flighthings

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Silverside Detectors, Finalist #128 at MassChallenge 2013

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One Marina Park, 14th floor, MassChallenge Headquarters, and Silverside’s new home.

Yesterday, 128 finalists were chosen from the roughly 1200 that applied for the MassChallenge 2013 Accelerator program.  A company we started called Silverside Detectors Inc. was accepted into the program. 

Silverside is trying to solve a hard problem: how do we make our cities much safer from the threat of nuclear terrorism over the next 25 years?  Our governments use their resources as best as possible to stop nuclear material from moving improperly through black markets, or from being brought into a city in a weaponizable form.

imageOne of the biggest challenges is that detection technology is far too expensive to be placed everywhere that it’s needed.  

Silverside provides a solution by making a new type of detector that does what others do, but is 10 times less expensive.  With these detectors, a much stronger Global Nuclear Detection Architecture at our borders, ports of entry, highways, and airports is finally possible.

I want Silverside to be the 128th finalist in MassChallenge this year by helping keep our vibrant and beautiful cities’ people safe, growing, learning, and getting better all the time.

I’ve never met a more wonderful, kind, passionate, and alive group of creators, thinkers, and doers than in the start-up community in Boston.  To me, MassChallenge is the epicenter of this passion.  Along with this year’s other finalists, Silverside is proud, humbled, and ready to get to work to change the world for the better.

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Late that night Hungry Joe dreamed that Huple’s cat was sleeping on his face, suffocating him, and when he woke up, Huple’s cat was sleeping on his face.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22

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There are countries in Europe where the native considers himself as a kind of settler, indifferent to the fate of the spot which he inhabits. The greatest changes are effected there without his concurrence, and (unless chance may have apprised him of the event ) without his knowledge; nay, more, the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or the parsonage, do not concern him; for he looks upon all these things as unconnected with himself and as the property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the government. He has only a life interest in these possessions, without the spirit of ownership or any ideas of improvement. This want of interest in his own affairs goes so far that if his own safety or that of his children is at last endangered, instead of trying to avert the peril, he will fold his arms and wait till the whole nation comes to his aid. This man who has so completely sacrificed his own free will does not, more than any other person, love obedience; he cowers, it is true, before the pettiest officer, but he braves the law with the spirit of a conquered foe as soon as its superior force is withdrawn; he perpetually oscillates between servitude and license.


When a nation has arrived at this state, it must either change its customs and its laws, or perish; for the source of public virtues is dried up; and though it may contain subjects, it has no citizens. Such communities are a natural prey to foreign conquests; and if they do not wholly disappear from the scene, it is only because they are surrounded by other nations similar or inferior to themselves; it is because they still have an indefinable instinct of patriotism; and an involuntary pride in the name of their country, or a vague reminiscence of its bygone fame, suffices to give them an impulse of self-preservation.

Alexis de Tocqueville

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Signing locations for We the People petitions

Here are 20 randomly selected petitions from We The People: Whitehouse.gov’s petition website that are around 25,000 to 40,000 signatures - the threshold of response from the administration.

I used the whitehouse scraper code, heatmap.py, the Free ZIP Code Database, and Google Earth.  Thanks these things.

Apologies if this not the best sample or visualization, just wanted to get something going during the snowstorm.  Also, poor form clipping Alaska and Hawaii.

This type of visualization helps me think about the dynamics of support that nationwide petitions have.  This would be a great thing to visualize right on the whitehouse.gov site.  Im lookin’ at you, whitehouse.gov hackathon :)

Allow H1B approved cases to get Visa stamped in US

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To award the Medal of Freedom to the 4 Firefighters who were ambushed in West Webster New York on Christmas Eve 2012

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Reason #347 that the Boston Globe rocks: robots.

Filed under boston globe

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why Wirite?

here are some examples…

- Bill Clinton, 2012 DNC Speech

- Dave Matthews, Radio City, 2007

- Lawrence Lessig, On Point with Tom Ashbrook Jan. 2nd 2012

And so on.

