Leaving Samasource.org

The Samasource.org team and I said our goodbyes Wednesday night, after a long evening of well-wishing and reminiscing (and strong drinks). We had a lot to celebrate about. I joined when Samasource was just Leila and two other insanely-devoted people working out of a conference room. Nine short months later, the organization has more potential than at any moment in its history. Every month, Samasource has brought in larger and larger contracts to bring ever-increasing numbers of people out of poverty in South Asia, East Africa, and Haiti. The young organization is proving its model.

The team has grown substantially, and fortunately I leave Samasource in very capable hands. David Yoon assumes technology leadership as the new VP of Engineering, after years of experience building sites like Donorschoose.org. Noah Bradach is the new VP of Sales, closing deals left and right. Chelsea Seale continues to wrangle order out of the chaos of their operations. That’s just a few of our amazing staff. The office is full of dedicated people like Caitlin, Luke, Rebecca, Joon-Mo, Kala, Marcia, Pamela, Tanya, and so many others before them who pour their heart and soul into the organization. And, of course, there’s Leila Janah, who continues to lead with immeasurable grit and intelligence.

The decision to leave Samasource was very difficult. The short of it is that I’ve found an opportunity to work on another problem of enormous scope. If you’re interested in this project, read on.

Google Earth Engine

The world is slowly getting serious about putting a dollar value on greenhouse gas emissions reductions.* One of the mechanisms for mitigating climate change that gained substantial traction in Copenhagen last year was REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). REDD is based on a simple fact: the world’s forests represent a massive carbon sink, sequestering huge amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. How much carbon? It’s estimated that the the amount of forest the world loses every year results in more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world’s cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships combined. Clearly that the world’s forests represent an enormous value, even if we only consider the value of the carbon they sequester.

The major challenge to the REDD mechanism is verification: How can we know that our actions are actually preserving forest and reducing CO2 emissions? Monumental sums of money are at stake in answering this question properly, as the world must reduce CO2 levels at the lowest possible cost. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of uncertainty about the effectiveness of forest preservation efforts. For example, legislation that protects forests in one region may simply push logging activity somewhere else. What’s needed is a global forest monitoring solution. Until we have this, only token investments will be made in REDD. Today, we see nations pledging a few billion here or there for forest preservation, but the market should theoretically support orders of magnitude more than this.

My new employer, Google (and more specifically, Google.org), is aiming to provide exactly this with Google Earth Engine. The product will serve as a central clearinghouse for all available satellite data and earth surface monitoring algorithms. It will be a place for scientists and policy makers to answer big questions at global scale, and to prove that their methods are best. If our small team succeeds, we will enable these forest preservation markets at a scale we have all only hoped for until now.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with the Earth Engine team half-time for a few months, now, but next week I will transition over completely. I’ll be returning to my roots in frontend engineering. This means designing and building the web applications that people will need to access and understand the vast stores of data that Google Earth Engine will be making public.

Wish me luck!

More great articles about Google Earth Engine:

• http://solveclimate.com/blog/20100429/google-powers-its-earth-engine-eye-saving-amazon
• http://news.mongabay.com/2009/1216-googleearthengine.html

One algorithm for analyzing satellite data

Here’s another quick roundup of recent, interesting talks.

Saul Griffith: Inventing a super-kite to tap the energy of high-altitude wind

This is a short update on what Makani Power is up to. Some inspiring videos of their efforts to harness high-altitude wind power (the second most-plentiful renewable energy source, after solar.) It looks like they have the autonomous kite-flying control systems working; impressive!

P.W. Singer: Military robots and the future of war

“In this powerful talk, P.W. Singer shows how the widespread use of robots in war is changing the realities of combat.” Singer discusses the reality of automated warfare currently in play in the Middle East. There are many complicated, troubling implications of this shift in warfare. For example, remote killing distances our soldiers from the physical violence that they inflict. The violence is put at a remove, and the resulting recorded media loses its context. A lot of clips of drone strikes are online. Soldiers will often to refer to them as “war porn” and set them to music. On the other hand, the availability of this systematic video and data collection provides opportunities for public oversight.

Another point: automated warfare may lose for us the war of ideas that we are waging against insurgent groups. Here’s the contrast between the message intended and the perception on the ground:

Bush administration official: “It plays to our strength. The thing that scares people is our technology.”

