What is Coworking? It May Be Too Much

Raquel Baetz writes about the risks of coworking, which are the same as faced by every worker (e.g., repetitive motion injuries, poor ergonomics, and so on), except independent workers have no one but themselves to supervise their work conditions. She advocates for coworkers to understand and care for their own health.

This month she considers work-life balance, “When home sweet home is at work“. Coworkers value their autonomy, which includes the freedom to work their own hours in a workplace they choose. But this also means that a coworker can work long hours, and in unhealthy ways.

Baetz notes that many workplaces, including coworking spaces, create a “a more home-like experience”, including “rooms that accommodate different styles of working, spaces for fun and exercise, furniture for movement and relaxation, spots to rest and sleep, and free food and drink.” This makes is attractive to spend more time “at work”.

This may seem like a good idea, but it really isn’t good for workers.

Baetz points out the physical damage from long hours of digital work, which strains the body and may lead to debilitating injuries. (I gather she has experienced such problems, and I have too. I think we’d both like to give our younger selves a good talking to.)

As she points out, our digital devices make it possible to work everywhere, all the time—bent over a screen, stressing our body. I love her comment about standing desks:

“Just because you’re standing doesn’t make it OK to look down at your laptop.”

Even more important, Baetz asks “Is it good for the brain?” As she says, the ability to work everywhere all the time is a temptation that is hard to ignore. And it is bad for you, in many ways . Baetz argues that down time, time away from work is just as important for productivity and creativity as, say, “serendipity”.

This comes to an important point that Baetz only lightly touched on. Continuous attention to work, like other digital activities, takes you away from face to face conversation. This is ironic, because the entire purpose of a coworking space is to foster face-to-face interactions.

“So even though free beer after 6pm sounds like a great perk, you’ll likely end up mulling over work or scanning social media while you’re hanging out.”

Baetz says, “turn it off”.

“It’s great that design-led, living room workspaces are being created to increase productivity, collaboration and fun at work, but we shouldn’t underestimate the value of getting away from work and the workspace, both physically and mentally.”

I would add that coworking spaces that are designed to entice people to work longer, and “never go home” are undermining not only the health of the worker but the value of the coworking space itself.

It’s not so much that coworkers should be booted out and told to stop working, nor that coworkers should take care of themselves (though they should definitely do so); the important thing is that they spend time with their fellow coworkers.

During the day, or “after hours”, coworkers need to pay attention to each other. This is a “human engineering” thing, not a “designed space” thing.

This is why successful coworking can happen in the sparsest setting (e.g., in someone’s kitchen ), and may fail in the fanciest designed space.

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1. Raquel Baetz,  (2016) When home sweet home is at work. New Worker Magazine, http://newworker.co/mag/home-sweet-home-at-work/

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(If this topic is interesting, please stay tuned for my new ebook, “What is Coworking”, coming early in 2017)

What is Coworking?

Cryptocurrencies: A Favorite Technology Of Criminals

Cryptocurrencies in the Nakamotoan vein have always be attractive for extralegal transactions, for tax evasion, sale of contraband, digital extortion or other purposes. Economically, it is the equivalent of a “bag of twenties out in the alley”, and seems deliberately designed as an economic weapon.

Many apologists have tried to claim that the legitimate (for certain values of “legitimate”) use cases are increasing, and that it is unfair to focus so much on a few bad apples. “‘Sin’ Activities No Longer Drive Bitcoin Economy, Researchers Find“, reports Pete Rizzo.

Unfortunately, the picture is not really so rosy, because cryptocurrency continues to be primarily used for extralegal purposes, as age old rackets exploit the speed and efficiency of twenty first century technology. This is readily seen in any sample of headlines.

“Bitcoin Has a New Top Dark Market” reports Michael del Castillo. Years after the demise of Silk Road, dozens of dark markets have sprung up to serve your need for drugs, guns, murder for hire, and services. Bitcoin itself has become the bridge between hidden transactions and the legitimate commercial world, i.e., as the laundry. (This function is the basis for some of the claims to increased “legitimacy”: these transactions are classified as “clean”.)

