cool portuguese tunes played by foreign people. our gaita is getting popular. today we’re doing a small diy segment again
me and T first prototyped a solar pouch almost a year ago. we designed it because one of the issues with solar chargers by themselves is that you have to carry them along side your electronics. putting them in bags is common, but expensive, so we designed a pouch with a panel and a charging cable.
since the first test, i designed an improved version of it using a 6V panel that is a single piece, versus the other diy segment i did previously that used 1V cells. with this 6V panel and a diode, i made a trickle charger for the cellphone. basically, if there’s enough sun, it charges the phone. if you put the phone inside the pouch, it charges it and also it protects it. it’s handy and feels more organic than having a separate unit. the jack for the charger on this model is on the side, which makes it kind of ridiculous to use. i guess i could mod the phone, but instead i’m willing to bend the jack a little.
feel free to copy this design, it is under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. if you want to sell them let me know and we’ll work something out. here’s how to do it:
materials
6V solar panel with less than 3W (in this case, 2W) so it doesn’t burn your electronics equipment (see what the power of your cellphone charger is and choose a panel below that power)
diode (any diode works, a shottky would be better, but i had a lot of regular ones). one advantage is that on a 6V polarization the diode should be at about 0.7V, which in turn makes the whole thing output 5.3 ~ 5V for the cellphone
a jack for your phone. i cut mine from an old charger. make sure it works (this was the second one i used, the first one didn’t work)
fabric, velcro and glue for the pouch. be creative. bland black pouches are so passé
soldering iron, multimeter, solder and whatever you enjoy to have around when you do electronics
instructions
sew a pouch that has about the same size as the panel. make sure it swells enough to stick to the panel even when the electronics are in it
solder the diode to the panel (to the plus terminal, make sure it is polarized correctly so that current flows only to the cellphone)
test the panel in direct sun. if it doesn’t work now, start again
solder the other end of the diode to the cable and jack (check the plus and minus with a multimeter)
test the panel on the jack terminals. if it doesn’t work now, start again
glue the pouch to the panel using whatever glue you may have. put something inside the pouch so that you don’t glue the pouch to itself
test it under the sun and happy charging!
results
it works! that’s it. this is an easy (and less extreme) way of doing a self-powered device. be creative! stick panels on everything!
demo video. i wasn’t drunk, i was filming with one hand, so i couldn’t plug the jack. the main thing is there: it charged!
i found this panel on some online store. just look for 6V panels and you’ll find some. these weren’t that cheap but they are sturdy and give enough juice to charge the cellphone in about 3 hours. also, on a lithium battery, you don’t want to charge all the time. but it’s definitely handy to have around. thanks for reading!
in sync with all the studies i published, CS has finally become a for-profit organization. as some other organizations have done, they started as a pseudo-non-profit (they never got the status approved) and with it, accepted donations and volunteer work to make the website grow. thanks to all that volunteer work, the website grew to a staggering 3,000,000+. once it got too big to fail, they sold it off and now it’s owned bycompanies such as ebay to investment groups that have in their funded website list organizations like twitter and are owned by, among others, the people behind ebay. while this is a big blow to volunteers, since i never volunteered more than my own couch, i don’t feel as bad as many do right now.
but that’s not really what i’m writing about today. today i’m writing my eulogy to my own participation on CS. i might still use it, but i certainly won’t use it the same way.
CS changed my life more than any other online community i’ve been a part of. not because it is very good as an online community, but because it promotes offline connections. this allowed me to meet almost 1000 amazing people from all over the world, allowed be to grow and test my own political ideologies, and most importantly, establish a network of friendships all over the globe. let me make it very clear: CS has made my life incredibly better in many different ways, and i’d be a fool to get angry because they decided to go a different ideological route than they did at the beginning.
what CS does is priceless in terms of breaking cultural boundaries in a select group of the traveling population. in practice, a couch is not commonly given to the poor, the needy or the oppressed. i ran the tests, see GDP data. the people that use CS are the people that don’t need to use CS. but that’s what makes them special. these are travelers that (still) believe traveling is more than a tour guide and a hotel, and no matter how naive, superficial or materialistic they might be, these core values create a very idealistic community.
it was there that i got the support and like-mindedness to advance my ideas for community building, and most importantly, understood how diverse we are and how important it is to listen to each other.
