The concept is simple: members of the public can download a free software program that runs silently in the background of their laptops detecting tremors and collecting data from the accelerometer in their machine. The data that is collected is transmitted to researchers who can analyze it and use it to (hopefully) predict an earthquake.

Neilova prezentace o trendech v médiích i o komunitách, které lze jen těžko uměle vytvářet - spíš jde o to najít danou komunitu a najít i to zajímavé, kolem čeho komunita vznikla. A stát se - jako značka nebo organizace - pro takovou komunitu užitečným.

S Neilem se setkáme 30.4. v Long Tale Café (www.longtalecafe.cz).

Workshop se bude skládat ze dvou bloků:

10.00 – 12.00 Prezentace
- Všichni jsme tvůrci obsahu - my a hlavně naši zákazníci!
- Příležitosti a nástrahy nelineárního a propleteného světa
networkingu
- Hledání rovnováhy mezi značkou a jejím publikem
- Jak využití komunit ve prospěch značek
- Efektivní budování komunit a práce s komunitou

(přestávka na oběd)

13.00 – 15.00
- Praktické cvičení ve skupinách - jak efektivně vybudovat
komunitu v praxi

Kapacita workshopu je 25 míst. V tuhle chvíli máme obsazeno asi 20 míst.

Link na registrace je zde:
http://registrace.londynvpraze.cz/

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L.A.S.E.R. Tag

“This is fantastic - I’ve got a laser pointer! … Holy mackerel … ah man, that’s terrific!”
– Donald Rumsfeld

Defense contractors say that within the next 10 years they’ll have a solid state laser mounted on a Hummer that can put a hole in sheet of metal from several miles away. Well Dutch graffiti writers can pretty much do that now with this Hymermobil rocking a GRL L.A.S.E.R. Tagging System.

Find out from Agent Watson how this big fucking laser works and download the open source code (built in C++ using Open Frameworks).

When the Pentagon finally does get those hand-held lasers I know a few writers in Holland who will be the first to rack them: F. Lady, BIC, Dask, Walk, NW, WLC (Berlin), Oles, Lastplak, Baschz, Evas, El Pussycat, EVK, Losers, TM, Curry, Ros, Raid, Guilty, LRK, VEV, GPS and ERAS. Thanks to everyone and all our love to Rotterdam (bring an umbrella).

A production of the GRL, Agent Watson, Bennett4Senate, and Huib Van Der Werf. This Weapon of Mass Defacement brought to you by the rouge nation of the Netherlands and the Atelier Rijksbouwmeester.

flickr photos
Watch the clip on youtube.
Check out the LASER Tag How to from Agent Watson.
Download Bennett4Senate’s Rotterdam mix here (186MB).

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  Laser Tag
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  G.R.L. Goes West
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  FREE BORF
  LED Throwies II
  LED Throwies
  the First LED Throwie
  the Electro-Graf
  

Design Downloaded from www.vanillamist.com--> Graffiti Research Lab Contact GRL-->

All you see is ... crime in the source code.

Text

From lacan.com:

There is a tiny line that separates this “humanization” from the resigned coming to terms with lie as a social principle: what matters in such a “humanized” universe is authentic intimate experience, not truth. At the end of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, a film which also “humanizes” its superhero, presenting him as full of doubts and weaknesses, the new DA Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante against the mob rule who got corrupted and himself committed murders, is dead, Batman and his police friend Gordon realize the loss of morale the city would suffer if Dent’s murders became known. Batman persuades Gordon to preserve Dent’s image by holding Batman responsible for the murders; Gordon destroys the Bat-Signal and a manhunt for Batman ensues. This necessity of a lie to sustain public morale is the film’s finale message: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder that, paradoxically, the only figure of truth in the film is Joker, its supreme villain. [4] The goal of his terrorist attacks on Gotham City is made clear: they will stop when Batman will take off his mask and reveal his true identity; to prevent this disclosure and thus protect Batman, Dent tells the press that he is Batman – another lie. In order to entrap Joker, Gordon stages his own (fake) death – yet another lie…

See also:

They Live! Hollywood as an Ideological Machine

October, 2009

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• The Dark Knight
• Film review: The Dark Knight
• Holy seratonin, Batman! And so long, Batcave…
• Batman Is Back — The TIME Review

THE OLD SAYING that "if you're not thoroughly confused you don't fully understand the situation" applies with a vengeance to our new media ecosystem. Take the strange case of teenagers, whose brains are being scrambled and rewired by nature to make them fit for adult life. Until the 1960s, "teens" (as they are called in the US) barely existed as an interesting social category. Like sex in Philip Larkin's poem, Annus Mirabilis, one might say they were "invented in nineteen sixty-three/… Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban/And the Beatles' first LP".

