NiN's Rob Sheridan on iPhone Application Rejection

In this interview with Rob Sheridan (@rob_sheridan), Nine Inch Nails' Artistic Director, Rob discusses the experience of getting the rejection letter from Apple, and what effect it has on the band's plans to build community applications on the iPhone platform. You'll hear Sheridan express an uneasiness that Apple can act as judge and jury without providing any transparency into the approval process. Rob spoke with me from Florida where Nine Inch Nails is getting ready for a tour with Jane's Addiction that kicks off on May 9th in Tampa, FL.

What is a headlining, often controversial industrial rock band to do when nameless censors at Apple decide that content downloaded by an iPhone application contains "objectionable content"? Yesterday, the world found out, as Trent Reznor (@trent_reznor) tweeted:

When a band like NiN encounters arbitrary censorship, they raise the issue in the public forum. In this case Trent Reznor tweeted and blogged about the issue expressing his dissatisfaction with the decision and drawing attention to the fact that the "objectionable content" in question is a song named "The Downward Spiral" currently available via the iTunes store. While comparing Apple's obscenity standards to Walmart's war against profanity, Reznor pointed to similar inconsistencies in a previous round of censorship:

I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any 'indecent' material for sale--but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film 'Scarface' completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes. How does that make sense?

While Apple's rejection of an application based on arbitrary and inconsistent standards, is nothing new, the attention being paid to this particular rejection is significant and could prompt Apple to add more structure and transparency to the iPhone application approval process. On Monday, Aidan Malley of AppleInsider reported that Apple may be prepared to allow explicit content with the introduction of more capable parental controls in the iPhone 3.0 OS update.

If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, here is a walkthrough of the NIN:access application from Trent Reznor and Rob Sheridan which was posted by the ninofficial YouTube user:

Four short links: 5 May 2009

Spies, Community, International Success, and DNA Origami

1. Supermap -- The CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is paying an undisclosed sum to California-based Geosemble Technologies to develop an intelligence version of the "geospatial data integration and layering technology" that the company developed for use by urban planners, real estate investors and market analysts. The technology combines overhead imagery, maps and heavy-duty data mining to create a map-based intelligence capability reminiscent of the Pentagon's former Total Information Awareness program. When the project is done - and In-Q-Tel won't say how soon that might be - CIA agents will be able to merge aerial images and electronic maps on a computer screen. Then they will be able to click on the building or other item of interest and all manner of information will pop up: who the tenants are, phone numbers, company records, links to company and organization Web sites, news reports related to the tenants or incidents at the address, property records, tax data and more. I love that Cheap Suit Susan, your local real estate agent, had the technology before the CIA. It's like learning that Lionel Hutz has a missile defense system to stop his house being TPed.
2. 7 Harsh Truths About Running Communities -- As the leader of your community, your personality sets the tone. As a result if the community behaves in ways you do not want, then you only have yourself to blame. I have seen many bloggers write about the negative comments they get on their posts. In most cases this is due to the tone they themselves strike in their writing. Although there are exceptions I believe that users will respond in the same voice you yourself set. If you are irreverent, then so will your users be. If you are rude, expect rude responses. "Social software" is an anachronism-software that doesn't let users interact has become antisocial software. Every web creator needs to know what successful communities have in common. (via Julie Starr)
3. Lingopal is Big in Japan (Lance Wiggs) -- Turns out we are biggest in Japan. We have done no marketing there - it is all organic growth as our google ad writing and PR ability is not so good in Japanese. More anecdata for my belief that, while chance favours the prepared mind (as Louis Pasteur said), we routinely use post-hoc rationalisation to explain why it was inevitable that this or that lucky SOB hit it big.
4. DNA Origami Seeds: Bottom-Up Methods for Molecular Self-Assembly (US News) -- Winfree's coworker at Caltech, Paul W. K. Rothemund, pioneered the seed-DNA technology that allows tiny "DNA origami" structures to self-assemble into nearly arbitrary shapes (such as a smiley face and a map of the Western Hemisphere). The researchers designed several different versions of a DNA origami rectangle, 95 by 75 nanometers, which served as the seeds for the growth of different types of ribbon-like DNA crystals. The seeds were combined in a test tube with other bits of DNA, called "tiles," heated, and then cooled slowly. At the lower temperature, the tiles start to stick to each other and to the origami. In this way, the DNA ribbons self-assemble, but only into forms such as ribbons with particular widths and ribbons with stripe patterns prescribed by the original seed.

