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The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we're happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud.

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

In this way, reCAPTCHA’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So we'll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.

That's why we're excited to welcome the reCAPTCHA team to Google, and we're committed to delivering the same high level of performance that websites using reCAPTCHA have come to expect. Improving the availability and accessibility of all the information on the Internet is really important to us, so we're looking forward to advancing this technology with the reCAPTCHA team.

Posted by Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager

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Via The Official Google Blog

Personal comment:

Après la fonte créée spécifiquement pour pouvoir être lue par les machines (on pense ici bien entendu à l'OCR), le CAPTCHA est apparu bien plus récemment avec l'objectif exactement contraire: ne pas pouvoir être lu par les machines... (pour les raisons que l'on sait d'éviter les logins automatiques et autres spams de listes ou siztes divers).
On avait réalisé un projet en 2004 (Electroscape 004) exploitant du "text to speech" et il y a peut-être un projet inverse à faire avec ça aujourd'hui...?

Personas [media.mit.edu] uses sophisticated natural language processing algorithms to create a detailed, visual data portrait of one's aggregated online identity.

Personas explores the web for information and attempts to characterize the person: to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized as a DNA-like, colorful strip with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Be sure to type in your own name in the online interface: is Personas able to analyze and represent your online identity in a sufficient way?

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Via Information aethetics

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Personal comment:

Pas très intéressant comme visualisation, mais le projet à l'air intéressant.

It’s a conceptual piece, but alarmingly plausible. Be careful you don’t venture out to the Republican fundraiser with your Gay Disco Party Animal ID turned on.

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Via Beyond the beyond (Bruce Sterling's blog on wired)

Personal comment:

Une vraie scène d'horreur! "Hmmm, cette semaine j'ai des bons ratings!" ...

A story in NPR reports an incident that happened to Iranian-American, as she was flying to Iran last week.

On passing through the immigration control at the airport in Tehran, she was asked by the officers if she has a Facebook account. When she said “no”, the officers pulled up a laptop and searched for her name on Facebook. They found her account and noted down the names of her Facebook friends.

The article discusses three “very disturbing” implications. You may think of more. Thanks to Katy Pearce for sending the link, and for her reaction:

A good reminder that when traveling in authoritarian countries, one should do a complete OS reinstall, encrypt EVERYTHING and keep all personal information off of the laptop. I’d also recommend doing a wipe of one’s PDA/smartphone. You just never know…

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Via Smart Mobs

Are social networks such as Facebook and MySpace doing enough to protect their users’ privacy? In the European Union, they might need to do more. A panel of European regulators has laid out operating guidelines for social networks, which will ensure their compliance with strict – albeit sometimes vague – online privacy laws in the European Union.

These laws mostly stem from the European Union Directive on Data Protection of 1995, which, among other regulations, prohibits collection of personal information without consumers’ permission, forbids employers to read workers’ private e-mail, and doesn’t allow companies to share personal information on users without their permission.

However, according to data-privacy lawyer Jan Dhont at Lorenz in Brussels, these regulations aren’t always very clear. For example, the companies that collect personal information must use it for “legitimate purposes,” which can be interpreted in many different ways.

Nevertheless, the guidelines that were laid out will require quite a bit of effort from sites such as Facebook and MySpace, who cannot neglect their European user base and will therefore surely at least try to comply to avoid clashing with the EU regulators.

According to the guidelines, social networks must set security settings to high by default; they must allow users to limit data disclosed to third parties, and they must limit the use of sensitive information (race, religion, political views) in behavioral advertising.

Furthermore, social networks must delete accounts that have been inactive for long periods, as well as discard users’ personal information after they delete their accounts; an interesting regulation in view of the recent Facebook scandal, in which Facebook claimed ownership of all the content you’ve ever uploaded even if you quit the service. Facebook later apologized and restored their previous Terms of Service, even letting users be part of the decision process in creating the new ToS. However, it must be noted that even if this sounds like democracy, it’s a frail one, as Facebook still sets up the stage and has the last word on every decision.

It is therefore good that there’s an overseer, looking over our online privacy and security. These latest guidelines from the European Union will definitely make life harder for social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, but will most likely have a positive impact on user privacy in the long run.

You can read the entire set of guidelines created by the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party in PDF format here.

