Unnamed Strengthen-Democracy Project

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Our mission is to bring mass-participation to the funding of projects, in the United States, that strengthen our democracy. We want people donating every month, just like paying for Netflix, or the water bill, to causes that address the systemic issues that impact the robustness and fairness of modern democracy. We will identify issues and their root-causes and identify and fund non-profits that are actively working to fix those root causes.

This project has two key features:

  1. Expectation of monthly donations (avoiding one-off gifts and on-going solicitations)
  2. Addresses the are-they-worthy doubts. We identify the big issues, and constantly re-assess the best ways to make things better. Donors merely pick which areas they care about, (like: just “Better Elections”, “Better News”, or “Balanced Solution Portfolio”) and then pick their monthly-spend amounts.

Initial areas of consideration

  • Better representation in elected officials (anti-extremism)
    • More community-centric representation in districts (anti-Gerrymandering)
    • Better incentives to represent all members of a district/state/country (anti-winner-take-all voting)
  • Better knowledge and critical thinking among electorate
    • Improved access to shared facts (anti-misinformation, anti-fake-news, anti-foreign-interference)
    • Better science literacy
  • Better sense of shared-cause among the electorate
    • Improved empathy between demographics (anti-tribalism)

Criteria of Success

  • Clear identification, understanding, and communication around goals, symptoms, and actions.
  • Broad appeal to Republicans, Democrats, and Others(1).
  • Sustainable financial throughput.

(1) Except for partisans that see gaps in the rules as game-features to be exploited, instead of weakness to be addressed.

Next Steps

  • Refine initial mission and vision
  • Articulate initial operating principles
  • Identify initial symptoms and cures
  • Identify initial set of target charities
  • Build community and get feedback from experts
  • Initial fundraising/pledges
  • Initial Technology & Operations rollout – website, collections, donor advisory fund agreements, etc.
  • Ongoing marketing and operations

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PowerNap (not) on the Oculus Go

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I recently started porting PowerNap from the iPhone to the Oculus Go. The Oculus Go form factor impresses me and I find the lack of cords great for sleeping. When I started re-learning VR development, I thought PowerNap would make a good first-app candidate. I was wrong.

PowerNap Icon for iPhone

PowerNap started on the iPhone so long ago, in 2008. Although there are several apps like it in the App Store today, it was pretty innovative at the time. A power nap, for those that haven’t heard of the term, is just a short, intense nap in the middle of the day. When I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy, we were always dog-tired, and if we could find a free 15 minutes, you bet we would close our eyes and rejuvenate. The risk was in oversleeping, or in needlessly bothering people around you. In your dorm, you could set an alarm, but on-the-go, you would need to set your watch, which was actually error-prone and would definitely annoy people around you. The PowerNap app was created to address the risk of a badly set alarm clock, or sleeping on the go in a library, or in a car.

And before you ask, this came out before the iPhone had a reliable timer function. The risk of setting an alarm for PM, when you meant AM, or reusing an alarm that was meant for certain days of the week, was a real threat. PowerNap was like a fancy count-down timer. It also had awareness that you might be napping, in say, a library, so the alarm would start with mere visuals and haptic feedback, before transitioning to progressively louder audible cues.

Sunrise in VR

PowerNap for the Oculus Go became my first-ever Unity app. I made a bunch of design mistakes, but it basically came together pretty nicely. I really like how I used a gorgeous sun-rise to transition from a darkened VR environment to a brightly lit scene that gently wakes the user. And instead of a boring alarm, birds start to gently chirp after sunrise before an eventual cacophony of birds, alarms, and music, that would be impossible to sleep through. You would annoy your neighbors if it ever reached this point, but by then, it is basically a personal emergency.

Wakey wakey screenshot for Oculus Go

Everything worked out pretty well, until final testing. Despite my app telling the Oculus to never power down, at least while the headset was mounted, the device would always turn off during a deep sleep. The OS detected the lack of movement and cut power to the device This, of course, is a pretty big problem.

Oh well. I ended up making instructions that described how to keep the device awake. This was far from ideal, and I knew it would hurt ratings, but it was the best we could do. I had also learned from my iPhone days, sometime it is smart to create a solution with a work-around, so that when the OS finally improves, you are fully ready to take advantage of the change.

Oculus workaround for device powering down, due to lack of movement.

By the time I finally got everything ready, and got approved by Oculus, they changed the OS, again! The setting was completely gone! Hmm, maybe it simply honored the mount vs. unmounted sensor? Sadly, no, and I got this confirmed from Oculus support. It simply not possible to keep the device awake if the user is super immobile.

2019-05 OS v3.60.36 can not force awake

So, without even a workaround to avoid powering down, PowerNap for the Oculus Go is on hold. I’m eager to test this on Pico and the Vive Wave platform. Let’s hope their purer Android implementations are more flexible. In the meantime, people will just have to sleep in the real world.

1 minute trailer

Update (June 2019): I’ve been working with some great people in Oculus support about this. At their encouragement, I created a bug-report and they’re now investigating to see if this can be fixed in a future OS release. Fingers crossed.

Join team Rave for the DARPA tag challenge

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DARPA is at it again with their Tag Challenge. My buddie and I worked at their last one. They distributed balloons randomly throughout the country. We had a good strategy, trying the enlist people what travelled the country and could spot balloons, like truckers. The problem was that the balloons where really only in city centers, so MIT’s social network found them first. Check out our new team here.

Behavioral Finance for Software Developers and App Publishers

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The Old Schoolhouse

I recently had my 10 year business school reunion. Being the business nerds we are, we had additional classes. Here are some thoughts from one of those:

Behavior Finance by Professor Malcolm Baker

From the session summary:
“At the foundation of finance theory is the idea that investors and managers act rationally… behavioral finance proposes a broader role for social, cognitive, and emotional biases”

Think of it as a bridge between psychology and economics. Economists, basically, work to find the underlying models that best describe how we make decisions in our lives. They don’t believe that we actually do complex math when deciding whether to buy the Tall vs. Grande, but they say, that on average, we all behave as if we were actually doing the the math. Do you wake up and think about your “Expected Utility”? You act like it. Psychologists focus more upon the times when individual act against their best interests. In other words, when their emotions or biases make them behave against the economists model. The press likes to point out the gap between the economists and psychologists, but it isn’t as wide as they paint.

One Hour Crash Course on Behavior Finance

… Read More

I’m running out of disk space …

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I’m running out of disk space on MacBook so I’ve velcroed usb drives to the lid. It makes it heavier, but I’ve gone from 100 G to 460G.

[update]: 2 1/2 years later (Dec, 2009), I’m using the same MacBook Pro.  The primary drive is now a 128Gig solid state drive and the CD-Rom has been replaced with an internally mounted 320Gig HD.  My external, velcro mounted, drive is a 500 Gig HD dedicated to backups.