Michael Dowse

How incentives saved Darwin's man-eating crocodiles

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:53:15 +1300

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to attend a post-conference dinner at Crocodylus Park in Darwin, Australia. We ate outdoors surrounded by over a thousand crocodiles while Grahame Webb, the founder of the park, spoke to us about his work saving the crocodiles from extinction.

My favourite solutions involve aligning incentives to achieve the desired result, and the story of Darwin’s crocodiles is a good one.

Saltwater Crocodiles are reasonably common around Darwin, and they’re dangerous. They grow up to 5 metres long, can weigh up to half a tonne and eat people. Not regularly, but it happens. At a visitor centre in Darwin I flicked through a folder of news clippings on crocodile attacks, reassuringly the attacks are uncommon enough to be newsworthy.

Since their arrival in Australia the settlers hunted crocodiles for their skins, their meat, and because they were a threat to people and livestock. By 1973 the crocodile population was in danger and the focus switched from hunting crocodiles to helping then survive as a species.

However by 1980 the crocodiles were doing too well. The wild population was thriving and during 1979-80 there were four serious attacks on humans by crocodiles, two of which were fatal.

While conservationists were patting themselves on the back for saving the crocodiles from extinction, the general population was increasingly unhappy with the growing population. There were calls to start hunting crocodiles again.

At this point saving the crocodiles became a matter of convincing the community not to kill them all.

The proposed solution was to make the crocodiles as environmentally valuable to the community as possible, such that the economic value of the crocodiles would outweigh the threat they posed.

To the chagrin of many conservationists Webb turned is efforts to finding ways to derive economic value from the crocodiles. That’s how Crocodylus Park came to be. It’s not the only one, we drove past other crocodile farms .

“If the public valued crocodiles for economic reasons, added to their other values, there was public support for their ongoing recovery.” - Grahame Webb

During my trip to Darwin the town was flooded with people. University students partying after exams. Tourists from around the country enjoying the school holidays. The came for the mild weather, the national parks, and the crocs.

How Club Penguin teaches charity

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:05:00 +1300

Yesterday I heard Lance Priebe, the co-founder of Club Penguin speak at AnimFX 2011. I was looking forward to his talk because Club Penguin is kind of a big deal. It’s a safe virtual world where children can play games and chat with each other. With over 150 million users between the ages of 6 and 14 it’s the most popular child oriented site around. Ask any 10 year old and chances are they’ll be able to tell you all about Club Penguin.

The whole story of Lance told of growing Club Penguin from a side project to an acquisition by Disney was remarkable, but the highlight for me was hearing about their Coins for Change program.

In Club Penguin kids earn coins by playing games, and then they can spend those coins on stuff like clothes for their penguin and decorations for their igloo. Each year when Christmas comes around, the kids are given a choice: they can buy themselves presents with their hard earned coins, or they can donate them by throwing them in a well. This is Coins for Change.

Every year Club Penguin produces a video showing what happens to the coins. You see the coins fall down the well (which looks more like a cauldron) and travel through an underground pipe until the pipe surfaces in Africa. The coins fly out of the pipe and into the hands of African children (at this point we switch from cartoon animation to video footage).

In halting english, the African children explain the impact that the coins donated by Club Penguin members has had on their lives. They show off the schools and playgrounds that have been built, and they say thank you, a lot. Watch the 2010 Coins for Change video here. This is the reward for donating.

Last year Club Penguin members donated over 12 billion coins, or about one million US dollars. That represents the decisions of millions of children around the world to forgo a new igloo decoration and donate to charity instead.

It will be a few years before Club Penguin’s users face decisions like this in real life but through their penguins they’re already learning how charity fits into their lives and how rewarding it can be to donate.

We’ve added images!

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:36:59 +1300

We’ve added images!

Fixing Kiwibank's Account Number Fields

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:33:00 +1300

In Kiwibank’s online banking the Account Number is split into four fields. To copy an account number you have to either copy and past in sections, or type it out. I do this a couple of times per week whenever I pay someone new. After months of mild irritation I wrote a Chrome extension to automatically change the 4 fields into one field which strips out hyphens and whitespace and reinserts the number into the original 4 fields. It then shows the number in the original fields so I can check it’s correct.

