Chris Peterson

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Unlike Snively's "Alaska" post of a year ago - which read, in its entirety, have decided that today I will operate under the assumption that I am in Alaska. Not because it's cold or anything, just because it's a change of pace. Your thoughts on Alaska are welcomed. - I actually was in Alaska earlier this month. My family, while not tremendous travellers, has managed to vacation together during the summer before I and each of my two younger brothers went to college. Since the youngest Peterson will be leaving for school in the fall, and since it's unclear when we'll have the time to vacation as a family again like this, they decided to make it a big one, and so we went to Alaska.

Two nights before we left, though, I was back in my hometown in NH, playing a knock-down-drag-out game of ultimate frisbee with my friends from high school, as we have every Tuesday night of every summer since our senior year of high school. We're all a bit older, slower, and fatter than we were then, but we've kept it going, and I'm pretty proud of that.

Anyway, at the end of the game, I dove for the frisbee at a full sprint. I came up with the game-winning catch, but at the price of torpedoing myself neck-first into the turf.

I'll save you the story of my (entirely satisfactory, as always) visit to MIT Medical, but suffice it to say that several xrays and a diagnosis of torn neck muslces later I was boarding a plane to Seattle in a neck brace.

I have to say, though, a neck brace is THE way to travel. Know those overpriced horse collar pillows they sell for $900 in Hudson News?

It's the same as a neck brace! So while my brothers tossed and turned and fought each other for sleeping space in the cramped confinement of coach, I slept like a baby with my head propped straight up in a brace. If it wasn't for the shooting pains in my neck, back, and shoulders, it would've been the most comfortable I'd've ever been while traveling.

We landed in Seattle, rented a Jeep that had been designed by someone specializing in the art of the physically uncomfortable, and drove to the space needle. But we didn't go to the space needle. First, we went on a duck tour of Seattle.

Now, duck tours aren't all that weird. We have them here in Boston. But I've never before been on a duck tour captained by a man who wore a decorated aluminum trash can lid for a hat and introduced himself as "Bob LaBlaugh." Of course I immediately asked him about his law blog (if you don't watch Arrested Development, you will not get this), and he looked at me in complete bafflement. He then started talking about his mom as he drove us at profoundly unsafe speeds through the city, exhorting us to yell "KA-CHING" every time we drove by a Starbucks and blasting the chicken dance out of earshattering speakers on the bus.

Despite Bob's best efforts, I still managed to enjoy the trip, which gave us beautiful photos of Seattle:

as well as Fremont, which, with its public art, ironic Soviet memorabilia, and bicyclists, rather reminded me of a more overcast Cambridge.

From the top of the space needle, the first thing you notice has nothing to do with the city and everything to do with Mt Rainier, which just dominates the landscape:

We then had dinner down on the wharf, packed (and I use that word advisedly) into our Jeep, and drove two miles into the wilderness, to the town of Leavenworth, WA.

So here's the deal with Leavenworth:

Back in the 1800s, it was founded as a resupply shop on a major railroad line through the mountains, catering to all the things railroads required: wood, coal, taverns, brothels, etc. But when advances in rail technology allowed the railway to save hundreds of miles of travel by taking more direct routes, it left Leavenworth out of the picture, and with no railroad to support it, the town slowly began to shrivel and die.

From the 1920s to the 1960s, Leavenworth was in the throes of a deep depression, and in the early 1960s the town began to reassess its very existence, and how it could continue on existing and not become an abandoned ghost town in the woods somewhere.

I wish I had been at this town meeting, because apparently someone stood up and said something to the effect of "you know, we're in the mountains, and there's snow everywhere: I know, we should become a mock Bavarian Village. So they did. "Barry's Biker Bar" became "The Bar in Berlin", they exchanged leather for lederhosen, and so forth.

So now you go anywhere in Leavenworth, and it's unbelievably kitschy mock-German-village chic. It's like a low budget Disney world where you're exploring Austria in the 1800s.

