http://cdharris.com/blog technology : art: dataviz : technoactivism Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:01:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A Canadian company has developed a technology called Eyebox2 that it says can monitor the gaze of passersby and respond to shifts in attention,  even tracking multiple people at once,  and even from more than 30 feet away. The company says the advertising pontential is large, wherein outdoor or unconventional ad ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=153 We are starting to hit the limits of the internet’s capacity to carry data, say experts.  So far applications such as streaming video have been able to function thanks to excess capacity paid for by investors in the internet boom, but which went relatively unused until recently.  Now the merger ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=157 Simple online guide,  sponsored by Participatory Culture Foundation,  on how to create and publish video to the net. http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=150 "The former Director of Operations of a US company that conducted campaign polls for President Bush and other political candidates, has been found guilty of ordering employees to fabricate survey results and sentenced to more than two years in jail. Tracy Costin, owner of political polling firm DataUSA (now known ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=155 Can’t make it to the Venice Biennale this time around,  but if I were there, I wouldn’t want to miss the installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer called "Pulse Room."  100 lightbulbs are connected to EKG sensors and thus are "controlled by the heartbeat of the public."  The exhibit runs from June ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=151 Great Britain is already estimated to have installed CCTV cams at a ratio of about 1 camera for every 5 citizens.  Now some of the cameras are designed to detect certain conditions and direct the surveilled person to do an action.  Call them "scold cams."  http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=149 At this year’s TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design),  where attendees are capped at 1,000 and tickets cost $6,000 each,  John Doerr, the famous venture capitalist whose firm bootstrapped such startups as Amazon and Google, began his climate-crisis talk with the words, "I’m really scared. I don’t think we’re going to ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=148 IntelliOne Technologies has just launched a real-world test of Need4Speed, a real-time traffic-monitoring system that tracks drivers’ cell phones. From their website: ‘Unlike any other solution available today, the IntelliOne Roadway Speed Measurement System produces live roadway speeds for all highways and surface streets where mobile phone coverage exists, accurate ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=147 Arstechnica reports:  "While text mining 330,000 New York Times articles poses an interesting challenge, it’s not as interesting as sifting through 70 million words (from over 70,000 unique documents) found in the Congressional Record. A team of political science researchers  found that their software was able to answer questions too ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=145 Google has revealed ambitious plans to create a unified advertising platform that could sell and deliver ads to print, radio, television and streaming media, including podcasts and Google Video. Advertisers would like to get the same kind of accountability and tracking that search advertising provides in other media, said Google cofounder ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=144 Jakob Nielsen recently conducted an eyetracking study of webpages and is worried that "text box blindness" is becoming as common as "banner blindness."  One recent eyetracking study by MIT’s Advertising/Media Lab(heatmap depicted here) showed that users "didn’t look at the Google ads in the right-hand margin of this page any more ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=143 Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard stole copyrighted books from Amazon.com by using sophisticated robot-technology as programmed by Cirio. Amazon sued the group and a settlement was just announced. The "Amazon Noir" Robots manipulated Amazon’s "Search Inside this Book" feature, forcing the feature to provide the complete volumes ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=142 Commenting on a decade of silent performances in front of surveillance cameras,  The Surveillance Camera Players have just published a new book.  The major themes are:  right to privacy, the militarization of the police, the ideology of transparency, the mass psychology of fascism, the society of the spectacle, the PATRIOT ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=141 BoingBoing reports that "The Jeep Waterfall", a water installation seen at a recent Jeep car show,  is a 25-foot-high sheet of falling water that can display arbitrary bitmaps in falling water, using a mechanism "similar to an inkjet printer."  A video of the exhibit is on YouTube.  Apparently, a professor ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=140 Many experts have written about the threat that total "price transparency" represents to traditional retailers,  and many retailers have seen their businesses decline due to the online consumer’s ability to easily compare prices.  Even in a store,  new barcode readers inside some celphones allow consumers to check online pricing across ... http://cdharris.com/blog/?p=139