Then they acquired spending power and became interesting to retailers and advertisers – and therefore to the mass media – to the point where our society is now obsessed with them. This obsession is particularly neurotic whenever cyberspace is mentioned, and leads adults to project on to the younger generation all kinds of fears and fantasies.

Thus they are perceived as confident "digital natives" of cyberspace, whereas we are merely nervous "immigrants". They supposedly have a legendary facility with communications technology, and indeed may be evolving overdeveloped thumbs from incessant texting. They think that research involves typing queries into Google, never read newspapers, regard Wikipedia as more reliable than the Oracle of Delphi, have no concept of privacy, are accomplished multi-taskers and are the early adopters who drive every internet trend. Or, to sum up adult conventional wisdom in a single ugly phrase, teenagers are more "tech savvy" than we are and, as such, the best guide to our networked future.

Hmm, I wonder. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week, an entire session paid homage to the myth of teenage omniscience. A troupe of Bay Area kids were invited on to the platform and interviewed respectfully by a former investment analyst. It was not illuminating. "It rambled and eventually degenerated to teenagers free associating on different companies ('Google?' 'Simple!')," wrote one observer, "but the most compelling part for me was seeing their visceral dislike of Twitter." They simply couldn't see the point of it. "If I were using Twitter, I would just say I'm sitting on a couch in front of a bunch of people," one said, adding that he couldn't see the point.

At this point, your columnist sat up and blinked. Twitter, after all, is the cyber-sensation du jour. It's growing like crazy and is even impinging on the British legal system (as evidenced by its unravelling of the Trafigura super-injunction). Yet the kids who supposedly drive every internet phenomenon have little interest in it. The statistics support this: Twitter is a preoccupation of older generations; according to comScore, only 11% of its users are aged 17 or younger.

Ah well, you say, at least teenagers are the motive force behind social networking, which many people see as the most important online development of the past five years. Here again, the statistics tell a different story. According to the New York Times, for example, teenagers now account for only 14% of MySpace users and 9% of Facebook's. Yet it is Facebook that is growing like crazy: it now has over 300 million users (and is adding 600,000 new users a day at present). And most of them are oldies.

A further intriguing twist was added to this story last week when the new chief executive of MySpace told the Financial Times that the company was no longer interested in competing with Facebook, in effect conceding defeat in the race to become the largest online social network. He said his company instead aimed to become an online hub for music and entertainment. "Facebook is not our competition," he declared. "We're very focused on a different space."

In truth, MySpace doesn't have much choice: it has to do something to arrest its decline. According to Hitwise, Facebook took more than 58% of US social network traffic last month, while MySpace's share fell to 30% (compared with 66% a year ago). Four years ago, Rupert Murdoch's purchase of MySpace for $580m was widely regarded by an awestruck media world as an inspired move. Now it's looking like an old man's punt on something he didn't really understand: teenage psychology.

And the meaning of all this? Simple: when it comes to predicting the future of cyberspace, the only certainty is that no one knows anything, least of all teenagers. Now where's that walking stick..?

By Martin Rosenbaum Producer, BBC Radio 4's Persuading Us to be Good

Is the gentle application of peer pressure the way to change behaviour

Are you a good citizen?

The kind who doesn't drink too much but always puts the empties in the recycling box? The kind who ignores tempting store credit card offers but does give blood, who saves prudently for your pension while avoiding unprotected sex?

In short, the kind who does what the nanny state might want you to do?

And if you're not yet perfect, how can the state persuade you to become better?

That's the question a growing number of politicians, local government officials, health professionals and think-tank members are grappling with, as they puzzle over how best to change public behaviour to achieve their policy goals.

Personal choices

And they are now turning to the increasingly influential ideas of social psychology and behavioural economics in their search for answers.

"In many areas now there are limits to the cures that can be achieved by government alone," says the climate change minister, Joan Ruddock.