That said, it is unbearably beautiful:

My brothers went white-water rafting in some class 4 rapids down the road:

And I stayed in and iced my neck while reading Achewood.

The next day, we drove back to Seattle, through the mountain passes that had sustained (and then foiled, and then sustained anew) Leavenworth for so long:

got back to Seattle, and boarded a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship heading north through Puget Sound:

We were on our way to Alaska! As for what happened there...that will wait for my next blog entry...

ChatRoulette collecting IP addresses, screenshots:

Now Andrey Ternovskiy, chief executive officer at Chatroulette has had enough.

“I believe that Chatroulette was great in the first honeymoon days after it was launched, before it was discovered by a strange people, who started to abuse the true freedom and democratic nature of the service,” he wrote on the site’s blog, upset at “difficulties raising venture capital”, dealing with “negative feedback” and doing what he could to ensure the site was still “legally operating in the United States territory.”

Ternovskiy said that he has had a “breakthrough” in dealing with these dramas by applying “the laws of a real world on an internet application.”

“We’ve started collecting information, such as IP addresses, logs and screen captures of offenders who actually break US/UN laws by broadcasting inappropriate content in a specific situations,” he said.

“We’ve captured and saved thousands of IP addresses of alleged offenders, along with logs and screenshots which prove wrong behaviour.

“We are initiating a conversation with enforcement agencies and we are willing to provide all the information we have.”

The end of an era. And I can’t help but feel a strange sort of pity for those who (mistakenly) thought they’d finally found anonymity in ChatRoulette, only to discover they were actually on LogRoulette.

Site here.

This browser extension stops Facebook social plugins—including those within iFrames—from running on sites other than Facebook itself. This includes ‘Like’ buttons, ‘Recommended’ lists, and should also stop any Facebook scripts from tracking your browsing history.

Click. Installed.

From AllFacebook, on a presentation by Google on a rumored new social utility:

The overall theme of the presentation was consistent: we have multiple groups and within those groups there are individuals who we have strong ties with and many more who we have weak ties with. There are also even temporary ties, like the person at the restaurant who served you food last night. While getting the system right on this is extremely difficult, the strong vs. weak ties is something that Facebook has yet to enable users to control.

…

If Paul Adams’ presentation is accepted as one of the primary perspectives of Google on social, perhaps the argument for Google’s new “Facebook killer” would be that there needs to be a more effective user-interface (UI) which helps users to control these various groups. Rather than dismissing it as a service for “advanced” users, perhaps the interface has simply not evolved far enough to give users the actual control that they want.

…

That would support the argument presented by Paul Adams in the slide below which states “If your privacy practices aren’t transparent, then you introduce doubt. Doubt leads to lower usage.” Only Facebook knows how great of an impact the latest privacy fiasco had on the company but it’s clear that Google sees this as a weakness.

If this is true, then Google has precisely the right privacy perspective to outflank Facebook on this issue. And they’re about the only company with the muscle to do it.

During the past two weeks – during which I was on a family vacation to Alaska, which is more desolate and beautiful than you could imagine – I found out, via phone, that I had achieved literary greatness: a letter to the editor published in The New Yorker.

As follows:

As a newly minted and fanatical follower of Eurovision, I greatly enjoyed Anthony Lane’s piece on the contest (“Only Mr. God Knows Why,” June 28th). My only disappointment is that Lane did not mention what has arguably become the most widely beloved phenomenon of Eurovision 2010. The saxophonist from Moldova known as Epic Sax Guy entranced millions with his white Wayfarers, thrusting hips, and muscle vest. Epic Sax Guy has claimed the hearts (and perhaps the minds) of new Eurovisionistas everywhere. He is Eurovision in precipitate form, with all else boiled away until nothing is left but hips and kitsch. Long after we are dead in the ground, Epic Sax Guy’s hips and horn will be thrusting throughout the digital Zeitgeist.

For those of you who’ve missed it:

I was just elected to the board of NCAC.

