Earlier, we talked about how programmers weren’t perhaps what you expect. Code isn’t either. Programmers used to program using series of 1’s and 0’s punched into cards (crikey!) but that’s not the case any more.
Program code has got more and more high level, and some languages are actually quite readable by humans! Some programming can even be done using drag and drop.
Programming is really just a way of thinking. More and more people are becoming programmers, some of them without realizing that’s what they’re doing.
You can learn to program using The Sims – isn’t that awesome? It’s a great initiative called Alice.
Warcraft World Editor
Image used with permission of Kelvin Schutz
More and more video games come with programming capabilities, Warcraft is another example.
There are also programs such as Game Maker or Fusion that allow you to create video games without writing any code – you just have to learn to think logically!
Fractal – created using Processing
This is relatively simple to create, and doesn’t require much code. It’s recursive, which means we split it into the same problem again and again and again – until we reach something really small and easily solved – in this case by drawing and filling in a square.
Here's the code!
That’s pretty short, hey?
Conversation Graph
This is something I’m working on currently, what I try to do is take some of the huge volume of information we’re presented with every day and make it into something that’s both pretty and useful. For instance, this shows the size and interactions in my Twitter network.
Clique Graph
We can also write programs to extract important information from the noise. Here, this graph picks out my core, central network.
The “hard” part of the code is just 6 lines!
Imagine how difficult it would be to create these things by hand!
Technology has changed our lives considerably relatively recently – we have new and impressive “hardware” and creative and innovating programming. This is just the begining – there’s much more to come.
Technologists – hardware designers, programmers – are at the center of what we will achieve next.
(Don’t you want to be part of that?)
Final Thoughts
Look around – changes are happening rapidly – in 15 years, you could be talking about what’s happened in your lifetime.
Be inspired! Human innovation is INCREDIBLE!
Push boundaries! Be limited only by your imagination.
This video shows the evolution of special effects in cinematography. Because the movie studios are often at the edge of computer graphics work, it illustrates the evolution of 100 years of technology.
Through human history, there have been various inventions and discoveries that have fundamentally changed things.
The first was probably fire – it’s suggested that the reason for the sudden growth in the size of the human brain was a result of early humans cooking meat.
Another was the printing press, which allowed for the easier sharing and distribution of information. Before the printing press, everything was hand-written – very time consuming. The church got very angry about this development, and tried to fight against it but ultimately they couldn’t stop the advance of technology. To show how utterly futile this attempt was, consider that in order to get enough copies of their reasons why the printing press was such a terrible thing, they had to use the printing press – because scribes couldn’t copy fast enough. We see similar reactions today from some industries and some religious organizations when it comes to the internet.
The combustion engine brought about great changes in production and human mobility. It’s made it possible to flit between continents, the way we take for granted today.
Model of the Internet
Taken by me at the Museum of Science and Technology, Tokyo, Japan
The internet is another such invention, and we’re just at the beginning of the changes that will ensue.
Timeline for the Evolution of the Internet
We can see here that the internet was created about 40 years ago, and email shortly after. The internet as we know it really starts with the invention of the “World Wide Web” over 20 years later, though. The internet is the infrastructure, and the web is the software that runs on top of it. Many people don’t understand the difference, but without the web the services like YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter would not be possible. Now, we’re at the start of the mobile web – by 2020 it’s predicted that more mobile devices will be accessing the internet than computers.
My childhood would probably be unrecognizable to children of today – No cellphones! No iPod! No DVDs! (instead there was VHS) No YouTube! No Facebook! No Twitter! My family didn’t have a computer until I was about 12 and it was very slow, and at first it didn’t have internet.
For previous generations, the differences weren’t this huge – they were, as I understand it, mostly differences in TV programs. However with things moving so fast, this has not been the case lately.
The giant brick cellphone on the left? My dad had one of those when I was little! I remember the first iPod, “Dial up” internet, floppy disks, my first CD and DVD and (vaguely!) what using the internet was like before Google.
In Canada, about 75 people out of every 100 use the internet. In the US, 74 people out of every 100 do. In China, which is a developing country, just 27 people out of every 100 use the internet. Number like this are why I can say with confidence that the changes we see as a result of the internet and other advances in technology are just beginning. When the whole world is online, the world will be very different than it is now.
Global Internet Use
China is still ahead of the worldwide average, which is just 25.5 people out of every 100. We have a long way to go before the whole world is connected, but I think we’ll get there.
One of the huge changes that programmers have brought about, through the creation of software, is the possibility for everyone to create content. This is so new, because if you think about it – before we used to distribute everything in books and newspapers etc, which have much higher costs of distribution. This development is something that impacts many people every single day.