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Vis Mashable

Personal comment:

De façon générale, la thématique de la privacité monte dans les médias, l'intérêt du public aussi et la législation tente de suivre...

In a campaign to promote the Editoras Online bookshop, DDB Brasil created a book that regularly updates its content.

The book, which is available exclusively from Editoras Online, features a series of QR codes. Using a mobile phone, the reader can decode them to reveal messages about love and hate that have been posted on Twitter.

These video explain how it works. Click HERE for the video.

Every time someone who is following the campaign's Twitter profile tweets a phrase containing either the words 'love' or 'hate', that phrase is captured and linked to one of the QR codes in the book. Tiago Marcondes, who created the campaign, explains that they would have liked to pull in phrases from all over Twitter but lawyers advised that only those of people following the campaign could be used.

To promote the book, before it was launched DDB posted 4000 stickers bearing 200 different QR codes around São Paulo. Each sticker says "Here's a moment of love" or "hate" and has a QR code below. As with the book pages, those with QR-enabled phones can decode the graphic to reveal a phrase from Twitter. All the stickers and the QR codes in the book are updated with new phrases every 7 days.

More pictures can be found here

The campaign website is here, with info in English here

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Via Creative Review

Personal comment:

Le lien entre web et livre, entre objet statique et données dynamiques. On a déjà vu plusieurs projets de ce type, certains mieux réussi (notamment l'aspect visuel du code), mais voilà un exemple qui peut donner des idées sur la façon de lier une communication papier et web.

The best way to see if something works or not is to try it out for yourself. FOXTEL Australia has sent us an email about their new website, called I Am Unique, which lets users create personalized 3D portraits that incorporate text, videos and images from social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Sounds vague; luckily, they’ve also created one for us, and I have to admit, it’s pretty neat.

The portraits are really in 3D, and you can pan, zoom and rotate them as you like; the entire experience and the interface is somewhat similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth. Each portrait consists of several “fragments”; click on one, and it’ll flip over, revealing content - a tweet or an image, perhaps - drawn from one social network or another.

You can do all sorts of cool things with the fragments; for example, you can browse through them with the arrow keys, or separate them all with the spacebar (hit “controls” on the right side of the screen to see all the options). You can create your own portrait for free, or contribute to other portraits by adding photos, text, stories, videos or blog entries that are relevant to the portrayed entity.

Now, while the entire site is primarily a visual gimmick and a showcase of FOXTEL’s technology, used in their iQ2 set-top unit, it’s done very well and I can actually see people using it; it’s free, simple, easy, and the results are undeniably cool.

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Via Mashable

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Personal comment:

Le retour de l'Avatar... Ici, un avatar construit à partir de fragment trouvé sur les réseaux sociaux. Quelque chose qui serait à la fois dynamique et plus représentatif de son identité en ligne. Cela me rappelle évidemment deux projets que nous avons fait (il y a longtemps): les reconstruction de personnages pour Parisienne en 2000 (fragments d'images de visages capturées à différents moments dans le temps) et Knowscape_mobile (cf lien) entre 2003 et 2005 où l'avatar, construit en temps réel, montrait les sites web par lequel la personne était passée (clickable sur son avatar).

Google has introduced a new feature to give you a bit more control over what comes up when someone searches for your name – sort of.

Now, when you search for a name on Google, you’ll get a list of the Google Profiles that users have setup under that name at the bottom of search results. If you haven’t yet setup a Google Profile, you’ll now be provided with the option to do so when you Google “me”.

This is going to be a welcome addition for lots of people, especially those who aren’t necessarily happy with what links Google has for them on the first page of results. It also solves the problem of sharing a name with someone that happens to be a popular search term. For Google though, it could be a big boon to Google Profiles, the service that is powering this whole thing.

 

 

 

Google Profiles themselves are rather basic, allowing you to enter some details about yourself, link to your social networking profiles, upload a photo, and share contact details with specific groups of people that you setup. They’re also available at a custom URL – google.com/profiles/yourname. If you want your profile to show up in search results, you’ll need to opt-in via the Google Profiles site - it’s not automatically included.

