You Wouldn't Download A Car...

Remember those anti-piracy adverts that tell you that "you wouldn't download a car"? Turns out that soon you could. Although it would cost about £1000 for the printer, as well as the cost of the materials. Oh, and it would be made of plastic. Still pretty cool right? I am of course talking about 3D printing. It's on the up recently and becoming far more accessible. Mainly due to its versatility. So long as it can be made of plastic you can pretty much 3D print anything you want. Need some new cups for a house party? Just download a 3D model and print. Bikes, hooks, even chairs can be 3D printed.

Unfortunately with all of the interesting possibilities for convenience that 3D printing brings, it also brings a lot of problems and controversy. You could easily 3D print stuff from its 3D model rather than actually buying it from the shops. This means that piracy of physical objects could actually become a problem in the near future. People could start downloading Ikea furniture designs, for example, and just start printing them. No need to go to the shop or pay any money to Ikea, even though they own the design. The only way that currently seems viable is a DRM system for 3D model files similar to the DRM on music, games, and video files. It would prevent users from printing certain 3D models if they did not have the rights to them. That being said I personally doubt that it would take a determined individual any more than a few minutes to get around this DRM. After all it's not like it stopped people from pirating music, games, and videos.

The more serious problem with 3D printing will fortunately not be a problem for a while given the current limited availability of 3D printers, as well as the even more limited availability of sturdy enough 3D printing materials. The problem is that it is possible that some time soon it may be possible to 3D print guns. In fact it is actually possible to 3D print guns now, but if they were made of the currently publicly available materials they would almost certainly explode immediately upon their first use. In fact the world's first 3D printed gun was tested by ATF agents some time last year and it blew up in their faces. Unfortunately they managed to later create a second gun using the same design that was made of sturdier plastics and was able to fire at least 8 rounds.

Personally I'm not really that worried for the time being about  3D printed firearms as bullets still need to be acquired or made in order to use them, which can be very difficult. On top of that there's the fact that anyone using them is fairly likely to have the gun explode in their hands, so I doubt they'll become popular any time soon. As for the 3D printing DRM I highly doubt that it will ever completely prevent 3D printing piracy, but to be quite honest there's nothing quite like the genuine product and at least you're guaranteed a certain level of quality if you do buy from the store. I don't think it will kill off buying most products from the store, but it certainly creates many new opportunities like selling 3D models for things to consumers to print and it definitely would be convenient to not have to go down to the shops when your door's coat hanger snaps.

Sources and related links:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19928502
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507654/The-worlds-fully-3-D-printed-gun-tested-Feds-blows-faces.html

Civic Hacking - Be Not Afraid

Hacking, it's a scary word these days. It's often associated with illegal activity like shutting down websites by force, stealing personal data, or stealing accounts from various online services. However hacking can, in fact, have a very different definition. Civic hacking is when "hackers" come together to create a solution to a problem by "thinking outside of the box". In just the same way as some hackers use their skills to figure out a way to use unconventional or never before thought of means to get around the "problem" of the barriers that prevent them from getting into a system, civic hackers use the same skills to figure a way around other problems in order to benefit society by creating open-source software that solves that problem or helps to solve that problem. A great example of this would be the app Ask Dory! that, to quote the opengovdata.io source below, "helps patients find information about clinical trials for cancer and other diseases, integrating data from ClinicalTrials.gov and making use of an entropy-based, decision-tree algorithm".

Plug-in Media | Creative JavaScript and HTML 5 Hack Day

Personally my favourite thing about civic hacking is the hack days (AKA hackathons). Some organisations that have a problem to solve or want to help civic hackers to solve their own problems so they organise events called hack days. At these events civic hackers gather in groups in order to spend a large amount of time (usually a whole day or more) working pretty much flat out on a civic hack project. They are a great place to meet interesting and talented people, as well as get involved with something creative. It is often surprising how much can be done in such a relatively short amount of time by a small group of individuals; many of the projects created during these hackathons are quite impressive and often many will go on to become fully-fledged projects. If you are looking to get into the creative programming or independent app making community/industry then hack days are a great place to start.

Here at Goldsmiths University a few students, including myself, are trying to see if we can get a hack society set up for people who want to organise small-scale hackathons, meet up for civic hack projects, or just plain have a place to regularly meet in groups to get stuff done. If you have an interest in civic hacking or like the sound of a nice place to meet diverse groups from different departments to get some collaborative projects going then please check out the Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/311892885615125/?fref=ts. You need to be a Goldsmiths student with a Goldsmiths email in order to join as it will redirect you and ask you to register a Goldsmiths email with your Facebook account if you haven't already.

On the whole I really love the idea of civic hacking. It takes a term like hacking and completely turns it on its head. It takes skills that would normally be applied to breaking into systems and instead applies them to creating something new and solving real world problems.

