Fabricating Info surfaces · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Feb 28, 2007
Some first runs of plain surfaces under the influence of fields etc using Blender. I got better results while using mesh plains vs NURB surfaces.
StrangeMap · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Feb 27, 2007
What is it?
A photo service where you can shoot familiar people/strangers and post those photos up on a website to share with other strangers.
Who are familiar Strangers?
People who you see everyday while you take the subway or walk to school. But they are essentially strangers.
So how does it work?
You take a picture, tag it with the place you were in- the address. Send it to mobtree{att}recombine…net
The picture is logged and shows up as a new familiar stranger on the community page. Now other users can add any info about the person you just shot. Does this scare you?
See more about it in these images-
See this pdf for higher resolution wireframes and flow (WIP)-
wireframesprint.pdf
Site for StrangeMap
(This is work in progress)
Why are you doing this?
Cause I don’t like familiar strangers who don’t talk to me? No. Is it urban voyeurism? Or is it about eventually getting to know strangers you see everyday? Eventually you wouldn’t need this app to mark your strangers.
Will there be a day when a familiar stranger who you shot becomes your friend?
Maybe.
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Gorden Bell's Sousveillance · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Feb 26, 2007
Gordon Bells’s been recording his life for about 6 long years now as part of the MyLifeBits project. The goal is to record “all of Bell’s communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits.”
There is recent really long story about the project here
**If I record even 10 years of information then I will, on an average, will I spend at least three times the time to go through it??!! I know there are filters, “i like” algorithms, but this is just a question for sake of being a question!
**What if such personal information can be used against the person in a legal situation? Where and how do you store such sensitive information? Even others involved in a conversation are put to risk..because what they say is recorded too.
**What is personal remains personal in any given scenario. So to what use can you put all this information to?
**How important does search or even the interface become in such a scenario?
Voting via the internet in Estonia · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Feb 26, 2007
First national election through the internet in Estonia
This is the first national election in Estonia using the internet. The first one was a local election in 2005 where about 10,000 people voted online. Estonia considers internet access as a fundamental right of its citizens! According to 80% of the population of Estonia has access to broadband internet.
Wikipedia page on Electronic voting in Estonia
Page where the actual voting will be done
Open source software for the elections? 2005
old ref 2003 – Estonia, where being wired is a human right
Quantum Encryption · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Feb 26, 2007
Madas writes “Scientists working in Cambridge have managed to make quantum encryption completely secure (registration required) by putting decoy pulses in the key transmission stream. According to the story this paves the way for safe, encrypted high-speed data links. Could this allow completely private transmission of data away from snooping eyes and ears? Or will it mean film studios can stop movies from being copied when traveling on the internet?”
more
wikipedia entry on quantum encryption
Flock, flag, Disorient · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Feb 26, 2007
It is interesting to see how individuals within communities like youTube and Digg are congregating to flag content generated/posted by the rest of the users which they think is inappropriate. For example there is a group on youTube that is flagging videos that they consider as hate speech against Islam.
Maybe some of the institutions that have been accused of surveillance and censoring their citizens don’t have to worry, cause now there is the intelligence of the mob or swarm, of people online who do the same work for them for free and pretty efficiently. But now its not about blatantly blocking content but creating enough consensus around an issue that either informs you or disorients you. So in the end you don’t really know what to take away from such places. Or worse, your notions of things remain the same. So you never really learn to tolerate far away people, culture, religion and points of view etc.
I wonder if the internet is ever going to be a place to grow sensitive as a human being…or if it will ever make us all that much more tolerant of different backgrounds and cultures? Or it will further segregate some of us by lending itself to ideas of citizen(netizen) surveillance and morale policing by the netizens themselves.
See some news here for how mobs of netizens are probably turning comment boxes into toilet paper rolls!
Mob Rule at Digg
Mob Rule in China
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A blogger in Egypt jailed for 'insult' · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Feb 26, 2007
What does exercising free speech online against the status quo involve?
Abdel Kareem Soliman, an Egyptian blogger is probably the first blogger to be jailed for expressing his views online.
You can read more about it here-
BBC
and
BBC2
IHT
You can find what other bloggers have written about this event
Aggregate
Abdel’s blog
More
freekareem
Debatepedia Instead of Wikipedia · posted by vaibhav bhawsar Feb 26, 2007
Just what I was looking for!
Debatepedia and wikinfo are two projects (that I have come across so far) that are similar to wikipedia but offer users to enter multiple points of view. They favor diverse ways of looking at something rather than a “neutral” way of looking. Wikinfo claims that it prefers debate and sympathetic point of view over neutral point of view which is what wikipedia outlines as its fundamental principle.
One interesting part of wikinfo are its Green links which are imported articles from wikipedia open for a SPOV.
Now sometimes consensus is really really important. But if one talks of knowledge it may come from diverse backgrounds and beliefs..which may not be something another culture subscribes to or even understands. So then what does one do about such views? Do we represent them or seclude them? Even if they are a minority and that they don’t have enough people to vouch for them?
Debatepedia
A new encyclopedia of arguments and debates
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