I was thinking about maybe heading toward the coast and riding 25 miles or so. For the month or so before the Danskin triathlon I'd been focusing on shorter, somewhat flatter rides followed by runs, so I hadn't been doing lots of hills.

I asked the friendly bike store guy what he recommended. He got out a map, and drew a magic marker route from central Scotts Valley up Mountain Charlie Road. He said it was about 20 miles. Now, he looked at me, and looked at my bike, and made the recommendation. I figured that if he thought I could do it, I ought to be able to do it.

So I had some lunch at Scotts Valley Falafel, changed, and headed uphill. The ride was absolutely gorgeous through redwood forest, with spectacular views on both sides of the road. When I got home I mapped it. The hill had about 1500 feet of elevation gain over 4 miles. The steepest parts had a grade of 17, most of the ride was about 5.

When I got to the Bay Area, I was pretty out of shape. Wherever I went, I would look up at the hills and wonder if I'd be able to ever climb them on a bike. Being able to reach a miscellaneous Santa Cruz range summit is a pretty big thrill.

The domain had been my primary web and email address for 10 years. It took me a few days to realize that the problem was the domain, not just an email delivery problem. Once I realized the problem was with the domain, I looked up the domain on whois and saw that it was registered at register.com.

Then came a comedy of redirection. I called Register, who sent me to their partner division, who sent to Earthlink, who sent me back to Register, who sent me back to Earthlink again. Each of these episodes involved long waits on hold. The last Register clerk who sent me to Earthlink a second time was extremely patient and volunteered to stay on the line while I talked to the Earthlink folk who denied I was registered through them.

This time the Earthlink clerk recognized the registration. But she was unwilling to give me any information about the account unless I provided her with the credit card number I used to register the account a decade ago. I don't know about you but I save financial information for 7 years, which is the recommendation for tax purposes. Finally she referred me to another number. She wouldn't explain why, or what the other number was. I stayed on hold at that number for 30 minutes, then gave up and tried Earthlink chat.

Finally, the chat clerk explained what the problem was. The number was a collections agency. Apparently I had owed money to Earthlink (even though my records showed that I had been paying them regularly). Another side trip to the billing department at Earthlink who confirmed that I was paid up. A re-visit to Earthlink chat. Now, the clerk identified that there were *two* accounts, one of which was delinquent (I hadn't gotten any notices that I remembered). But he couldn't give me any more help unless I remembered the decade-old credit card. He was about to invoke a supervisor confirmation procedure that would take another day to verify my identity.

But then I had an epiphany. Amazon.com to the rescue!!! I realized that I'd been buying stuff from Amazon for a decade. I looked up the history of my Amazon account. Lo and behold, there were the 10 year old credit card numbers. At this point, Earthlink's computer system went down and I needed to call back 30 minutes later. Finally, they were able to look up my account, and sent me to the collections people with instructions to get a confirmation number once I had paid my bill.

By this time, the collections office was really closed (they hadn't picked up the phone earlier when they were supposedly open). I tried them in the morning, the first minute they opened, and someone answered the phone. They confirmed that my account was paid up. They couldn't give me a confirmation number, since I didn't owe any money. To get out of the catch 22, I offered to pay them just to get a confirmation number. The supervisor discovered a fee of $50 (real or fictional, I'm not sure), and I used this to ransom the confirmation number.

Then I called back Earthlink, gave them the number, and was ready to renew the domain. Ok, in order to renew your domain, you need to transfer the hosting to us, said the clerk. Oh, no I don't. It took a few steps of back and forth to cause them to renew my domain name without getting their hosting services which I very definitively did not want. I gave them a new credit card, and paid $30, which is $20 more than the going rate.

A couple of hours later, alevin.com was back in service. But that wasn't even the end. I got an email from them, saying that my credit card had been rejected. They hadn't used the new credit card number I gave them, but the 10 year old number that had been expired for years. I gave them the current credit card number, again.

I think I registered the domain with Mindspring, back in the day, when they were good. Earthlink bought mindspring and went through years of turmoil and decline. Now they have acheived a level of customer service that is dramatically awful.

In 30 days, I can transfer the domain to some other registrar and be rid of Earthlink forever.