so seeing CS go for-profit (even if they call it “B”, it’s still for-profit), is both its coming of age and mine. since i started, i have been on permanent state of deepening my own understanding of how things work between common people. what i found, that can be seen in all the studies i’ve done all these years, has not only surprised me but given me a stronger basis for when i say people are generally good, trusting and above all, creative and empathetic. i have gathered evidence that demonstrates that age, race, gender or nationality are irrelevant, and that what still matters is the real human moments created and the setting they are created in. it matters more if you are tired and need a bed, hungry and need food, or lonely and need a hug, than whether you are rich or poor, black or white, man or woman or other.
i have also learned one of the biggest lessons of my life. though this wasn’t through CS, it was thanks to CS that i met the amazing people that helped me achieve it. i learned that the homeless, the weak, the junkies, petty thieves and low-lives that surround us are not hopelessly trapped, not invalids and certainly not lazy, no matter how the capitalist individualist mindset tries to push that through propaganda. i have seen hiv positive people with their eyes lit about the future as they worked for a common goal even though their lives had been dramatically shortened, i have seen junkies reduce their drug use for the simple fact that they were fed and happy. above all, i have see that social justice and a meaningful existence are the most powerful tools one can have to change the world around us. empathy and compassion but also bravery and relentlessness to exert them.
but it was also through these experiments and experiences that i learned that new ideas are necessary. i grew frustrated with the middle class european activists that i would meet, that seemed to be more focused on hypothetical situations and impossible practical options than getting their hands dirty. and above all, the overwhelming majority of humans that though having their hearts in the right place, feel they can’t do more, powerless to do more, and hopeless for the future.
i can say that certainly there is little hope, but hope is for those who don’t know what the consequences of their actions are. we are only hopeful and faithful if we don’t know what will come of our doings. i have no hope and no faith on my own future now because i understand what works and what doesn’t, and above all, have finally detached myself from the veiled need for survival.
i grew frustrated, as time went by, of how many people were telling me they wanted to change the world. of how many were telling me others were wrong and they were right. but when asked a concrete ideal for our present, there was none. this is the value crisis we live in, and this is where i focus my ideological work now.
none of this would have been possible without CS and the wonderful people i met through it. but CS itself was an organization i had a high moral respect for. what they were doing, though naive, was sending a message to the world that borders and property weren’t realities, but man-made fictions. what CS confirms now is that the idealistic, when naive, are quickly capitalized by the unscrupulous elite. CS has gone from the wonderful idealistic and incompetent group of people that just wanted to meet foreigners and do parties with all of them, to a serious business venture. this, therefore, makes it incompatible with the way i see things should be done. either one is for profit openly, as airbnb for example, or one is for other goals, like servas. what CS did was a bait and switch: get volunteers, raise enough social capital, and once you’re big enough, sell and go for profit with all the work done by the volunteers. the only thing wrong here is the fact that there was a clear claim they were non-profit when it wasn’t true. i certainly don’t appreciate being lied to or deceived, so now i will provide alternatives to whoever seeks equivalent systems.
i wouldn’t say CS owes me anything or that i owe CS anything. for the years i worked with it, it was more of a mutual reciprocity exchange. now that my experiences will be sold, i feel that trust has been broken and will move on.
here’s my list. i recommend anyone who hosts on CS and wants to leave to maintain their profile and write to people to request to them through other networks. that way, one can transition people from CS to other networks, to stop the deception.
some musette de cour. a lovely painting of a bagpiper too
i won’t do much discussion this time. this is a short test i did to the data and it somewhat confirms the rule that some hosts have that there should be a minimum stay. this is the first widespread rule that i see has some evidence to it (even though the correlation is very low, 0.17454, octave source)
here is some evidence that rating is biased: the longer someone stays, the more likely it is that their rating will be higher. it doesn’t mean, however, that the maximum rating will be affected. instead, it seems there is a “logarithmic” effect on the curves: though it grows, it will settle on a value that still might not reach a high rating, and probably settles on what would be the “final evaluation” of the experience. i.e., you don’t like someone at first sight, but with time, you will gain a better perspective. this perspective might still be negative or positive, so this is not a predictor of quality of stay. instead, it is probably a predictor of how good it will be seen in the end.
for this set all guests were considered, including friends of CSers and non-CS people.
an interesting test of this would be a rating of a guest over time. this would give us an idea of how personal rating changes over time. i have some data on another rating i did a while a go, i might stitch it together with this one. here is the plot of the data
today i’m continuing my series on the connection between measurable profile variables on CS and my own personal rating of the experience. since it is a personal subjective rating, consider all of this data as merely informative.
