@EthanZ on networks: "... I think projects that connect professionals in the developed and developing world to encourage cooperation and skill transfer are significantly more likely to lead to good outcomes."
Is anyone really surprised about this? "Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse."
"The room—tucked away on a floor used by The Guardian’s advertising staff, deliberately out of view of curious newsroom eyes—featured two rows of a half-dozen or so desks, facing each other. A floor to ceiling window looked across The Guardian’s office building.
Davies was having further discussions with Assange in Stockholm, and, until Monday when he joined the staff in the bunker, was somewhat out of touch with the effort he had kicked off in London."
"ACTA is an extreme copyright treaty that threatens to establish a world of border iPod and laptop searches for infringing music and movies; jail sentences for downloading; universal network surveillance; and whole-house Internet disconnection orders served on ISPs against customers who are accused (without proof) of violating copyright law."
"They first met in Philadelphia in 1974. Teller was a high school Latin teacher who did magic in his spare time. It had gripped him with the force of an obsession since, as a five year-old laid up at home with a heart ailment, he had sent away “15 cents and three Mars bar wrappers” for a magic kit advertised on television. Penn was a student and a juggler with a fierce distaste for magicians. “Early on, Teller said to me that magic was essentially an intellectual art form which, when you picture the kind of dips---s that do magic, sounds like an insane thing to say,” he says. “Can you do magic without insulting the audience? Can you do magic that is intellectually satisfying? It is those questions, rather than the magic itself, that fascinates me. Those are the question that we have been playing with for 35 years.”"
Through the magic of technology, this post at CrissCrossed.net from January just popped up on my radar, covering examples of using the one-two visual and data-rich impact of maps for activism. His examples cover pollution reporting in China, community mapping in Brazil and others. Add to that the Ushahidi-powered BP Oil Spill Crisis Map and of course the gamechanging effects of incident reporting and crisismapping in immediate the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, and you have a sea-change in the ability to respond to a problem with geographic dimensions quickly, and with data-driven, crowdsource-able maps. This ability is largely thanks to the work of Ushahidi (which now even supports remote reporting via voice calls) and projects like Open Street Map.
"Both kiwis and bananas are shipped long-distance. But what is being grown—and the inputs (fertilizer, pesticide, heat) needed to grow it—often matters as much as where the growing happens. The point: Carbon footprints for food are, unfortunately, not terribly intuitive. To me, this is why we need some standardized system of carbon labeling. Right now, it's all but impossible for individuals to make decisions about the carbon footprint of the things they buy. You shouldn't have to be an expert, or tote a calculator and the proper formulas around with you."
Fred von Lohmann, senior copyright attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has just posted a review of Adrian John's monumental, 500-page Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, a thoroughgoing and well-researched history that draws compelling conclusions about the need to view piracy as a business-model crisis, not a moral one
How do you think the psychogeography of the city might be affecting identity and tribalism? Do you suspect the trend is more towards collaboration or fragmentation?
That word "psychogeography" probably means something, but guys who use it go out on Situationist drifts and look for urban ley-lines. I do a lot of similar activity, but I don't like to dignify it too much.
Modern large cities are the engines of globalization in the way that New York used to be an engine of Americanization. You look at New York back in the 1800s, obviously collaboration and fragmentation were going on there at the same time. Little Italy, Little Ukraine, whatever... but those sharp distinctions tended to melt with time. Cities that segregate their citizens into ghettos tend to go broke.
Sign languages tend to spontaneously emerge when the deaf people of a country or region first start coming together to form a community, usually based around a school. It's happening right now in Nicaragua, where special education schools opened in the 1970s. Over the past 30 years, Nicaraguan Sign Language has evolved from simple gestures between friends, to a full and complete language. That recent evolution makes Nicaraguan Sign Language the enticing blue bug zapper to linguists' and cognitive scientists' curious moths. Case in point: The study of the way language and learning interact. The structure and composition of the language you speak has a big impact on how you think and perceive the world.
At a California State University, Fresno lecture on veganism, six of the 60 in attendance were undercover officers from the local and campus police. The Oakland Police Department in California had infiltrated a police-brutality demonstration, and its undercover officers selected "the route of the march."
A vegetarian activist in Georgia was arrested for jotting down the license plate of a Department of Homeland Security agent who was snapping photos of a protest outside a Honey Baked Ham store. A Joint Terrorism Task Force in Illinois went on a three-day manhunt in Chicago searching for a Muslim man for his suspicious activity of using a hand counter on a bus. As it turned out, the man was counting his daily prayers.