“Demand for Zcash Mining Grows as Blockchain Launch Approaches” says Jacob Donnelly. The original Bitcoin concept prominently promised “transparency” as a crucial feature. This has turned out to be a drawback for the many dark transactions on the Internet, so new protocols such as zcash are coming out which are designed to be entirely opaque.   Let’s be very clear here:  these systems have little purpose other than cloaking transactions, mainly to avoid surveillance by authorities. Nothing good can come from this technology.

Cryptocurrency has found favor in some ancient criminal artforms, bringing them up to the minute. Bitcoin has become a favorite tool of for digital extortionists, allowing them to fully automate their racket. “Bitcoin is Not the Root Cause of Ransomware” reports Peter Van Valkenburgh, but it does fit perfectly into the MO that it might have been deisnged for this purpose.

As a computer scientists I am more than a little embarrassed by how automation has made it so easy for anyone to execute what is basically a mindless racket, over and over, whisking away the proceeds via the internet.  Sigh. Beautiful engineering, for such a low purpose.

Cryptocurrency technology can also be employed in pyramid schemes and similar scams. Some cryptocurrencies are widely believed to be essentially nothing other than pyramid sales schemes, dressed up in fancy terminology.

“London Police Investigate OneCoin Cryptocurrency Scheme” reports Stan Higgins.  In this case, the scam, if any, would be in the story surrounding the technology, and the associated sales programs. The Onecoin scheme is no different from any of hundreds of other multilevel marketing schemes, except they use cryptocurrency as a sort of window dressing, and, of course, to efficiently whisk away the profits. Sigh.

Having reinvented the universally abandoned Gold Standard, and made the world safe for money launderers, cryptocurrency is now invigorating age old crimes and scams with new, highly efficient technology.

This is certainly “disruptive”, though no points are awarded for “innovation”.

How is this a good thing?

 

Cryptocurrency Thursday

Biologic – biofilm for active materials

I have often advocated bio-inspired and biomimetic design, and at the extreme end of that spectrum lies biomaterials—new materials built from biological products or organisms.

A group from the MIT Tangible Media Group are exploring one such material which they term ‘biologic’.

Using a microbe discovered centuries ago in Japan, they are creating hybrid fabrics that respond to humidity. The Natto bacteria expands when the air is humid, making it a naturally evolved “nonactuator”.

The team has done remarkable work to incorporate these living microorganisms into a hybrid “biofilm”, which can be fabricated in configurations to perform useful behavior (e.g., to allow more air flow for cooling). They have also worked out methods for actually building these ideas. (A glance at their videos shows just how non-trivial that part truly is.)

This group has adapted ideas for “responsive structures”, which have been used in “origmi” robots, and self-assembling furniture, etc.. In this case, the expansion and contraction of the biofilm is turned into useful work by the origami style folding. Combinations of simple curved and angular bending are used to create structures that change shape in 3D.

The actuation is driven by humidity, so they experimented with techniques for rapidly wetting and drying the film. In principle, these mechanisms should make it possible to control the action of the film.

They also developed an “ink jet” deposition system for fabrication, which is kind of neat. (See the video.)

They have demonstrated some applications.

One is a cute tea bag timer, which has a leaf shaped flag that unrolls as the bag is saturated, indicating when the tea is ready to drink. I didn’t really need this, but it’s really cool!

Another application is “second skin”, which is a garment that opens ventilation holes in response to sweating. In this way, the garment adapts to the activity of the wearer, to help keep cool. The biofilm requires no batteries, and is completely automatic.

Other origami like applications are also possible, items that fold or unfold in response to humidity and heat. They point out that the microbe is food safe, so we could imagine “actuated food”. I’m not sure I’m ready for my fish to start wriggling, but it might be cool to have something like cookies that not lonely look like, say, animals, but actually move!

