Check it out, the BBC published a piece I wrote on why it’s important to break the rules and how to do it without getting fired right off the bat. It’s a kind of updated viewpoint on Hacking Work, my latest book. You can read it here!
Stylus.com is the only business-to-business design & inspiration resource that provides validated, cross-vertical blah blah blah. I can’t tell you the rest because their “about” page is a JPG. That said, it’s apparently a big deal for designers, because lots of my designer friends saw the interview when it came out and told me about it.
You can check it out here – I thought they did a great job of highlighting the business value of my last book, Hacking Work!!
It’s always a joy to get interviewed by someone who loves the topic as much as you do. When Briana Abrahms was setting up the interview she was in Africa tracking wild dogs, so it was pretty clear she had the hardcore element covered. We talked about the crow project and how it happened; read it here.
Had a great time doing a podcast interview with these guys; their approach is a decidedly functional mastery of social engineering from a security viewpoint – really refreshing!! Check it out.
Richard Morris gave me a thorough going-over in this interview about how I started hacking, how to make a living breaking the rules, and writing code.
Debbie Evans and I published this article in Wired Italy; it’s about how virtual currency money laundering is primarily a useful tool for the 1% of wealthy corporations and individuals, and what that will mean for the rest of us.
You can get a translated version in English here.
One YPO member told me that Punjab was like India’s version of Detroit in the 1920′s; the seat of heavy industry, it’s growing fast. But more important to me was the open-mindedness and acumen of the people; one fellow who manufactured nuts and bolts grilled me at length about the viability of VPNs vs. local encryption for the computers used in his manufacturing process – and this only moments after he’d learned what a VPN was.
Punjab may not have the financial backing of Mumbai, or the tech savvy of Bangalore, but it more than makes up for it with can-do attitude of its inhabitants. It was exciting to see.
Here’s how I’ve been billed at conferences like:
And here are some nice things people have said after my talks:
“I hack everything now. When I have an assignment, I think to myself ‘how can I hack this?’. … It [the concept of hacking] has changed my life. Now when I do anything I ask myself – how can I hack this?”
“Josh is a smart, captivating speaker who offers more than his thoughts on technology – he offers real accounts of his lived experiences hacking computers, cellphones, and even crows.”
“Josh Klein will be one of the most exciting cultural players to watch in the coming decade; his personal fluidity between disciplines and movement of ideas across worlds both real and virtual, technological and creative, allows him to be a guide for those of us who are interested in being the architects of our own identity.”
“My brain is still splattered against the wall from this morning.”
“too often, when i’m at a restaurant and asked if i would like some dessert, i feel like i’m being taken for a ride, tempted to increase my bill for no perceptible reason other than the fact that my senses are pre-disposed to consume and therefore need sugar. but there is only one piece of sweetness that i would pay for on the diminutive dessert menu, and that is joshua klein’s brain.”
I’ve somehow found myself in positions of responsibility for a number of organizations. Some of them have been:
Board Member:
Judging:
Other:
Here’s an interview a brilliant friend of mine conducted to force me to think more clearly about what I offered clients. It was super helpful to me; I hope it helps you!
Alternately, I was interviewed for the New York Times on how I do what I do – this one is pretty fun too, and has a story about the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy! I know, it’s crazy what they’ll publish these days.
What do you do?
I innovate – particularly around systems, across disciplines, and in ways that entrenched industries are too afraid to try. For example, I mixed new a new business model (free) with an old industry (publishing) and got a distribution deal for my novel with Amazon when nobody else would publish it. In another example, I took an established psychological method (operant conditioning) and a problomatic ecological niche (crows) and combined them by making a vending machine from crows that trains them to fetch lost change for peanuts. More recently, I’ve been combining technology and fashion, public speaking with gastronomy, and robots with secretaries.
Why is it important?
All leaps of human progress have occurred on the fringes, by people taking big chances and thinking differently. Now, more than ever, we need innovation that will take us ahead of the problems we face. For example, the ecology is suffering from human kind’s inability to foresee the implications of our technology choices. Economically we’re unable to keep up with the rate of change in industry. There are all kinds of problems like this right now, all occuring at the same time as we’re seeing unbelievable advances in science and technology. Connecting the two – particularly across siloed disciplines – is both effective and important.
How do you do it?
First off, you need to be passionate about something. I am passionate about technology, people and creating positive change within society. Then, you need to talk to a lot of different people about it and to learn a lot about it. In doing so you’ll get not just the established cannon of information on the discipline (or niche, or industry, or whatever), but also the problems and quirks of the systems that people inside it take for granted. Those are your entrance vectors to bring about radical change. Then, take the information and access that you can uniquely bring to the problem and start talking over your ideas for unusual solutions. Eventually you’ll meet the right team of folks who have the best mix of backgrounds and insights and you’ll have developed a solution to match. In being courageous enough to question the obvious and being willing to collaborate you’ll be able to do something completely different and effective in a space where others take those problems for granted.
So What? Why does this matter in the long run?
I don’t do things “by the book.” And when you look around, most of the greatest inventions – penicillin, the internet or chocolate cake – didn’t come with instructions. Most people are used to the deeply-siloed, tautologically-divided way of doing things. I try to color outside of the lines and do things that haven’t been tried before because if you don’t take risks, you won’t succeed. Making a vending machine for crows, for example, or giving away your novel for free as a way to get it published. Sometimes, turning the expected view of things and turning it on its head gives way to radical new ways of suddenly evolving a formerly stagnant situation. As we all get increasing access to new and expert information doing this is just going to get more important; insight is only going to become more valuable.
April 15, 2009
I got to learn a lot about the press this week. The short version is this: an intern for the New York Times interviewed me in December of 2008 and confused Brooklyn (where I had proven the entire training process with captive crows) with Binghamton (where we tested whether crows would approach the box in the wild), thus taking my plan to test the crow box with a Binghamton professor at a zoo there as history. The NY Times then failed to fact check with the zoo and published the intern’s article in the Top Ideas of 2008 issue.
As a result, the professor I was working with there had her tenure and funding threatened, which resulted in her severing her relationship with me, which has led to terminating any further progress on the project in either Binghamton or Ithaca.
The NY Times later told me that the request for a retraction which I submitted via the NY Times’ website had been lost by their system, leading to the professor’s phone call reaching them first, with the result that I appeared errant in suggesting there was an error.
Four months later, the NY Times published a correction that was 100 words longer than the original piece which said that the experiment in Binghamton was a failure and that corvid experts felt that the machine was unlikely to work. This was contradictory to the enthusiastic emails and phone conversations I had previously had with said experts, and, when I asked the NY Times about this on April 15, 2009, their fact checker told me that “I can totally understand why you’d be annoyed that people would say they wouldn’t touch your project with a ten foot pole when they had clearly been involved with it before.”
I pointed out that several other folks took the correction to mean that I had lied to the NY Times. While their fact checker agreed that in terms of this article, “everything went wrong that possibly could go wrong,” he also told me directly that the NY Times was not going to publish a correction to their correction to address my concerns.
He also told me they had gone to great lengths to assure that the correction was fair and balanced and made it clear that the NY Times took responsibility for their mistakes, and that he was suprised I felt injured by it.
Here is the original article, and Here is the correction. This is my web page where I’ve had my thesis and all the other information you see there up since 2007. You decide, and let me know what you think.
Abstract:
Home goods and services are increasingly available online and through delivery. The savings of these solutions is substantial, particularly in terms of the time spent otherwise travelling to and selecting these goods.
The primary offset to these gains is that, typically, you have to arrange to be at home to receive the deliveries. While FedEx, UPS, Freshdirect, etc. are more than happy to deliver without a signature (provided you sign a waiver ahead of time), this means you’re subject to the risk of having your goods stolen or misdelivered without legal recourse.
This project solves that problem by providing you with a virtual presence for accepting deliveries.
Description:
Our building has a gated backyard located near the primary door. This system enables deliveries to automatically call their recipients for identification before being remotely let into the backyard to access a weatherproof storage container. The entire process is videod via webcast so the recipient can also visually verify the identity of the deliveryperson as well as watch their actions, and a video record is always taken for later reference.
Here’s an example:
Later, if John has any questions about the delivery, he can reference the stored video and call record via the website.
Components:
There are two main components to the Backdoor system; the gate hardware, and the server which ties them together. These components consist of:
1) The gate hardware:
2) The server (a simple linux box), w/:
Total: $325 (assuming you have a spare computer to use; the software is all free.)
The hardware is bundled together at the gate and can be run to power and data via the floor 3 window. The software is all open-source and uses a free AIX service (GizmoCall) for placing the VOIP calls to the delivery recipients, meaning that operating costs should be nill. This leaves the one-time cost of the hardware, detailed below, plus the installation and configuration. Based on time and cost savings experience in trying out numerous delivery services, it’s our belief this cost is easily offset in one year of service.
Summary:
The biggest cost we experience is in time, and delivered services can win us back a significant amount of it. This project proposes to enable safe, secure, and verified deliveries at any time regardless of recipient’s physical presence. This translates to substantial time and financial savings.
This is a concept piece myself and three others put together on how a mesh-networked assemblage of mobile devices could preserve privacy and intelligently assign permissions to all the media created about you. Mesh networking is already becoming a reality, and mobile devices are steadily becoming more ubiquitous. As they do, the need to be able to dynamically (and automatically) have privacy preserved is only going to grow.
See: omfgi.com
Beware of conversations started at cocktail parties. That’s what started this idea, which took hold of my brain almost ten years ago. What makes this project so wild is that it has such a high chance of success – in working on it I’ve conferred with many of the world’s leading experts on Corvids (the family crows belong to), and they’re all confident it’ll work – it’s just a matter of how long it will take the birds to learn it.
Aside from the potential for gathering enormous amounts of lost coins, the device is that it would be a great way to test intelligence in different bird populations as there is no human intervention to pollute the test. We’ve done initial tests in Ithaca and are looking to make a kit you can download and build yourself, so stay tuned!
The Goal
The goal of this project is to create a device that will autonomously train crows. So far we’ve trained captive crows to deposit dropped coins they find on the ground in exchange for peanuts. The next step is to see how quickly we can get wild crows to learn the system, and then how quickly they can learn it from each other.
Once we’ve got system down for teaching coin collection we’ll move to seeing how flexibly they can learn *other* tasks, like collecting garbage, sorting through discarded electronics, or maybe even search and rescue. The crows continue to amaze us with their abilities, so who knows?
The Device
The first version of the device consists of a box from which protrudes a perch, a food tray, and a funnel. The whole thing is made out of sealed wood so as to minimize noisy clanging which might result from using metal components while retaining the ability to leave the thing out in the rain. It is run by a laptop which provides power and control up to 50 feet away.
Based on established Skinnerian training principles, the action of the device is divided into four stages:
Stage One: Food and Coins Available on Departure.
At this stage the device pushes a few peanuts and one or two coins onto the feeder tray whenever a crow *leaves* the device. This ensures that the device always has food whenever it is examined by a potential feeding crow. It also ensures that both the sound of the device and its mechanical operation occur in close proximity to the feeding act so as to aclimate the crow. By having this noise occur as the crow leaves it prevents startling a potential feeder away from using the device.
Stage Two: Food and Coins Available On Landing.
Herein the action of the device is identical except that food and coins are issued when a crow arrives. At this point the crow should be comfortable with the sound of the device and is now being trained to wait for its reward when arriving at the machine. Note that the feeding tray is slanted such that coins will pile up and prevent peanuts from being available until the crow cleans them away – a typical behavior of crows is to sweep things out of the way with their beak, and in this case this causes the coins to fall down the funnel. This should help reinforce the connection between coins going down the funnel and peanuts being produced.
Stage Three: Coins Available On Landing, Food Available on Deposit
This is the highest-risk segment of the machine’s operation. At this point coins alone are made available whenever the bird lands on the perch. However, should a bird peck or sweep coins off the tray and cause a coin to fall down the funnel, the device then produces some peanuts. This stage is designed to cement in the crows’ mind the relationship between coins going down the funnel and peanuts being made available.
Stage Four: Food Available On Coin Deposit
If you’d like more details, I wrote a paper on the vending machine.
Press & Media
Previously I have presented on this topic at TED, Gadgetoff, and The Swedish Computer Science Institute. I also gave a 15-minute presentation on it as part of ITP’s thesis week. If that doesn’t grab you, Gizmodo did a nice little video review of it.
Radio pieces were done on Newstalk 106-108fm in Dublin, Ireland, Ifyourejustjoiningus.com, KOMO 1000 in Seattle, The CJ Radioshow, and NPR.
Articles have been written in Oprah Magazine, The Seattle PI, BoingBoing.net, Spice Magazine, The New York Times once, and then again in their Top Ideas of 2008 (which was followed by a “correction“), Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine, and Wired.
Oh, and if you speak German, it was also featured in Vögel Magazine.
Next Steps…
The idea of mutually beneficial synanthropy is gaining ground. That’s the concept that we can have mutually beneficial relationships with animals adapted to human ecologies – like crows, rats, coyotes, deer, and others.
In order to further this idea I’m looking to make a Creative Commons licensed, freely available design for the crowbox available to anybody. That means that anyone anywhere can make a version of the box and share their results with others. For that to happen, though, I need the help of an electrical / material engineer and/or the funding to hire one to do it right. If that’s you, let me know! Alternately, feel free to donate to get us that much closer to making it a reality:
Also see Zach Eveland of Blacklabel Development for more mad genius – he’s responsible for the electronics that made this project work.