again, i used the same database, and this time loaded the whole thing into octave. then i calculated the correlation coefficients between each variable and my personal rating. octave is much better to work with, so i’m abandoning “pretty” graphs for more accurate ones.
correlation factors found
variable
correlation with rating
number of photos
-0.013480
number of positive references
0.068074
number of neutral references
0.039177
number of negative references
0.0037717
it’s interesting to note that of all, the strongest indicator is the total number of positive references, even though it is very weak. it is also interesting that the correlation factor between negative references and rating is positive. i would say it is a small sample size for me to conclude anything, but it’s interesting nevertheless since one would expect a negative correlation for both neutral and negative, if these were good predictors of bad experiences
graphs of the data distribution
as usual, bell curves slightly tilted to the positive experience. since the distribution seems to be consistent with a bell curve, the correlation coefficient is appropriate enough.
sources for replication
besides the usual database, here is the octave script. make sure you edit the shebang line and the database path according to your needs.
discussion
by now i’m a bit tired of getting always the same “random variable” results. it would be interesting to look at datasets of people that believe references, images, etc are predictors. since i controlled for these variables at my own place, my dataset is the “raw” version of the experience. my guess is that depending on the variable chosen, each person would selectively bias their own perspective on the experience, when if controlled for, the variables amount to very little in terms of predictive power.
this would allow us to see how is it that things really feel like they work when they don’t: we shape it ourselves via our own perceptions of the other. by assigning arbitrary characteristics to them that come from some outside narrative and not a real, factual analysis of who they really are. prejudices come in many forms, and these online status symbols are themselves tools of prejudice and social differentiation. it is by now clear that these symbols have no evidence to support their validity, however, they remain essential tools for this group’s stability. the seeking and valuing of these virtual status symbols creates a shared belief that one should behave appropriately, which causes a safer behavior in general.
so, in a somewhat contradictory way, even though these status symbols are not relevant in practice in terms of quality of the experience, they become so through common beliefs in their validity, and this makes the community as a whole work more harmoniously.
as a side effect, anyone who unknowingly ignores the social codes of CS will be treated as an example of the things these symbols are trying to protect people from, even though there is no evidence this is true, creating a whole set of people that will suffer injustice and prejudice on this network. these people will rapidly leave the network due to the overwhelming unfriendliness that they might encounter. this filtering out then leaves only the people that comply with the social codes, rendering the network functional.
nowhere in this chain of filtering and reasoning is any account to facts. there is no critical analysis of any of this data. but that shared irrational belief is what keeps the community functional. in a way, these status symbols and social rules are essential to properly filter out users on this network, not because they work, but because they are only accepted and tolerated by those who believe them, and those who don’t are progressively outcast or eliminated.
many times i ended up hosting people that were clueless about how to message someone and that felt great injustice about it. fact is that CS works very well, but only for a group of people. for the rest of the “scum” that uses it, the frequent failures to find a place, the angry or disrespectful replies and judging encounters will cause people to leave the network.
i’ll do another one on this: my hypothesis is that CS is a temporary phase in people’s lives, and that after some time or a bad experience people will simply leave it. my guess is that there are nowhere near 3 million CSers. i’ll dig for the real numbers soon.
i decided to continue the data analysis i started in my previous post. this time, i decided to go full subjective and will not try to extract any scientific conclusions. i decided to test my ratings versus geography, and made a “heat map” of how much i like people of each nationality. this chart is a bit clunky, but gives us a good global perspective. blue is lower, red is higher, yellow is in-between. sorry new zealand, my zoom skills cut a bit of the map!
interestingly enough, i don’t seem to rate central europeans as high as, let’s say, eastern europeans. same thing with anglo saxon countries: us rates high, as does australia. i think we can remove the language barrier, since there are rating differences between austria and germany and i don’t speak german. also, best rated? my own country but my sample is biased: i only hosted, with one exception to this, friends and friends of friends, who i ended up rating higher than the average CSer. since the map doesn’t show sample size, we might be dealing with a lot of anomalies.
since these looked promising, here are the rating curves by country. watch out: a lot of graphs coming. it’s very nice to see that bell curves emerge on big sample sizes: that means i’m not particulary favorable to any country. but it’s also interesting that some countries provoke a more variable response, versus others. for example, compare canada to germany. as usual, no evidence for being favorable to any particular country. Y axis is the total frequency, X axis is the rating.
here are the sources for replication (besides the database on my previous post): heat map and country charts. i love the discouraged if/foreach syntax for php. sorry but that’s what you get for free personal code.