Jeff Hawkins On Intelligence poses a speculative theory about how the neocortex works. Hawkins asserts that the distinctive aspect of human intelligence is that it allows us to make predictions. Based on a few strands of previous research, some insight, and aggressive reverse engineering, Hawkins proposes a neural architecture that enables humans to generalize patterns from raw sensation, allowing us to predict the next notes of a familiar song and to extend knowledge with analogies.

The hypothesis about how the neocortex works is interesting. The way that it proposes the generation of predictions by a combination of top-down and bottom up feedback is clever. The observation that sense-making requires a dimension of time -- not just music, but touch and sight -- is insightful. Unlike the evolutionary hypothesis of say, Terrence Deacon on the origins of symbolic thinking, Hawken's algorithm is testable. However, Hawkins' understanding of intelligence leaves out some crucial factors. Hawkins is interested in the mind as disconnected from emotions and desires. He believes that computers that have predictive intelligence without ambition, lust or greed will have the good of human intelligence, without the flaws introduced by the passions.

This dualistic vision ignores the insights of Antonio Damasio, a neurologist whose theory of intelligence embraces the emotions. Damasio observes patients with injuries to emotional processing, and finds that they lack the senses of fear and anticipation that enable people to make functional decisions. A lack of normal empathy prevents someone from getting along with other people. A computer that implemented predictive learning without emotions might be some combination of sociopathic and unwise. A computer that implemented learning without boredom and forgetting might not even be optimally effective at synthesis.

Hawkins focuses on the connections between neocortex and senses, but ignores the connections between neocortex and emotional parts of the brain. The neuroscience bits of Deacon's book explain how in humans, the connections between the limbic system and the neocortex became intertwined as humans evolved. There's a biological basis to Damasio's observation that emotions are part of intelligence.

Where Hawkins focuses on human intelligence as a superb prediction engine, Gary Marcus focuses on the flaws and glitches in human smarts in areas such as decision-making, language, pleasure-seeking, and mental illness. In Kluge, the Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Marcus counters against evolutionary and anti-evolutionary arguments that the human mind reflects the best of possible worlds. Instead, the mind is a hodgepodge awkwardly cobbled together.

We don't do a good job of making decisions about financial risk, or resisting temptation, because of our biological tendency to maximize short-term gain. Here, Markus shares a bias with Hawkins, that reason would result in better outcomes. But if you eliminated the motivations of hope, greed and fear, a rational being might not take the risks that drive good as well as bad aspects of human society.

Marcus points out the ambiguities in human language as a sign of the awkward results of evolution assembling a speech system from older parts. Here, what Marcus sees as a bug, Hawkins might see as a feature or at least a side effect. Ambiguity in language is a result of the generalizing, pattern-matching engine that drives human intelligence. The same design that makes it hard for us to remember details makes it possible for us to recognize and create new patterns.

Marcus' book is flawed because he compares workings of the human brain with a straw man that has perfect reason. The interesting thing is not how the human mind is perfect, or how it breaks, but why it works the way it does, and how the way things break shows the way things work most of the time.

This is the focus of Oliver Sachs' Musicophilia. Where Hawkins and Marcus are theorists, Sachs is an anecdotalist. He tells story after story of individuals who gained heightened musical abilities, or diminished musical abilities, due to changes in the brain. The stories themselves are fascinating but have little theory to explain why most humans are attracted to music, or to explain the aspects of the brain that govern parts of musical appreciation and skill.

Reading Musicophilia alongside Hawkins, it makes sense that music plays on the human mind's attraction to structure and mild surprise. The recent advances in therapies depending on neuroplasticitity are also nicely explained with a theory of how the neocortex is designed for continuous learning. The stories of how memory of musical performance and sequence is retained in patients who can't store new memories can be explained by a theory that old memories and learned processes are storied differently than new stuff.

Summary recommendations, for Peterme.

* I liked On Intelligence. Some reviewers give Hawkins grief because he brings very little evidence of the neurological or biohistorical basis of his speculations. He was frustrated by the lack of academic support for the kind of science he wanted to do as a younger man; and so he thumbs his nose at the establishment and its puny traditions of supporting arguments. Nevertheless, his argument is testable, so evidence will win in the end. The bigger weakness is his discounting of the role of emotion in intelligence.
* I didn't like Kluge. I thought it was much weaker than Marcus' earlier books, which had a stronger grounding in scientific detail, melding infant development, evolutionary developmental biology, and computer modeling. In his earlier books, Marcus built interesting arguments about brain development from rich evidence. This book has some interesting anecdotes, but is mostly a polemic against some common fallacies. The fact that the straw men are common doesn't make debunking them more interesting; the book reads like he is arguing against poorly educated undergrads.
* I liked Musicophilia, despite its limitations. The book consists of anecdote after anecdote, without much connecting theory; but the stories are interesting, and it's an entree onto some hopefully more robust studies on music, mind, and neuroplasticity.