It’s funny how aligned we can be about certain challenges we face in our country, but how little we can actually talk about and do anything about them.

Here is an example: A recent U.S. Gallup Poll found that reducing corruption in the federal government ranked at the top of Americans recommended priorities for the next president:

Sounds like an issue that would get a lot of air time for discussion.. from the media and the presidential candidates.  But it doesn’t.  Why?

One reason may be that it ranks much lower in importance within either group of Obama and Romney supporters:

Such issues can get slammed for multiple reasons.  First, since politicians run campaigns focusing on their base, they may only take the top tier of issues with their group.  Second, even if they are trying to create positive vibes on the other side of supporters, they may focus on that side’s top tier issues.  Third, another issue that is also high priority across the board can be the large frontrunner for a bi-partisan issue, especially if it is easier to understand and more seemingly pressing - such as job creation.  Lastly, when the issue is about a problem with the decision making body itself, it is an issue that representatives are less keen on talking about.

Another problem is that our media is not taking the lead to address such middle of the road issues.  Even though there are many voices that could take the charge:

Such voices become siloed in a similar way as our representative systems, possibly for some of the very same reasons.  Issues that try to be raised in the middle that do not fit in this system (ie: No Labels, Rootstrikers, and United Republic) are drowned out.

So…

Such a system wouldn’t have just a small group of representatives - such as our congressmen, or people in the media, or leaders starting petitions, or foundations like Rootstrikers - deciding what topics to address and how to address them… it would be the entire community:

There is a growing amount of research that is hinting that we need everyone to create good collective decisions, not just leaders and representatives.

Existing tools, although amazing and getting better every day (see loom.io, meldd, and a list of others), are not yet ready to create documents from a large collaboration of differently minded people.  Out of the major tools that we have that could potentially help:

How do we make a tool that can get there?

What if we take a Wiki style editor, and meld it with a user voting system, like Reddit?

and make a new tool:

The goal of the tool is for edits to be made by anyone who wants (the Wiki part of the tool):

… at the same time, all of the edits are being voted up and down by the community (the Reddit part of the tool):

then the top non-conflicting edits are placed into a new version of the document:

The document would be discussed and honed from version to version until a large enough group of authors were supporting it.

We live in a connected world, however we tend to only talk to people closest to us in our networks.  Take for example this map representing the behavior of Facebook links within the United States:

This image shows that although we are very connected in the online world (how awesome are all of those links pouring over the oceans?), we still have a tendency to connect with like-located people.  And even though it can’t be seen, there ends up being a huge tendency to connect with like-minded people as well.  Another study that looked at just this was done during the 2004 presidential election:

This shows conservatively minded blogs (red), liberally minded blogs (blue), and the connections when they link to each others ideas (yellow and pink).  You can see it doesn’t happen that often.

So how can we stop this from happening with Wirite?  Two things…

Any person at any time can see exactly what the sentiment of the document is.  In other words, what groups of people are supporting it, which are not, and why they feel this way:

Furthermore, one can look at the history of the document, and see how the support has changed from version to version, and what changes to the document have brought people on board, or off board the document:

With the benefit of this information, here is the second thing:

If you help make a change to the document by either editing or voting up an edit that brings more people on board that are near you demographically, you will get some diversity karma:

but by making changes that bring people on board that are less like you, you can get much more:

By expressing and discussing edits, votes, and diversity karma on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, we will be able to see how our collective efforts bring a larger, more diverse group of people together to solve and reach solidarity on challenging issues:

If this seems a little like a game, you are right! There has been lots of research showing that people can figure out and do the most incredible things with one another, just by making tools that enable it, and just by asking them to help

We are using some of the best practices from this research as spelled out in Jane McGonigal’s recent book Reality is Broken (cool quotes):

So how are we going to use all of this to make a tool at the Boston Globe?  Well, one way that we are thinking about is to write an article with the Boston Globe community that probably couldn’t be written in any other way. 

