Wednesday, December 01. 2010Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 MinutesWednesday, September 01. 2010Google’s Earth - William GibsonVia /Message ----- Google’s Earth - William Gibson (The New York Times): Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. Gibson wonders about Google’s role in our world, and how it is a reflection of us, a tool that shapes us as we use it. Personal comment:
Gibson's article starts with this sentence by Eric Schmidt (Google's CEO): "I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.". This probably tells a bit about where Google aims to go.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
10:06
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, data, fiction, mining, science & technology, search, writing
Wednesday, August 25. 2010Why Privacy Is Not Dead-----
The way privacy is encoded into software doesn't match the way we handle it in real life.
By Danah Boyd
The reason for this disconnect is that in a computational world, privacy is often implemented through access control. Yet privacy is not simply about controlling access. It's about understanding a social context, having a sense of how our information is passed around by others, and sharing accordingly. As social media mature, we must rethink how we encode privacy into our systems. Privacy is not in opposition to speaking in public. We speak privately in public all the time. Sitting in a restaurant, we have intimate conversations knowing that the waitress may overhear. We count on what Erving Goffman called "civil inattention": people will politely ignore us, and even if they listen they won't join in, because doing so violates social norms. Of course, if a close friend sits at the neighboring table, everything changes. Whether an environment is public or not is beside the point. It's the situation that matters. Whenever we speak in face-to-face settings, we modify our communication on the basis of cues like who's present and how far our voices carry. We negotiate privacy explicitly--"Please don't tell anyone"--or through tacit understanding. Sometimes, this fails. A friend might gossip behind our back or fail to understand what we thought was implied. Such incidents make us question our interpretation of the situation or the trustworthiness of the friend. All this also applies online, but with additional complications. Digital walls do almost have ears; they listen, record, and share our messages. Before we can communicate appropriately in a social environment like Facebook or Twitter, we must develop a sense for how and what people share. When the privacy options available to us change, we are more likely to question the system than to alter our own behavior. But such changes strain our relationships and undermine our ability to navigate broad social norms. People who can be whoever they want, wherever they want, are a privileged minority. As social media become more embedded in everyday society, the mismatch between the rule-based privacy that software offers and the subtler, intuitive ways that humans understand the concept will increasingly cause cultural collisions and social slips. But people will not abandon social media, nor will privacy disappear. They will simply work harder to carve out a space for privacy as they understand it and to maintain control, whether by using pseudonyms or speaking in code. Instead of forcing users to do that, why not make our social software support the way we naturally handle privacy? There is much to be said for allowing the sunlight of diversity to shine. But too much sunlight scorches the earth. Let's create a forest, not a desert. Danah Boyd is a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a member of the 2010 TR35. Copyright Technology Review 2010.
Personal comment: In connection to this post, you can look a this picture from Mashable site.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
08:49
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, media, mining, privacy, science & technology, social, surveillance
Thursday, July 22. 2010Time-Lapse Twitter Visualization Shows America’s MoodsVia Mashable ----- by Jolie O'Dell A group of researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University have gathered enough data from Twitter to give us all a snapshot of how we Americans feel throughout a typical day or week. Not only did they analyze the sentiments we collectively expressed in 300 million tweets over three years against a scholarly word list; these researchers also mashed up that data with information from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Google Maps API and more. What they ended up with was a fascinating visualization showing the pulse of our nation, our very moods as they fluctuate over time. The researchers have put this information into density-preserving cartograms, maps that take the volume of tweets into account when representing the land area. In other words, in areas where there are more tweets, those spots on the map will appear larger than they do in real life. It will surprise almost no one to learn that findings indicate a general mood slump mid-day and mid-week, when we are most likely to be at work. Our tweets show that we’re happiest in the early morning and late evening; during the week, our mood tends to peak on Sunday morning. Less predictable, perhaps, is the fact that West Coast tweets were “happier” than tweets from the East Coast. Although West Coast Twitter users expressed emotions in the same cycles as the East Coast users (with a three-hour gap, of course, because of time zone differences), the West Coasters didn’t dip as low in mood as the East Coasters by a significant margin. For the inforgraphic fans among you, here’s a lovely PDF showing some of the data displayed: And here’s a cool video showing the American Twitter mood expressions changing over the course of a day: Monday, June 07. 2010“The Geotaggers’ World Atlas” by Eric FischerThe maps are ordered by the number of pictures taken in the central cluster of each one. This is a little unfair to aggressively polycentric cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles, which probably get lower placement than they really deserve because there are gaps where no one took any pictures. The central cluster of each map is not necessarily in the center of each image, because the image bounds are chosen to include as many geotagged locations as possible near the central cluster. All the maps are to the same scale, chosen to be just large enough for the central New York cluster to fit. The photo locations come from the public Flickr and Picasa search APIs. See them all here.