In conventional wisdom, data sharing and privacy are seen as black and white opposites. Everything is locked down, private, non portable. Or everything is open, public, and free-flowing. But data sharing and privacy are not black and white. In real life, people share and present information based on social context. There are gradations of privacy and information sharing.

Here are some of the stories we came up with regarding gradations of privacy and sharing. The ideas came from the session, plus pre- and post-conversations with Joseph Smarr and Thomas Vander Wal

Truly Private information

There are times when it is right to share data in a way that preserves privacy. Family members use different photo services, and want to share photos with each other but not the rest of the world. A group working on mergers and acquisitions absolutely needs to keep information confidential. In these cases one give permission to family, friends, or business associates based on membership in a group.

Signal to noise, social context

There are many circumstances where information isn't truly private. But people choose to share with smaller groups. Someone doesn't want to bore all of their friends with information about knitting or rock climbing, when that information is relevant only to a few. Information about one's political or religious affiliation isn't a secret, but it may not be the information one chooses to share when meeting new people at a professional conference. In these cases, it would be useful to have the ability to create tags for the relevant groups, and share by tag. The tags can capture the nuances of subgroups: knitting hats vs. knitting sweaters, say.

Progressive disclosure

There are circumstances when people want to start by sharing with a smaller group, and invite more people. Or start by sharing a little bit of information about common interest, and later share more sensitive information.

Stream filter

The signal to noise and progressive disclosure patterns are about the person sharing information. Stream filtering is for the recipient. Sometimes one wants to "people watch" a diverse stream of information. And sometimes one wants to focus on the current work project, or upcoming social events. Stream filtering is used by individuals who want to apply a context to the information they receive.

Persona

People use identifiers -- dress or email address -- to represent more than one persona. The same person wears different clothes, with co-workers, at a customer meeting vs. a barbecue.

Personal vs. organizational control

In organizations, there are some things that an individual may want to control, and some things that admins want to control. A person might want to share soccer pictures with the soccer league. An admin may want to ensure that people aren't sharing the sports illustrated calendar widget.

Wiki notes on data sharing and privacy

Managing reputation

People share about their experiences in order to get their side of the story out and create a public image. Among digital natives, "it's not a real breakup until you've listed it on facebook.

Handling fame

Before the internet, there were only a small number of people who had more followers than people can comfortably manage socially. Now many more people do. More widespread fame means that more people have the issues with stalkers and pestering fans.

Cautionary and instructive tales

At the session at the data sharing summit, the conversation turned to cautionary tales about social data sharing gone wrong.

Failed white lies

Someone begs out of a work-related social event by claiming the flu. His boss discovers a picture on flickr of the guy wearing a skirt and holding a drink. The picture is timestamped at the same data as the work party. His boss sends him a note suggesting that that may not be an effective way to recover from the flu. The lesson here is that some things that feel private are more public than we think.

Social network molting

It is socially awkward to unfriend people. Some people get around obsolete lists of friends by "forgetting" their password and needing to invite their current lists of friends with a new password. The lesson is that declared, public friends lists are in

The ex-girlfriend effect

The list of "people you should know" in social network recommendations often includes exes and enemies. These are people who are part of your social graph - but you are not connected to directly. In an organization, similar algorithms might locate internally competing projects. The algorithm doesn't know that some gaps in the social graph are deliberate.

Laura Hale of the Fan History Wiki talked about how, since 2005, big media companies have stopped harrassing independent fan groups with takedown notices and other threats. Instead, they have set up their own commercial fan hosting sites, and use those as a way to promote their brand's content. Independent communities still exist. The big media companies can dismiss them as "unauthorized". The indies think of themselves as un-coopted. The main story is, the business model has changed, and the media companies think of communities as ways to make money, and not worth legal prosecution.

Ehud Lamm, a researcher in the philosophy of science, shared that the NIH, after years of debate, had mandated that researchers taking NIH money must make their papers available to the public. This decision was ratified into law in December of last year. Since the NIH is a major funder of biomedical research, this will have a transformative affect.

