I just found a wonderful service spell with flickr that makes images like:
It is built from a pool of letters on flickr which have been collected independently (there are also pools for digits and punctuation), a lovely example of Web2.0 in action!
I’ve added it to Snip!t, so now if you snip a single word ‘spell with flickr’ gets suggested as an action.
I had thought I had got used to the ineptitude of Microsoft programmers, that nothing would surprise me any more. However, yet again their inventiveness in producing obscure yet damaging effects has once again amazed me.
I’ve noticed that I reuse very few tags … and thought I was just a poor tag-user. However, I read the other day a reference to a paper at the CSCW confernce last year; it reported that the average number of re-uses of a tag was just 1.311 . I thought this meant that most tags are never reused … I am not alone 🙂
Having downloaded and read the paper it turns out that this is the average number of users who use a tag – that is most tags are used by only one person, in fact individuals reuse their own tags a lot more … so I am no-good tagger after all 🙁
Incidentally, I use ultimate tag warrior plugin for wordpress and it seems OK. Only drawback is that if you want tags displayed with your post, they really get inserted into the post itself. This is not a problem for tags at the end, but would mess up an RSS feed if you like your tags above the post. I guess this is because wordpress does not have a handle for plugins to add things to display loops, so the only way to ensure the tags are displayed are to make them part of the post.
Also Nad sent me a link to a neat tag visualisation by Moritz Stefaner.
I was at futuresonic last Friday doing a panel keynote at the Social Technologies Summit. I talked about various things connected to imagination: bad ideas, regret modelling and firefly/fairylights technology. On the same panel was a guy from Satchi and Satchi who created television adds for T-mobile and a lady from Goldsmiths who described a project for Intel where they studied a London bus route. The chair Eric introduced the session with a little about blogging and other web-based technologies and in general we were immersed in the ways in which digital culture pervades the day to day world.
In my way home on the train I sat opposite a father and son who were playing hangman. The boy was about 6 or 7 and the father had to help him and sometimes correct him. Every so often I noticed the words they chose, but just before I got off the train there was obviously the father’s hardest challenge yet. I gradually noticed the hightened excitement in the voices … it was a word with ‘X’ and ‘Y’ in it.
As I stood to get up, the boy eventually got the last letters and completed the word …
F O X Y B I N G O . C O M
The dream of the web seems a form of omniscience, unlmited and universal knowledge available at the vlick ofof a button or least at the click of a Google ‘Seach’ button. However, last night I was on a site that empitomised the problems of the web.
I was pointed to a blog entry about a presentation that the blog said was “Simply the best presentation I’VE EVER SEEN!“. I was intrigued and and followed this to the Identity2.0 site and in particular a page about a keynote at OSCON 2005.
The entry about the talk mentioned ‘Identity2.0’ and ‘digital identity’ so guessed this was something to do with single logins (like MS passport) or open authentication, which has long been an open issue (with many ‘solutions’ but so far little success). However, was this person and this site talking about one of these such as plain open authentication, or something deeper.
Well it is fine for the page about the talk not to say clearly, it is written within the context of the Indetity2.0 site, so I looked for an ‘about’ link or something like that … nothing I stripped the url back to plain identity2.0.com and of course simply got to a stabdard blog front page (I guess rather like this one), with the latest news, but nothing to gove over context or background.
In fact by chasing yet more links to other sites, by half guessing from various abstracts, blog entries, etc. I managed to pick out half a story about what this was about … but why so hard?
This reminds me of the problem I recorded a month or so back when trying to find last week’s (as opposed to yesterday’s) news. Really easy to find the latest item or even the hotest item, but really bad at getting to the background that gives context and turns buzz words into meaning.
At the risk of sounding like a codger at a cafe table, the same is true of much software documentation. If you have seen the software grow and develop over the years it makes sense, but to students trying to make sense of Java packages, AJAX, Mac/Windows APIs, it is like fumbling in the dark. Good signpoosting at every street corner, but no roadmaps.
In all these cases there are real questions we want to ask, this is not like meandering around Flickr or YouTube, travelling just for the journey. However definitive statements (I’ll not say answers) give way to half-overheard conversations in a coffee shop.
It is often said that experts know more and more about less and less untul eventually they know everything about nothing. It seems we are turning into a generation who know less and less about more and more until we know nothing about everthing – omingnorance rules.
My Macintosh has a list of recently accessed files, but when I want to re-visit a file I have used earlier in the day it is never there. I have many folder windows open, but again the folder I was earlier working on is never one of them. This seems a sad measure of not multi-tasking but over-tasking, too many interruptions upon interupptions, too many disparate things and a singular lack of single purpose.
When I was in school we studied the Scholar Gypsy by Matthew Arnold. It is a tale of an Oxford scholar who foresakes his studies and joins the gypsies. As I always admired and desired the gypsy life this combination of the intellectual and nomadic appealed immediately. When Arnold writes it is 200 years since the scholar started his wanderings, but there are still occasional reports of sightings and Arnold concludes that his longevity is the result of his singleness of purpose, he has “one aim, one business, one desire”.