Lebanese news editor: “This is just another sign of the cold-hearted, cruel Israelis and Americans who are cowards because they send out machines to fight us. They don’t want to fight us like real men. They are afraid to fight. We just have to kill a few of their soldiers to defeat them.”

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

“Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.”

Ariely gives a quick summary of several studies that show clearly how the presentation of various options can affect the choices we make. There are clear implications on user interface design, here.

Here’s a great piece about a guy who was able to produce a bumper crop on a vacant lot in Tuscon, Arizona by harvesting runoff from roofs and streets around the lot. It’s a nice bit of daydreaming for the wannabe urban farmer.

Here’s a map of the growth of his terraced gardens over the years, which I include because it’s a lovely small-multiple visualization:

The Evolution of the Russ Farm

My Share

To left is a live meter, showing the current estimate of my personal energy footprint. This combines all my energy usage (electric, natural gas, oil) encompassing transportation, the embodied energy of my possessions, and my share of the energy used by the governments of the USA and California.

You can make your own energy profile at WattzOn.com. They have incredibly easy-to-use interfaces for quickly estimating your energy profile.

Compared to What?

More importantly, the site provides some very useful context for your profile. I’ve included some screenshots, below. The first is a pie chart showing the relative magnitudes of different parts of my energy usage. I don’t commute by car, so the vast majority of my energy usage comes from the energy expended by government and by airplane flights. For example, the nearly 2000 Watts of energy I expend flying comes from six short flights and four long ones I take each year, on average. You can also see that food and my home heating are also big energy expenditures.

There’s also a screenshot showing how I stack up amongst world citizens (somewhere between Japan and Russia, less than 2/3 the energy consumption of the average American.) After than is a graphic showing how large of a solar panel would be required to power my lifestyle, if it could all be powered by electricity (one enormous panel, 15m square, or somewhere between $50k and $100k worth of solar panels!)

The Big Picture

How much energy should we be using, though? Saul Griffith (MacArther Genius Award winner, head of Makani Power, parter of Squid Labs, and one of the founders of Instructables) is the man behind WattzOn. He created WattzOn in response to a year of thinking he did on climate change. You can see the very well-thought-out, very straightforward presentation of his ideas, below. The bottom line? To stabilize the climate in the next few hundred years and restrict the impact of climate change to moderately-terrible effects (“only” 20% species loss, tens to hundreds of millions displaced, etc.), each of us need to reduce our energy usage to 2,250 Watts. 2,250 Watts! That’s the energy usage of the average Chinese person, a third of what I currently use. When I look at the numbers this way, the future looks pretty grim.

Improving WattzOn

Of course, every bit counts, and being able to visualize my energy usage goes a long way towards changing my behavior. I’m certainly trying to fly less, these days, eat less meat, and ease up on using the heaters in my room. I think WattzOn has a lot of potential to do the same for others. I’m sure they’re working on new features that the public doesn’t know about, but I’ll take that risk of telling them what they already know and make some suggestions.

My biggest one is to allow people to interact with this data socially. It means one thing to be able to visualize one’s energy usage, but the application’s spread and impact will increase dramatically if people can show off their numbers and compare with others. Here are some example social features:

• SNS widgets: Being able to place a badge on my blog is one small step (the badge in the upper left of this post is a javascript widget.) Better if it can live on my LinkedIn or Facebook profile.
• Data sharing: My roommates should be able to “duplicate” my profile as a starting point for their own.
• Trend data: Am I reducing my energy usage? By how much? I want to see graphs showing my progress.
• Pledges: Public promises to change behavior are strong incentives to follow through. Making a promise to your friends reinforces the action, and spreads the message.
• Competition: Race your friends! Or, make a group pledge so that many people can work together to meet targets.
• Viral Challenge: Make a profile for someone close to you, based on what you know of their lifestyle. Let them take ownership of that profile, correcting assumptions you may have made. Challenge them to reduce their footprint.

There are many other sites experimenting with this idea. See eco:Drive, Positive Energy, and the Climate Pledge Facebook App. The Nike+ workout tracking system has also implemented many competitive social features that would be useful for the WattzOn team to examine.

Good luck, WattzOn! In the meantime, I hope everyone signs on and takes a hard look at their own energy usage.

Note: Jay also mentioned that his company, SolarCity, also has cool information visualizations for its solar panel clients. Here’s a nice example.

