Love this. Steven Mann, the Blair Watch Project & Sousveillance: Wearable Computing and Citizen "Undersight" | h+ Magazine

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Excerpt:

Watching from Below Rather Than Above

Written By: Steve Mann
Date Published: July 10, 2009

"When Canadian police tasered Robert Dziekanski –- a man who had arrived in Vancouver International airport in October 2007 from Poland – it was not the surveillance cameras that helped bring the incident to light. It was witness Paul Pritchard who captured the killing on his camera phone. Dziekanski was tasered at least twice and then beaten by police.

This is but one example of citizens capturing their ordinary day-to-day life activities and uncovering crimes that have previously escaped capture by surveillance that looks only “from above.” Clearly, there is value in looking in all directions -- an ordinary citizen can round out the perspective provided by surveillance cameras by watching people “from below” with a simple hand-held camera phone.

Sousveillance – the inverse of surveillance – is the general activity of an individual capturing a first-person recording of an activity from his or her own perspective as a participant in the activity. Rather than watching "from above," the French “sous” means “under” or “from below.”

This is “undersight” rather than oversight – looking upwards from below.

The SenseCam...."

Read the full article:

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/politics/sousveillance-wearable-computi...

Most Useful Article I've Read Today: 10 Ways to Get the Most Out of Technology

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Excerpt:

"Your gadgets and computers, your software and sites — they are not working as well as they should. You need to make some tweaks.

But the tech industry has given you the impression that making adjustments is difficult and time-consuming. It is not.

And so below are 10 things to do to improve your technological life. They are easy and (mostly) free. Altogether, they should take about two hours; one involves calling your cable or phone company, so that figure is elastic. If you do them, those two hours will pay off handsomely in both increased free time and diminished anxiety and frustration. You can do it.

GET A SMARTPHONE

Why: Because having immediate access to your e-mail, photos, calendars and address books, not to mention vast swaths of the Internet, makes life a little easier.

How: This does not have to be complicated. Upgrade your phone with your existing carrier; later, when you are an advanced beginner, you can start weighing the pluses and minuses of your carrier versus another. Using AT&T? Get a refurbished iPhone 3GS for $29. Verizon? Depending on what’s announced next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, get its version of the iPhone, or a refurbished Droid Incredible for $100. Sprint? Either the LG Optimus S or the Samsung Transform are decent Android phones that cost $50. T-Mobile users can get the free LG Optimus T.

STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER

Why: Because, while the latest version has some real improvements, Internet Explorer is large, bloated with features and an example of old-style Microsoft excess.

How: Switch to either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. Both are first-rate, speedy browsers, and both are free. It remains a tight race between the two, but Chrome has had the lead lately in features and performance. Both browsers include useful things like bookmark syncing. That means that your bookmarks folder will be the same on every computer using Chrome or Firefox, and will update if you change anything.

UPLOAD YOUR PHOTOS TO THE CLOUD

Why: Because you’ll be really sorry if an errant cup of coffee makes its way onto your PC, wiping away years of photographic memories. Creating copies of your digital photos on an online service is a painless way to ensure they’ll be around no matter what happens to your PC. It is also an easy way to share the photos with friends and family.

How: There are many good, free choices. To keep things simple, use Picasa, Google’s service. After your initial upload — which may take a while, so set it up before you go to sleep — you will have a full backup of your photo library. And by inviting people to view it, privately, with passwords, you will not have to e-mail photos anymore. Anytime you have new pictures, upload them to Picasa, send a message to your subscribers, and they can view your gallery at their leisure...."

Seven more to go.... read the full post...

Excellent Post on 'Rise of the Micro-Medici'

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From : Change Observer: Design Observer

By Maria Popova

Excerpt:

"...Crowdsourcing, however, has become valuable for creative projects in a different way. While efforts to tap the wisdom of crowds may fall flat in bringing creative visions to life, tapping the wallets of crowds has been incredibly successful. Microfunding platforms like Kickstarter, alongside a handful of copycats and competitors, are liberating innovators everywhere from film to industrial design to programming. Just this month, Scott Wilson funded his TikTok+LunaTik Multi-Touch Watch Kit concept on Kickstarter, raising a staggering $941,718. His idea — a snap-in design that transforms the iPod Nano into a multifunctional timepiece — had so much merit in the eyes of the microfunding community that it raised 6,827 percent more than the original goal of $15,000. LoudSauce allows supporters of causes and nonprofits to buy media space to help their message reach a wider audience and facilitate mainstream awareness. ProFounder enables entrepreneurs to microfund small business ventures; IndieGoGo does the same for independent filmmakers. ArtistsShare and PledgeMusic give artists the means to subsidize tours, shows and installations by sourcing donations directly from fans. Founded by a pair of World Bank and UN Development Fund alums, Kopernik uses the model to connect innovative humanitarian designs and technologies with the communities that would benefit from them, allowing local organizations to take the fulfillment of their needs into their own hands.

This new kind of patronage is essentially a return to the Medici, only in fragmented form via micropayments. An intelligent evolution of crowdsourcing, it preserves the nucleus of a creative endeavor – its singular point of view – while harnessing collective power to bring it to fruition...."

Amazing Photos, Interesting Idea: Flâneurs in Automobiles* | Venturi and Scott Brown on the Road « dpr-barcelona

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Excerpt:

"Baudelaire‘s meaning of flâneur was that of “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”. But with the automobile industry suffering big changes in the USA in the decade of the 60s, while the European makers adopted ever-higher technology, and Japan appeared as a serious car-producing nation, American architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, with students from Yale University, embarked in 1968 on a groundbreaking investigation of the Las Vegas Strip… as flâneurs but in automobiles.

Now, almost forty years after that experience, it’s time to re-think about what we’ve learned of this psychogeographic trip. At those years, architects had a fresh way of understanding the cities. They were looking at the influence of popular culture, advertising, film and the experience of the built environment. From a moving automobile, they extended the categories of the ordinary, the ugly, and the social into architecture. About this project, we can read at Venturi & Scott Brown website:

Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of “common” people and the commercial vernacular and less immodest in their erections of “heroic,” self-aggrandizing monuments. This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas Strip, and Part II, “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed,” a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl...."

Excerpt:

"In Flâneurs in Automobiles, a conversation between Peter Fischli, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist; Fischli talks about his own experience:

In the early 1980s. In 1982, I guess. I bought a car in New York and drove across America for four months. It’s a completely astonishing experience when you drive for three days through the desert and then come to Las Vegas. You see this “thing” in the middle of just dry stones and nothing. And when you arrive there, it starts with one sign, then two signs, and more and more … . So that big empty space around Las Vegas was always something important to me. The “fata morgana” moment. It wasn’t the Las Vegas as we know it today, of course...."

read the full post with the gorgeous images:

http://dprbcn.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/flaneurs-in-automobiles/

Love this Project: Helping People Help Their Narratives >> Andrew McGregor & The Tiziano Project

Interview

Helping People Help Their Narratives


Andrew McGregor talks about The Tiziano Project, a nonprofit that provides occupants of conflict, post-conflict and underreported regions with the resources and training to tell the stories that shape their world.

By Maria Popova


Tiziano reporter Sazan Mandalawi learns how to use social media tools at a workshop in Iraq. Photo: Jon Vidar / The Tiziano Project

"Citizen journalism" has been one of 2010's most frivolous buzz phrases, tossed around like a democratic panacea for the injustices and imbalances of news. A leap of logic consistently accompanies the concept: the assumption that mere access to new-media tools and platforms is necessary and sufficient for this breed of decentralized, mass-driven reporting. Necessary, certainly. Sufficient, hardly. What makes the difference between mere information gathering and true journalistic practice, with its compelling storytelling and investigative rigor, is the mastering of those tools.

This is precisely what the The Tiziano Project addresses. Founded in 2007, the nonprofit provides occupants of conflict, post-conflict and underreported regions with the equipment, resources and – perhaps most important – training to tell the stories that shape their world and, in the process, better their lives. It is as much about community empowerment on the local level as it is about harnessing collaborative journalism on a global scale, using the capacity of photojournalism, multimedia storytelling and information technology to foster a new kind of communication education.

In this interview, founder Andrew McGregor talks about the project’s goals, the democratization of the newsroom, Tiziano's recent effort in Kurdistan and the importance of sensitivity to cultural differences in the process of implementing new-media platforms.

read the interview on:

http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=23578

Massively detailed post from cityofsound: Notes on the 'next generation check-in' experience from Qantas

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Excerpt:

"I fly a lot. A few thousand kilometers every week on average. I'm not proud of this, and as much as I remain fascinated by airports and aviation I'd really rather not fly so regularly. The reasons for regret are multiple, from family life to carbon footprint to the dismal lack of a high-speed rail alternative, but also because Qantas has an effective monopoly in domestic aviation in Australia. (As with many sectors here, privately-owned effective monopolies rule, from Qantas to Telstra to Coles supermarkets, which leaves punters with few of the benefits of either publicly-owned enterprises or of diverse, competitive markets. It's part of the reason why innovation in products and services is generally so thin on the ground in Australia.) As such, Qantas can deliver a patchy service and largely get away with it.

But, particular credit where it is due for their new frequent flyer check-in experience, which—at this admittedly early stage—is one of the most promising mainstream examples of touch technology and service design I've seen recently.

It was launched at Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport (SYD) about a month ago. I was there on the day before launch, heading up to Brisbane, and noticed the newly installed check-in poles under cover. On the following day I was there again, horribly early to head to Melbourne, and the system was live....."

read the full post

NVidia presents 3D community: website with 3D trailers, clips, sports, photos

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From newzglobe.com:

"NVIDIA brings on the first 3D Vision Community, offering users full-resolution 3D photos, movies and videos.

Here’s what many have been waiting for; NVIDIA recently unveiled a pioneer web community specifically for 3D content.

3DVisionLive.com is an exclusive online community, where users can enjoy and experience a gamut of 3D content on their computers. Besides streaming 3D movie trailers, clips, music videos, sports snippets, and video shots, users can also post and view high-resolution photos.

3D photos on the online community can be viewed in full color and resolution using NVIDIA 3D Vision technology, as well as in blue and red mode. Users can also avail the option of sharing their photos by making their albums accessible for private and public viewing. Sporting videos, include surfing; mountain biking; flying; and racing.

“The goal of 3DVisionLive.com is to create an online community where users can experience the best applications and content for 3D PCs,” said Phil Eisler, General Manager of 3D Vision. “Now photo and video professionals and enthusiasts will see the future of their profession or passion in 3D with an easy-to-use website.”

NVIDIA is the worldwide leader in 3D technology for personal computers.

NVIDIA will officially exhibit 3DVisionLive.com at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 in Las Vegas this year. It will also be showcasing and demonstrating a number of new 3D Vision equipped PCs, displays and devices.

NVIDIA 3D Vision technology encompasses a rich gamut of 3D content, including 500 games; Blu-ray 3D movies; 3D photos; and video files. It also includes 3D Vision software and advanced active shutter glasses, which delivers high-resolution, enthralling 3D images that any gamer or photo enthusiast’s delight."

Karachi goes 3D

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From Newzglobe:

"Karachi’s first 3D digital cinema, The Atrium, officially opened its doors this week.

Situated at the Atrium mall in the heart of the city, The Atrium is the first 3D digital cinema in Pakistan.

The project was the brainchild of Mandviwalla Entertainment's Nadeem Mandviwalla. Mandviwalla said that when he watched James Cameron’s 3D blockbuster, Avatar, he decided that he, “must bring this technology to Pakistan.”

“Pakistani cinema industry is currently undergoing the fall, as the trend of demolishing cinemas to replace with malls is rising,” Mandviwalla said before noting that the technology itself is in it’s evolving stages, and it would be unwise to predict that it will be an instant hit.

Other audience members at the opening night screening of Avatar expressed their hope that soon Indian and Pakistani movies will also be shown in 3D.

Pakistani film star Nadeem was also present at the screening and said, “It is crucial for cinema culture to be revived and for the film industry to get a desperately needed boost.”

Mustafa Qureshi, another famous Pakistani film star present at the event commented on the present state of the Pakistani cinema, “Our movies are currently not worthy of being on these screens but I hope we will soon move in the right direction and make some world-class movies.”

Chief Guest at the event, Federal Minister for Culture, Aftab Shah Gillani said the government is doing all it can to support the cinema and film industry.

The Atrium’s upcoming lineup of 3D movies, includes Chronicles of Narnia; and Voyage of the Dawn Treader."