One thing that isn’t really clear to me is just how rugged this material might be. Does it “die out”? How long does it live? It is sensitive to high heat, soap, or other chemicals?

The latter point is important for use in garments: can I wash it without killing the cool biofilm? Will it die if I leave in the sun, or in a dark drawer, or the freezing luggage compartment of an airliner? What happens if you get caught in the rain, or swim in it? What happens if I dry it over a campfire?

Anyway, well done, all.

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1. Lining Yao,, Jifei Ou, Chin-Yi Cheng, Helene Steiner, Wen Wang, Guanyun Wang, and Hiroshi Ishii, bioLogic: Natto Cells as Nanoactuators for Shape Changing Interfaces, in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2015, ACM: Seoul, Republic of Korea. p. 1-10.

What is Coworking? It Reproduces an Artists Coop

When considering the question “What is Coworking?”, it is clear that there are many precedents that contribute to the concept of coworking spaces and coworking communities. In my forthcoming book, I show that these influences include telecommuting, digital nomadism, high tech office spaces, business incubators, design studios, maker spaces, and so on.

Maira Sutton writes this week about another partial inspiration for coworking, “artists cooperatives”. This piece made me think about these worker owned enterprises, and how they relate to coworking spaces an coworking communities.

“Art Co-ops and the Power of Mobilizing Collaboration for Creativity“

The age old idea of artists banding together to share studio space and resources, and to collaborate and stimulate creativity has moved into the digital age.

Creative artists live in a highly digital world, and live or die by the vagarities of digital commerce. Artists are also “first adopters” for digitally augmented cooperatives, which match the collaborative ethos of working artists.

Sutton notes Stocksy United, which is a well known digital artists cooperative. The technology is standard stuff used by corporate and other enterprises, but the business model is organized as an artists cooperative, which is cost effective, fair, and gives the site artistic “integrity”.

In other words, the cooperative model is a good match for this business (commercial versions of which are known for cut throat and blood sucking practices).

Sutton reports on another coop, CoLab (in Ithaca, NY) (not to be confused with this or this or the dozens of other organizations with the same name that pop up in Google), which is a digital design studio serving mission oriented enterprises. Again, the technology and design are identical to commercial operations, but the business is organized as a coop, which, again, offers both cost and “integrity” advantages.

In this case, the cooperative is actually a distributed group, including remote workers. Not surprisingly, they use Loomio and other digital communications to cooperate and collaborate.

Sutton describes an interesting variant on the “kickstarter” idea, exemplified by Meerkat Media, which is a digital production company that operates as a worker owned cooperative. The collective ownership gives the artists more creative opportunities as well as a better deal financially.

Sutton extols these examples of “Restoring the Cooperative Tradition”, and her story makes it is clear that properly designed digital technology is a good match for these types of organizations.

I have pointed out that these worker owned cooperatives are a good match for their goals and values, especially when their customers and stakeholders are mission oriented or creative artists.

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What does this have to do with coworking?

Clearly, the notion of independent workers banding together to share resources and collaborate is one of the inspirations for coworking spaces. If it works for artists, let’s do the same thing for programmers and other professionals.

Indeed, the descriptions of the artistic groups echo many of the reports from coworkers. Sutton’s title refers to “the Power of Mobilizing Collaboration for Creativity”, which could be the motto of many coworking spaces.

However, many, and probably most coworking spaces are not organized as coops (though many are not-exactly-for-profit enterprises). There are many reasons for this. Coops are hard, legally and sociologically. Coworkers are highly transient, and their commitment is short term and contingent. Many coworkers are not “mission oriented”, and many are technically one person corporations.

Nevertheless, I observe that coworking communities often act extremely similar to formal coops, inviting participatory decision making, and sharing resources. For that matter, communities of coworkers operate very similarly to the communities in artists communities. Ideas are freely shared, people help each other, collaborative projects are born and executed, and so on. And coworkers are happy to belong to their community.