From their website:

The National Coalition Against Censorship, an alliance of fifty-two participating organizations, is dedicated to protecting free expression and access to information by:

• Providing educational resources and advocacy support to individuals and organizations responding to incidents of censorship
• Educating and empowering the public to fight censorship
• Documenting and reporting on current censorship issues
• Expanding public awareness of the prevalence of censorship and suppression of information
• Working to influence judicial opinions about free expression and access to information by submitting amici briefs.

In light of my work (along with former ABFFE intern Alita Edelman) on mapping banned books, some current members of the board nominated me. I’ll be advising them on a variety of issues, including new media, digital native perspectives on censorship and information issues, and so on.

Excited!

Summer hath come to Boston, as demonstrated by the fact that bitter cold has been replaced by stifling heat and humidity, with the two week interim comfort of "spring" gone all too quickly.

I, however, love summer, for that's when I break out my bicycle.

an actual photo of me with my bicycle (wikimedia)

I began commuting by bike when I was in college, taking the Norwottuck Rail Trail from my house in Belchertown to school in Amherst or to see my girlfriend in Northampton. At the time, it seemed like a nice way to get outside, get some exercise, and get to places, but I never thought I'd become committed to it. But though I hadn't ridden regularly since I was 10 or so, and my mountain bike was far too small and rusty to boot, I quickly fell in love with biking as a means of transportation.

Once I moved to Boston I went to Wheelworks - the best bike shop in the greater Boston area by far - and picked up a nice, simple commuting bike. It set me back a few hundred dollars, but I like to think of that as just a few car payments, plus the health benefits accrued by exercise each morning. Ever since, I've been biking to work every day that it is reasonably safe to do so, meaning any day during which the rain hasn't rain flooded the banks of the Charles (along which I bike) or which it isn't so cold that I could slip up on hidden snow or ice.

Commuting via bicycle has several benefits, especially in a city like Boston. For one thing, it's great exercise: I bike about 8 miles each way, which gives me about 35-40 minutes of a workout in the morning and afternoon. I arrive at work feeling refreshed and without the jumpiness associated with too little exercise. It's a timesaver, too, since my morning workout is wrapped up within my morning commute.

Biking is also usually faster than any other form of transportation. The route to MIT from where I live in the suburbs has poor access to public transit and the roads are clogged worse than Elvis' arteries. During rush hour, door-to-door via car is usually around 45 minutes; via bus, more like 60. Unless I hit all the wrong lights or get a flat, I can speed past all of them on my bike.

Needless to say, it's also greener - assuming the increased calorie intake is offset - and much, much less expensive. And as long as I shower at the Z Center before heading in to work, I'm not even stinkier!

Now, I know what you might be thinking: biking in a city? Why is this deeply psychotic and apparently suicidal man reading my college applications?

There's a smart way to bike, and a dumb way to bike. I bike very carefully, and almost entirely along bike trails that are off-the-road and devoted to cyclists. There are great regional bike maps - not to mention Google Maps Biking layer - that can tell you which roads are safe, which roads are unsafe, and the varying degrees in between. I always recommend driving (or walking, or busing) a route before bicycling it, because sometimes routes can be deceptive.

For example, Massachusetts Avenue, which bisects the MIT campus, ostensibly has bicycle lanes on either side down its entire length; however, the placement of these lanes, sandwiched as they are between the main road and the side parking, makes them somewhat less safe than biking on the shoulder On the other hand, much of Vassar St (another road which bisects campus) has off-the-road bike paths newly installed in the last few years.

If you're not a policy wonk, you may have missed Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood's new policy, which states that "walking and biking should not be an afterthought in roadway design" and will require states and municipalities competing for federal highway funds to include "equal access" for pedestrians and bicyclists. Translation: when roads get fixed in the future, they will be required to add safe, accessible bike lanes to facilitate commuting. So biking will only get better!

