Day 87

Societal Verification
I'm in Berkeley for a conference on crowd-sourcing arms control verification.  They use the terms "societal verification" and "public technical means" to refer to the concept of verifying treaties and agreements by the lay public.  It's sort of like what SafeCast is doing with privately collected, volunteered radiation data for post-Fukushima Japan.  A fascinating concept.

Glass figures into this as just a harbinger of what people will be using in a few years--technologies to witness, record, and comment on nuclear proliferation activities worldwide.  I shared Glass with several participants during the workshop, but generally kept them in their case since we were using Chatham House Rules of non-attribution.  One panel discussion member (no attribution) while talking about privacy law did say that Google Glass was not a passing fad.  #goodtoknow

However, this evening during the conference dinner, I wore them and, as planned, it sparked a lot of discussion about privacy and the capabilities of wearable technology.  Plus the view of San Francisco Bay from the cafe was glorious from high in the Berkeley hills.  I did get some great photos that almost match the panorama taken with my Droid.

As things were winding down, one diner remarked that she was going to walk the two miles down from the cafe to downtown Berkeley.  She wanted to get down before dark and asked what time it was and when was sunset.  The Glass default screen answered the first question, 7:35, and a simple voice query to Google ("What time is sunset?") returned the second answer, sunset in Berkeley (it correctly surmised my location, of course) was at 8:04.