Joel Mahoney

blindmen6: Leibniz’s medallion for the...

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 16:36:30 -0800

Leibniz’s medallion for the Duke of Brunswick from Postdoctoral Thesis by Johann Bernard Wiedeburg of Jena (1718)

The Universal Language of Machines

The success of the computer as a universal information-processing machine lies essentially in the fact that there exists a universal language in which many different kinds of information can be encoded and that this language can be mechanized. This would concretize the well-known dream of Leibniz of a universal language that would be both a lingua characteristica, allowing the ‘’perfect’’ description of knowledge by exhibiting the ‘’real characters’’ of concepts and things, and a calculus ratiocinator, making it possible for the mechanization of reasoning. If such a language was employed, Leibniz said, errors in reasoning would be avoided, and endless philosophical discussions would cease at once by having all philosophers sit aroung a table and say ‘’calculemus’’.

Leibniz . . . found a predecessor [of his binary number system] in Abdallah Beidhawy, an Arab scholar of the thirteenth century. A few other authors also proposed binary notations during the seventeenth century, but it was not until its ‘’discovery’’ and publication by Leibniz in 1703 that it started a growing interest in non-decimal numerical systems. Leibniz’s invention can be traced back to 1697, in a letter to the Duke of Brunswick detailing the design of a medallion (see figure), but he delayed its publication until finding an interesting application. The one he choose was the explanation of the Fu-Hi figures, the hexagrams of the I-Ching, or book of changes, from ancient China, that have been communicated to him in 1700 by the Father Bouvet, a jesuit missionary in China. Two centuries and a half later, binary notation found another application with a much broader impact : digital computers.

[pauillac.inria.fr/~codognet/web.html]

"This tomb holds Diophantus. Ah, what a marvel! And the tomb tells scientifically the measure of his..."

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 22:37:00 -0800

““This tomb holds Diophantus. Ah, what a marvel! And the tomb tells scientifically the measure of his life. God vouchsafed that he should be a boy for the sixth part of his life; when a twelfth was added, his cheeks acquired a beard; He kindled for him the light of marriage after a seventh, and in the fifth year after his marriage He granted him a son. Alas! late-begotten and miserable child, when he had reached the measure of half his father’s life, the chill grave took him. After consoling his grief by this science of numbers for four years, he reached the end of his life.””

- Epitaph to Diophantus, the father of algebra: http://amzn.com/0470229055

“Civic Technology & the Calculus of the Common...

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 21:58:00 -0800

“Civic Technology & the Calculus of the Common Good” TEDx talk

Just finished “Turing’s Cathedral” by George...

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 22:26:00 -0800

Just finished “Turing’s Cathedral” by George Dyson. A fascinating account of the “origins of the digital universe”. Relevant for everyone who lives in the digital universe.

http://amzn.com/1400075998

"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking,..."

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 19:53:00 -0700

“

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return— prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.

”

- Walking, Henry David Thoreau

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1022

"That a city then precedes an individual is plain, for if an individual is not in himself sufficient..."

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 15:51:00 -0700

“That a city then precedes an individual is plain, for if an individual is not in himself sufficient to compose a perfect government, he is to a city as other parts are to a whole; but he that is incapable of society, or so complete in himself as not to want it, makes no part of a city, as a beast or a god. There is then in all persons a natural impetus to associate with each other in this manner, and he who first founded civil society was the cause of the greatest good; for as by the completion of it man is the most excellent of all living beings, so without law and justice he would be the worst of all, for nothing is so difficult to subdue as injustice in arms: but these arms man is born with, namely, prudence and valour, which he may apply to the most opposite purposes, for he who abuses them will be the most wicked, the most cruel, the most lustful, and most gluttonous being imaginable; for justice is a political virtue, by the rules of it the state is regulated, and these rules are the criterion of what is right.”

- Aristotle (2004-10-01). Politics: A Treatise on Government (pp. 3-4). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

“The Information Machine” - 1958 IBM commercial by...

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 14:34:10 -0700

“The Information Machine” - 1958 IBM commercial by Charles and Ray Eames.