Now that they are integrated in Google ego searches, you can imagine that people are going to be paying a lot more attention to what’s in their Google Profile and keeping it updated with more frequency. As such, Google might have just unlocked an incredibly important piece of their social networking strategy. There might not be a social network (in the traditional sense) built around Google Profiles just yet, but the groundwork has just been laid in a very big way.
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Via Mashable

Personal comment:

Oui, bien sûr, nous avons tous fait des recherches pour le nom de telle ou telle personne, pour son propre nom, etc.
Google offre maintenant une possibilité de customiser partiellement les résultats des recherches qui concernent sa propre identité/personne --US only! pour l'instant-- (et collecte au passage quelques informations utiles puisqu'il faut posséder un compte Google...)

  By Geoff Manaugh

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[Image: The population density of the United States, ca. 2000, via Wikipedia].

If you'll excuse a quick bit of landscape-inspired political speculation, I was reminded this morning of something I read last year on Boing Boing and which has stuck with me ever since – and that's that there are more World of Warcraft players in the United States today than there are farmers.
Farmers, however, as Boing Boing and the original blog post it links to are both quick to point out, are often portrayed in media polls as a voice of cultural and political authenticity in the United States. They are real Americans, the idea goes, a kind of quiet majority in the background that presidential candidates and media pundits would be foolish to overlook.
If you want a real cross-section of Americana, then, you're supposed to interview farmers and even hockey moms – but why not World of Warcraft players? This is just a rhetorical question – it would be absurd to suggest that World of Warcraft players (or architecture bloggers) somehow have a special insight on national governance – but, as cultural demographics go, it's worth asking why politicians and the media continue to over-prioritize the rural and small-town experience.

[Image: A street in Columbus, Wisconsin, the small and, at the time, semi-rural town in which I grew up, photographed under a Creative Commons license by Royal Broil].

In a related vein, it's often said in the U.S. that certain politicians simply "don't understand the West": they're so caught up in their big city, coastal ways that they just don't get – they can't even comprehend – how a rancher might react to something like increased federal control over water rights or how a small-town mayor might object to interfering rulings by the Supreme Court. Politicians who don't understand the west – who don't understand the rugged individuality of ranch life or the no-excuses self-responsibility of American small towns – are thus unfit to lead this society.
But surely the more accurate lesson to be drawn from such a statement is exactly the opposite?
One could even speculate here that politicians from small towns, and from the big rural states of the west, have no idea how cities – which now house the overwhelming majority of the American population – actually operate, on infrastructural, economic, socio-political, and even public health levels, and so they would be alarmingly out of place in the national government of an urbanized country like the United States.
If the United States – if the entire world – is rapidly urbanizing, then it would seem like literally the last thing we need in the White House, in an era of collapsing bridges and levees, is someone whose idea of public infrastructure is a dirt road.
Put another way, perhaps coming from a ranch or a small town is precisely why a certain candidate might be unable to govern a nation that is now 80% urban.
It's a political collision of landscape management strategies.

[Image: Urban areas in the U.S. Map courtesy of NASA].

On the other hand, perhaps this juxtaposition would be exactly why a rural or small-town candidate could be perfect for the job – fresh perspectives, thinking outside the box, and so on. After all, a good rancher is surely a better leader than a failed mayor.
Or, to take an even more aggressive stand against this argument, surely the administrative specifics of your previous professional life – you were a doctor, a minister, a novelist, a governor, a business owner, a soccer dad – are less important than your maturity, knowledge, clarity of thought, and judgment?
Even having said that, though, I can't help but wonder if a candidate might "understand" one particular type of settled landscape – a small town, a thinly populated prairie, an icy state with a population one-fifth that of Chicago – but not another, more heavily urbanized type of landscape (i.e. the United States as a whole).
So I was reminded again of the opening statistic from Boing Boing – a statistic that I have not researched independently, mind you, but that appears to be based on this data – when I read that President Bush had stopped off this morning to speak about the credit crisis "with consumers and business people at Olmos Pharmacy, an old-fashioned soda shop and lunch counter" in San Antonio, Texas.
The idea here – the spatial implication – is that Bush has somehow stopped off in a landscape of down-home American democracy. This is everyday life, we're meant to believe – a geographic stand-in for the true heart and center of the United States.
But it increasingly feels to me that presidential politics now deliberately take place in a landscape that the modern world has left behind. It's a landscape of nostalgia, the golden age in landscape form: Joe Biden visits Pam's Pancakes outside Pittsburgh, Bush visits a soda shop, Sarah Palin watches ice hockey in a town that doesn't have cell phone coverage, Obama goes to a tractor pull.
It's as if presidential campaigns and their pursuing tagcloud of media pundits are actually a kind of landscape detection society – a rival Center for Land Use Interpretation – seeking out obsolete spatial versions of the United States, outdated geographies most of us no longer live within or encounter.
They find small towns that, by definition, are under-populated and thus unrepresentative of the United States as a whole; they find "old-fashioned" restaurants that seem on the verge of closing for lack of interested customers; they tour "Main Streets" that lost their inhabitants and their businesses long ago.
All along they pretend that these landscapes are politically relevant.
My point here is not that we should just swap landscapes in order to be in touch with the majority of the American population – going to this city instead of to that town, visiting this urban football team instead of that rural hockey league, stopping by this popular Asian restaurant instead of that pie-filled diner (though I would be very interested to explore this hypothesis). I simply want to point out that political campaigning in the United States seems almost deliberately to take place in a landscape that no longer has genuine relevance to the majority of U.S. citizens.
The idea that "an old-fashioned soda shop" might give someone access to the mind of the United States seems so absurd as to be almost impossible to ridicule thoroughly.