Sources and related links:

http://opengovdata.io/2012-02/page/2/civic-hacking-example

http://thegovlab.org/improving-government-through-civic-hacking/

http://www.pluginmedia.net/2011/04/creative-hack-day-at-plug-in-hq/

http://www.meetup.com/UK-Hackathons-and-Jams/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/311892885615125/?fref=ts

#BlogTitle #TwitterHashtags

If you've ever used Twitter then you've probably heard of hashtags. If you haven't, they're basically tags preceded with a # that you put in a Tweet. There are all different kinds of hashtags, if you can think of it then it's probably a hashtag. As for their purpose they have several but one of the main ones is to allow easy following of subjects or events by going to a hashtag's page where it lists all of the posts that use the particular hashtag. Hashtags are also used to find trends in Twitter activity by checking the most used hashtags, and therefore the most common topics of conversation.

Hashtags are actually a surprisingly good way of spreading something fast. Once a hashtag catches on it tends to circulate surprisingly quickly. Many companies have made use of this before as a powerful marketing tool. For example #MakeItCount was a hashtag used by Nike to spread its viral add campaign that encouraged athletes to "make it count" in 2012. This was extremely effective and is known as one of the greatest hashtag marketing campaigns so far.

Unfortunately hashtags can also backfire and become a PR nightmare. One of the funniest accidental hashtag fails was the one created to promote Susan Boyle's album party: #susanalbumparty. That's susan-album-party. It's so bad that it's hard to tell if it was intentional or not. The person creating the hashtag was clearly either one of the best or one of the worst PR people ever. Regardless, it managed to draw an incredible amount of attention and ended up achieving the initial aim of the hashtag by creating a lot of publicity for Susan's album party, even if the attention was not generated in the way originally intended. Another similar example of this kind of hashtag backfire is when the company Research in Motion posted job advertising tweets with the hashtag #RIMjobs.

Hashtags can also backfire in a different way. McDonald's seemed to think it would be a good idea to ask people to share fond memories of their fast food using the hashtag #mcdstories. Unfortunately they mostly ended up getting horror stories of bad service like old food and hair in burgers. Hashtags that backfire in this way are commonly known as bashtags and are almost always the product of a company with bad customer service attempting to get good PR from their (unfortunately unsatisfied) customers.

I suppose hashtags are like any powerful PR tool, they have great potential but also carry great risks. They have great versatility and can be used to spread both the important and the mundane, unfortunately it's usually the mundane. Such is the mentality of Twitter.


Sources and related links:
http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2012/11/5_twitter_hashtag_fails_susanalbumparty_waitrosereasons_childrenslaughterhouse.html
http://geniastevens.tumblr.com/post/49300855808/4-successful-hashtag-campaigns-marketers-should-read

Big Data, Big Controversy

Big Data, what is it, why is it useful, and how can it be controversial? Let's start with the "what". Big Data is a very large amount of formatted or unformatted data, usually collected by an automated system, although not always. It is usually such a large amount of data that it is almost impossible to store or process in one location or on one server. The processing of Big Data is usually handled by methods such as data mining to extrapolate information or statistics from the data; in other cases it can be processed in parallel using multiple privately owned servers, although this is very expensive and is usually only done if reliability of response speed or privacy of data is a priority.

Next comes the "why"; why is Big Data useful? Big Data is often used by large organisations to extrapolate information that is of great importance to their purpose, service, or product. For example Big Data is collected by mobile companies about their customers' phone calls, from which they can extrapolate usage statistics and information like the most frequently used areas. Form this they can find out which areas need to be upgraded to handle a higher call bandwidth and how best to manage their network traffic. Search engines also use Big Data to calculate their search results from databases of URLs and tags, etc. although they usually use their own servers to store and process the data so that search times can be more reliable. Big data can even be used to figure out new cures and treatments for diseases and improve the quality of medical care as is being proposed by the NHS in the for of Care.Data, but we'll get to that later.

Finally we come to the "how"; how can Big Data be controversial? Big Data is often as anonymous as possible. However the problem is that there are so many sources of Big Data out there. Although each set of Big Data individually does not individually identify you, it does include a lot of data that can be cross-referenced with other Big Data to build a profile. This can then be used to narrow down who the data can belong to and eventually can even narrow it down to a single person. This could be used for beneficial purposes, but at the same time it could be used just as easily for malicious purposes like aggressive advertising or identity theft.

One of the most controversial cases of Big Data use is the proposed plan know as Care.Data. The NHS plans to sell anonymized medical records at £1 each. The idea behind this is that the Big Data from the combined medical records can be analysed to easily find ways to improve medical services, as well extrapolate correlations relating to conditions and illnesses that can be used to guide and improve development of new treatments. While it is true that the data could be incredibly beneficial to the medical world, it has also been pointed out that there is little that prevents almost anyone from walking up and buying this data to do with as they please. As mentioned before this could lead to people being matched back to their medical records using large-scale Big Data processing from multiple sources. The extrapolated information could then possibly be used to manipulate elderly and vulnerable people (for example those whose medical records show that they have learning difficulties or dementia) by focusing telemarketing or scams on them. It could also be used to increase insurance costs for people considered "high risk" due to medical conditions.

Personally I think that Care.Data could do a lot more good than harm. But I also believe that there need to be stricter regulations on who can buy the data and for what purpose. Care.Data is just a great idea that needs to be reworked to prevent it from being executed poorly, which is unfortunately a far too common occurrence these days.

Sources and related links:

http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/records/healthrecords/Pages/care-data.aspx

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation