newsmap changed its layout, now you can read all the headlines…
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for those new to it, newsmap is a google news interface, that shows the most visited news BIGGER and the least smaller, so it’s nice to have an overview picture of what people are talking about…
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you can also select diferent countries (sadly, brazil is not there) and categories (i switched off sports and entertainment right away).

“Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever.”
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engadget interviews jack valenti, the president of MPAA. I’ve seen the same silly ideas from some CEOs I worked with. a mix of wonder and fear of the “technology”. after an idiot analogy and clueless statements (like the title, above), i had to reply.
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ok, I tried to listen to him with open mind, but the faulty analogies (they really want to sell ideas as products, right?), just pisses me off.
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“A digital thing lasts forever”. thing? what thing? the “thing” with digital is that we finally separated the content from its representation (the vessel, so to speak). the digital is always experienced by some vessel, but it can jump around to new vessels, and that’s what makes it last forever. the name of this game is SHARING (if it’s for others) and BACKING UP (if it’s for yourself).
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i mean, it only lasts forever if you BACKUP YOUR STUFF constantly. otherwise, it will just die away with the media. and guess what, our media are fragile, real fragile. any oxidation, or magnectic pulse can destroy it. if we don’t share or backup (same technique here, remember) it just inherits the physical properties of its vessel, and dies away.
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sharing and backing up digital data is precisely the only way to keep it eternal. and that’s what we’re doing.
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please, don’t patronize me with this talk. either he doesn’t get it, or he thinks he can dupe us with silly words.

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and remembering that those guys have more power to shape our laws than our elected politicians… democracy my ass, we’re already living in a corporate plutocracy.

still MEA, RIT’s cary graphic arts collection
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as a relief, and because RIT is all commited to printing technologies (just to give you a hint, they’re sponsored by eastman kodak company), i went to see the cary graphic collection…
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the curator, a guy with a rosetta stone tie (and if you know about linguistic’s history, you understand the devotion ppl have with this rock), showed us:
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- some medieval pre-gutemberg manuscripts, totally different punctuation, with animal parchment (
- some post-gutemberg printing… the funny thing is, they tried to reproduce the more they could the old technology (manuscript), but then pagination and other metadata started to surface (indexing, lead, diagrams, and all the stuff we can find on newspapers nowadays). probably the printer guys were dying to experiment with the technology, but the clients wanted the classic stuff… i can relate to that!
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- and an original gutemberg bible page… the peak of it… i kept admiring the page, entranced by the aura of it. funny, coz printing press was precisely the tool that spawned the age of simulacra we live now, so destroying the very concept of “aura” in arts.
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i understand that as it’s hard for a fish to understand the concept of water, it’s difficult for our generation to understand the concept of no-reproduction, so if you are too entrenched in our ouw age and can’t get all the raving about the printing press, read “art in the age of mechanical reproduction” to get a glimpse of the revolution it was. or, if you have time, read all “gutemberg galaxy” (i recommend to smoke a joint before, mc luhan works better this way :).

no wi-fi for you, sir
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[upset]
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it seems that although all RIT campuses have wireless connection (my computer sense it and i can almost smell it, too), i can’t get a temporary password.
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it’s like refusing a cup of water to a stranger. yeah, you can do this, but it’s gross.
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like, if you think in a technological point of view, you think about rules for this and for that. ok, procedures. but when you think politically, you have to have a reason why not to grant temporary access to visitors. is it fear of illegal use? is it because of $$$? lemme know.
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getting stuck in technologial have-nots and forget about the social implications of it is the blindness of computer users… the technical system as an end in itself…
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[/upset]
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ok, i’m an addict in forced abstinence. tho i have a point, in fact i’ll find any justification to grant me access to my piece of noosphere.

complex information visualization
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two nice treemaps, so you can have a glimpse of… everything.
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newsmap is a flash application of the google news, you can select your map view by sections (sports, world, entertainment) and nations (currently, 10 countries there). the darker the color, the older the news.
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marketmap is the same idea, but all about bling-bling. and in java, too, slower to load. the greener, the more up, the reddish, the more down. black means steady (see, you cna predict whole industries by that).
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a brief (and insightful) explanation of treemaps can be found here. and a flash app for blogs treemaps (the bigger the square, the more comments it have), here.
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and hey, my computer is fast enough, any chance to export a quicktime/flash animation within a selected range? let’s see, i wanna know the fluctuation of technology sector from march 2002 to march 2004, 1 second a day (a 12 min movie). that’s revolution!

taxibus, a neat transportation idea: the users ask for a ride from a cellular/website, and the central system reroutes the nearest cars, using satellite navigation.
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they even illustrate a travel on a taxibus from the point of view of the passenger.
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it’s true the “Can the Taxibus Save the Planet?” article is a lil bit over the edge, but it’s a new solution for an old problem, emerging from the critical mass of technology.

psychogeography
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two good pdfs: the effects of mobile telephones on social and individual lives, a psychological study made for motorola…
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and the technology of political control, a paranoid paper about police state and repression of its citizens (this one i can’t remember where i found, so i uploaded it myself)