I’ve finally started educating myself on the current economic crisis. However we move past this current credit crunch (soft landing vs. hard landing), the fact is that Americans will likely face a lower standard of living within our lifetimes. You might not have believed that the decline of the American Empire had begun up until 2008, but it’s clearly in motion now.

Unfortunately, the imperial decline could have dire effects, worldwide. Whatever your opinion on the fairness of an empire, one thing it can promote is stability. If our capacity to service our national debt diminishes to the point where we have to remove our military presence from the hundred or so nations where we have bases, we may see scores of regional wars in the power vacuum.

Additionally, an empire in decline has few resources to devote to stewardship of the enviroment (or, put more simply, long-term planning.) We can elect as progressive a government, come November. The US may simply be unable to withstand the political and economic costs of raising energy prices in order to combat global warming.

Perhaps another nation will take up the role of “global policeman.” Perhaps dramatic new technologies will save our GHG-saturated climate. The future is unknown, but the dire scenarios are looking worse and more likely than ever.

I love how Robb generalizes phenomena, creating useful frameworks that find application in many disparate domains (e.g. economics, politics, warfare, sociology, etc.) His latest is the concept of a “dissipative system,” a system that draws energy from its surroundings to resist entropic forces:

This upshot of this is that it can extract energy from this larger external environment to increase its structural complexity (build itself up through a process called self-assembly). It can also use this external environment to dump the entropy created during the energy conversion process to minimize the deleterious impact on its structure.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking (obsessing a bit, perhaps) about how complexity emerges in various forms (at different physical scales, on different substrates), and how our own individual experiences of consciousness fit into those ideas. Robb’s “dissipative structures” is a useful tool for generalizing the underlying constraint that shapes selection functions for natural selection at every level.

For example, in a later post, Robb begins re-framing economic and conventional warfare in terms of dissipative systems in conflict:

NOTES: Isolate your opponent from the external environment to prevent energy acquisition and trap entropy (force them towards thermodynamic equilibrium and “heat death”). Increase your own connectivity to acquire energy and expel entropy faster (movement farther away from thermodynamic equilibrium and greater structural complexity).

I had this to add, in a comment on that post:

The function that translates energy into complexity is far from constant. It is highly dependent on technology, for example (compare joules required to power the Pony Express vs. fiber optic communcation, per byte.) You might call this “efficiency,” but my suspicion is that the translation function is much more complicated than that.

In any case, struggling over energy sources is necessary tactic for dissipative system, but a system may prevail with lower energy sources if its energy-to-complexity function outperforms.

And by RIP, I mean “rot in historical ignominy.” It turns out that consumer demand for fuel is more elastic than we all feared. With gas prices going through the roof, people are finally starting to buy more reasonable cars.

GM saw a 28% drop in light-vehicle sales in May. Ford’s sales fell 16%. The Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in the United States almost every year for the past three decades, was knocked off its perch by both the Toyota Camry and Toyota Corolla.

Hummer sales fell by 60%!

GM has announced the closure of its Janesville assembly plant, and the discontinuation of the plus-sized Tahoe, Suburban and Yukon lines as early as 2009. No word on the Hummer, but the buzzards are circling. GM will add additional shifts to plants that produce more fuel-efficient cars, and the company hopes to have the electric Chevy Volt in showrooms by 2010.

As a side note, the H2 hummer was not only an obnoxious and wasteful “fuck you” to everyone whose visual field it polluted, it was also a shitty car, engineering-wise:

The old record of 29.4% was set in 1984. The new one is 31.25%.

[From Tim]

Here’s another batch of notes on three TED Talks (you can see all of them here). The Pinker one is particularly interesting, to me; I’m going to solicit comments from an email list I’m on.

Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence

Pinker lays out a story of humanity that I believe to be true, but has been challenged repeatedly by those I’m close to: A long history of dramatically-declining violence and a commensurate increase in our empathy towards the other. He describes this history at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and individual years, calling it a “fractal” decline. He also draws from thinkers over the last hundred years to lay out four explanations for why this decline has occurred:

1. Thomas Hobbes: Life in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The Hobbesian solution to this problem was the “leviathan state,” a central authority with a monopoly on violent power. The Machiavellian explanation here would give some credit to the rise of central governments for the
2. Life is Cheap: When suffering and early death are commonplace, the consequences of violence seem less dramatic to us. As wealth and quality of life increase, so does our value of that life, even if it is of the Other.
3. Robert Wright: Nonzero-sum games can often result in parties benefitting when they trade or cooperate rather than enter into violent conflict. Over time, the greater ability of parties to communicate has allowed more and more people to discover these nonzero-sum dynamics in more and more situations.
4. Peter Singer: The “expanding circle” of empathy. This, too, has been borne along by increasing wealth, access to communication technologies, and education.