Mobile is hardly "new" anymore, but we're seeing increasing tools for peer-to-peer communications and decentralized development. Instead of SMS reporting for mHealth metrics or election observation (both amazingly powerful), we have Ushahidi and a team of volunteers from colleges and Haitian diaspora communities across the world saving lives in Haiti after the earthquake by synthesizing and translating reports from on the ground into actionable, trustable pieces of information.
Instead of training-and-visit agricultural extension work, we have tools like Patatat which are building group email lists through SMS messaging, enabling farmers (or anyone) to collaborate on their work, market prices, crop diseases, and so on - with increasingly little need for anything at the center. And of course there's twitter, which, while still "centralized" as a website, enables un-mediated communication amongst basically anyone in the world with a cell phone and a good text-messaging plan.
Where the last SMS4D Technology Salon reminded us of the unique gift of mobile technologies to be based where there impact will be, The Cloudy SMS4D Salon really drove home mobile as a multifunctional tool whose true impact is tied more to the usage than the technology itself. While we gathered to discuss SMS4D, we really talked about heath reporting and outreach, education, and community-building through knowledge management and sharing. It just so happened that these health projects were using SMS codes to report longitudinal child health statistics.
Data gathering in health, and even knowing when to gather data, is a huge burden, often relying on community health workers doing the healthcare version of the T&V system of the agricultural extension world. Waiting around for a planned infrastructure is hopeless, but working with the more incremental nature of mobile can improve reporting rates and reduce errors -- "utter chaos works everywhere" being the best quote of this tech salon. Childcount builds on existing SMS reporting to enable community health workers to rapidly register children, note any symptoms or diseases they might have, improve patient tracking (and thereby reducing duplication), and schedule immunizations and outreach. The SMS "encoding" builds off of a simple and familiar paper form, which is handy for training (but less useful than a mango tree, as we'll see). The runner-up quote from this Salon dealt with discussion around the potential risk of intentionally fabricated data -- "humans are awful at falsifying data" -- digitizing and quick, auditable reporting exposes both errors and lies.
Winning the award for innovative ideas in mHealth was the HappyPill project -- instead of boing old SMS, HappyPills uses "flashing" - where you call a number and hang up immediately to "ping" someone. Usually, flashing is just a free way to ask someone to call you back, or you can sometimes work out extensive codes -- one missed call is just saying hi, two is call me back, three means an emergency, etc.. HappyPills takes this basic, essentially binary interaction and applies it to help improve adherence rates for prescription regimens. A medical center can send out flashes to their patients, and the patients are reminded to take their pills and would then flash back to signal that they took their medicine. It's naturally not foolproof, but hugely more cost effective (almost cost-free) in comparison with sending a community health worker out to the patient on a motorcycle to witness their pill-taking.
It turns out that people are not just willing, but economically motivated and excited to use (and pay for) basic SMS-based services to improve their numeracy and literacy skills, improving their ability to communicate cheaply over their phones as well as better navigate market prices. In these low-technology communities, Tostan's Jokko Initiative is creating a curriculum to enable this via SMS, and they have also come up with an amazingly simple methodology to introduce people to menu systems using a mango tree metaphor which gracefully transitions from the concrete (planning a climbing route on a real tree to get to a specific mango) to the semi-concrete (the same, on a diagram of a tree), to the abstract (the tree diagram becomes the menu diagram, the mango a specific function). Anyone who thinks that is basic has never shown their grandparents a new shiny piece of technology, or had their entire worldview of user interface challenged by someone physically pointing a mouse at a screen).
Patatat is an early-stage solution which puts SMS into the role of a community town hall/newsletter/email list. It removes not only the normal geographic barriers that a listserv gets around, but also infrastructure barriers, so (for example) farmers across a region or the world can share knowledge around their crops without relying on the grid and hardwired phones/Internet to do so. This also centralizes costs to one "host" and minimizes it to the community, so a farmer could send one SMS (free to receive, costs to send), and the host would re-broadcast it to the entire "community." With Twitter already showing that it can (technically) report earthquakes faster than the earthquake itself spreads, this rebroadcasting tool also has clear applications in emergency announcements, citizen journalism and a myriad of other fields.
So, was this technology salon about technology, or was it about development projects? Sure, all of the projects discussed at the salon happened to use server and cloud-based SMS technologies. They also probably use paper, transportation, and people. That the technology is now moving from the focus of a project to being a (cool, exciting, powerful, still new-and-shiny) tool in the toolbox is truly heartwarming. It means it is maturing into a cross-sector role and not into another silo (sorry, a "cylinder of excellence" in the parlance of our times).
The 9th edition of the ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Development Report (WTDR 2010) focuses on Monitoring the WSIS Targets. The year 2010 marks the midpoint between the 2005 Tunis phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and 2015, the deadline for achieving the ten targets that governments agreed upon at the WSIS. The Report is a mid-term review, and provides policy makers with a comprehensive assessment of what has been achieved so far, and what remains to be done.