Some leaflets are more likely to encourage anti-social behaviour than discourage Martin Rosenbaum Freedom of information blogger Read Martin's thoughts in full

"Behaviour change is a very important priority because we know that things like health and the environment are affected by the choices people make."

And the Conservatives are also interested, according to the shadow chancellor George Osborne.

He argues: "Social psychologists are helping governments around the world design policy solutions that are more effective than big state solutions. If you go with the grain of people's instincts you are more likely to achieve the public policy outcomes you want, rather than sitting in a government department dreaming up some rational scheme that doesn't work in practice."

Barnet Council in north west London is one of those local authorities trying to improve its population.

We've got to stop nagging. If nagging worked we'd all be skinny, we'd all be recycling and we'd all be walking to work Mike Freer, Barnet Council leader

In one pilot scheme in Finchley, the residents have been asked to reduce their carbon footprint by turning down their heating, reducing their car use, and so on.

A traditional persuasive strategy would be based on stressing how this could benefit the environment. But the council is going further in testing out techniques of influence.

The residents are asked to make pledges in a face-to-face conversation with one of the canvassers who have been going door-to-door in this area.

They are only asked to make some limited pledges - to choose three out of nine options on the pledge card they are shown.

And posters on lampposts proclaim the number of households in that street who have agreed to participate.

Peer pressure

In other words, this project is based on enticing people into making a small but face-to-face commitment and then using the force of peer pressure to encourage others.

"If you go to someone's door and say 'can you do a great deal for the environment?', they're probably going to back off," says Daniel Delange, of the charity Groundwork, which the council has employed to implement the project.

"But if you say 'a little bit for the environment', they feel they can do a little bit and feel good about themselves for doing it."

Alarmism about obesity actually encourages its spread, one expert says

"We put these posters up, so we hope the neighbours see," he adds. "We hope the neighbours will feel 'if they're all doing it, maybe I should be doing it as well'."

But there is still some way to go.

When we asked one resident if she was impressed by the posters about the number of neighbours taking part, she replied: "Not knowing who the neighbours were, I don't know."

For the council leader, Mike Freer, this approach is an idea whose time has come.

He says: "The role of the council has shifted away from being a provider of services to being responsible for helping local citizens improve their lives. Nudging people along is a terrific idea, we've got to stop nagging. If nagging worked we'd all be skinny, we'd all be recycling and we'd all be walking to work."

The Barnet pilot scheme is being funded by the Department of Communities and Local Government, which wants to examine how well the academic theories involved can be implemented in practice.

Similar ideas are also being employed at the national level.

If you fill out the "carbon calculator" on the government's Action CO2 campaign site, you will see that at the end it compares your carbon consumption to that of other households like yours.

Some of this is based on the work of the leading American social psychologist, Professor Robert Cialdini.

He argues that the key role of peer pressure or "social proof" is illustrated by a Californian experiment about trying to reduce household energy consumption.

The participants were given information about how cutting consumption could benefit the environment, and also about what other households were doing to save energy.

The outcome?

"The messages we sent to them about what their neighbours were doing were the only ones that made a difference," he says.

New jargon

But this also suggests that politicians who complain about how widespread an undesirable behaviour is can inadvertently be encouraging it, because it can help that behaviour become a social norm.

I'm starting to hear local authorities...now talk about 'person-shaping' Matthew Taylor

This applies to everything from young people carrying knives to patients who don't turn up for their medical appointments.

Thus Professor Cialdini believes that talk of an "obesity epidemic" simply encourages more obesity.

"Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, you want to marginalise it," he adds.

All this may mean that we have to learn a new item of political terminology.

"I'm starting to hear local authorities that were quite recently using the phrase 'place-shaping' as the jargon for what they did now talk about 'person-shaping'," says Matthew Taylor, a former Downing Street policy aide to Tony Blair.

The term "person-shaping" probably won't appeal to politicians, but it could increasingly describe what they are trying to do.

Persuading Us to be Good will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 20.00 on Tuesday, 15 September, and again at 17.00 on Sunday, 20 September 2009.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Like a balding hipster who imitates a young trendsetter’s style, Facebook is updating itself to look a lot more like Twitter.

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Susan Ragan for The New York Times

Luna Park in California uses Facebook and Twitter.

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Times Topics: Facebook | Twitter

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Unlike Facebook, where friends mutually agree to let one another into their online lives, Twitter lets people share updates and links with anyone who cares to read them.