The stanza I still recall almost word perfect comes near the end as Arnold expresses his wish for this simpler life … and remember he is writing in 1850, not the days of email and IM:
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife
Last night watched ‘Waking Life‘ a strange film all about dreaming
We ordered it from amazon video (their subscription lending library), but not quite sure how we managed to do it. Certainly when it arrived and I read the description it sounded a little too arty … I of course like James Bond and Famous Five!
However, it was very enjoyable and has most stunning animation. It looked as if it had been filmed live, but then, either by hand or using computer, reduced to comic book effect. It chronicles a young man’s day or dream as he discusses (mainly listens) to various people talking about the philosophy of dreams and reality – I assume taken from lots of real philosophers, but I’m not well read enough to recognise many! All of this in a constantly shifting animation as if each object were half floating. Sort of Disney meets Derrida.
Two things struck me … well actually many more, loads of lovely quirky asides, but I forget most already 🙁
First is how lacking in grounding so many of the philosophical ideas are; sitting somewhere between mysticism and reason. I’ve recently been reading Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis and got a similar feel there – lovely stuff for a novel, almost poetic … but without solid ground. An age that has forgotten or rejected God and lost faith in rationality, but struggling to find something in the void.
The other thing was a point when one of the characters said to the protagonist (I misquote!) “your sneakers aren’t real, your feet inside your sneakers aren’t real, you are a mental model” … the character is referring to the fact you are not real in a dream, but to some extent this is precisely the self we experience, my mental model of me is the ‘I’ I know, so (and this was said elsewhere in the film), to some extent aspects of dreams are as real as anything in waking life.
I am in Tirrenia, one of the resorts on the Mediterranean outside Pisa. February is not the normal tourist month and the palm trees are all wrapped in sacking or plastic to protect them from the rain.
It was overcast when I arrived and yesterday was bleak with heavy rain, but this morning the sky was open from edge to edge, the unfettered wind blowing the waves clear from the coasts of Spain.
Dabbling my toes in the waters edge, or wading deeper having to run as the larger waves threatened to wash me clear to my waist. Icy feeling, but I’m sure still just the chill of cool water, air thrown through the night, no Arctic currents penetrate here.
To my back are the shuttered beach buildings, and tall rectangular pillars of plywood I assume enclosing the summer showers. Also sprinklers along the beach edges. I’d wondered at these when I’d walked at dusk when I’d first arrived, but not realised they were along every beach side – presumably to dampen the sand and keep it from blowing and burying the resort.
The sand slopes steeply towards the sea, and on the water’s edge a huge driftwood log, like a seat deliberately placed to watch the sea, but now periodically half covered then left stranded by the flow of waves.
On the map it is an contained sea, the Mediterranean, but here I see open sea – if there are boundaries they are far away and the waves long enough to build and be as terrible and awesome as those that had crossed the whole atlantic a few months ago when I was in Brazil. These waves though are less uniform, not the slowly growing and breaking of surf beaches, but more a tumbling boiling ferment.
To the north the jagged edges of snow flecked mountains mirror the wave crests, sharp edged against the clear morning sky. Further north they will become the marble-shot mountains of Carrera from which the best stone in the world is quarried. Marble not unlike the frozen surface of these surf flecked seas.
The sun just breaks over the land. It must be a marvelous place for sunsets over the sea. Slowly as the orange edge rises over the beach buildings the first rays touch the white wave crests, shining above the grey troughs between, then gradually the grey surface turns slate green.
I retrieve my sandals from under the pile of flotsam where I’d left them earlier, then reluctantly turn my back to the sea.
Last week I was stuck a night in Frankfurt due to the high winds. Soon after I settled into the 17th floor of the Holiday Inn, gusts screaming round the building, I got a call on my mobile. I thought it would be my taxi driver confirming the time for the re-booked flight the next day, but instead there was an unfamiliar voice:
“This is HM Revenue and Customs, we have a message for you, but first can we confirm your name and address”
Actually name and address to phone number is not that secret, but still I asked:
“How do I know you are who you say you are?”
“If you prefer you can ring back on …. it is to your advantage”
I checked that it would be OK to ring the next day on my return and rang off … I didn’t say (life is too short), that being given a number to ring back does not increase my confidence unless I can verify it.
In fact the next day I checked on the HMR&C site and the number was their helpline. However, this call had many hall marks of a fraudulent call: how could I, or a less technically aware citizen know this was a good call? In this case the information requested was relatively innocuous (but of course could easily continue, “and date of birth … bank details …”) and the phone number given was an 0845 number which costs the recipient money … either genuine or high-value fraud. Of course, if I was fradulently ringing up people pretending to be HMR&C, at any sign of trouble giving the genuine helpline numer would be just what I would do to allay suspicion!