I also love the bicycling culture. The bike shops in the area - especially Wheelworks - are all staffed by incredible people who are always happy to show you how to fix something or just hang out. The rear rack on my bike broke the other day, and I went down to Wheelworks and hung out for 45 minutes, borrowing tools and little bolts and getting my hands greasy on their shop floor.

There are also some incredible opportunities for social improvement / justice through bicycling. You can get involved with Bikes Not Bombs, a nonprofit in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston of that works with disadvantaged youth in violent areas, both locally and internationally. BNB runs a bike shop and teaches kids how to fix bikes so they have something constructive to do rather than getting in to trouble. In the last 25 years they've sent over 25,000 bikes to Ghana, Tanzania, Guatamala, New Orleans, and elsewhere.

If you're on the West Coast, you may have heard of the Scraper Bike movement in Oakland. If you haven't, you have to watch this short, wonderful documentary. If it doesn't change your life, it will at least change the way you think of bikes.

"In order to become a member of the Original Scraper Bike Team, you must: Be a resident of Oakland, CA. Be at least 7y/o or older. Retain A 3.0 Grade Point Average (GPA), Create your own Scraper Bike…(It Has To Be Amazing, Or Else You Can’t Ride.) A single-file line when riding. After 10 rides The Scraper Bike King and his Captains will decide if your bike is up to standards and if you can follow simple guidelines. After your evaluation we will consider you a member and honor you with an Original Scraper Bike Team Shirt. Only worn when Mobbin’ Stay posted to our website for all upcoming Scraper Bike Rides..." -- The Scraper Bike King

Bikes can change health, commutes, communities, and the world for the better. Come ride with us!

From Nudge blog:

The process of mentally bucketing money in multiple accounts is often combined with earmarking the accounts for specific goals…While it seems like an inconsequential process, earmarking can have a dramatic effect on retirement saving. Cheema and Soman (2009) found that earmarking savings in an envelope labeled with a picture of a couple’s children nearly doubled the savings rate of very low income parents.

The results by Cheema and Soman could explain why some US financial institutions offer clients the opportunity to label college savings accounts with a child’s name. Saving becomes easier because the money is earmarked for the education of a specific child.

I already do this with my dozen savings accounts from ING Direct – “Car”, “Rent”, “Groceries”, “Vacation”, etc – but it’s nice to have some more empirical validation for what I’m pushing.

Two days ago, Facebook rolled out new privacy tools in a blog post by Mark Zuckerberg.

On balance, the privacy revamp represents a net benefit from where we were in the last few months. For example, Facebook has finally returned to users the ability to control basic information such as whether or not complete strangers can see your hometown.

Additionally, their new privacy dashboard (as illustrated below with a picture from the site):

Is a helpful way for people to begin to visualize what is available to whom if they select one of Facebook’s settings.

But – as is so often the question in policy problems, from health care reform to financial reform to Facebook – the question is not whether the reform is better than what we had, but actually “good enough” to be truly praiseworthy. By way of analogy, of course it’s better to throw a rope to a drowning man than to not throw one at all, but if he is 10 feet from your boat and the rope is two feet long, the effort may not be as laudable as it initially appears .

What more could Facebook have done? It could’ve made Instant Personalization Opt-In. It could’ve integrated some of the great tools like the Facebook Privacy Scanner or Zesty.ca profile mirror. It could’ve shown people what they currently are sharing and tweak it from there on the Dashboard, as opposed to simply giving them four options to pick from (although the four options are good for simplicity’s sake). Finally, it could’ve announced these changes in a big box on everyone’s News Feed – or forced them to visit the new privacy page the next time they visited the site – rather than hiding it in plain sight on the Facebook blog, which almost none of its users read.

I’m not pointing these things out just to complain about Facebook – I’m pointing them out to demonstrate how much Facebook didn’t do in their privacy reform. That doesn’t mean I don’t approve of the changes they did make – I do. But to understand the full context of Facebook’s actions, one must understand what they did and didn’t do. And in that respect, it’s still the latter that is far more striking.