Upcoming Robot just inferred those, erroneously, from unstructured text. And then, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, it began pumping those errors onto the web. It has evidently done so for a couple of years and will, if unchecked, continue into 2013.

I don’t blame the Upcoming Robot. Denied access to the structured data it craved, the poor thing scavenged what it could. The lesson here is for the Seattle Aquarium and for all who mean to publish data online. If you don’t establish yourself as the authoritative source for that data then others will step in to do it for you. And they are liable to get it wrong.