When the internet reached the mainstream, models based on open access to content and active user communities became more powerful than models based on limited access to physical artifacts. It's taken a decade for institutions and business models to adapt. But the times are changing, and the participants in wiki communities are seeing up close the results of the change.

On a somewhat related note, I was glad to see that DIY food had started to colonize maker faire. As I munched on jessie cool's asparagus, I listened to a talk on beekeeping and the environmental risks to bees, and admired the locavore cookbooks and composting worm bins which are ahead of my EQ at the moment.

McCormick lives and works in Marin. I hope the work that he does sets precedents, instead of creating a Disney-demo natural world in .000x of our landscape while big agriculture and poverty erode the rest. There has been really fascinating and inspiring progress in river restoration in recent years, but for each restored stream in Marin and NAPA, there are new CAFO lagoons wrecking more watersheds.

I also hope that the locavore movement sets precedents. The Chron had an excellent article about the rise and very minor successes of real food in the farm bill debate over the last year. On the plus side, it's on the map, compared to a decade ago when it was fringe. Realignments at the congressional level take more than one cycle to build.

I enjoyed the Engineers Without Borders and the Appropriate Technology group (I think i've got the right link for them). These groups are using engineering engenuity to help people get clean water, food, electricity.

My favorite Maker Faire writeup is Liz Henry's resolution to create disability access hacks project. Hopefully will get to see that next year!

Thanks to all of you who helped spread the word and contact assembly members. Your work helped kill this bad bill.

If you live in California, now is the time to contact your rep, and the members of the committee.
Find your assembly person
Committee on Governmental Organization
Committee on Local Government

Tell them your name, and that you oppose AB1978 -- it's important to mention the bill number. And give a few reasons you oppose the bill. Please be polite and concise -- staffers talk to many constituents about many different issues.

Here are some facts you can use to explain why public GIS data is good, and the bill is bad.

In the age of the internet, having public access to government data is important for democracy, and provides new opportunities for citizen engagement. Citizens are using public map data for a wide variety of beneficial purposes. Just a handful of examples out of many:

• The Oakland police department makes its crime data available so that citizens can see what's happening in their neighborhoods and help solve crimes
• A group in New Orleans is using public data to publish information about planned demolitions to provide residents the opportunity to speak up regarding the fate of their homes.
• San Francisco publishes excavation information. An online service mashes this up with public mapping to show where and why streets are being torn up

What's the motivation behind this bad bill? Solorio filed the bill on behalf of Orange County which tries to make money selling GIS data.

However, according to a USGS-funded study of GIS professionals, representing city, county, metropolitan, and regional governments, "most government agencies that sell public data have not realized significant revenues; in many cases, they have actually lost revenues." A study by KPMG Consulting, Inc in March, 2001, reported that "US agencies reporting
data income had revenues equal to 2% of their expenses." The study describes a 10 different economic models that can be more effective than selling data.

In summary: making the data available to the public is good public policy, and closing the data to the public does not provide meaningful financial benefit to the government.

If you speak up, we can help kill this bad bill.

Government GIS data is a valuable source of information for planning, environmental action, and many other areas of public interest. Closing this down is a step entirely in the wrong direction. The availability of public data in the internet age is creating amazing new opportunities for public participation. We need to be making more data accessible, not less.

If you live in California, call your member of the state Assembly. If you happen to live or work in Mountain View, you can be especially helpful. Your rep, Sally Lieber is on the Local Gov't Committee where this bill is being reviewed.

For more information, see this blog post from the California First Amendment Coalition

In my opinion, perceptions are lagging reality. In the latest 2006 large-scale internet study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 73% of US adults had internet access. The percent in the San Francisco Bay area was 83% back in 2003.

A decade ago, there were serious accessibility concerns. Today, internet access is mainstream. Physical attendance to a meeting poses greater accessibility barriers than online participation. Meetings in a building pose problems with people who have mobility impairments and sensory impairments, as well as people who have needs for child care or elder care.

Internet meetings surely need to be as broadly noticed as meetings in a physical building, and it would be important to accommodate people who have shared internet access for example at the library. Taking those considerations into account, I see internet forums as a way of broadening access, not limiting access.

