A Sesame Street for Makers?
“Discussions of modern technology often evokes the word “magic.” Some of the most popular devices, like the MacBook Air, are built in such a way to seriously dissuade anyone who would go inside and tinker with the works. For the vast consumer market, it makes sense for technology to present itself as a “magic box.” Most people don’t care about how their laptop works; they just want it to work. And that’s fair.
But we must think of the children.”
“I’ve interviewed a lot of engineers over the years, and it’s amazing how many of them can trace their fascination with technology to a youthful moment where they played with or took apart a piece of kit. You can only become fascinated with the structure of something if you can see the structure of it. You need that gear, that spring, that rivet to pop out at you and send you down the rabbit hole. This is how passions are born.”
Full Story: MIT
Welcome to the “Circuit Playground”
copiesofcopies/youtube-transcription · GitHub
Open government developer Waldo Jaquith had a problem: he wanted transcripts for videos of the Virginia legislature but didn’t have the resources to fund their creation nor time to transcribe sessions himself.
When he talked to Matt Cutts at the Newsfoo unconference last December, Google’s lead for Web spam suggested to Jacquith that he make use of YouTube ability to automagically created machine-generated transcripts of video.
Last week, Jaquith posted a $500 bounty for a speech transcription program, funded by 95 backers for a Kickstarter campaign to liberate Virginia’s legislative video.
That’s when something interesting happened, as Jacquith blogged today: Aaron Williamson, a lawyer for the Software Freedom Law Center, created a Python script to fix the problem.
It took just 27 hours for the $500 speech transcription bounty to be claimed. Aaron Williamson produced youtube-transcription, a Python-based pair of scripts that upload video to YouTube and download the resulting machine-generated transcripts of speech.
Jaquith intends to use the code in the Richmond Sunlight project — and because it’s open source, anyone else can press it into service as a means to generate transcripts of video.
The quality of YouTube’s machine-generated transcriptions are, to be fair, mixed, although they are improving. That said, they’re better than none at all.
Williamson told Jaquith that he’ll donate the Kickstarter cash to charity.
@waldojaquith @digiphile @mattcutts (@copiesofcopies, BTW, has directed the bounty to a pair of charities.)
— Waldo Jaquith (@waldojaquith) March 25, 2013
Video of author Cory Doctorow’s talk on ebooks, libraries, and copyright at the Library of Congress.
A Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond (by LibraryOfCongress)
The obfuscation of culture (how to hide your s-t online)
One of my favorite bits from Jacob’s post on “seapunk” was this bit about keeping subcultures “sub”:
It is an impossibility for a subcultural style to be “owned”. Sub-culture exists when gazed at by mass-culture. The only way to ensure that your aesthetic is not going to become used by others is to never share it with anyone. Another approach is to protect your aesthetic with physical violence (see: gang colors). Otherwise, once you allow your presence to be seen, it can be consumed.
Most communities protect their culture through some form of obfuscation: hiding the meaning of their communication by making it hard to interpret.
This is a practice I’ve been studying for some time and some of it is incredible.
- Tum bl r an d L J u sers sep ar ate w ords thr ou gh o dd spacin g in o rde r to fo ol sea rc h en g i nes.
- Chinese users hide political messages in image attachments to seemingly benign posts on Weibo.
- General Pretraeus communicated solely through draft mode.
- 4chan scares away the faint of heart with porn.
- More technically astute groups communicate through obscure messaging systems.
If you want your subculture to go undetected, all of these techniques are moderately effective at keeping your activity away from people and their machines. Until they *want* to find you. Then they’ll find ways around the gates you throw up.
update #1:
We see a lot of people posting whole posts in tags, so that they’re only visible in the dashboard and not their external-facing blogs, too.Brilliant.
update #2: Alex Leavitt points me to this First Monday piece by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, ‘Vernacular Resistance to Data Collection & Analysis: A Political Theory of Obfuscation’
Nat linked up this post in Radar today.
Last week, Radar’s managing editor, Mac Slocum, interviewed Ben Waber at Strata Santa Clara 2013.
Waber’s company, Sociometrics, was featured this week in a Wall Street Journal article on tracking sensors in the workplace.
“Gathering big data about human behaviors can be a sensitive topic,” said Dave Lathrop, director of workspace futures and strategy at Steelcase Inc.
There’s no doubt about that reality.
(Via OReillyMedia)
A look behind the “data sensing lab” at the O’Reilly Strata conference.
Last fall, Alasdair Allan, Brian Jepson, Julie Steele, Rob Faludi and interested attendees at the Strata Conference put together a network of data sensors in the conference venue in New York City.
This video, featuring Edd Dumbill and others, explains what they created using open source hardware and 3D printing.