Who owns the Gulf of Mexico? That's a question you have to ask while perusing Offshore magazine's 2010 poster of the Gulf—downloadable here as a large PDF, but well worth checking out. Where most people look at the Gulf, they see a vast marine ecosystem, wetlands, and, until recently, gorgeous beaches.
What energy executives see is a massive grid, tangled with scores of oil and gas pipelines and rival fields with macho names that sound like heavy metal bands, black-diamond ski runs, and weapons systems. (See "Quiz: What Do BP and Kurt Cobain Have in Common?") Here's a small detail, slightly blurry, but you get the point. (Red lines are gas pipelines and pink are gas fields, green lines are oil pipelines and green blurbs are oil fields.)
"This is the final proof-of-concept video from 2009, made to illustrate True Reverse Perspective. The scene was modelled and rendered in a camera-hacked version of AoI [ artofillusion.org ], Peter Eastman's open source, java-based 3D package.
In Reverse Perspective the expected visual rules are inverted, so close objects are small and far objects are big. This is not only true for whole objects, but their structure as well. So the near points of an object are closer together, relative to its far points, which gives the flared-out look of the buildings, and the scene as a whole."
Dan Gillmor on the future of journalism: "First, direct subsidies for journalism are the wrong way to go, even dangerous. But we absolutely could use the kind of indirect help -- taxpayer-funded deployment of high-capacity, wide-open broadband networks -- that would be an analogue to the early American postal subsidies, and then some. This would be essential infrastructure, aimed at beefing up all 21st Century commerce and communications, including but not limited to journalism."
The WikiLeaks advised proposal to build an international "new media haven" in Iceland, with the world's strongest press and whistleblower protection laws, and a "Nobel" prize for for Freedom of Expression, has unaminously passed the Icelandic Parliament.
Drezner’s main explanation is that great powers have proud civilizational identities (and thus their own sports) while lesser powers presumably do not. I don’t buy it. Most countries have their own proud cultures and their own sports (korfbal anyone?). ... Soccer success is all about prestige. Superpowers have no incentive to put their prestige on the line by putting 11 men on a field against 11 other men, arbitrated by a neutral referee. As Schelling would remind us, if you invest strongly in soccer, you put your reputation on the line. Why do that with so few opportunities to rig the result? If you sit on top, you organize a tournament, invite a few hapless Canadians, and call the winners World Champions. Or, you do what China does: invest heavily in those sports with many Olympic medals and relatively little competition. If you are a middle power, however, winning the World Cup is the closest thing to being on top of the world.
Salim sez, "Photoblogger Dark Roasted Blend has found some excellent footage (Cantonese with English Subtitles) of the (now bulldozed) 'Walled City of Kowloon'. You might remember, that this was a quirk of history - a small region of land which for political reasons could not be policed by the British when they managed Hong Kong. It proliferated for years without any building regulation or law-enforcement. It became a vast chaotic 3D maze."
In one recent episode, the AV Club helps cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester film a near-exact copy of Madonna's Vogue music video (the real-life fine for copying Madonna's original? up to $150,000). Just a few episodes later, a video of Sue dancing to Olivia Newton-John's 1981 hit Physical is posted online (damages for recording the entirety of Physical on Sue's camcorder: up to $300,000). And let's not forget the glee club's many mash-ups -- songs created by mixing together two other musical pieces. Each mash-up is a "preparation of a derivative work" of the original two songs' compositions - an action for which there is no compulsory license available, meaning (in plain English) that if the Glee kids were a real group of teenagers, they could not feasibly ask for -- or hope to get -- the copyright permissions they would need to make their songs, and their actions, legal under copyright law. Punishment for making each mash-up? Up to another $150,000 -- times two.
Cory Doctorow reviews Ubuntu's latest: "Since then, it's Just Worked. When I need to do something new -- edit audio, say -- I go to the software center and look at what apps exist for that purpose, select some highly rated ones, download them, try them, keep the one I like (all the software is free, so this is easy). Migrating to new machines? Easy. Just take my list of installed apps to the new machine as a text-file on a USB key and ask Software Center to download them and configure them. Backups? Easy: external generic USB drive and rsync (exactly what I used with my Mac)."
"If he really had access to these cables, we've got a terrible situation on our hands," said an American diplomat. "We're still trying to figure out what he had access to. A lot of my colleagues overseas are sweating this out, given what those cables may contain."
The universal power symbols are described in the International Electrotechnical Commission 60417 standard, Graphical symbols for use on equipment, appearing in the 1973 edition
I made a much lower-tech personal version many years ago, as an IT Peace Corps volunteer. Mine of course was (a) very low cost and (b) designed to travel stuck in side-pocket of a backpack on a crowded country-bound bus. OK, it was really just a few screwdrivers, a 3-2 prong electrical adapter, and a flashlight.
