Help Film a Time Capsule for Future Generations | Epicenter Saturday will be different. Thanks to a legion of netizens armed with video cameras, the day’s unfolding across the world will be recorded, uploaded and then sealed in a video time capsule to inform and amuse future generations. Director Kevin MacDonald, best known for Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland, is urging everyone in the world to film a slice of their lives Saturday and upload it to YouTube. He plans to sift through it all, weaving our collective days into a single documentary called Life in a Day, a “unique experiment in social filmmaking” to document one specific day in our lives for future generations to watch, with footage ranging from the whimsical to the dead serious. The project, produced by director Ridley Scott, clearly has posterity in mind.
Who knows? “It’ll be kind of like a time capsule, which people in the future, maybe in 20, 30, 40, 50, 100, 200 years could look at that and say ‘Oh my god, that’s what it’s like — a portrait of the world in a day.’” » The Data Will Be Portable Shortly, Please Be Patient | iCrossi. May. 12, 2008 | by Alisa Leonard We’re not at social computing utopia yet, but the latest announcements from MySpace, Facebook and Google on their various data portability initiatives are exciting.
After months of being members of the Data Portability Workgroup, these announcements (although made separately) appear to be the first of what I hope to be many: On the premise that “users are in control of their data,” MySpace was first out of the gate with their Data Availability announcement. Inside this opt-in framework users will be able to dynamically share their data with third-party sites, data and content including: (1) Publicly-available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks.
Facebook quickly countered with their own version of a data portability initiative, Facebook Connect. Enter Google: The Google offering, Friend Connect, takes a different turn bringing the social Web to the long tail. Any app, Any site, Any friends…. 1. 2. Software's Dirty Little Secret. Most people surf the Web, gab on their cell phones, and stop for cash at an automated teller machine (ATM) with nary a thought of how they're able to accomplish these feats. They simply take for granted that these devices will work at the touch of a button. Reminder: these devices would be useless were it not for the software that instructs computers to communicate with the Web, cell phones to find signals, and ATMs to confirm that customers are cleared to receive and deposit funds.
In other words, software is the heart and soul of today's array of gadgets—and, the way it is written is crucial to their operation. The problem is, however, there is no one manual dictating how it should be written. IBM fellow and self-proclaimed "software archaeologist" Grady Booch explains why this needs to change—and what it will take to bring software writing into the 21st century. You say there's a "dirty little secret" when it comes to writing software. What can be done to improve software? Compassionate Coding: Students Compete in Microsoft Competition to Write Humanitarian Apps [Slide Show] As society's reliance on information technology surges, software has become an indispensable component of any disaster response effort.
This includes programs for maneuvering robotic subs (as with the efforts to contain BP's Deepwater oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico) or sophisticated mapping tools for emergency-response crews using mobile devices to assess earthquake damage (as in Haiti). With the understanding that emergency, health care and other services' reliance on software will only grow over time, Microsoft has for the past eight years hosted a global competition that challenges high school and college students to develop applications that address some of the planet's most urgent needs. The company's Eighth Annual Imagine Cup finals wrapped up Thursday in Warsaw, Poland, with 400 students vying for $240,000 in prize money.
Some of the apps are finding immediate use in critical situations worldwide. View a slide show of 2010 Imagine Cup finalists. Beat Censorship By Hiding Secret Messages In Flickr Photos | Epicenter There may be a message hidden in this picture. Or not. Flickr photo by John C Abell Georgia Tech researchers have developed a tool called Collage that will allow Internet dissidents to insert hidden messages into Twitter posts and Flickr images in order to circumvent the censorship measures imposed by oppressive governments. ‘This project offers a possible next step in the censorship arms race’ The tool, which is implemented in Python and uses the OutGuess framework, relies on a technique known as steganography to weave hidden messages into an image file. It uses an automated testing tool called Selenium to facilitate the deployment of the messages. “This project offers a possible next step in the censorship arms race: rather than relying on a single system or set of proxies to circumvent censorship firewalls, we explore whether the vast deployment of sites that host user-generated content can breach these firewalls,” the project’s website explains.
Further reading. Analysis: Google and China Agree on a Fiction | Epicenter Google got its Chinese visa extended Friday, but that doesn’t mean the company is having a good trip or that China’s censorship has gone away. Google’s application to run Google.cn for another year looked like it was going to be denied by the Chinese government, who decided that simply redirecting all Google.cn users to an unfiltered search site in Hong Kong wasn’t acceptable. Perhaps they found it a bit too clever and easy for Google. Now Google has replaced the search box on Google.cn with a picture of a search box, which when clicked on takes the user to Google.hk.com — adding another click between a Chinese citizen and unfiltered search results.
That seems to have satisfied the Chinese authorities — and saved them some face — at least for the time being. It’s a testament to the power of Google that it can get away with what is really a shameless charade. The problem is neither side is totally committed to their stated positions. So now we have a new fiction to add to that one. See Also: A Silicon Valley Conference About Failing Is Big Success | Epice. In Silicon Valley, failure isn’t an option. It’s mandatory. A whole conference devoted to failure, FailCon, may be a first, but it’s looking like a success, with the likes of PayPal co-founder Max Levchin talking about how he failed repeatedly before making billions making the payment platform for the web. “The one liberating thing with failure is that you start at like -5 the next time,” Levchin said. “Failure? That doesn’t mean that Levchin, now CEO of Slide — a Facebook app maker — or any one else at the conference likes failure. “Failure sucks,” Levchin said.
The point of the conference, which drew a sold out crowd to the swanky Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco, wasn’t to celebrate failure, but to learn from it. Mark Pincus, a serial entrepreneur who now runs the popular social gaming Zynga, argued that learning to claim responsibility for failure leads to the fearlessness that entrepreneurs must have. “It could have been huge, man,” Pincus joked. But it has worked, for now. See Also: Science as Search: Sergey Brin to Fund Parkinson’s Study | Wired Science. The ideal combination of the internet and science is to put data (lots of data) into a readily searched database. The hypothesis becomes a search: Want to know what people are prone to which disease? Want to know what genetic backgrounds compel certain behaviors? Run a search. That’s the ideal — and though this idea has been hashed about for a few years, we’re a long way from there now. Until, perhaps, today. On Thursday, 23andMe will announce a project with the Michael J.
Ten thousand is a big number for Parkinson’s disease, and researchers hope such a large population will allow them to draw meaningful inferences. The idea is to create a genetic database around one disease — Parkinson’s — that is robust enough to answer lots of questions that get into minutiae: If this isn’t a "genetic disease" (typically brought on purely by genetic cause), then what are the fractions of effects caused by our genomes? Again, this isn’t a research study — this is a new way to study research. See Also: You Don’t Want ISPs to Innovate | Epicenter There’s a complicated fight in D.C. right now over how the FCC classifies broadband services, so it can regain the power to impose some basic rules on the industry. Free-market groups and the industry are banging the table, arguing against the consequences — saying that the FCC is trying to regulate the internet and will kill innovation.
Here’s the simple truth: You don’t want your ISP to innovate. At least not in the way, they want to “innovate.” The net has seen an explosion of cool services in the last decade — Google created a search engine that works, Facebook created a social network that helps people stay more connected, webmail became a viable replacement for desktop software, you can collaborate online through wikis and online word processors, and everyone in the world can now have their own online printing press, thanks to blogging software.
Where are the major players in the U.S. broadband industry in all of this innovation? Basically, nowhere. When ISPs Innovate It’s a sideshow.