[Images: From the fascinating series of electoral maps produced by M. T. Gastner, C. R. Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman after the 2004 U.S. presidential election].

Of course, I understand that there are electoral college strategies at work and so on; but what I think remains unchallenged throughout all of this is the idea that small town voters somehow offer a more authentic perspective on the political life of this country – and not, say, people in West Hollywood or the Upper East Side or Atlanta or even Reno. Or World of Warcraft players. Or people who eat sushi. People who read Harry Potter novels.
"President Bush stopped off today with a group of people who read Harry Potter novels – the eleventh-largest demographic group in the United States – to discuss the ongoing financial crisis..."
Which group is larger, more important, more likely to vote, more demographically representative of the United States?
Call them micro-niches or whatever new marketing term you want to invent, but it seems like American politicians are increasingly trapped in a kind of minor landscape, a geography that is demonstrably not that within which the majority of Americans currently live.
"Barack Obama campaigned today in the early 1960s by visiting a small pancake house near Springdale..."
In any case, the entire political premise of the last eight years seems to have been one of landscape: big city dwellers near the Great Lakes and the ocean coasts simply don't understand small town communities, and they're embarrassingly out of touch with the everyday big skies of lonely ranchers on the plains. But while this might be true – and I don't think it is, frankly – reversing this belief is surely even more alarming: the idea that someone whose background includes ranches and small towns should go on to lead an urban nation in an urban world seems questionable at best – and potentially dangerous in actual practice.
Again, though, there seems to be no adequate way to measure how political exposure to certain settled landscapes might affect a candidate's ability to govern – and so this post should simply be taken as a kind of geographic speculation about democracy in the United States.
But it does raise at least one interesting group of questions, I think, including: what are the real everyday landscapes of American life, if those landscapes no longer include old-fashioned soda shops and small-town hockey arenas – or do such everyday landscapes simply no longer exist?
And if there are no everyday landscapes, then surely every landscape we encounter is, by definition, extraordinary – so we should perhaps all be paying more attention to the spatial and architectural circumstances of our daily lives?
Further, if political candidates have managed to discover – and to campaign almost exclusively within – an American landscape that seems not yet to have been touched by the trends and technologies of the twenty-first century, then why is that – and is it really a good indication that those candidates will know how to govern an urbanized, twenty-first century nation?
Finally, if urban candidates – or coastal candidates, whatever you want to call them – "don't understand the west," which is simply cultural code for not understanding small town life and for being out of touch with the moral hardships of the American countryside, then surely that's not altogether bad in a country that is 80% urbanized?
Put another way, it would certainly be frustrating to think that a candidate doesn't understand how a cattle ranch or an alfalfa farm operates, or that a candidate has no experience with a small town and its parent-teacher associations and so on – but it is extraordinarily troubling to me to think that a candidate doesn't understand how, say, New York City functions – or Chicago, or Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, or Phoenix – let alone the globally active and thoroughly urbanized economic networks within which these and other international cities are enmeshed.
Surely, then, it is small town candidates and politicians with ranching backgrounds who are demonstrably unqualified for the leadership of an urban country?
Surely we need urban candidates for the twenty-first century?

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