two-day public program on RFID and things to come.
19 & 20 OCTOBER 2007
DE BALIE AMSTERDAM
http://www.debalie.nl/recallingrfidd

It’s in travel documents, building passes, pet animals, clothing stores, libraries, public pools, theme parks and prisons… and yet only a few of us know what RFID is. RFID (radio frequency identification) uses radio waves to identify people, animals or objects carrying encoded microchips. For government and industry, RFID signifies economic innovation, while for the futurist it marks the next stage in digital connectivity. RFID’s pervasiveness will only increase in the years to come, forcing shifts in perceptions of the public sphere and private domain.
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About a year ago Richard Rogers, Marieke van Dijk, and I made the Issue Dramaturg, a tool to display a site’s Google rank per query. Today, whilst preparing for the public form on Quaero I checked our query on 9/11 again. Every day we query Google for 9/11 and see which sites have what rank for that query. Normally 911truth.org has a very high rank in Google for this query. Since the 17th of September 2007 however, their rank has declined very fast. On the 20th of September 911truth.org completely disappeared from Google! 911truth.org is an important source for information about 9/11. According to Wikipedia,

[911truth.org,] The 9/11 Truth Movement is the name adopted by the loosely-connected organizations and individuals that question the mainstream account of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States. [...] The common proposition among all of the movement supporters is that what they call “the official account” of the events of 9/11 is not true, and that the truth has been covered up by high-level officials and the official investigators.

Below you can find a screenshot of the Issue Dramaturg documenting the decline in Google rank for 911truth.org:

911truth.org itself says this about it:

It seems absolutely clear Google has purposefully removed 911truth.org from their search engine. Is this the same Google whose mission statement includes the goal “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Uhm, maybe only sort of universally accessible?

… Talking about a well documented case of Google censorship… I am constantly reminded why we started Open Search - a distributed peer to peer search engine which is set up to avoid search engine manipulation, censorship and profiling.

Cross posted on Masters of Media weblog

“De Big Brother Award 2007 in de categorie Personen is toegekend aan U. De Nederlandse burger is volgens de jury namelijk de grootste bedreiging voor de privacy. Door een onverschillige houding - ‘Ik heb toch niks te verbergen’ - en desinteresse in wie er allemaal met zijn persoonsgegevens aan de haal gaat, is de burger zelf mede verantwoordelijk voor het verdwijnen van privacy in Nederland. Waar Time vorig jaar ‘You’ nog lof toezwaaide als persoon van het jaar, waarschuwt de BBA-jury met deze prijs U voor het gemak waarmee U de vergaande inbreuken op de privacy voor lief neemt.”

Damn right You won the big brother award.

As you might have noticed, I played some more with the Flickr script I wrote yesterday. The top bar of this site is now newly generated from Flickr each time. The individual mass gives meaning to a picture. You are presented with a word, and a picture with the word as that tag is presented to you. You give it meaning. The aggregation gives you meaning. You give the aggregation meaning. The mind is associative, I guess that’s why this is so cool and tagging seems to work some times

One more Flickr Haiku here.

Rosa asked me a week ago when I would make something beautiful. She is involved with a lot of net art and I guess she referred to the fact that I do a lot with web scripting, crawling and scraping. However, as I am not a designer all things I make are ugly, unless a designer cooperates with me.

Today Rosa invented Flickritti (Flickr graffiti) and more specific, Flickr invaders. Whilst chatting with the Geeks 4 World Domination (g4wd) posse, she brought this up and my mind started wandering. Couldn’t I make a crawler that leaves notes on semi-random Flickr photo’s? Wouldn’t it be possible to create a trail with secret notes, maybe even constituting a work of art (whatever that may be) if seen in a larger picture (i.e. when the trail is reconstructed and visualized as one)?

Long time a go I wrote smile, a little script that fetches a random smile from Flickr. Although I had to study I figured I could easily tweak it to search for more words, e.g. those of a poem. So, without further ado, and without any trails and notes, I present to you: the Visual Haiku machine.

The Visual Haiku Machine gets semi-random images for each word in a haiku. It queries Flickr for a picture tagged with that specific word and picks one out of the 300 ‘most interesting’ pictures. These are then displayed underneath the word.

Alright, the haiku’s are over-romantic but I really like the fact that you can read a couple of lines over and over and get a different feeling with it each time, because the pictures always change.

The first thing that gets your attention on eboman.info is the list of well known web 2.0 logos. Next to it, Eboman coupled the logos to his own interpretation of what the service is about. YouTube for example lists his low-res videos, Wikipedia contains his history (actually his story, but I’ll come back to that later), Kiko holds his performance agenda, etcetera. At the top left of his site there is a call for participation: “Upload your videos to YouTube and JumpCut and make audiovisual sampletracks with Eboman”.