It is not just HMRC that give calls like this; banks and credit card companies are forever ringing up and asking you to confirm your identity … and that usually does include giving some form of security code. But they have rung you up, so have more confidence in who you are then you do in them, yet never offer any means to confirm their identitiy.
Email too: I have received various mails from banks which look very like phishing emails. In one case I received an email where the domain of the sender was different from the domain of the reply email and different again from the domain of the URL link. It goes to say that none of these were the same as the standard domain of the bank. In this case the only reason I knew it was not phishing was that it offered information and did not request anything secure.
By sending emails and making phone calls that are virtually indistinguishable from fraudulent ones, the banks (and even HMR&C) are training us to be victims of fraud.
Literally we are encouraged to practice being insecure.
I had been struck by Blair’s long-awaited statement about the manner of the execution of saddam, that he belatedely made last Tuesday evening. However, I wanted to be suer of what he said, so yesterday evening attempted to find out. Perhaps I am just too poor a web-user, but I found it incredibly difficult. Google seraches fund many earelier news articles about the fact that he hadnlt said anthing at that stage, and ones from earelier last week saying what he was about to say something and what it would be (now-a-days it seems news is written before the event), but nothing reporting what he said or when he said it (I couldn’t recall the exect day either).Having found earlier or later articles in newspapers and on the BBC I thought it should be easy to trace from them to related ones and hence the statement I was after … but no. While most seem to offer long term “most important stories in 2005” archives, there does not appear to be an easy way (or possibly any way) to say “what was the BBC online stories for Wednesday January 12th 2007?”.
I did find the ‘number 10‘ site that does have a list of the prime minister’s speaches and statements, but of course not all his statements, just the ones they want you to read!
Eventually yahoo! news came to the rescue (albeit found through Google!) with a more recent article, but with links to background including a guardian online article from last wednesday … which yes! did have the full text of the relevant part of the statement:
As has been very obvious from the comments of other ministers and indeed from my own official spokesman, the manner of the execution of Saddam was completely wrong. But that should not blind us to the crimes he committed against his own people, including the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, one million casualties in the Iran/Iraq war and the use of chemical weapons against his own people, wiping out entire villages.
So the crimes that Saddam committed does not excuse the manner of his execution but the manner of his execution does not excuse the crimes.
Now to be fair, knowing this was accessible I tried an alternative tack and searched inside the guardian site using keywords and was able to find the article that way. Having realised this and did some searches on the bbc site and got the video of the statement. (Once I’d found suitable serach terms!)
So on newspaper and the bbc sites it seems you can do google-style searches, but not (unless I’m still missing something) ask “what was on the news last Wednesday” or (reasonably completely) what are the related articles to this one.
Obviously in a pre-web world I would not expect to be able to do this. I could (and still could) visit the British Library for old copies of newspapers (I assume they keep them) and for the last week possibly the local library. But of course when information is available it is not what you could find that counts, but what is easiest. The information that is available is the information that gets seen. Even in university our students are reluctant to read books as they believe they can find all they need on the web.
Now the reason I wanted to find the Blair statement was the reference to “one million casualties in the Iran/Iraq war”. He was rightly pointing out that the failings of the legal process of his execution should not blind us to the horror of his crimes. Now given the delay I assume the words were well prepared, and yet of three crimes things he noted one was this.
I guess the figure of 1 million sounded good (big numbers always impress), but to mention this without also noting that that war was waged with the complicit and explicit support of many countries including the UK and US seems at best amnesiac and at worst deceptive. Does he really not know this? Or is he simply hoping most who hear it won’t?
I can recall the Iran-Iraq war as a young adult, but those younger will have been in school and even for those around at the time I’m sure the memories get a little fuzzy, so perhaps he can get away with this type of manipulation. Or perhaps it is tht he only partly recalls the events and honestly presents this?
The US involvement is well documented, both in terms of miltary presence in the Gulf at the time, officially neutrally, but with minimal pretense acting against Iran who was then the ‘evil power’. Indeed (recalling my own and Nad’s earlier posts about the execution), in looking for this I found George Washington University’s National Security Archive of declaissified documents. In this there is a photograph of Donald Rumsfeld, then a special envoy from President Reagan, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. This is not surprising, diplomatc have to do this all the time. Significantly though this meeting was, as the national secturity archives show, shortly after US intelligence had confirmed Iraq’s use of chemical weapons (Blair’s point 3) and discussed this at a presidential level. The US (in full knowledge) then went on to block UN resolutions deploring Iraq use of chemical weapons … initially with UK support. the ful story of UK support, I’m sure is there, but even harder to find … I seem to recall British warships in the gulf, but it was more than 20 years ago!
I an age of instant information, it is amazing that getting the basic facts of ongoing news items is so difficult. I recall a year or so back there was a call for journalists to give more context in theor reporting. However, when interviews a respected journalist insisted that theor job was the news, the changes not the backgrund … but without the background the interpretation of what we hear is different.
If journalists do not see it as their job to give such background and it is still so hard to find elsewhere, then politicians can go on deceiving themselves and their people.