cdharris

We’re watching

Administrator — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 13:23:25 +0000

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 space could be sold "by the eyeball." In addition, the technology could provide a new kind of test lab for evaluating and refining ads in unusual contexts.

We’re out of bandwidth?

Administrator — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 14:37:48 +0000

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 of video delivery and the internet (and IPTV in general) will begin to strain these resources. Will parallel systems such as the vaunted "internet 2" save the day, or not?

How to make “Internet TV”

Administrator — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:23:19 +0000

Simple online guide, sponsored by Participatory Culture Foundation, on how to create and publish video to the net.

Pollster Pleads Guilty to Fraud

Administrator — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:17:33 +0000

"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 as Viewpoint USA), admitted in her plea that she had conspired to falsify survey and polling results between 2001 and 2004 in order to meet deadlines. She also admitted that she had directed employees to doctor results by completing surveys after calls had been concluded, changing the respondent’s gender, ethnicity or political affiliation to meet a quota, and faking the responses for entire surveys. "

This is a very bad development, to say the least, at a time when researchers are facing eroding cooperation rates and sagging client confidence. [reblogged from MRWeb.com]

Biometric + Digital Art at Venice Biennale

Administrator — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:24:44 +0000

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 10 - November 21 in the Palazzo Van Axel.

Scold Cams and Surveillance

Administrator — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:01:20 +0000

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."

We’re not going to make it….

Administrator — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 09:05:28 +0000

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 make it"- and was too overcome by emotion to speak. Another speaker this year actually used the term "species extinction," referring to ours. The talks are always thought-provoking and some are exceptionally powerful. Some are already online where you can hear them at: http://www.ted.com/tedtalks.

Using the GPS in your celphone for traffic reporting…

Administrator — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:21:48 +0000

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 to within three miles per hour.’ Of course, any compulsory phone-tracking system raises privacy concerns. According to an article on LiveScience, ‘the personal identification data of users will be stripped from cell phone signals before they are processed by IntelliOne’s software.’ The cell phone companies have this data, but IntelliOne says they won’t be keeping their copy."

Tracking the Congressional attention span

Administrator — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:08:21 +0000

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 difficult for humans to handle on their own.

What’s exciting about this project and others like it is that computers are at last capable of unsupervised, dynamic analysis, and they can produce meaningful results with little or no intervention (humans will still be required to interpret the results, of course). The researchers in this project turned their software loose on 70 million words of Congressional debate without doing any initial topic coding. Researchers wanted to know several things: how do elected leaders distribute their attention? Under what circumstances do leaders push or follow public attention to an issue? Is debate on most issues incremental or explosive? Now that they could accurately track topics over time, the researchers found, for instance, that "judicial nominations" have consumed steadily more Congressional attention between 1997 and 2004. In fact, the topic produced the most number of words published in a single "day" of the Congressional Record: 230,000 on November 12, 2003.

Another hot issue, abortion, has moved in the other direction. Abortion has steadily received less Congressional attention over the last decade, and floor speeches on abortion now remain stable at one percent of the total (down from six percent in the 105th Congress)."

Google takes over the world

Administrator — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:45:01 +0000

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 Sergey Brin, The technology that came with the recent acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting could do it.

DMarc’s technology automatically schedules and places radio advertising, and Google plans to integrate the dMarc platform with the Google ad-serving platform. With dMarc’s system already serving audio ads, music is a likely candidate for Google’s ad expansion."

Is search engine “text box” marketing over?

Administrator — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:37:22 +0000

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 than they did banner ads."

The “Amazon Noir Caper”

Administrator — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:04:45 +0000

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 of copyright protected books, by sending up to 10,000 requests per book. The resulting data was then logically reassembled into pdf-format by the team’s "SIB-Book-Generator."

Sousveillance

Administrator — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 10:46:08 +0000

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 Act, Rudy Giuliani, September 11th, face recognition software, reality TV, webcams and wireless systems, among other topics.

Printing on falling water

Administrator — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 13:25:27 +0000

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 at University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, Dr. Pevnick, creates the installations through his company called PevnickDesign in Milwaukee. Setup reportedly takes about four days, plus two days for debugging and programming.

Price Protection and Pricing Transparency

Administrator — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:48:48 +0000

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 vendors and decide immediately if the in-store price is favorable or not. Now there is a new service that adds additional price transparency: PriceProtectr. Among other things, this service will notify you if prices drop on an item at any of dozens of retailers. This could also be valuable for consumers where stores have instituted "price protection" within a certain period, typically 30 days, where if a price drops on a purchased item, the buyer receives the difference.