I’m sure Kiwibank have their reasons but I think it’s safer this way. Copy/pasting the whole number is far less error prone than typing out the number, and I still get to review the number in it’s correct format to make sure it copied correctly.

I’m not publishing the Chrome extension, but the javascript is here: https://gist.github.com/1247125.

Camping by the Waikato river

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 21:27:33 +1200

Camping by the Waikato river

Photo

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 22:03:21 +1200

"I may be wrong but I think the idea of legacy is for fools. We will all be dust. Everything we think..."

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 22:48:41 +1200

“I may be wrong but I think the idea of legacy is for fools. We will all be dust. Everything we think we made will be dust.”

- Alex Bogusky

Subliminal Stimuli

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 02:48:00 +1200

Yesterday I signed up for Spotify. Pick a song, any song, Spotify lets you play it instantly, on your computer, or your phone, or your ipod. For someone like me who loves music but can’t be bothered keeping their local music library up to date it’s a game changer.

The free account I’m on is loaded up with free advertising and the major launch partner is Coca Cola, so for a few hours my music listening was occasionally interrupted with ads for Coke*.

Suprise suprise, later that night I felt like a glass of Coke. I knew it was probably the advertising to blame as I’ve barely been drinking Coke for the last year. I try not to be influenced by ads, and I knew I was being influenced, so it should have been easy to pick a different drink from the fridge. But I really wanted Coke.

Ten minutes and $2.40 later I was back on Spotify with a glass of Coke in my hand.

—

Today I watched a series of Derren Brown videos on Youtube. Derren demonstrates conversational hypnosis, subliminal advertising and the like.

When he’s not convincing people to hand him their wallets, or persuading the bookie that his losing ticket is in fact “the dog you’re looking for”, the most interesting parts of his videos are the comments from the victims.

In particular their are a few videos where he’s playing his tricks on psychology professors and students. These guys know what he’s trying to do, they even understand how he’s trying to do it. But they still can’t beat him in his mind games.

This led to me thinking about how our subconscious is easily influenced by everything around us, yet we rarely understand exactly how and to what effect we are being influenced.

—

* Yes, I think Spotify is worth the ads, but I am looking into their premium accounts.

166 Years

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 19:47:02 +1200

In August of 1844 a German explorer named Ludwig Leichhardt departed Sydney to explore the inland section of Australia now known as the Northern Territories.

The expedition party initially numbered 10, but two turned back and another was killed in an attack on their campsite by aboriginals (natives). The remaining 7 completed a 3,000 mile overland journey to reach Port Essington in December of 1845.

During this journey Leichhardt’s party became the first Europeans to encounter the aboriginals of the Kakadu region.

The aboriginals were hunter-gatherers, using stone to make tools and charcoal for fires. They drew pictures of the foods they ate on rocks to serve as a survival guide that lasted many generations. They’d been living this way for more than 50,000 years, surviving an ice age along the way.

A complex kinship system was used to describe how people relate to each other. In the kinship system people identify those around them as mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, potential marriage partners, etc, regardless of their blood relationship.

In hindsight, studies have shown that the aboriginal kinship system is the best method ever encountered to avoid incest and keep bloodlines diverse within a small community.

166 years later I’m standing in Kakadu National Park along with a couple of hundred other tourists to watch the sunset. Other than some pictures carved into the rocks there’s no sign of the aboriginals that used to live here. The park ranger mentions another park ranger who has aboriginal blood, but that’s the closest we get.

Clouds are obscuring the sunset so I’ve got my iPhone out and I’m flicking between three different cell networks as I try to check my email. After a couple of minutes the sun slips below the horizon and we’re done.

I drive back to my hotel and get to work programming a website that will almost certainly be obsolete within a decade.

Darwin, Kakadu National Park & Sydney Highlights: Snakes,...

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 02:05:58 +1200

Darwin, Kakadu National Park & Sydney

Highlights: Snakes, Crocodiles, 130k speed limits, eating Kangaroo, almost running out of petrol in the outback, meeting cool people, doing business.

