BarCampBoston3.
I spent most of this weekend at BarCampBoston3, a web/computing/networking/entrepreneurship unconference that left me exhausted when I got home at 8:30 pm and exhilarated now that I'm up at 3:45 pm. For an event that demanded mostly sitting, listening, thinking, and talking, I'm surprised how much it took out of me. One explanation was the absence of any real downtime; there was no buffer scheduled between sessions so conversations were pushed into the breaks. Twitter/blogging/IRC/etc. ate up the spare seconds.
(Photo by jeckman, who gave the Twitter talk.)
I'd heard about BarCampBoston3 (#bcb3, hereinafter) from Shimon Rura when I ran into him at another event (ROFLcon). I got the impression that this was typical of how folks found out about #bcb3. Beyond IRL contact, tweets and blog posts seemed like the primary vectors. Getting there was a trivial walk down Mass. Ave. to the Matignon High School; I'm really going to miss Boston.
Next time I go to a conference, I'm planning on taking notes that I can clean/flesh out into a comprehensive post. Since I didn't this time, I'm just going to briefly hit on the memorable stuff.
Matt McKeon of the IBM Visual Communication Lab gave a talk on the very cool Many Eyes collaborative visualization software and led an open discussion on data visualization. There are great tools out there for finding patterns but I think that grasping the uncertainty in inferences still requires a statistician.
Talked with one the founders of Lingro, a dictionary for language learning. This should be useful for the German project.
The Wearable Computing talk started off with a ten minute introduction to teledildonics. Including a demo. Sort of. Some of the ideas were followed up in the Brain Computing session the next day. The consensus seems to be that getting information into the body is the easy part. There's room for clever stuff, e.g., putting electrical arrays on the tongue, but there's more than enough bandwidth in the typical senses. Getting information out seems more interesting. We may not be able to carry an fMRI around with us but an EEG helmet plus eye-tracking might take us most of the way there.
I had some regrets about the session choices I made on Day 1. tolchocky was pretty incensed when she heard that I missed the Arduino intro and Your 'Fridge on the Web (Roomba!). Same with Better Democracy through Software, although that's more of her interest than mine. I wasted twenty minutes in an Open Education discussion education that never really took off while missing the Public Data Roundtable. Picking sessions is a tricky problem and I still don't have a good idea about the right way to do it. Shopping, i.e., jumping between sessions as they are going, is probably effective but it would ruin a conference if everyone did it.
The after-party, such as it was, was dinner in the back room of the Burren. After putting up with the swimming pool acoustics of the Matignon cafeteria, it was good to be able to speak without strain. Absurdly good luck had me sitting next to and across from computational scientists. There was some solid discussion of molecular dynamics approaches to protein folding and scientific collaboration.
As someone who is Smart and has aspirations to Get Things Done, #bcb3 was a bit painful. Most people there had done really cool things with technology and I felt like a bit of a wannabe. The API talks I made it to (Twitter, Google AppEngine, processing.js, iPhone) were particularly frustrating because they showed how low the barrier of entry could be. The only real solution to this problem is just to go out there and make. I'm just not sure how realistic this is knowing what I know about myself.
(Photo by jeckman, who gave the Twitter talk.)
I'd heard about BarCampBoston3 (#bcb3, hereinafter) from Shimon Rura when I ran into him at another event (ROFLcon). I got the impression that this was typical of how folks found out about #bcb3. Beyond IRL contact, tweets and blog posts seemed like the primary vectors. Getting there was a trivial walk down Mass. Ave. to the Matignon High School; I'm really going to miss Boston.
Next time I go to a conference, I'm planning on taking notes that I can clean/flesh out into a comprehensive post. Since I didn't this time, I'm just going to briefly hit on the memorable stuff.
Matt McKeon of the IBM Visual Communication Lab gave a talk on the very cool Many Eyes collaborative visualization software and led an open discussion on data visualization. There are great tools out there for finding patterns but I think that grasping the uncertainty in inferences still requires a statistician.
Talked with one the founders of Lingro, a dictionary for language learning. This should be useful for the German project.
The Wearable Computing talk started off with a ten minute introduction to teledildonics. Including a demo. Sort of. Some of the ideas were followed up in the Brain Computing session the next day. The consensus seems to be that getting information into the body is the easy part. There's room for clever stuff, e.g., putting electrical arrays on the tongue, but there's more than enough bandwidth in the typical senses. Getting information out seems more interesting. We may not be able to carry an fMRI around with us but an EEG helmet plus eye-tracking might take us most of the way there.
I had some regrets about the session choices I made on Day 1. tolchocky was pretty incensed when she heard that I missed the Arduino intro and Your 'Fridge on the Web (Roomba!). Same with Better Democracy through Software, although that's more of her interest than mine. I wasted twenty minutes in an Open Education discussion education that never really took off while missing the Public Data Roundtable. Picking sessions is a tricky problem and I still don't have a good idea about the right way to do it. Shopping, i.e., jumping between sessions as they are going, is probably effective but it would ruin a conference if everyone did it.
The after-party, such as it was, was dinner in the back room of the Burren. After putting up with the swimming pool acoustics of the Matignon cafeteria, it was good to be able to speak without strain. Absurdly good luck had me sitting next to and across from computational scientists. There was some solid discussion of molecular dynamics approaches to protein folding and scientific collaboration.
As someone who is Smart and has aspirations to Get Things Done, #bcb3 was a bit painful. Most people there had done really cool things with technology and I felt like a bit of a wannabe. The API talks I made it to (Twitter, Google AppEngine, processing.js, iPhone) were particularly frustrating because they showed how low the barrier of entry could be. The only real solution to this problem is just to go out there and make. I'm just not sure how realistic this is knowing what I know about myself.