Jeopardy!: Desk Set Edition

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101214/ap_on_hi_te/us_tv_man_vs_machine

Chaos' technology

Sousveillance necklace

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sousveillance-necklace.jpg

Check out Yellowarrow.net
It was a public art project designed to turn urban landscapes into peer to peer built recordings of local experiences. "Combining stickers, mobile phones and an international community, Yellow Arrow transforms the urban landscape into a "deep map" that expresses the personal histories and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces."

http://yellowarrow.net/v3/index.php

The idea is to give out or sell yellow stickers in the shape of arrows that people can stick anywhere, pointing to a paricular subject they were interested in. On each sticker is a unique number code. By sending a textmessage to the Yellow Arrow number starting with the number on the sticker, a person can attach their personal story to their arrow. The stories can be about anything, but Yellow Arrow hoped people will write about the places they had pointed to. With enough arrows in a city, this in turn will create a new urban map of the city that was baced on experiances rather than directions. Passers-by are be able to text message the arrows number to Yellow Arrow and recieve the attched story. They are also be able to add their own experience to the existing story.




This project is very similar to art projects the Surrealists International were doing in the 50s and 60s in France and other cities around Europe. The Surrealists were an avant-garde artist group that would use old maps, blue prints and areal photographs to composite new maps of the cities they lived in. they would wonder around the city randomly and record their paths, thoughts and experiences. The redefined cartography by creating maps "put the spectator at ease with a city of apparent disorder, exposing the strange logic that lay beneath its surface. The Situationist maps described an urban navigational system that operated independently of Paris's dominant patterns of circulation."



http://www.systemed.net/blog/legacy/entry060413015813.html

Projects like Yellow Arrow look to incorperate ordinary people and their experiances into a landscape that is often inpersonal and devoid of individual connections. We should be looking to create maps that "answer the question of 'what's it like?' rather than 'where is it?'... maps where scale and projection are no longer the key considerations. Through the web, we can deliver maps that inspire rather than simply inform."

internet shows

Shows made only for the internet are becoming more and more popular. Here is one of my favorite, Stiller and Meara. Its one of the funniest comedic couples ever, old, kind of senile, and talking about popular culture: its awesome.

you can only watch it on yahoo video and hulu, and each episode is only about 2 minutes long.

here is the link to one where jerry and meara discuss justin bieber:http://www.hulu.com/watch/193684/stiller-and-meara-justin-bieber

stealth bot! only $149.95

http://www.skymall.com/shopping/detail.htm?pid=203188705&c=102961917

"Easy To Use & Undetectable Total Computer Spying Tool Covertly Monitors Passwords, Chatting, Photos, Websites & More Insert In USB, And In 5 Seconds Data Nano iBots Monitor All Computer Activity On ALL USER ACCOUNTS w/o Tell-Tale Hardware Left Behind Covertly Record Everything A Person Does On A Computer Remove Stealth iBot After 5 Seconds: No Hardware Left Behind Undetectable By Most Anti-Spyware Applications Store Up to 10,000 Screenshots & Virtually Unlimited Text Total Surveillance - Record All Computer Activity - Even On Other User Accounts Works With Any PC Computer Including Laptops ** Must be logged into computer with installation rights prior to inserting device** 3 Easy Steps Insert Into USB Of Any PC Or Laptop In 5 Seconds - Nano iBots Attach To Windows To Begin Full Covert Monitoring - Remove USB When Ready, Re-Insert Into USB to Retrieve Everything Specifications: 1 GB USB Flash Drive Activity Monitoring Stores Up To 10,000 Screenshots Stores Virtually Infinite Amount Of Text Remembers Visited Websites Works with XP, Vista, Vista Sp1 **Legal Disclaimer: Only to be deployed on a computer that you own. Not Mac compatible. " Review This Product Customer Review: Caught Them! Red Handed!, March 27, 2010 By James1bond (read all my reviews) Pros: installation is simple, takes pics of screen Cons: might find out more than what you want to know, the scary truth "I bought it for my brother-in-law to catch what his child do when they are on the internet. One of them was writing dirty messages to friends, the other watching XXX stuff. They denied it, but of course he had the proof."

Dead Drops

http://deaddrops.com

Here's the link for the dead drops we talked about last Thursday

How Are Your FInals Going?

Are you enjoying the exercise? Finding it more difficult than expected? Are some elements easier than others? Any advice to ask for or offer your colleagues? Do you feel good about it? Anybody trying anything wildly experimental? Discuss here.

4th amendment underclothes.

this is pretty cool.

for those pesky little invaders of your privacy.

http://www.cargocollective.com/4thamendment

A Thanksgiving Prayer by William S. Burroughs

The Promise of Robots...

Brewbot Infomercial

Machine VS Man

Colossus: The Forbin Project is a scary example for when man loses control over what he has made. Forbin and his team build a self-sustaining indestructible security machine that will protect the USA from any threats from other countries. At the time this seemed like a good idea but after a series of “unpredictable” events where Colossus decides to take matters in his own hands and impose his own policies it soon becomes evident that the creation of Colossus was a very bad idea.