The content users could create used to look a little… plain and dull and required some know-how.
Now, very little knowledge (if any) is required and designers can create beautiful looking web pages, that showcase their artistic sensibilities as well as their content.
In fact, the creators of I Want You To Want me used blog content to make another installation – this one online – called “We Feel Fine”.
So there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to change, and one of those things we can say with a good degree of certainty, is that newspapers are going to die out. Some of the brands will remain, but we’ll access them in a different way than on giant pieces of paper.
Some people are getting very angry about this, but it’s pointless to cling onto a dying business model. Innovative companies will survive. Those who waste time complaining probably won’t.
But innovation doesn’t just mean the destruction of old things, there will also be new things that are created. Tactile computing, like tablets and tables will become mainstream. Communications will evolve through services like Google Wave. And eventually we’ll have house cleaning robots! (Sooner the better!)
We Tell Stories is a project that uses the web rather than the traditional medium of a book. This enables another dimension to the story, one of the stories is interactive (your choices change the story), whereas another is recounted through Google Maps.
PostSecret is a community art project, where people write secrets on postcards, and send them in. They’re collated by a man, Frank Warren, who collates them into a series of books and speaks at universities all over the US. Every Sunday, he publishes a blogpost called “Sunday Secrets”. This combines the traditional medium (post and books), and a new medium (blogs).
I Want You To Want me visualizes data from dating sites, it, “explores the search for love but also the search for self in the world of online dating”.
See the video below.
I really love this project, it’s a great source of inspiration to me in my work and I think illustrates beautifully the intersection of programming and art.
This is where I introduce myself. Graduate student, computer science. Originally from Europe. Bachelors degree from the University of Edinburgh. Working on Twitter, data-mining, and visualization. 24, so not actually that old, and what I’m going to be talking about are for the most part developments that have happened in my lifetime. I really want to give a sense of how fast technology is evolving, and how exciting it is to be a part of that.
Overview
My talk has three themes. The first is art – and the way technology enables different ways of creation and distribution. The second is life – the way technology has changed our lives unrecognizably in the very recent history. The final theme is programming, and this links the first two together because I think programming is central to the changes we’re experiencing. Programmers can be artists, and artists can be programmers. Programmers create tools that enter into our lexicon and soon we can’t imagine living without. Whilst computers and technology are a part of everything I’ll talk about, what’s more interesting is the human capacity for innovation and our reaction to change.
Change the World
Picture taken by my at the Museum of Science and Technology in Tokyo, Japan
Do you want to change the world? There are many ways you could potentially do that, over the course of my lifetime humanity will likely face many problems with the environment and global warming. Some countries and states may end up underwater, whereas others may have potentially catastrophic shortages of drinking water. We face many issues of global health, such as AIDS and Cancer. The obesity problem in the US is a potential time-bomb, as are the aging populations in the west.
I think that technology will be key to solving the great problems that humanity is facing. I think programmers will be a central part of the solution. So if you want to change the world, programming is potentially a great choice for you.
However, every day peoples lives are made easier, and more productive, through the use of applications that make our lives easier by enabling us to be better organized, or automating boring tasks. Every day, we use things that renders our lives different because someone, or a group of someones, wrote some code to make that happen. Even if we don’t aspire to change the world on a macro scale, we can make change on the micro scale.
Of course, sometimes programmers write horribly unusable applications and make change for the worse. So we should be aware of that too.
What do programmers look like? They have poor hygiene and too much facial hair, and prone to living in basements? There’s a stereotype about programmers, and yes some are like that, but it’s definitely not true of me and, trust me, these attributes are not a requirement for a successful programmer.
Do you like math? Do you like solving problems? Do you like being creative and making stuff that’s visually appealing?
These are things that programmers do. No darkened basement required.
This woman doesn’t look at all like the stereotype we were talking about before, and she was the first ever programmer! Her name was Ada Lovelace, and she was British, and lived between 1815 and 1852. She wrote the first ever program, for a computer (designed by Charles Babbage) that did not yet exist.
Bill Gates was a programmer with a mission – a computer in every home. In the West, he’s very nearly achieved that – an amazing contribution to humanity.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google with a goal – to organize the world’s information. Google has been around for a little over 10 years, and has succeeded in organizing the web – but that is just the beginning. It’s difficult to imagine the web pre-Google. I remember it being a lot harder to find things.
Even if you don’t use Facebook, can you imagine keeping in touch with your friends in other way than digitally? Waiting weeks for letters to cross continents?
Services like Facebook have made “ambient awareness” a normal part of life. They’ve revolutionized the way we keep in touch. It’s actually quite incredible.
Programming Skills are Like a Toolbox
Programming skills are another tool that we can use to build things, bridge gaps. Programming is also another medium for expression.
On Monday, I’m giving my “Art, Life and Programming” presentation. I’m a little burnt out after a crazy semester and frankly terrified, because I’m presenting in French.
So since I got back to Canada, I’ve been working on revising my slides and thinking about what I’m going to talk about. It’s turned out, that there’s a lot more work to do on them than I thought. So I’ve been getting panicky and stressed, which makes me less inspired, so it all seems harder than it should.
This morning, though, something clicked. 1. I have a hard time believing that I have something of value to say to that number of people, and 2. the university promotion of my talk has several errors in it (this was a little upsetting – I would have been happy to correct it, had it been sent to me). However, let’s combine these things – clearly, what I’m talking about is not obvious. Not everyone knows about it. So hopefully there will be something of value that I share with all these people.
And, if I’m not happy with my slides (which I spent a lot of time on back in August or December), that just goes to show that my presentation skills have improved.
If I’m not happy with my content, if I feel like there are things missing – that just shows how much more I know now than I did 3 months ago.
At the highest level, my talk is about how technology has changed the world, and how it will continue to. At the highest level, what’s my goal? To inspire people with and about technology, to make it seem accessible as a career, a choice for university.
On Monday, I’m going to be terrified. No point denying that as if you see me you will almost certainly know. But also on Monday I’m going to be doing my tiny bit to make a difference. I’m going to be jumping up and down and hard and as high as I can, because we need to make a tidal wave to make a change.
We can recycle all our plastic bottles. And we can cut down on international flights. We can walk to the corner store instead of drive, but our world has more problems than global warming. We can shop sustainably, we can encourage development through services like Kiva, but globally, there are many problems other than poverty. Governments can borrow money and spend it on services to create jobs, but how well that works is variable.
Here’s what I believe – technology will help us save the planet – it will provide viable alternatives to flying, and smart solutions to reduce our global footprint. Technology will make the world smaller and provide more options to people in developing countries, lifting them out of poverty. It will make it easier to force corrupt governments to be accountable, and provide means for citizens under oppressive regimes to communicate with the outside world. Innovation, not just in the financial sector, will be how the west recovers from this latest collapse.
This, I think, is bigger than my fear. So that’s what I’m going to focus on. Because I think in order to make this reality, we need nations of technologists and innovators, not bankers and traffic wardens. What better way to start than with a big group of 7-10 year olds and their families?
Abstract for a talk I’m giving tomorrow some time between 1300h and 1500h at the University of Ottawa. Let me know if you want to attend (slides will be up later).
Follower / Following networks are essentially meaningless on Twitter due to the prevalence of spam. However by creating the graphs of conversation networks it is possible to create a better picture of more meaningful connections – the other users that interact / are interacted with by a given user. For power users, however, these graphs can be extremely busy, making it difficult to pick out the most important conversations and connections.
One potential way to summarize the most important connections in a network is to pull out cliques – completely connected sub-graphs. These cliques may represent part of a users core network, or a suggestion of new users to interact with by generating those cliques that a user is connected to. For example, user A might be in a clique with users B, C, D and users B, C, D may be in a clique with a 5th user, E. This suggests that user A might well be interested to interact with user E, as well. This may also help us determine tie strength as well, as a clique is likely an indication of a stronger tie strength than just a singly connected node.
I see this problem continually in the first years I TA – they’re so overwhelmed by syntax they don’t know how to start to write the program. VB (in Excel) is especially mean about this, as if a line of code won’t compile it won’t let you go to the next one.
So, having given the same explanation 10+ times I’ve made it into a presentation – I hope if you’re a beginner programmer you’ll find it useful. Let me know what you think!
Ignite is a tough format – 5 minutes, 20 slides, and the slides advance every 15 seconds. As such, the talks aren’t so much informative as inspiring and I really enjoyed the evening. First such event in Ottawa, but hopefully there will be more to come.
You can see the full line up here, however sadly some people couldn’t make it and so the line up was as follows:
This is actually something I’ve been thinking about lately and had actually sat down with my boyfriend, given him my passwords and told him that if anything happened to me I’d want him to let people know. I will probably blog about this properly soon. What I hadn’t thought about, and what this talk brought into focus for me is OK, so I die, my boyfriend lets people know – then what? Do I want my Facebook profile to be a memorial? What do I want to happen to my Twitter account, my blog, LinkedIn etc. I still haven’t come up with any answers to that.
Adele talked about Mac Tonnies who died recently. He had not planned his digital afterlife, as a result the problem of what to do with his archives is ongoing. His family apparently do not own a computer, and did not realize that he’d not just left a website, he’d left a tangible community and online ecosystem – an Amazon affiliate account where money is paid in, and also services that cost, such as hosting.
Before this talk I realized that we had to think about our digital afterlife. Now, I’m starting to realize how much thought needs to go into it. I have more thinking to do.
Shakespeare and Oral Culture
Apparently Shakespeare couldn’t spell. I always thought that was just how people wrote at the time – but apparently it was more than that! Interesting talk and perspective about how rules restrict creativity. Mashups have no rules, and that’s partly why they’re so exciting.
Coworking
Fantastic quote from this – “The harder I work, the luckier I get” (originally by Samuel Goldwyn). This was a talk on entrepreneurship. He stressed the importance of small victories – celebrate them. Think you can change the world, because the people who do change the world are the people who think they can. Love what you do. Being an entrepreneur means you can choose who you work with.
Summary: Work hard, have fun, surround yourself with great people and eventually you will succeed.
Online Community
Susan talked a lot about “Superstars”. In the case of her work in a production company, these were the people in the trenches, people with full time jobs spending 18 hours a day working on productions. Everyone working there was a superstar – they finished each others sentances and raised each other up. Acheived the near impossible on a regular basis.
She started OttawaTonight.com (URL not currently working for me). after noticing the lack of good arts and entertainment information in Ottawa when out with a friend. She thinks that building stronger communities means building the 3 elements of a community, which are: soul (passionate to come together and create), everyone needs to be a superstar, space to come together and share. Concludes – we spend so much time thinking about technology and tools, but it’s not what’s important.
You Inc.: We’re all freelancers now
Scott starts by urging us all to quit our jobs, today (even if we don’t tell our bosses). We used to trade our skills and time as an employee so the company would make a profit in return for security, however that security doesn’t exist any more. Hence – we are all freelancers now! In the new reality, we won’t get to retire at 65, and thus rather than trying to earn more money we should instead look at our career as a journey.In Canada, the opportunity to have your own business is better than ever before.
Focus on skill growth – broad, not deep as this means more industries open to you when you change jobs. Connect with people – social networking enables connections. Your social reputation is increasingly important. Because of connectivity, it’s possible to make a living in a niche market. Authenticity trumps brand. Don’t worry about what you put online, just get online and do something. Do something that’s big and important to you.
In sum:
Dream big.
Quit job.
Build skills.
Build network.
Recommends Network Hippo as a tool to help manage your personal network.
Public Service Renewal in 5 Minutes
Great quote (threat?) from this guy – “or I’ll retire on the job and collect my pay for the next 26 years“. Trying to encourage us to put pressure on the government to change, because it moves so slowly. Talks about how difficult his first year working for the government was, how he was in denial about being in the public service. However, through blogging and finding his personal voice (buried under bureaucratic bullshit) he was able to connect with “fallen comrades” and started to build respect – which he used to try and tear down walls. Finally he started to connect with the job, and now he’s excited to go to work every day. He uses social media technologies to try and make the government more effective but it’s a drop in the bucket. What we can achieve collectively is far greater than what we can do on our own, we need to try and envision new ways to do stuff.
The goal of his talk was to be a call to action – a demand that we step up our civic participation and get our hands dirty. If you work in the government, be willing to think and act in color in a system that’s black and white. If you’re not in the government, you need to help to change the game – more pressure from the public is needed in order for the government to become more open and transparent – come up with ideas! Public servants need to be more engaged, and make change faster.
Improv and Everyday Life
Improv is increasingly popular – businesses want it, although they’re not sure why. Thinking on your feet, being able to work off the cuff and have intelligent things to say is helpful, great skill for job interviews – as such, Al owes every job he ever had to improv, especially those that weren’t improv related.
Another word is “Yes” – positivity. Things happen when you say yes. If you say no, nothing goes everywhere. He thinks we’re at the start of a trend towards positivity, which will carry us through the next decade. It’s important to say yes because it makes stuff happen. Pessimists make great stand-up comics – but lousy improvs. Accept the challenge, move forward and defeat it. Yes it involves risks, but risks motivate. There’s the potential for failure, but celebrate your failures – if you’re celebrating, the audience is laughing with you. The wost thing to be on stage is boring.
Concludes: MacGyver was an improv – didn’t worry about what he was going to do, just went for it and it was great. Make more improv in your every day life
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