> Formerly reserved for totalitarian countries, this wholesale surveillance of citizens has moved into the democratic world as well. Governments like Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom are debating or passing laws giving their police new powers of internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell. More are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain customer data in case they might need to be investigated later.
I was going to write a long, rambling post about tolerance and freedom of speech, but can’t seem to do it without a strong infusion of bile against the mouthbreathing cretins that removed the candidate’s poster.
The University recently wrapped up some research into the perceptions of teaching and learning on campus. The report includes this gem, aimed squarely at the department I’ve been a part of for nearly a decade:
>There were polarised views about the centralised professional development centre. These ranged from overt appreciation for their work and views that they supplied an essential service to faculty members, to criticism of the lack of specificity of topics, lack of flexibility in timing of courses, and concerns with the overriding emphasis on technology-facilitated learning. Undertaking professional development was reported as not rewarded or recognised in the university.
For the first time since I can remember, I’m not running any analytics packages on either of my blogs. I’d been running either SiteMeter, or Google Analytics, or WordPress.com Stats, or Piwik, since (almost?) day 1. I’d sworn off third party analytics apps recently, because I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be feeding companies with detailed information about everyone that comes through my sites. And I realized today that I don’t need analytics at all any more.
Several thoughts have been percolating over the last few weeks, from a bunch of different areas. Here goes a pretty random braindump to try to get the thoughts together…
I just watched the documentary No Impact Man, and a conversation between Colin Beavan and Mayer Vishner struck me. Mayer was talking about how Colin’s project may be harmful to the cause of environmentalism, and suggested that the only reason the project was being given any attention was because nobody thought it would make a difference. That if the project was really going to be challenging the status quo, and specifically in a way that harmed the players in the hegemony, that it would be ignored until it faded away.
François Vautier stuck an ant colony inside his scanner, and watched it grow for 5 years. The result is a fascinating hybrid of organic biological growth, and rigid, cold technology.
I hadn’t taken a look at Google Earth for a while, but as I was adding a map to our department website, I noticed the “earth” button on maps.google.com - I clicked it, and got a nice 3D view of campus. And had a pleasant surprise - someone had started creating 3D models of buildings on campus. Only a handful are there now, but I’m sure the whole campus will eventually be 3D-ified. Someone’s been busy building models for downtown, as well (including cranes on the top of The Bow).
I shot with a Fujifilm point-and-shoot 15 years ago, and with my trusted E510 just a few years ago. They were both nice little compact cameras. But Fujifilm’s new X100 is fracking gorgeous. It looks like it pulls the best of the old school 35mm camera designs, and mashes them into a full on decent digital camera. Metal case. Rings and controls that work when the camera is off. I love everything about this camera. Or at least the press release…
I’ve been shooting almost exclusively with my iPhone4 for almost a month now. The IOS 4.1 update’s new HDR photo mode is pretty fracking amazing. Here’s a quick test shot I took in my extremely interesting living room. Hand held, in low light. The first/top shot is “normal” exposure, the one that the iPhone would have picked for a regular shot without the flash. The second/middle image is HDR tonemapped. The third/bottom is the HDR version, pumped through Aperture to apply my usual tweaks (adding some contrast back, setting white balance, vignetting, etc…)
An article in The Atlantic describes Christina Dunbar-Hester’s PhD course at Rutger’s. It sounds absolutely fascinating, delving into media theory, technological determinism and change, politics, etc…
>In order to answer these questions (or at least deeply consider them), the course starts with an introduction to theories of technology and technological change, drawn primarily from the scholarly field of Science & Technology Studies. From these readings, we gain a nuanced sense of how social relations get “inside” technology, including the assumptions about society that may come to be embodied in technical artifacts and knowledge. So for the first half or so of the course, we are mainly just getting our feet wet with these theories of technology.
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>However, I teach in Rutgers’ School of Communication & Information, and this course is for our Ph.D. students. So the challenge is to make these general theories about technology, culture and change relevant for thinking about media and information technologies specifically. Fortunately, this is becoming easier to do: more work that forges links between these areas of scholarship is coming out all the time, which is exciting and makes now a great time to offer this course.
I’ve grown to feel completely disenfranchised as a Canadian citizen, at all levels of government. I’ve tried voting with my head. I’ve tried voting with my heart. Every election, I feel as though my vote is wasted. So, now I’m trying something different.
With the civic election next month, and with what will hopefully be a federal election in the next few months, I’ve decided to base my vote on a single issue.