That has turned Twitter into a tool for people to peer into the collective mind and see what people are talking about in real time. It is also a tool for businesses to reach customers and monitor what their customers are saying about them.

Facebook seems to be very interested in those features. Since last fall, when Facebook tried and failed to acquire Twitter, it has been slowly introducing features that mimic Twitter.

Last week, Facebook added two new, Twitter-like features. Users can now “tag” friends or companies that they mention in status updates, and they can use a pared-down version of the site called Facebook Lite that resembles Twitter’s stream of status updates.

Meredith Chin, a Facebook spokeswoman, played down the changes. “We’ve been making iterations to our product over time to reflect the rapid evolution of how people share information online,” she said.

But others see another force at work. “Twitter envy: Facebook has it, absolutely,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a social media consultant at the Altimeter Group, which advises businesses on using new technologies. “Facebook absolutely recognizes that Twitter is a threat, and they’re doing what they can to replicate the features before Twitter gets mainstream adoption.”

To tag another Facebook member in a status update, users type the @ symbol before the friend’s name. The @ symbol is a convention that Twitter users started. In response, Twitter added a section on its site where people can see any tweets that mention them. The mentions are hyperlinked so others could click on them to see the subject’s profile page.

Andrew Huang, a product manager at Facebook, said it is “a common Internet mechanism,” and he expects Facebook members to use it more for storytelling than Twitter users do.

Facebook has long allowed people to tag friends in pictures, but until now, not in status updates. When people are tagged, they get notified by e-mail, the update appears on their profile pages and their names are hyperlinked to their pages.

Mr. Huang, who developed the new tagging feature, said it would enable users “to talk about their real-world connections” and “interact with each other more.” It will also enable people and businesses to monitor what others are saying about them on the site, which was previously much harder to do. That has been one of Twitter’s vital selling points to businesses.

Adoption by businesses is a revenue-generating opportunity for both companies. Twitter, which does not yet have any significant revenue, has said that it will soon introduce features that help businesses interact with customers. Facebook offers businesses special pages and the option to buy ads to show to users who like similar companies.

Luna Park, a chain of three restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles, uses both Facebook and Twitter to send out promotions. Chuck Meyer, Luna Park’s general manager in San Francisco, said Facebook is more useful because the restaurant can post photos and longer updates. But he said customers use Twitter more because they think of it as a place to follow businesses and Facebook as a place to chat with friends. Luna Park has about 1,580 fans on Facebook and 2,350 followers on Twitter.

Mr. Meyer is pleased that Facebook added a tagging feature similar to Twitter’s because when people mention Luna Park, their friends can go to Luna Park’s profile page with a single click and Luna Park will get an alert. The new feature will also lure people to the site with e-mail notifications that they have been tagged.

“A lot of companies are envious of Twitter because people spend a lot more time there, and this allows Facebook to do the same thing — it gives them another opportunity to get people to come back to the site,” said Jason Keath, a social media consultant in Charlotte, N.C.

The second new feature, Facebook Lite, is meant for people with very slow Internet connections or new users who want an introduction to the core features of the site, Ms. Chin said. But it might also appeal to veteran Facebook users who like the simplicity of Twitter.

Facebook Lite is essentially a stream of updates, like Twitter. It includes photos and comments, which are not available on Twitter, but disposes of other distracting sections that clutter the traditional Facebook homepage.

Facebook has made other Twitter-like changes. In March, it updated users’ homepages to show the full stream of updates from all friends in real time, instead of just the updates selected by an algorithm. And last month, Facebook allowed brands and celebrities to send status updates directly to Twitter without visiting Twitter’s site. Twitter users can send tweets to Facebook.

Twitter says it is happy to share with Facebook. “Twitter continues to reduce friction between many services,” said Biz Stone, a founder. “Our services are complementary to mobile networks, social networks, search engines, software platforms, television networks and maybe a few other areas we haven’t thought of yet.”

No matter how many features they share, it is unlikely that Facebook will make Twitter unnecessary for its users — or vice versa, Mr. Keath said. “I don’t think that divide is going to close soon. There’s going to be certain aspects where Facebook can compete or maybe take over Twitter, but over all, they are safe in their niches.”

Sign in to Recommend More Articles in Technology » A version of this article appeared in print on September 14, 2009, on page B4 of the New York edition.