Swine Flu Tracker

Rhiza Labs has launched Flu Tracker to enable people to clearly track the progress of H1N1 Swine Flu. On the site you can see news stories about the flu and maps based on the data of Henry L Niman. The maps show the number of Suspected, Confirmed and Fatal Cases by country:

They also show the data by state with the ability to drilldown to a city, like this map of the Seattle area shows:

You can interact with this map or add other data on their site. The data is available for download as RSS, KML, and other formats.

These maps are just snapshots of the current state. You'll have to watch them over the next couple of days to get your own feel for how fast the Swine Flu is spreading.

Four short links: 4 May 2009

Maps, Africa, Protein, and Rockets

1. Old Japanese Maps on Google Earth Unveil Secrets -- Google criticised for putting up map layers showing the towns where a discriminated-against class came from, because that class is still discriminated against and Google didn't put any "cultural context" around it. Google and their maps didn't make the underclass, Japanese society did. Because they're sensitive about having the problem, they redirect their embarrassment into anger at Google. You could make a long and profitable career in IT consulting simply by charging to say "it's not a technical problem" and you'd be right more times than wrong.
2. See Africa Differently -- using the Internet to reframe a continent. Videos, essays, and more, all designed to get you seeing the majority of Africa, which isn't defined by conflict and famine. (via NY Times book review)
3. Fold.it - Solve Puzzles for Science -- science harnesses our "cognitive surplus" by inviting us to help solve the problem of protein folding, one of the hardest in biology. (via auckland_museum on Twitter)
4. Arduino Telemetry Payload in Class C Rocket (Jon Oxer) -- Because class-C rockets are so small and light they can't lift much of a payload and I had to keep the mass of the electronics as small as possible. You can get a sense of scale from this photo which shows a small white bundle in the bottom of the nosecone. Inside that bundle is an Arduino Pro Mini 5V/16Mhz, a 433Mhz transmitter module, and a Lilypad 3-axis accelerometer. PCBs ... in ... Spaaaaace!

Big Data: SSD's, R, and Linked Data Streams

The Solid State Storage Revolution: If you haven't seen it, I recommend you watch Andy Bechtolsheim's keynote at the recent Mysqlconf. We covered SSD's in our just published report on Big Data management technologies. Since then, we've gotten additional signals from our network of alpha geeks and our interest in them remains high.

R and Linked Data Streams: I had a chance to visit with Dataspora founder and blogger Mike Driscoll, an enthusiastic advocate for the use of the open source statistical computing language, R. After founding and leading online retailer CustomInk.com, Mike went back to grad school and earned a doctorate in Bioinformatics. He has applied data analysis and programming in a variety of domains including retail, biotech, academia, and government projects.

Having been an avid user of S/S-Plus in the 1990's, I seamlessly switched over to R in the early 2000's. To this day, I consider the S/S-Plus user manuals to be the best reference and introductory books on the R programming language. (Mike wholeheartedly agrees.) R has been popular in the statistics community for many years, but I've been noticing that its visualization and analytic capabilities are attracting interest from developers. Moreover, recent efforts by the R community to improve its ability to scale large data sets (see brief update from Jay Emerson), will strengthen R's place in the Big Data stack.