It is interesting to see the interaction and politics that happen between the humans and the machines in this film. As men, we create machines to help us in our daily choirs, we direct and order machines to do things we don’t want to do, and if the machines don’t comply to our demands we junk them and replace them with more suitable machines. There’s a real paradox in the film when Colossus can no longer be directed but is instead giving orders to the humans. Seeing that Colossus is able to control weapons of mass destruction, not being able to control Colossus is a very scary thing. It is funny how the humans react to this, there’s a moment in the film when the President tries to put things back in order by using his status as the leader and the man in control of the USA by telling Colossus, “This is your President…”. But to this, Colossus blows the President away as if he where nothing else but another warm blooded human creature. This is the part of the film where it is clear that even the most high ranked human cant order Colossus, and that they have no other chose than too submit to whatever Colossus demands.

This film shows a real turn of events where the unimaginable becomes reality. Where humans become slaves to the machines. Where what was once an enslaved tool becomes a whip of enslavement.

Keywords -- Supplemental List

1. access
2. crowdsourcing
3. flash mob
4. security theater

Suggestions for Stray Keywords?

As I was reading the list to you in class Thursday it occurred to me that I hadn't included the word "crowdsourcing," and that I did want to include. Another word like that is "flash mob." Do you have any other suggestions for Keywords that deserve inclusion in the list but are not there? If you do, post your suggestions in the comments to this post. I will consider all suggestions. If I like your suggestion, I will include it in the Keyword Supplement in the next post. Do not treat any suggestion as a Keyword until it is included in my List. Confine your choices to the list included in the Final Post and to the Keyword Supplement List I post and update myself.

What You Should Be Doing

I know everybody has some time off for Thanksgiving, and I know many of you are using that time to work on other projects, but do be sure to devote some of your time this week to the Final. Choose the terms you will be defining, group them into the three categories that make sense for you. Allow yourself to think about these choices and tinker with them. No need to devote yourself immediately to the hard work -- but it would be wise for you to play around with the Project a bit in pockets of down-time. Jot down authors and titles and topics that occur to you as good places to turn to when you start searching for quotations. Think about how you might want to adapt the Final to your practice in some way, so that your synthesis of the course materials speaks more forcefully to your own work, your own place in the world, you own efforts to reconcile your history with your hopes. It's better to devote low-level effort and thought to the Project over a few weeks than try to generate the whole Project in one concentrated burst of attention the night before it is due, believe me!

Finding the Final

I've placed a permanent link to the Final in the Course Resources space in the upper-right corner of the blog. So, even as people post new content you should always be able to find your way back to the final very easily.

my presentation 2morrow

The paperclip maximizer -

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

"This concept illustrates how AIs that haven't been specifically programmed to be benevolent to humans are basically as dangerous as if they were explicitly malicious."

The Final Project!

1. abundance
2. acceleration
3. accountability
4. agency
5. amateur
6. analog
7. artificial intelligence
8. auteur
9. author
10. authoritarianism
11. authority
12. basic income guarantee
13. biopiracy
14. blog
15. blogipelago
16. blogosphere
17. broadcast
18. "California Ideology"
19. canon
20. citizen
21. citizen journalism
22. code
23. collaboration
24. commons
25. commonsense
26. commonwealth
27. consensus
28. consensus science
29. consent
30. control
31. copyright
32. creative commons
33. credentialization
34. critique
35. crypto-anarchy
36. culture
37. culture industry
38. cybernetics
39. cybernetic totalism
40. cyberspace
41. cyborg
42. democracy
43. democratization
44. digirati
45. digital
46. digital divide
47. dissensus
48. diversity
49. elite
50. enclosure
51. end-to-end principle (e2e)
52. enframing
53. enhancement
54. eugenics
55. excludability
56. externality
57. fair use
58. filtering
59. finitude
60. free software
61. The Future
62. futurity
63. futurology
64. genomic enclosure
65. gift economy
66. information
67. industrial model
68. liberal subjectivity
69. linking
70. mapping
71. mass culture
72. mass mediation
73. media
74. micro-payments
75. monster
76. Moore's Law
77. negative liberty
78. Neoliberalism
79. Net Neutrality
80. Netroots
81. network
82. node
83. objectivity
84. open source
85. participation
86. panopticon
87. peer
88. peer to peer (p2p)
89. planetarity
90. popular
91. post-humanist
92. precarity
93. precarization
94. privacy
95. private property
96. professional
97. propaganda
98. prostheses
99. prosumerism
100. public
101. publication
102. public good
103. public relations
104. reductionism
105. relational
106. representative
107. retro-futurism
108. revolution
109. rivalrousness
110. robotics
111. secrecy
112. security
113. sharing
114. Singularity
115. social
116. social aesthetics
117. social networks
118. socialization
119. sousveillance
120. spectacle
121. spontaneous order
122. stakeholder
123. surveillance
124. technocracy
125. technology
126. technoscience
127. techno-utopianism
128. "Tragedy of the Commons"
129. transparency
130. viral


For your Final Project you will generate a kind of personal conceptual mapping of the subject matter of the whole course. In order to produce this map, you will need to draw on readings and notes over the course of the whole term. Many connections and problems will likely become clear to you for the first time in making this map. Before you make your choices you should spend some time dwelling over the whole list above, since what may at first seem obvious choices often give way to different questions and concerns once you give them more thought.