“The calculator is helping to define society’s most complicated problems. It is a tool for turning inspiration into fruitful prediction. As an information machine, it has done much to broaden the base of our growing concepts. But the real miracle is the promise that there will also be room for those smallest details that have been the basis for man’s most rewarding wishes. This is the story of a technique in the service of mankind.”

Knight News Challenge Round 2: DataDonor.io

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 10:10:00 -0700

Knight News Challenge Round 2: DataDonor.io:

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

DataDonor allows individuals to donate personal data (from e.g. Facebook, Runkeeper, 23andMe) to qualified non-profit and academic research groups.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]

As Tim O’Reilly once put it: “The guy with the most data wins”. As Bryce Roberts interpreted this: “Web 2.0 ends with data monopolies”. DataDonor allows individuals to unlock their personal data — not for the purpose of storing it in a “data locker” — but to apply this asset to the advancement of the common good (i.e. by donating it to social, medical and journalistic research).

3. How is your project different from what already exists? [30 words]

DataDonor is the first project of its kind to promote personal data as a form of charitable contribution.

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

In their report to the World Economic Forum — Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class — John Clippinger et al. discuss the explosion of personal data in 21st century. This report, along with increasing media attention, indicate a growing awareness around a formerly esoteric issue. Data advocacy is at an inflection point. More concretely: researchers will submit their projects to DataDonor to gain access to previously inaccessible information; individuals will donate data for the same reason that they make charitable contributions or sign up to be organ donors: to support the causes that they care about. DataDonor is in talks with UCSF and the Harvard Medical School about the possibility of a pilot project.

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

Joel Mahoney is an engineer and serial entrepreneur with 10 years’ experience designing and developing web applications. He was a 2011 Fellow at Code for America. He is currently the Interim Tech Strategist & Evangelist at Code for America.

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

The DataDonor prototype uses OAuth authentication to connect to a range of popular web services. Once a connection is established, data can be continuously accessed by DataDonor and distributed to projects matching a donor’s stored preferences (e.g. Medical > Cancer Research). DataDonor is in talks with Singly.com about the possibility of leveraging Singly’s advanced storage and retrieval technologies as the basis for the DataDonor platform.

7. How would you use News Challenge funds? [50 words]

DataDonor will use News Challenge funds to procure design services, and to pursue partnerships and pilot projects.

8. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

DataDonor expects continued support from the web community (one can imagine the DataDonor badge becoming a seal of approval); it will also use a freemium model to sell advanced visualization and analytics tools to researchers.

“Code for Europe” Launch, Amsterdam

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 22:10:00 -0700

“Code for Europe” Launch, Amsterdam

Can Gov 2.0 be lost in translation? Great talk...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:07:00 -0700

Can Gov 2.0 be lost in translation? Great talk by @jlopezventura at ESADE Barcelona.

Using Maps to Optimize School Decisions with DiscoverBPS

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:03:00 -0800

The following article was published on the Google Geo Developer’s blog.

Every year in Boston, parents navigate the school selection process in an effort to get their kids into the best possible public schools. The process is complicated, and, depending on the outcome, can leave parents feeling frustrated and confused. DiscoverBPS was designed to make the process more intuitive, and to help parents make better choices for their kids.

Iteration #1 - Geocoded Addresses
In our first iteration, we used a home address and grade level to identify a student’s eligible schools, and then displayed the results on a map. In the screenshot below, the green circle represents the student’s “walk zone” (in this case, a 1.5 mile radius appropriate to a 7th grade student), the yellow polygon represents the North Assignment Zone, and the markers represent the schools.

With a little help from Google’s Geocoding and Maps APIs, we seemed to be on our way!

On closer inspection, however, we noticed one school that fell just outside of the walk zone boundary, even though – after zooming in and switching to satellite view – the school campus was clearly overlapping with the walk zone:

Obviously, if our goal was to build a tool to make the process more intuitive, we needed to avoid introducing new ambiguities into the system.