There are holes that one can poke in this description of our history. Pinker’s narrative is very Euro-centric (what happened in China during these centuries? Africa?) It also completely ignores the incidence of sexual violence towards women; It’s hard to say if that how much that has declined over the ages, if it has.

Overall, though, I think Pinker is right. I’d be interested to see any data that contradicts the trend line that he can draw from hunter gatherer times to our own.

Bill Clinton: TED Prize wish: Let’s build and health care system in Rwanda

Clinton discusses the work of his foundation, and how it fits into the larger picture of social inequalities and development work. He stresses the importance of focusing on systems rather than taking on problems piecemeal. The Clinton foundation cut out middlemen in Haiti, cutting per-annum costs of anti-retrovirals from $3500 to $500, and then reduced it further to $190 by helping the pharmaceutical companies change their business models (from “jewelry store” to “grocery market.”) Mentions Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health; they are working with PIH to reproduce that system in Rwanda. In time, they want to develop a health administration system that can be adapted for any number of other countries. An interesting thought on “fund leakage”: On corruption in developing nations, Clinton mentions that he believes that lost opportunities due to health problems are a much greater problem, and they in fact feed corruption.

Juan Enriquez: Why can’t we grow new energy?

Playing on words, Enriquez extends the definition of “bioenergy” to include coal and oil, which of course were originally plant and animal matter, eons ago. He describes the possibility of using biological processes to convert underground oil and coal into gas, thus allowing us to extract the energy content without mining, and thus greatly increasing the reserves we have access too (3x, possibly.) He likens the possible growth of such an industry to the “green revolution” that allowed the productivity of agriculture to boom in the 20th century: think in terms of biology, not chemistry, in order to scale massively.

Of course, this is not a carbon-reduction technique (in fact, it sounds like a perilous way to keep dirty energy costs very low.) Enriquez proposes it only a “bridge” to new tech.

Another, separate idea: stabilizing oil prices by taxing to set a floor on oil prices, giving alternative fuels a floor to work with (and thus be able to invest against.)

As usual, you can see all of the TED talk notes, here.

I’ve been consuming TED talks at a fairly rapid pace for a year now, and they keep on coming. As I’ve been going along, I’ve been capturing brief notes on the ones that I’ve found interesting. Going forward, I’m going to post small batches here. This is mostly for my own reference, but maybe the internets will also find them useful.

Here are the first three (you can see all of them here):

Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

I rolled my eyes a couple times as he was introducing his topic, but as the talk went on, most of my skepticism was addressed, and then I was totally absorbed. He seems to have found many instances where fractal math was consciously used in African culture for very practical engineering and cultural purposes. He has also found that this conscious use of fractals is not present in other non-state societies. He finishes his talk by mentioning how these cultural uses can actually be used in the US to show African-American students that their heritage includes a rich mathematical history, as well.

Matthieu Ricard: Habits of happiness

A Quebecois molecular biologist-turned monk relates the basics of Buddhism, from a Westerner’s point of view. This talk is simple and straightforward, they way I like my explanations of Buddhism. There is a good balance here that represents my belief in mindfulness practice: part subjective experience, part science.

Amory Lovins: We must win the oil endgame

Author of the book Winning the Oil Endgame sees the path to an oil-import-free U.S. as a profitable, not a costly one. His ideas are comprehensive, including new materials for making cars lighter, “feebates” to change buying incentives per weight class of car (rather than between them), and an overall focus on efficiency. The latter one is interesting, as he makes those savings clear by pricing efficiency in terms of $/barrel of oil displaced. He is very glib with his free-market cheerleading, however, and explain very well why profit motives haven’t already pushed our industries to make these changes on their own. Some of his comments about the military wanting to defend America rather than oil pipelines in foreign countries are incredibly naive; it’s not our people on the ground who make policy, it’s the politicians who are financially bound to arms manufacturers.

Again, you can see all of the ted talk notes, here.