The assignment is quite straightforward:

[one] Choose forty-four Keywords from the list above.

[two] Organize your chosen Keywords into three separate, conceptually connected, sets. You can use any criteria that seems useful to you to organize these sets. The only rule is that no resulting set can contain fewer than eight Keywords.

[three] Each of the three sets should be given a unique title or heading and an introductory paragraph (no longer than a single page) that elaborates the criteria governing your choices as to what would be included in that set.

[four] Once you have organized your three sets in this way, briefly define each one of the Keywords you have included in each set in your own words. Ideally, your definitions should be as clear and as concise as possible. These definitions should be a matter of a sentence (or at most two), NOT a paragraph or more. They really are just definitions, not essays or lengthy explanations. It should be clear from your definitions why each of the Keywords in each of the three sets are conceptually connected to each other, but it is also crucial that no terms within any set are treated by you as synonymous, and that your definitions distinguish Keywords from one another clearly (even if the resulting distinctions are sometimes matters of nuance).

[five] Once you have defined all these Keywords, provide a short quotation (feel free to edit and prune to keep your chosen citations properly pithy) from one of the texts we have read this term to accompany each one of your definitions. The quotation you choose can be a definition you found helpful in crafting your own definition, it can be an example or illustration you found especially clarifying, it can a matter of contextualization, framing, or history that you found illuminating, it can even be something you disagreed with so strongly it helped you understand better what you really think yourself.

Obviously, there are endless ways of organizing these sets, defining their Keywords, distinguishing them from one another, and connecting them up to the texts we have read. What matters here is that you follow the rules of the exercise, not that you arrive at some single "right answer" you may fancy I have in mind.

Everyone's map will likely be quite dramatically different from everyone else's. That's a feature, not a bug.

Many students might also find it useful to introduce additional elements to their final projects -- illustration, cartography, collage, AV supplements, sculpture, games, and so on. None of these are required but students are welcome to make this final project their own, to introduce additional formal and experimental dimensions that help you come to terms with the course material as a whole in your own way once the basic requirements are satisfied.

I hope this final project is both illuminating and also enjoyable for you all, as I know it can be. You'll discover, as in so much else, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

Anybody Presenting Tomorrow?

The number of classes remaining is dwindling fast...

Faster then lightning: Precise on Paul Miller

My precise is on Paul Miller’s paper Material Memories: Time and Cinematic Image. Broken into approximately 15-20 sections, they seem to be a mix of simple contemplations of a Dj and the relationship of present-day computerized networking as it relates to music and cinematic Time. Cinematic Time utilizes short cuts of frames captured by the camera lens to expand and reconfigure time in a way that aids in a narrative. Miller points out that the interconnectedness of cybernetics within our everyday life of monitors and codes is compartmentalized into splices of reality similar to that of cinematic time.

I’m not sure who the target audience is for Miller; however, it seems be those influenced by early hip-hop culture, academics and cinematic enthusiast. Providing a historical outline that begins with Maya Deren’s use of cinematic time as a way to explore “rhythms of fragmentation and loss”, he then moves through singular synchronization, Newton’s theory in the seventeenth century, to Einstein’s 1905 theory of multiple ”asynchronous timelines”. All of which are intermixed with how these influences connect to the present states existence. Our lives have become compartmentalized into alter-persona’s that change and get re-innovated like Cher (always reinventing her career, a constant evolution), as modules of our contemporary lives are updated.

The text seems to matter as a way to put together various pieces of contemporary society of computers and Internet personas that stop and start in fragments. What is interesting is that Miller draws attention to these fragmentations that happen within our contemporary lives. He notes that he purposely switches his thinking, language and writing style. Miller creates a “self-subject synchronization”, defined as moving parts aligned in the field of view of another. It’s a marriage of “flow, rupture, and fragmentation” which happens within the contemporary lives that create this; it is not just limited to cinema.

Throughout reading the text, Miller drew me to the use of language and specifically to the actions of a Dj; however, the content of the material was dense and at moments seemed to be leading in the opposite direction of where I thought the paper was going. Miller’s use of comparison of “cinematic time” and music was to get across the point of what a montage of pieces could create in direct response to the senses. Miller is calling attention to the narrative we create within our lives through the tools we deploy. We are writing history faster than lightning.

Side: I've included the link to DJ Spooky website so you can download Free mix's. A great sum up to the the fragmentations that he speaks to within the paper.

http://www.djspooky.com/