The video description, by O’Reilly Media, provides more context and looks ahead to what’s happening right now, around me.
“Sensors are the future of distributed data. General-purpose computing is dissipating out into the environment and becoming increasingly invisible and embedded into our lives. We will soon begin to move in a sea of data, our movements tracked and our environments measured and adjusted to our preferences, without need for direct intervention. At the Strata Conference in Santa Clara this February, we will observe and report on the conference once again, with more sensors, real-time visualization, and some new interactive features for attendees.”“Distributed Environmental Data: On the Ground at the Data Sensing Lab” (by OreillyMedia)
Dale Dougherty and Anil Dash talk about the Maker movement
Last week in New York City, MAKE founder Dale Dougherty talked with entrepreneur Anil Dash about making and participatory design. Video of their conversation is embedded below.
Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government
Today, the White House responded to the We The People e-petition on open access.
John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, released a memorandum directing agencies with “more than $100 million in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication.”
Today’s White house #OA directive & #FASTR = watershed for US public’s right to access taxpayer-funded research bit.ly/VBnwC6
Great the Pres. is joining the fight to provide free & open access of taxpayer funded research to the American public 1.usa.gov/15Bsenx
As Hayley Tsukayama notes in the Washington Post, the White House acknowledged the open access policies of the National Institutes of Health as a successful model for sharing research.
Was this a policy change? An open question on Twitter received clear answers:
@digiphile definitely, and an exciting one. Wonder if DOD/DARPA will get a pass though. #opengov
— Joseph Mosby (@josephmosby) February 22, 2013
@digiphile it is a policy change.NIH PMC only provides articles for free.”And analyze” in OSTP policy implies broader usage rights.
— Richard Akerman (@scilib) February 22, 2013
@digiphile Definitely jives with what I’m hearing from @gbinal at #apistrat regarding forward movement on exposing fed data through APIs
— Jeremia Kimelman (@jeremiak) February 22, 2013
@digiphile It’s a change—expanding NIH model more Fed agencies (over $100mil budget, i.e. NSF, DARPA, etc.) Mentions data, not just pubs.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) February 22, 2013
@digiphile It’s a change—expanding NIH model more Fed agencies (over $100mil budget, i.e. NSF, DARPA, etc.) Mentions data, not just pubs.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) February 22, 2013
@digiphile It’s a marked policy change — the administration hadn’t taken a stance previously.
From the day they were announced, one of the biggest question marks about We The People e-petitions has always been whether the administration would make policy changes or take public stances it had not before on a given issue.
ThThe Obama administration has been considering access to federally funded scientific research for years, including a report to Congress in March 2012. The relevant e-petition, which had gathered more than 65,000 signatures had gone unanswered since May of last year.
While the memorandum and the potential outcomes from its release come with caveats, from that $100M threshold to national security or economic competitions, an answer from the director of the White House Office of Science Policy accompanied by a memorandum directing agencies to make changes is a substantive outcome.
While there are many reasons to be critical of some open government initiatives, it certainly appears that today, We The People were heard in the halls of government.
Earlier this week, Lawrence Lessig marked his appointment as Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School with a lecture entitled “Aaron’s Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age.”
“Hacking is the use of technical knowledge to advance a public good,” said Lessig, seeking to bring the term back to its original meaning and away from the cracking, espionage and malicious use in which it is frequently employed by media today.
(Source: HarvardLawSchool)
![smartercities:
‘Bioconcrete’ Uses Bacteria to Heal Self | ThisBigCity
No product evokes a sense of solidity and sturdiness the way concrete does. However, the tiniest of cracks in an otherwise colossal slab will inevitably lead to structural degradation, leakages and costly repairs.
It is precisely this problem that two Dutch researchers from Delft Technical University have been working on. Beginning in 2006, Henk Jonkers, a microbiologist, and Eric Schlangen, a specialist in concrete development, sought to develop a self-healing cement [pictured] that would stop cracks from forming in the concrete, thereby extending the life of constructions.
Self-healing concrete.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/07604de0ed2862b10a1255524a5efb7a/tumblr_miingyW1qA1qzlda3o1_500.jpg)
‘Bioconcrete’ Uses Bacteria to Heal Self | ThisBigCity
No product evokes a sense of solidity and sturdiness the way concrete does. However, the tiniest of cracks in an otherwise colossal slab will inevitably lead to structural degradation, leakages and costly repairs.
It is precisely this problem that two Dutch researchers from Delft Technical University have been working on. Beginning in 2006, Henk Jonkers, a microbiologist, and Eric Schlangen, a specialist in concrete development, sought to develop a self-healing cement [pictured] that would stop cracks from forming in the concrete, thereby extending the life of constructions.
Self-healing concrete.