Iteration #2 - School Parcel Shapefiles
To solve the overlap issue, we obtained shapefiles for all of the City’s school properties, and used a PostGIS-enabled database to calculate distances between the home address and the nearest point on the school parcel. In so doing, we were able to calculate walk zone distances, which allowed us to properly identify schools with walk zone eligibility:

After a several weeks of deep-diving into the internals of PostGIS mapping, we seemed to be back on track.

Stepping back, however, a new consideration came to light: was it fair to assume that a 7th grader could walk from downtown Boston, across the Charles River, and to a school in Charlestown in less than 1.5 miles? A Google Directions search suggested otherwise (the route below is estimated at 1.9 miles):

If the purpose of the walk zone policy was to determine which schools a student could reasonably get to on foot (and to discourage parents from busing their kids to schools on the other side of town), our walk zone circle began to seem misleading.

Iteration #3 - Walkshed Mapping
In the end, we decided to use an open source project called pgRouting (which extends PostGIS to provide geospatial routing functionality) along with OpenStreetMap to derive a “walkshed” polygon and to calculate street walking distances. We also could have used the Google Maps Distance Matrix API to calculate walking distance, but opted to go with pgRouting based on the need to create the walkshed polygon. These tools allowed us to then visualize the walkshed in Google Maps:

Aside from being noticeably smaller than the walk zone circle, the walkshed conveys a representation of walkability that is customized to the home address. Notice how the walkshed area is confined by bodies of water that are not spanned by any bridges.

DiscoverBPS is now live at www.discoverbps.org. The walkshed map (which would require policy changes by Boston Public Schools) is being considered for use in 2013.

Code for America Summit, 2011

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:15:00 -0800

Code for America Summit, 2011

Why I'm Coding for America

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:14:00 -0700

The following essay was published in Issue 31 of Next American City.

After college, I took an internship in the urban planning department of a mid-sized, U.S. city. I was excited to learn about urban planning and to see from the inside how cities evolve. Urban planning seemed like an important profession and a likely direction for my own career. But after six months of painstaking progress on a waterfront renewal project (punctuated by constant speculation about the ongoing FBI investigation in City Hall), I decided that public service was probably not for me: too slow and too bureaucratic, I concluded. Instead, I jumped into the fast-paced world of web application development, where I’ve worked for the past 10 years.

During my time developing web apps, I’ve witnessed tremendous innovation in the industry: web servers have been “virtualized” and can now be paid for by the hour; low-level integration tasks have been automated by frameworks like Ruby on Rails; the open source community provides an ever-expanding universe of freely-available source code and tools. In addition, management protocols carried over from engineering and manufacturing have been replaced by Agile methodologies like XP and Scrum, which are better-suited to the iterative nature of rapid prototyping and development. These advancements allow modern web developers to build entire sites (and also companies) virtually overnight, and without the need for massive rounds of funding. As Y Combinator founder, Paul Graham, puts it: “When starting a start-up was expensive, you had to get the permission of investors to do it. Now the only threshold is courage.”

It’s an exciting time to be working in software development, and yet — as one of the first Code for America Fellows — I find myself returning to the public sector. What would prompt me to make such a move? My reasons are summed up in Code for America’s own mission statement: to help city governments become more open, efficient and interactive by leveraging the tools and technologies of web 2.0.

It seems to me that the economic crisis gives elected officials a mandate to go beyond the status quo. Citizens feel a similar responsibility and are engaging in the civic process in new and meaningful ways. I believe that the Internet provides a perfect platform for this kind of dialog and that the potential for innovative gov 2.0 apps is limitless. It may be an exciting time in the private sector, but it’s an exciting time to be working in the public sector, too!

Tocqueville said that America’s greatness lies “not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” To me, that sounds like the description of any good start-up company: wasn’t America a “disruptive technology” when it launched? Doesn’t it have a solid value proposition and a loyal customer base? Hasn’t it refined its mission statement along the way?

Maybe a new dose of start-up culture is exactly what U.S. cities need. Maybe as Code for America advances its work, more lights will be on in City Hall at night and more ramen noodle bowls will be on desks in the morning. Maybe the Next Big Thing will come from City Hall instead of Silicon Valley. And perhaps, as a result, citizens will find new ways to engage in this critical phase of American history.