It looks as if the guy understands what web 2.0 is all about. There are a million definitions of web 2.0, but some of the characteristics seem to be: the Network as a (service-) platform, user -generated and -distributed content, and network effects created by an architecture of participation (deep linking). Eboman clearly calls for participation, uses different web services for various content generated by him, and uses this domain as a starting point to them.
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In this review, Howard Rheingold’s vision on the future of communication and interaction is explained, as layed out in his book ‘Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution’, 2002.

Rheingold noted that SMS has been used for dating in teenage culture but also for the mobilization of big groups; for example in the overthrowing of the Filipinian government in 2001 or the goal orientedness of the protests in Seattle. Instead of just seeing SMS as a technology in his book, Rheingold takes you on a journey to discover the broader system that enables such a seemingly simple medium to have such a profound impact on society.

Three observations are at the basis of Rheingold’s book:

1. 1) There are ever smaller, more powerful, and cheaper computational devices,
2. 2) There is more and more ‘always on’ wireless communication to, and connectivity between, these devices,
3. 3) The people using them constitute and live in social networks which can be easily accessed anytime at any place, through these devices.

Rheingold’s central thesis is that the combination of these three offers people a new way to combine their knowledge and energy. This then gives rise to Smart Mobs: ad-hoc self organizing networks of people in the technosphere, capable of collective action. In his book he looks at how people interact with, and through, close-by and invisible ubiquitous technologies like the Internet, mobile phones, wireless and the web. He extrapolates from his observations and goes on a quest to get wiser. He foresees that the possibility to add wireless communication in every device will be another shift in the way people will interact with each other.
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From September the 22nd till the 29th, Amsterdam will host PicNic 2007. Picnic is a conference, festival, diy thingie, and much more. Although a lot of hot shots (euhm, interesting speakers) are coming and the program is quite nice, it is quite expensive (come on, +-500 Euros a day??). Fortunately there are good and sometimes free, or cheap, evening and side shows.

Best of all though, is that there will be some 1200 people carrying a RFID badge, linked to a social network. And I can play with it I was invited to join a very interesting group of people at the RFID Hackers Camp. The idea is to think up and realize 6 to 8 projects with the available hardware and data. Mjummy.

In mijn archieven vond ik nog een samenvatting van een leuk artikel over de strijd tussen twee stromingen in de kunstmatige intelligentie. Tijd voor een post dus

‘Making a Mind versus Modelling the Brain: Artificial Intelligence Back at a Branch-point.’ Van Hubert L. Dreyfus en Stuart E. Dreyfus, 1988.

In het artikel wordt uiteengezet dat er sinds de jaren 50 twee verschillende aanpakken van AI zijn. De symbolische en de (holistisch) neurologische. Voorstanders voor de eerste aanpak waren vooral Newell en Simon en later ook Minsky en Papert. Voor de tweede was het Rosenblatt die het startsein gaf met zijn perceptron.

De eerste school zag computers als een systeem om mentale symbolen te manipuleren. Newell en Simon zeiden dat een menselijk brein en de digitale computer, alhoewel totaal verschillend qua structuur en werking, twee instanties van hetzelfde ding waren; iets dat intelligent gedrag voortbracht door het manipuleren van symbolen met behulp van formele regels. Die filosofie, die liep van Descartes’ naturas simples tot de Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus van de vroege Wittgenstein, stelde dat er absoluut enkelvoudige primitieve elementen en logische relaties in een subject waren die ‘s werelds primitieve objecten en hun onderlinge relaties die de wereld opbouwden weerspiegelden. Newell en Simon verwerkten deze filosofie tot een empirische claim. AI zou volgens hen deze grondelementen en relaties vinden. Deze aanpak bestond dus uit de bestudering van de formele, logische, structuren die de computer de mogelijkheid gaven een probleem op te lossen.

Rosenblatts tegenoverstaande visie vond zijn oorsprong in de neurowetenschappen en volgde Hebbs principe: ‘What wires together fires together’. Rosenblatt beredeneerde dat intelligent gedrag te moeilijk was om te formaliseren. Daarom kon er volgens hem beter gezocht worden naar een automatisering waardoor een neuraal netwerk patronen leert onderscheiden en overeenkomstig reageren.De logische structuren die een eigenschap voortbracht waren niet belangrijk, maar het was interessanter om te bekijken wat voor systeem een bepaalde eigenschap kon voortbrengen.
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I’ve been wanting to reread some books. Unfortunately I saw a lot of my books were missing. Whoever has got one of these books, or others which I don’t recall missing, plz return them asap. There will be no repercussions

	Philosophy of Mind
	Future Active
	The Search
	Who Controls the Internet?
	Diamond Age

Next time I will keep track :s