I also always carried around:
1 ~3' crossover cable or crossover adapter (no faster way to test networking!)
1 multi-head cable tool (the kind with a core USB retractable cable and a pouch of other cable-heads to turn it into a phone, network, mini/micro/device USB, firewire, etc. -- easy way to carry around "the right cable for the job" when you're not sure what today's job might be)
My favorite toolkit items were more around the software end of the spectrum, though:
1 bootable USB stick with DamnSmallLinux and a PortableApps Suite
1 bootable floppy with WinXP/NT admin password reset tool
1 BartPE bootable XP CD with anti-virus and diagnostic tools
1 Knoppix or other Linux LiveCD that will work on a wide range of hardware and let you extract files from the HDD
1 CD and USB stick of common free/shareware/OSS software tools - anti-virus, various anti-mal/spy-ware, registry cleaners, zip/archive software, OpenOffice, PDF creation tools, and so on.
Ushahidi's Patrick Meier has a fantastic graph of deployment time for Ushahidi's amazing crisis-mapping solution (which has been deployed for such diverse projects as Haiti post-earthquake, the Gulf Coast post-BP, and DC's 2009/10 "Snowmageddon"):
The simplicity of Ushahidi setup sometimes leads to some crestfallen administrators.
Just because you bought a domain name and ran the Ushahidi installer doesn’t mean that anyone is going to use they system — and even if you somehow get a lot of reports, you might not be relevant to the existing systems [...] Ushahidi is only 10% of solution.”
I'd posit that this 10%/90% division applies to any and all "tech" solutions to real-world problems.
The technology is increasingly (perhaps it always has been) the easy part. It's a shiny, tangible product with clear "milestones" of in development, in testing, deployed, working. Lots of happy checkboxes for any M&E report, and photo-ops to generate great press and build excitement and community around a technology.
Whatever your view of it, notice first just how different this future promises to be. In real libraries, in real space, access is not metered at the level of the page (or the image on the page). ... The real-space library is a den protected from the metering of the market. It is of course created within a market; but like kids in a playroom, we let the life inside the library ignore the market outside. This freedom gave us something real. It gave us the freedom to research, regardless of our wealth; the freedom to read, widely and technically, beyond our means... The architecture of access that we have in real space created an important and valuable balance between the part of culture that is effectively and meaningfully regulated by copyright and the part of culture that is not. The world of our real-space past was a world in which copyright intruded only rarely, and when it did, its relationship to the objectives of copyright was relatively clear. We forget all this today.
The US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance has asked the US Trade Rep to add Indonesia to its list of rogue nations that don't respect copyright. What did Indonesia do to warrant inclusion on this "301 list"? Its government had the temerity to advise its ministries to give preference to free/open source software because it will cost less and reduce the use of pirated proprietary software in government. According to the IPA, this movement to reduce copyright infringement is actually bad for copyright, because "it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions."
The World Bank Institute recently launched a massively multiplayer game called Evoke designed to get people around the world to work collaboratively on pressing problems like food security, human rights, etc. Evoke builds a storyline based around a comic book (eh hem, sorry, graphic novel) to lay out a quest each week. The initiative is still very new, so it is hard to judge its value, but in general I see great potential in "serious games" like this.
It took very little time for a parody of Evoke to crop up, called (appropriately enough) Invoke. At first, I took it in good humor. Parody and snark have their uses, all the way from Swift's A Modest Proposal to Bill Easterly's Aid Watch. But many of the parodies I've run across lately go beyond useful criticism into the realm of snark for the sake of snark.
Cryptome.org publishes documents "that are prohibited by governments worldwide," according to the site. It recently posted Microsoft's global criminal compliance handbook, prompting the DMCA takedown notice from the software giant.
Under the DMCA, a hosting company that is notified about possibly infringing content on one of its sites is required to either remove the offending content itself or ask the site owner to remove that content, pending an investigation. Sites that believe they are not in the wrong can file a counter-claim to have that content restored.
Microsoft said it did not want the site to be removed.
"We did not ask that this site be taken down, only that Microsoft copyrighted content be removed," Microsoft said in a statement. "We are requesting to have the site restored and are no longer seeking the document's removal."
The Audrey Fino failure led Singhal on a multiyear quest to improve the way the system deals with names -- which account for 8 percent of all searches. To crack it, he had to master the black art of "bi-gram breakage" -- that is, separating multiple words into discrete units. For instance, "new york" represents two words that go together (a bi-gram). But so would the three words in "new york times," which clearly indicate a different kind of search. And everything changes when the query is "new york times square."
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