Getting amped for this season :)

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 18:42:26 +1200

Getting amped for this season :)

Rarotonga 2011 :)

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 18:25:04 +1200

Rarotonga 2011 :)

10pm, driving, I stop at the lights. A man runs onto the road and sprays something white all over my windscreen. I can't see, I'm freaking out. Now he's cleaning my windscreen, why? I'm half expecting him to ask for money, but he keeps cleaning. My windscreen's clean, he walks back to the side of the road. Confused, but grateful I give him a thumbs up, he smiles. Green light, I'm off. He's waiting for the next red light.

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 23:26:00 +1300

I love it when websites have character. We use MailChimp for...

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 23:21:11 +1300

I love it when websites have character. We use MailChimp for sending our email newsletters and they have this chimp as a mascot. Basically he sits there at the top of the page giving you links to hilarious Youtube videos (like this). It’s very distracting when I’m trying to get work done, but at the same time, it’s fun!

Will you release the RailsQuest source code on Github for a look?

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 18:04:48 +1300

https://github.com/samdalton/railsquest :)

RailsQuest

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:04:55 +1300

I spent last weekend at Railscamp, an unconference/hackathon for developers. One project I worked on while there is RailsQuest. It started on friday night when a group of us started brainstorming ideas for a project that we could build at Railscamp, for Railscamp.

The concept was to take something that happened at Railscamp (people programming stuff for fun) and add a unifying social game mechanic on top. So, avoiding the implementation details, people create challenges such as a maze game, or a quiz and these ‘Quests’ are aggregated by Railsquest. Then you can complete other peoples challenges and earn their badge by doing so.

This works because we just added a little bit of structure to what people were already doing, the guy who was already building a game just needed to integrate with the Railsquest api, and those who couldn’t think of something to program could now build a ‘Quest’ for Railsquest.

For me, Railsquest was an interesting exercise from a product development point of view. From the very start, it was a collaborative effort, our entire potential userbase was in the same room as us, so we talked to people.

If our discussions on how it should work got stuck or we had any doubts we could just lean over to the next table and check. “Would you use this? Would you build a quest? Can you start now? Here’s some paper, write down the api you want.” Combined with enough fexibility and humility to completely pivot the product, this approach makes it hard not to build something people want.

We had to work fast, and build the absolute minimum product required, we started brainstorming after dinner on Friday night, say 8pm. Because Railsquest was designed to be used at Railscamp, it needed to be fully functional well before the end of Railscamp so that people could use it. We set a goal of having a working app by Saturday morning, and worked till 4am to achieve this.

On Saturday morning we added encryption and verification so that badges couldn’t be faked, and built some quests. Then we presented Railsquest to a bunch of other Railscampers, and people started using it. Mission Accomplished. I spent the rest of the weekend recovering.

Now Railscamp is over and I’ll probably never look at Railsquest again, but the concept of encouraging peoples independent projects with a social, game-like environment that encourages people to show off remains. And it’s something that could work really well in the formal education system, I look forward to working on it.

I’m back, I’ve been busy working on my new...

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:41:19 +1300

I’m back, I’ve been busy working on my new website/company/startup Go Vocab. Go Vocab is the best way to revise vocabulary, check it out.

Heaps! cleaned up at the Onyas, we won the Most Innovative and...

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 18:50:04 +1300

Heaps! cleaned up at the Onyas, we won the Most Innovative and Best Web Application categories. I don’t work on heaps! anymore but congrats all, I’m proud to have made a contribution.

EVERY SINGLE PHYSICAL OBJECT I OWN. Also, I live in Wellington...

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 21:23:12 +1300

EVERY SINGLE PHYSICAL OBJECT I OWN. Also, I live in Wellington now.

Heaps! wins TUANZ awards

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:01:09 +1200

I spend a lot of my time working on heaps! and last week we won the Education and Commerce categories at the TUANZ Innovation Awards which is fantastic! If you’re a Kiwibank customer and you’re not using heaps! yet then you should definitely check it out.

I’ve just had a fantastic couple of days in Dunedin, though the temperature is about a quarter of what it was in California. Caught up with some friends and did some ‘business’. Off to Wellington tomorrow.