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Four short links: 1 May 2009

Smart Grids, Open Source, Stuff That Matters, and Global Culture

1. A Little Give and Take On Electricity (NY Times) -- Dennis L. Arfmann, a lawyer at the Boulder office of Hogan & Hartson who specializes in environmental law, said he had no idea how much electricity he and his wife, Dr. Julie Brown, had used before he filled his roof with solar panels producing 4.5 kilowatts of power. During the day he sells power to Xcel and at night he buys it back; his goal is to cut his use so his net sales rise. All hardware networked, everywhere!
2. Open Source World Map (Red Hat) -- very nice map showing the intensity of open source use in countries around the world. (via Flowing Data)
3. Imagine Cup -- Microsoft's contest to get students working on stuff that matters. The winners of the New Zealand leg, Team Think, tackled literacy: they devised a program for tablets that provides both handwriting recognition and audio output, eliminating the need for basic literacy to understand lessons or instructions. They hope to take this prototype to developing countries that have underutilised computers due to literacy issues. (via Idealog newsletter and Scoop)
4. UGT -- It is always morning when person comes into a channel, and it is always late night when person leaves. [...] The idea behind establishing this convention was to eliminate noise generated almost every time someone comes in and greets using some form of day-time based greeting, and then channel members on the other side of the globe start pointing out that it's different time of the day for them. Now, instead of spending time figuring out what time of day is it for every member of the channel, we spend time explaining newcomers benefits of UGT. (via migurski on delicious).

The iTunes App Store and One-hit Wonders

Thousands of sellers created the 40,000 apps that have appeared in the U.S. iTunes app store. Measured in terms of apps per seller, developer and vendor engagement has gotten stronger over time:

The above average (mean) is somewhat misleading: 52% of sellers have produced just one app, and 80% have released 3 or fewer. Certain types of apps (e.g. electronic books) are easier to create, thus inflating the overall average app per seller. The disparity in complexity across categories is captured in the chart below. Aside from Books, Travel and Education apps also tend to be easy to develop and launch. (Note: Some apps are listed in more than one category.) The number of apps per seller also depends on whether one is interested in Paid or Free apps.

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Jack Dangermond Interview 3 of 3: The Geoweb

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history of GIS and online mapping.

Jack will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 20th in San Jose. You can use whr09rdr for 20% off at registration.

Brady Forrest: What do you think will be coming in the next couple of years that will make the geoweb a reality?

Jack Dangermond: I think the geoweb is a reality. It's just a matter of how you define it I guess. There's just millions of pieces of content now available on the web for either FTP download and use in GIS or other analytic tools or as services that people are accessing by way of open systems. So I'd say maybe more analytic services that are available on the web or developers who take the foundations of technology as they exist today and build applications to them. But there's got to be motivation. There has to be a commercial incentive for people like young developers to build applications on the web with web services. And maybe there has to be a marketplace created. I'm speculating here. I don't have a clear answer for you on that.

Brady Forrest: You guys did have a marketplace for a little while, did you not?

Jack Dangermond: We do. We started with something called ArcWeb which was a little bit successful. It focused primarily on content and then developed an environment for people to build apps out of. But considering the cost of that compared to the kind of income that was coming in from it, it was not sustainable. Google and Microsoft's websites in some way displaced that because much of the content that was there was free and it was much bigger. From what I've been told, somewhere between $75 and $100 million a year is spent on that content basemap to maintain it and serve it. That's not sustainable if we're talking about small developers. So we sort of shut ArcWeb down effectively. I mean we still have a few users that are using it, but it's not something that sustains itself. If you have search and advertising revenue coming in, then you can afford to -- as Google and Microsoft do, you can then afford to subsidize a lot of that content. But you can't do it as an independent. So our second stage is --

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Where Week 2009

Where Week, five days when geohackers across the world descend on Silicon Valley, is coming up. WhereCamp, the unconference put on by Where 2.0 attendees has been scheduled. This year it will happen at SocialText in Palo Alto on Friday May 22nd and Saturday May 23rd 2009. There will be unconference sessions during the day and a hackfest in the evening. Here's how the organizers describe it:

WhereCamp2009 is the unconference for hackers, mappers, thinkers, artists and anybody who wants to know their place. Hot on the heels of Where 2.0 we bring together up to 300 enthusiasts for two days of in depth discussion and hacking. Last year we did this at Google - thanks Google! And the year before at Yahoo - thanks Yahoo! This year we're doing it at SocialText in Palo Alto on Friday May 22nd and Saturday May 23rd 2009.