Honestly, I suspect that most coworkers don’t care about the details of the legal structure of the coworking operation. They care about their fellow workers and how they interact with them.

The main point is that coworking seems to capture the essence of an artist coop, without the formal organization or ideological commitment to worker ownership. One could conclude that, one way or another, independent workers should band together in communities of peers. The diversity of ways that coworking spaces operate shows that you don’t necessarily need to organize as a cooperative to achieve many of the benefits.

Organizing as a cooperative is important for other reasons. Obviously, workers get a much better deal from worker owned enterprises (which is why many coworkers are happy to be independent contractors). Furthermore, a worker owned cooperative is a very close match to the kind of work community that coworking seeks to foster. Not only a room full of workers like me, but a room we own and operate together. In fact, participating in a coop requires more commitment, and therefore creates greater identity with the community.

One final consideration is that joining a cooperative is a much longer term commitment. Coworking is, by definition, a short term commitment, sometimes as little as a few hours. The challenge for coworking communities is to sustain a group of highly transient workers. Organizing as a cooperative makes workers commit to each other in a more permanent way.

For this reason, I think cooperatives may be more “sustainable” than coworking communities. The prospect of a relatively stable career over many years is good for many workers, especially workers with families. This is one of the biggest unanswered question marks in coworking and the gig economy in general: how well can workers sustain a full lifetime career?

 

What is Coworking?

(Stay toned for my new ebook, “What is Coworking?”, out ins early 2017)

Augmented Reality Food Explainer App

From the Ideo and MIT CoLab, Pickl, a concept app to improve food shopping, including some Augmented Reality features. (CoLab is really into blockchain things these days, but this particular project doesn’t foreground that technology.) The AR caught my eye, though it turns out to be an extremely insignificant part of the app.

The statement of the problem gives us a good idea of what they are trying to do. “Finding food that is good for you and the planet” is “complicated” and takes hard work if it is even possible. Worse, the “food shopping experience” is highly “manipulated”, and we can’t trust food labels.

The idea is to build an app to help “navigate” this difficult problem as easily as possible.

Pickl, the App

The basic features are a profile of your preferences (which apparently might include stereotyped guesses based on, say, your political party affiliation ?!), and a plethora of data sources about food in the store. The app does various simple filtering and matching, to point you to the choices that fit your inferred preferences.

The AR component is basically overlaying information on the physical store. This might point you to the items on your list, or give you rankings of the items on display.

It turns a quiet walk to the market into an information intensive tooth-grinder, working hard to “optimize” which apple you buy.

Where does the data all come from?

This is a concept app, so it is mainly to teach us what we might want an app to do. While the app itself is not especially brilliant, it does clearly show one of the big pieces missing today: where would you get all that cool information?

First of all, much depends on their user profile. The initial concept is to collect some self report data, and, we assume, use some statistical models to infer food preferences from the personal profile. I note that this could well be extended to use other information, such as social media profiles, and even data from social media. It might even make inferences, e.g., from recent social history, connections to other people, and your ratings of restaurants. It should also know about the household—who is eating and cooking together.  There might be other semantics baked in, such as geographic or cultural specifics.

The filtering and matching algorithms are pretty simple, and there is lots that could be done to make them snazzier—providing we have a rich sea of information at our fingertips, information that is tied to the specific food on offer, and information that is valid and trusted. If we had all that, we could build any number of interesting apps.

But where do we get all that info? This is a big problem, not least because there are competing interests here. Suppliers want to sell as much as possible, and are motivated to “manipulate” buyers to buy. Why would they provide all this information, so you could decide to not buy their products? And why would we trust what they report, anyway?

I note that this is the problem that provenance.org is tackling, and they are using blockchain technology.