One interesting place to start is for the presidential election.  We already know that sometime soon there will be opinion articles that look something like this in our national newspapers:

But what if we could write something like this?:

…and not have it written by just a small group of people, but rather the group of people influenced: the American public.  We could imagine a document that increases in size and diversity by giving people the right tools to be able to do it, by challenging them to use it, and by asking for their help:

We could have a competition, so that if the document reaches a certain level of support AND diversity, it could be republished in the Boston Globe:

Such a document would be an important new way to find and express the pulse of a city, a town, or a country in a way that we have never seen before.

This is what we’ll be trying to make at the Boston Globe!  If you are interested in helping, please shoot use an email at andrew@wirite.org.

Thanks!

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Theory vs. Experiment

Reality is too easy.  Reality is depressing.  It’s unproductive, and hopeless.  It’s disconnected, and trivial.  It’s hard to get into.  It’s pointless, unrewarding, lonely, and isolating.  It’s hard to swallow.  It’s unsustainable.  It’s unambitious.  It’s disorganized and divided.  It’s stuck in the present.

Reality is all of these things.  But in at least one crucially important way, reality is also better: reality is our destiny.

                                                                - Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken

Recently the two main experiments - Atlas and CMS - at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN published results showing that there is strong evidence that a Higgs-like particle exists.  The result was the first in a potentially long list of things that will be observed at the LHC.  

The Higgs observation is going to change how the Physics community does what it does within the upcoming years.  Mainly, it will make us revisit the relationship between experimentation - observing our universe with our senses - and theory - explaining how our universe works using mental models and mathematics.  These two divisions of labor have an amazingly complex and beautiful interplay, both motivating one another to explore truth in the world and the universe. 

Exploring new and better ways for our government and democracy to work is kind of like this as well.  There is a similarly amazingly complex and beautiful interplay between observations of how we get along and make decisions with one another, theoretical analysis of why things are happening the way that they are, and experiments that are creatively implemented to see what we are all capable of.  These experiments in governance and democracy not only have the potential to change the theory about what we are capable of together, but also have the potential to change the the very world we are exploring.

Just as in physics, learning the history of experiments that have come before and what theories have been developed to explain past experiments is a good first step to decide what to do in new experiments.  Seeing which past events, and which past theories are the building blocks of the things we do is helpful to guide and understand the new task at hand.

For these reasons I am laying out the major histories, theories, and ideas that we are mixing together to motivate Wirite during it’s stay at the Boston Globe.  The main themes of these writings are that:

  1. we have always struggled in the United States to find the right balance of friendship vs. adversarial decision making,
  2. we need lots of people working together to create good decisions on complex issues, and
  3. there are new ways to think about empowering people to do good and challenging work together.

on to the texts…

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a new home…

Starting August 01, Wirite has a home!!

The Boston Globe Innovation lab is a space at the Boston Globe dedicated to “understanding, imagining, and demonstrating the (near) future of news”.  Wirite has had an amazing summer leading up to this.  By moonlighting the MassChallenge program, and learning from our awesome mentors and advisors, we have a plan to make Wirite the tool that people love to become empowered with.  Now we are ready to make it happen.  

We believe that by pooling resources in an easy, Facebook-able, Tweet-able manner, we have the potential to make large changes in our world that can only be made if 1) we have a lot of us, 2) we are diverse, and 3) we do it together.  From newspaper opinion articles written by thousands of liberals and conservatives, to peace treaties written by the people in different countries, Wirite strives to give very large groups tools to find what they have in common, so that they can be stronger together.

For the next few months Wirite’s founding team will work with the Boston Globe on its first test case: a new way for opinion articles to be drafted… by Bostonians just like you!

We’re going to need a lot of help, so thanks in advance as we pester you, our friends and family, and anyone else we can find, to help build this important tool with us.  We couldn’t do it without you.

Stay tuned…

Filed under wirite