We are self-organized in true bar-camp style. Bring your projects, work and ideas to get feedback from a group of the worlds most passionate social cartographers. Topics are whatever you want them to be. Over the last two years we've seen presentations ranging from emergency crisis response such as the work Ushahidi is doing, to local food such as Serve Your Country Food to psycho-geography to visualization, to mobile mapping to re-factoring urban landscapes.

The expectation is simply that you participate. It's your event and we'll all get out of it what you put into it.

It's free to attend, but you can reserve a spot early (and help fund Wherecamp) by buying a ticket. I'll be there with a purchased pass in hand.

The three days right before Where Camp is Where 2.0. The two events work really well together. There's always a buzz happening after the conference and WhereCamp provides us the opportunity to dissect the news and tech. Radar readers can get a 20% discount if they register with whr09rdr.

Ignite @ Google I/O; Submit Your Talk

Ignite is coming to Google I/O later this month. On May 27th, the first afternoon of the conference, I'll be hosting an Ignite at the Moscone Center. As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of five minutes. We'll be looking for talks that geeks will like. Think of hacks, how-to's, and insights. If you're not sure what an Ignite talk looks like check out the Ignite Show. You have until May 11th to submit your talk.

I/O is Google's developer conference. If you rely on Google's APIs this is something to attend. They'll be running sessions on Android, App Engine, Chrome, Open Social and many of their other projects.

Four short links: 30 Apr 2009

Youth, Government, Tween Arduino Hackers, and Table Slurpage

1. Ypulse Conference -- conference on marketing to youth with technology, from the very savvy Anastasia Goodstein who runs the interesting Ypulse blog on youth culture that I've raved about before. Register with the code RADAR for a 10% discount (thanks, Anastasia!).
2. Government in the Global Village -- departing post by the NZ CIO (and Kiwi Foo Camper) Laurence Millar. The principles here are applicable to almost every nation. We need to recognise the network effects of opening up government data in a form that means others can access it. Economic value is created by businesses building innovative new services using government data. Public value is created by enabling a richer and deeper understanding and dialogue among interested individuals about what the data tells us about our lives.[...] The legal, policy, and moral position is clear - New Zealanders own the data, having paid for its collection through taxes. These “problems” will all be solved by the community, and our role as government is to give priority to this. These efforts are stuff that matters. See also Google adds search to public data.
3. Children's Arduino Workshop (Makezine) -- video of three eleven-year old girls working on an Arduino project, and should be inspiration to anyone who has ever wanted to work on hardware projects with kids. Whoever did it succeeded in making it fun! (via followr on Twitter)
4. With YQL Execute, The Internet Becomes Your Database -- YQL is a query language for Yahoo! data sources, and now they've added a server-side Javascript way to import your own web page's tables into YQL. YQL and Pipes are turning into very interesting pieces of infrastructure (e.g., Museum Pipes blog). (via Simon Willison and straup on delicious)

Wordle visualization of my Tweetstream

Mike Hendrickson (@mikehatora) sent me a nice Wordle visualization of my tweet stream, dating back as far as Twitter keeps it. As you can see, I retweet a lot. It's also interesting that many of the repeated words are not concepts or topics, but people's names (in the form of twitter handles.) This is one of the interesting things about twitter: it's a reflection of a community of shared minds, rather than of shared ideas.

(Tweets were retrieved using this python script.)

Recent Posts

• Jack Dangermond Interview 2 of 3: Sharing Government GIS Data | by Brady Forrest on April 30, 2009
• Four short links: 29 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 29, 2009
• Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web | by Tim O'Reilly on April 29, 2009
• Jack Dangermond Interview 1 of 3: Web Mapping | by Brady Forrest on April 29, 2009
• Forge.mil Update and DISA Hacks Public Domain | by Jim Stogdill on April 28, 2009
• Ignite Seattle (and elsewhere) Tomorrow, 4/29 | by Brady Forrest on April 28, 2009
• Four short links: 28 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 28, 2009
• How Big Data Impacts Analytics | by Ben Lorica on April 28, 2009
• Trying to Track Swine Flu Across Cities in Realtime | by John Geraci on April 27, 2009
• Your brain really is forgetting... a LOT | by Brett McLaughlin on April 27, 2009
• Four short links: 27 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 27, 2009
• Four short links: 24 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 24, 2009