Furthermore, some of the fantasies are truly expansive. John Brownlee comments in FastCo,

“When scanned by Pickl, you could learn anything you wanted to know about that fruit. Not just its nutrients, its type, or how many calories it is, but how much energy it took to grow it, the path it took to get to your supermarket, how much CO2 it is responsible for, and even what its specialties are: for example, if it’s a better apple for baking than juicing.”

Socioeconmic critiques

I found the problem statement at least a little problematic, because it is so clearly tackling rich people’s problems. More precisely, it is tackling the problems of young, trendy design students.

The scenarios involve designing clever menus and then shopping for ingredients. This isn’t the way everyone does it. The examples are people shopping and cooking for themselves, i.e., the app doesn’t have to consider anyone else’s preferences, just the one user.

I think the app could well deal with variations, e.g., a weekly shopping trip, and planning menus for a family. But it is clear that the designers haven’t considered the issue in this first concept.

The whole enterprise assumes that food is abundant and you have a choice of multiple sources. Furthermore, it assumes that you care about meta issues, such as “finding food that is good for you and the planet”.

Not everyone has the luxury of choice, and not everybody thinks so philosophically about their chow.  Some people don’t care about dinner, so long as it is fast and easy.

Weak Political Analysis

The political agenda is clearly stated, if not carefully analyzed. The problems include “manipulation” and trust, and also a preferences for certain sources and practices, e.g., local and sustainable stuff. The app is designed to solve these issues by putting information in the hands of customers, and honoring preferences of the customers (rather than the corporate suppliers).

“The hope is that Pickl will put pressure on vendors and supply chains to source foods more responsibly and make ingredients more transparent.”

Furthermore, all this information has to be nearly free (what good would it do if there is a steep subscription fee?), but it would certainly cost quite a bit to maintain an up to the minute, extremely accurate database. Actually, probably many different databases.

In other words, I don’t immediately understand the business model here.

How will this happen?

I guess the logic is that if people have apps like this, then vendors will want to be visible in the app. I.e., if the app sees something that has no data available, it may black it out or mark it as undesirable. (I.e., the app will “manipulate” the shopper’s experience.)

Will this work? Can consumers “manipulate” the behavior of the food suppliers, instead of the other way around? Who knows.

I think it is safe to assume that there will be data sources and apps created by suppliers and retailers which will “manipulate” the experience to their own financial advantage. Can a consumer-oriented app compete successfully? Again, no on knows.

A Useful Concept Piece

This app is a useful concept piece, making the ideas concrete enough to easily imagine how you would want it to really work.

Sure, I was able to poke lots of holes in it—that’s kind of what it is for, no?

And most of my criticisms are things that definitely could be handled with some additional design.

The huge, huge missing piece is trustworthy supply chain data. This is why things like provenance.org <<link>> and other projects at MIT and elsewhere are so important. If we get that working better, than we can create as many apps as we want, and let natural selection kick in.

Book Review: “Crosstalk” by Connie Willis

Crosstalk by Connie Willis

The latest novel from perennial favorite Connie Willis examines contemporary “connectedness”, not only via digital networks but with the additional twist of full blown telepathy. If you think life is hectic with a constant flood of phone, text, and social media “communication”, imagine if you people could also just talk brain to brain!

As the story unfolds the people constantly misunderstand each other, and the more “communication” there is, the less understanding seems to occur. The reader is treated not only to private and public conversations, but we also watch people fail to grasp what is happening, or literally talk themselves into believing crazy stuff.

Willis returns to earlier explorations of psychology and parapsychology (e.g., Passage (2002)), this time taking a stab at how telepathy would really work if it were real. Obviously, telepathy doesn’t work the way she says (or at all), and her fantasies about brain surgery and a simple single trait genetic mechanism are bogus, as is the hope of the sleazy tech barons who want to replicate the effect in a phone, and ideas for “jamming” it.

All that stuff is just silly.

Sometimes I complain about this kind of illogic,  but in this case Willis makes it work because (a) she writes well and (b) she is telling a story about communication, privacy, and intimacy. The technical details aren’t important to the main point about how people communicate (poorly), and the notion that adding more channels and media doesn’t make it better. More bandwidth probably makes it worse.

The story itself is exhaustingly fast-paced and complicated. I lost track of the number of plot twists, major plot twists, that occur. At points I had to put the book down because I just didn’t have the energy to keep going.

Much of the story is told as complicated internal mono- and dialogs, mixing multiple speeches, out loud and in-your-head. When telepathy is happening, then both the internal and external words may be heard at the same time, though you may not know who is listening, and have little control over what you overhear.

It’s all very confusing, as it would be if you were telepathic.

You should be convinced by this story that if telepathy were possible, you wouldn’t want it anyway. It’s a bad idea for many reasons.

And, of course, she is leading us to think the same about our contemporary hyper-connected technology. We probably shouldn’t want it, because it’s a bad idea for many reasons.

By the way, along the way, Willis sketches out some designs for smartphone features that are very plausible, and really, really should exist. I expect they will be available soon, if not already. It would be nice if she at least gets credit for advocating them.

In the end, this is a good book, if more than a little overwhelming.

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1. Connie Willis, Crosstalk, New York, Del Rey, 2016.

 

Sunday Book Reviews

Did Dinosaurs Sing?

Very possibly not.

In this great age of dinosaur science, we are learning more and more about dinosaurs and other ancient species, including what they looked like, how they moved  and how they lived.

One thing we really know very little about is what dinosaurs sounded like.

We also have a sketchy understanding of the evolution of birds, i.e., the avian dinosaurs. Setting aside the messy “missing link” question (just how and when did birds diverge from their cousins the dinosaurs?), we know surprisingly little about the history of the key features of birddom:

• Flight!
• Feathers!
• Eggs in Nests!
• Song!

We know that there are early birds, contemporary with other dinosaurs, which had feathers (check) (and so did non-avian dinos) and nests (check) (and so did non-avian dinos), but we’re not sure about flight (probably some did, others may not have) (and non-avian dinos may also have flown).

But what about the most attractive feature of all, birdsong?

Our contemporary world is filled with bird and insect songs, at least if you can make the humans quiet down. Did the dinosaurs hear a chorus of birds? What might it have sounded like. And, if so, did non-avian dinos also sing? Or is that something uniquely avian?

Inquiring minds would like to know.

Julia A. Clarke,  and an international team of colleagues report this month a recent fossil find from Antarctica (which is a neat place to be paleontolgizing, no?), with the syrinx of an ancient bird [2]. The syrinx is the anatomical structure in birds that support their unique vocalizations, i.e., the honks, whistles, and songs.

The researchers note that very few remains of the syrinx are known in the fossil record, so this find is the oldest and only one from the time of the dinosaurs.

Interestingly, no similar finds are known for non-avian dinosaurs; which do have feathers and other features in common with birds–but not this distinctive sonic organ. This raises the possibility that dinosaurs could not chirp/honk/tweet, at least not the way birds do.

In fact, this particular specimen may suggest that modern vocal production might be a relatively recent evolutionary innovation, preceded by metabolic changes and feathered ornamentation. The researchers note that this possibility is interesting given current hypotehses about the importance of vocalization for the development of social structure and possibly the development of larger brains.

This fossil also suggests that there is a complicated evolutionary story to unravel, elucidating the relationships of social and mating behavior to brain, display, and vocal communication. Did birds sing, and then evolve brains to use vocal signals? Or were birds communicating to each other, and then singing evolved into a new channel?

These are deep and interesting questions about our favorite cohabitants on this planet.

In any case, it is possible that birdsong as we know it is a fairly recent development, and something that is unique to avians.