Related Links:Personal comment: This is nothing new as a practice (to build up maps based on the analysis or mining online data --pictures in this case--), but the maps are beautiful and of course revealing when it comes to tourists or popular locations in cities! Friday, May 14. 2010Who Controls Identity on the Web?-----
Facebook and Mozilla have contrasting visions for the future of your online identity.
By Christopher Mims
The two approaches are fundamentally different. Facebook's Open Graph Protocol uses the oAuth standard, which lets a website identify a user via a third-party site without exchanging sensitive information. Facebook--whose 400 million active users make it the world's largest social network in the world--stands to benefit as other sites come to rely on the information it holds about users and their social connections. The approach taken by the Mozilla Foundation, which makes the Firefox browser, comes in the form of a suite of browser extensions. One of the extensions, called Account Manager, can replace all of a user's online passwords with secure, computer-generated strings that are encrypted and protected with a single master password. Mozilla's identity extensions can interact with other identity standards, including OpenGraph, oAuth, and OpenID, a standard that allows any website or Web service provider to host a social network-style profile of a user. The goal of the Mozilla Foundation's efforts is to establish a set of open standards and protocols that could be implemented in any browser or website. As much as possible, identity would be moved out of the webpage itself and into the "chrome" of the browser--the parts around of the webpage. Logging in and out of sites would be accomplished through buttons at the top of the browser that would activate secure protocols--rendering the process of creating and memorizing usernames and passwords obsolete. "Every user of the Internet today is expected to describe themselves to every site they go to," says Mike Hanson, principal engineer at Mozilla Labs. Inevitably, Hanson says, this leads to confusion and security holes, such as passwords that are identical across multiple sites. The solution, according to Hanson, is to let the browser itself manage user identity. Weave Sync, another Mozilla extension, is designed to enable that vision. It stores encrypted versions of a growing list of data on a Mozilla-hosted server (or any user-specified server), including a person's history, preferences, bookmarks, and even open tabs, which can be synced across two or more browsers. This allows users to have the same browser workspace on any device that supports Firefox or its mobile equivalent, Fennec. There's even a prototype for the iPhone, built on top of Apple's Safari browser. Last fall Mozilla Labs also commissioned Chris Messina, at the time a researcher in residence at Mozilla Labs, to design a Web browser that would manage the other half of online identity--a user's social graph. In Messina's mock-ups, a user can interact with people on the Web in ways that go beyond what OpenID or Facebook's OpenGraph currently offer. "The idea of a social browser is important to me because it's the single point of integration for all websites," says Messina. "It's the one thing that knows who you are across all social experiences." Messina's designs envision a browser that lets users "follow" other users by viewing all of their relevant information streams--Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.--collected into a single browser tab stamped with that user's profile picture. A similar interface could also be used to control exactly what personal information other people and websites have access to. This could allow, for instance, a user to change her shipping address across any number of sites at once, or to control which version of their identity a particular groups of friends can access. "I'm not interested in the [Mark] Zuckerberg approach, where privacy doesn't exist anymore," says Messina, referring to the CEO of Facebook. Both Facebook and the Mozilla Foundation will face challenges in pushing their own vision of online identity. John Mitchell, a professor of computer science at Stanford, says the most significant barrier will be the adoption of suitable protocols. Before such protocols can be standardized and rolled into, for instance, the next version of HTML, Web developers are going to have to be willing to experiment. "What I've seen from a lot of companies is an attempt to guess the end solution and build that only," says Mitchell. "It would be better if, instead, we had an open architecture where people could try many different approaches." If the new Mozilla software and Messina's designs are sufficiently popular with users and developers (not to mention the influencers who sit on the boards of standards committees like the World Wide Web Consortium), then the foundation's technology could find its way into the regular release of Firefox and perhaps, ultimately, into other browsers. To Messina, just drawing up the blueprints for such technology was an important first step. "We're further away from the death of the password than I'd like to be, but it's a nice goal to aim for," he says. Copyright Technology Review 2010. Personal comment:
Back in 2003 (and up to 2005), we treated this question of identity, surveillance-monitoring technique and data mining of user's data in the Knowscape Mobile project, or in the AI vs AI in self-space project too. We claimed for a total open approach of online identity considering the web as a public space (open data collected in open space belongs to everybody). Of course, this was a speculative project to address the question. An approach that won't be feasible in reality because we definitely need all type of spaces: public, private, semi-public, semi-private, etc. But the status of "space" and their data should be transparent to all users.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology
at
10:49
Defined tags for this entry: data, identification, marketing, mining, monitoring, science & technology, surveillance
Friday, September 18. 2009EyeBrowse: Record, Visualize and Share your Browser HistoryAs if finding out one's "Online Persona" or everyday activities is not sufficiently revealing, MIT goes one step further as it started looking at your online surfing behavior. Eyebrowse [csail.mit.edu] is an add-on for Firefox developed by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, which has the ability to record, visualize, and share one's browser history in real-time. The resulting data is represented as a collection of insightful data visualizations, such as individual profiles, tickers, page stats or more data-heavy bar graphs, timelines and dot charts that highlight day-by-day usage patterns (e.g. top URLs, #websites over time and time patterns respectively). These visualizations should allow one to gain personal and social insights, even catching a glimpse of what Google "knows" about online usage patterns of individuals. For instance, users can learn how much time they spend on reading the news or other online procrastinations. Currently, most web browsing data is collected by search engine companies (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Alexa), which is hardly available for public domain research. Eyebrowse seeks to fill this gap by providing an open and public repository of "web trails". By making this data openly available, the project hopes to support the creation of useful public services that report major trends on the web, services that support personalization through collaborative filtering, and other as-yet unimagined services that require a mass of data about the world's interaction with the web. ----- Personal comment: Data to the people? Tuesday, April 28. 2009Mapping the World's Photos: Extensive Flickr Photo Analysis
For instance, their findings show that the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, which opened in May 2006, is more popular than many other well-known tourist sites such as St Paul's Cathedral in London, the Reichstag in Berlin and the Washington Monument in the US capital. Interesting visualizations include diagrams for Manhattan and the San Francisco Bay area that illustrate the movement of photographers by plotting the geolocated coordinates of sequences of images taken by the same user, sorted by time, for which consecutive photos were no more than 30 minutes apart. "The figures are striking in the amount of detail they reveal about these cities. For example, one can clearly see the grid structure of the Manhattan streets, caused by users traveling and taking photos along them. The Brooklyn Bridge, in the lower center of the figure, is clearly visible, as are the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges just to the north. One can even see the route of the ferries that take tourists from Lower Manhattan to the Statue of Liberty". Another figure shows maps of representative images for the top landmarks in each of the top 20 North American and European cities. It raises the intriguing possibility of an online travel guidebook that could automatically identify the best sites to visit on one's next vacation, as judged by the collective wisdom of the world's photographers. See also World's Eyes. Via Sydney Morning Herald. ----- Personal comment:
Intéressant évidemment de constater que l'on tire de plus en plus d'informations à partir de site regroupant des données (ici Flickr, des photos "taguées"). Les traces qu'on laisse ici et là sont analysables, etc. On connait désormais la litanie.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology, Territory
at
09:18
Defined tags for this entry: data, mining, monitoring, photography, science & technology, surveillance, territory
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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