I see local governments in this area doing a lot to try and stimulate civic participation. Local governments are also open to innovation in other areas such as green policy. So I would hope that some local governments would want to take the lead.

There were two parts to the presentation. The first showed three different development scenario - minimal change, moderate change, and maximum change.

The "change" in the pictures, though, was new development and density. The first scenario showed a handful of new buildings, the second a few more, and the third showed more new, taller, bigger buildings, with a bunch of new parking lots too. There was nothing about the character and purpose of the buildings, the design of the buildings, and the way people at ground level will get around among the buildings.

And there was no supporting information to help people make these choices.There was no additional information about the impact on the number of residents, number of workers, how people would be travelling and getting around, impact on tax revenues, impact on schools.

The second part showed different plans for increasing sidewalk width, in three segments of El Camino. Should sidewalks be widened by taking space out of the building lot or the street?

What are the underlying assumptions in this presentation?

There are a bunch of empty and underutilized lots, and the open question is how much community approval there will be to build big buildings on them -- not what sorts of buildings, and the character of community created by the buildings.

People want sidewalks. But sidewalks alone don't make a neighborhood walkable! For a walkable neighborhood, you need a bunch of destinations that are close enough that people care to walk from place to place. And you need people who live and work close enough to walk, or to have a destination that is compelling enough that people will drive there and get out of their cars and walk around.

Community input is not being framed to solicit a vision for the city. Instead it is being framed to get citizen input on implementation details.

And even this input is missing a few important things. There was a Stanford representative on the panel. He said, "some of the lots are going to be occupied soon." He didn't say by whom and for what purpose. Ok, thanks.

What's missing from this picture? The kinds of input we citizens can have on the process, other than being "pro-development" or "anti-development."

Fortunately, several people on the panel raised the concern that the things that citizens we being asked to weigh in on were at the wrong level level of detail, and missing key information that will help people formulate opinion. I don't know whether the consulting firm got the point, or if they did, have time to make the changes that would spark a more meangingful public conversation.

There were also some interesting clues about the points of view in the community. One man on the panel scoffed at the idea to add more sidewalks, since El Camino is noisy and nobody wants to walk anyway. A man in the audience talked about improving nightlife in Menlo Park, and creating more of a village.

There are at least three contrasting visions for Menlo Park:
* maximal suburbia. Minimal new development, maximal new parking lots, and expand the roads for faster traffic. Pay homage to the needs of pedestrians by adding flyover bridges and walkways, but don't make anything anybody would walk to
* urban village. Add mixed use, transit oriented development that draws people to live, work, and play, and walk or bike when moving around town. Be a place that people want to come to.
* whatever developers can get away with. Build buildings, as big as possible, wherever they will fit, however you can get approval for them.

It would be interesting to have this conversation, but it's pretty well hidden in the cross-section diagrams of sidewalks.

The plot thickens. I asked informally, through city council folk in two Bay Area cities, and got conflicting responses from city attorneys. One says it's illegal. Another says it's permitted but recommends that officials use the tools cautiously. And neither has provided citations in case law or administrative ruling.

Point to point email is explicitly prohibited under California's Brown Act, which requires conversation among a quorum of public officials to occur only in public meetings. But web forums are different -- unlike an email, which is visible only to the sender and recipients, tools like blogs, forums and wikis are visible to the public.

Teleconferences are permitted under the Bagley Keene act. What about web conference and chat, which are like teleconferences without a phone number, and with or without voice?

In search of some more solid legal grounding, I sent a question to these California open government watchdogs. If I don't hear from them directly, I'll network in.

The new tools are great ways to broaden public discourse. If they're not legal, they should be. The first step is to find out where the law stands.

I discovered another opportunity for fixing, listening to Jon Udell's interview of Carl Malamud on IT Conversations. Malamud's activism was behind the publication of Edgar, and many other initiatives to make public data publicly available. In the interview, he mentioned that Congressional Committee meetings are webcast but not recorded and archived. Well, that's wrong. Sounds like a lovely opportunity for some blog activism, sometime after election season.

The talk was also missing a few things, I think. His psychological model was individualistic. It was all about the individual player, and didn't talk about the social factors - decoration, storytelling, came creation. And his social model was purely competitive. "Of course,", he says, "people are playing the game to win. " But people play games with a variety of motivations, and social software includes ways to play individually and collaboratively, in addition to competitively.

This topic is really interesting and needs some more fleshing out.