Cool!   As Patrick O’Connor comments,

“Clarke and colleagues have uncovered one key piece of that puzzle in a small bird fossil from Antarctica, foreshadowing the soundscape of things yet to come during avian diversification.” [2]

1. Julia A. Clarke, Sankar Chatterjee, Zhiheng Li, Tobias Riede, Federico Agnolin, Franz Goller, Marcelo P. Isasi, Daniel R. Martinioni, Francisco J. Mussel, and Fernando E. Novas, Fossil evidence of the avian vocal organ from the Mesozoic. Nature, advance online publication 10/12/online 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature19852
2. Patrick M. O’Connor,  Palaeontology: Ancient avian aria from Antarctica. Nature, advance online publication 10/12/online 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature19480

 

What is Coworking? It Could Be A “Co-Workation”

Digital Nomads  are some of the original and happiest coworkers, bebopping around the world, hacking away on their digital projects from wherever they please. And while the vast majority of coworking spaces are very, very mundane, there have always been a handful of “destination” workplaces, such as Hubub (Bali), The Surf Office (Santa Cruz) place, and so on. Not surprisingly, these places seem to be booked up for months in advance (unlike your local coworking space, which has open desks whenever you want! 🙂 )

Charlie Sorrel snarks at fast company about a recent trend, packaged “co-workations”.  In an earlier post, I noted Nader Luthera’s “CoWork the World” expedition, and apparently there are real businesses that do this. It’s a thing now: assemble a group of people who want to travel together to “exotic” locales and spend some of the time there working via the internet.

Sorrel is cool to the whole idea. I take that back. He is hostile to the idea.

“The Latest Way To Annihilate Your Work-Life Balance”, he calls it. Likening it to “summer camp”, it’s “like backpacking trips without the backpacks or exploration, but with all the “fun” of a backpacking hostel”. And why would your want to travel to “an exotic, faraway location only to spend most of [your] time on the internet”?

As he says, not everyone will like it.

I think success depends mainly on the “curation” of the participants. The intended audience is “location-independent professionals”, which generally means young, single digital workers. I’m not seeing kids or pets being a plus for these expeditions, and it would be difficult to care for aging parents or many other “grown up” behaviors.

Sorrel makes a good point that it is pretty easy to travel, and ever easier to work while on “vacation” if you really want to. So why do you want to hang out with a bunch of “digital nomads”?

Sure, I get it. I did some bohemian things when I was twenty something,  had fun hanging with other kids, and travelled a bit. Mixing in remote working? I don’t really get that.

I would note that one of the principle benefits of coworking is the sense of belonging and the conviviality and networking that comes from a community of peers. I have to wonder just what kind of community these co-workations develop, and whether these travelling coworkers perceive gains in creativity and productivity typical of most coworkers. While my memory is somewhat hazy, I don’t recall my bohemian days as especially productive, and if there was much of a “feeling of community”, it didn’t last much beyond tonight’s party.

As to the idea that these feckless youths are “professionals”, I guess my notion of “professional” is a bit out of date. Frankly I have to wonder who would hire a worker who has no permanent address and proposes to “dial in” from some tropical hostel, who knows where. Someone who I can never meet in person, and is so self-centered that he chooses to loll about in Bali or wherever, and to heck with you drones back in the city.

For that matter, if I am trying to build systems that are relevant to real people, or even that tackle important social needs, just how useful is the creative input of a rootless nomad who doesn’t live in the world we are targeting?

(Perhaps it is telling that the most successful digital nomads seem to be in the travel business and in the “motivational” industry. E.g., see Jacobs.)

I suspect that the main point is to travel and have fun, and I grant that it is probably more fun than working the same old urban environment. But I doubt that this is a great formula for working, or for solving problems, at least not for very long.

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1. Kimberley Mok , Can co-working vacations offer a better work-life balance?, in Treehuggger. 2016. http://www.treehugger.com/culture/coworkations-better-work-life-balance.html
2. Charlie Sorrel, The Co-Workation: The Latest Way To Annihilate Your Work-Life Balance, in co.exist. 2016. https://www.fastcoexist.com/3064200/the-co-workation-the-latest-way-to-annihilate-your-work-life-balance

 

What is Coworking?

Ethereum Under Attack

Apparently, Ethereum is not out of the woods yet. After a catastrophic crash, and equally disastrous recovery via hard fork this summer , Ethereum seems to be under determined assault by unknown hackers. The attack appears to be motivated by the controversial re-writing of history to undo the DAO heist.

Internet DDOS attacks are hardly novel or newsworthy these days, pretty much anyone can do it to pretty much anyone. But this case has several important lessons for Cryptocurrency, Blockchain and “Smart Contract” enthusiasts.

First of all, this crypto-blockchain software is just as vulnerable as any other to common attacks, and, indeed, is far more vulnerable than conventional “centralized” services because it operates in so many machines under so many different authorities. The entire idea of blockchains is to disperse responsibility widely, and this means that there are a plethora of targets.

Furthermore, the attacks have generally slowed the network, degraded performance of mining operations, and generally driven nodes of the network.

This impacts everyone, even if they are running software that is not infected or buggy. It also threatens the existence of the system, because latency and too few nodes can be as bad as loss of service.

Second, I note that the only reason the network is still operating is that a “centralized” group of programmers has responded to the attacks and patched the code. “Decentralized” software engineering tends to be slow and ineffective in the face of system critical attacks.

Third, some of the attacks, like the infamous DAO melt down, use the very “smart contracts” that are the core feature of the system. The general rule of thumb for computer security is “if it can be programmed, it can be hacked”.   “Smart contracts” are an ideal way to insert spam into the network, and the attackers are using this capability.

I note that many enthusiasts believe that these attacks are deterred or even infeasible because of transaction fees. Just as postage fees have never stopped junk mail, the Ethereum “Steam” charges don’t seem to be deterring these attacks. For one thing, microfees are, well, microscopic. The estimated $3,000 that has been expended paying for these attacks is small potatoes to a serious operator.

In general, I’m sure that any system with low enough fees for mass adoption, has low enough “postage” that spammers are not going to be deterred.

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In summary, these troubles are neither surprising, nor likely to abate. They also reveal some of the faulty reasoning underlying both cryptocurrency and “smart contract” technologies.

Can something like this happen for other systems, such as Bitcoin? Absolutely. It will be more expensive to attack, but the payoffs could be much higher for some actors.

Could this happen to zero-knowledge coins? Of course. If anything, stronger anonymity can only help spammers and crackers.

Could this happen for “private blockchains”? Not in the same way, because the network can and will cooperate to block out spam and to patch bugs.

Will formal verification solve this problem? Of course not, though it may reduce the vulnerabilities from “a plethora” to merely a millliplethora of bugs.

 

Cryptocurrency Thursday

Deltu Robot – Tres Cool!

Designer Alexia Léchot of Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) presents Deltu, a strange and useless little robot that wants to play with you.

First of all, I love the completely non-humanoid body for this robot. It’s not human, so why should it try to look human? And it is flat out fascinating to watch how it operates, elegant and simple.

But…even if he (this appears to be the preferred pronoun) doesn’t look human, he exhibits a very definite personality and intelligence, apparently desiring attention from humans, and wanting to best us at his games. so cool!

I admit that I was astonished by the way the robot can manipulate the touch screens. Apparently his artificial finger is close enough to human to work.  I wonder how that is made.

It is also kind of cool that the robot takes selfies—very useful for documenting the project. (He can probably make phone calls and purchases, too.  And boast of his victories on Twitter. Why not?) I guess this would be “humanoid” but not “intelligent” behavior, no?

What a lovely project! Very nice work.  I look for great things in the future from Sensei Léchot.

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By the way, I rule that this robot definitely is not an inappropriate use of a touchscreen!

 

 

Robot Wednesday