go to blog
with help from paris marashi

A work in progress, but now provides some organized documentation on the project - gardenelectric.com

There is a nice article in Herald Tribune about the information we have/ going to have more in the future through our cellphones and their potential consequences.
It talks about software systems like Jaiku’s which is based around the location of friends and family. One researcher from UCLA Danah Boyd puts a good alternative criticism of [...]

For an alternative take (outside CNN, Fox, and NBC), see these links:
(thanks to Shawn Van Every and Matt Burton for links)
Link TV
Democracy Now
GREAT International TV
Crooks and Liars

Healing Iraq
River Bend Blog
Iraq Blog Count

For Christmas, I bought myself the Nikon D80 (with some surprising help from my parents who I think felt bad about my laptop situation). I have been shooting ALOT, more then I have in the last two years (which is really nice). So far, I like it. Its VERY lightweight, which after shooting with a Mamiya 645 for the last few years is a welcome change. The flash is a bit harsh but thats to be expected and its no worse then any other on camera flash I’ve used. I haven’t explored all of the features yet so I will have to write a more thorough review at a later time, but I can say that it is very different then shooting with film. I think the largest change is I have had to stop myself from thinking about the film itself when shooting (i.e. ASA, pushing, pulling, etc.), its a little weird.

I haven’t had a chance to upload all the pictures I have taken because I actually just received my new laptop in the mail, payed for mostly by my insurance company. I decided to purchase the Inspiron E1505, the new version of my old laptop. The screen is slightly larger and its slightly faster with a better video card, which apparently also makes it Vista compatible. The last two days have been a marathon of installing programs and configuring the new baby. Now I just have to update my iTunes with all of the music that I lost. Hopefully, some friendly peeps will donate some music to my cause.

It is moments like this that make me glad  the NYTimes is around:
“Toppling Saddam Hussein did not automatically create a new and better Iraq. Executing him won’t either.” See full editorial HERE
Aneen Shaman says Iraqi state run TV is reading sections of the Koran.
In Dearbon, MI (a large Muslim community) - people “dancing in the [...]

The world simply waits for execution, revolts, praise, explosions, and word.
Hussein will be presented with a red card, which was given to people executed during his regime.
The CNN
6:06 am - baghdad - the execution has been carried out ten minutes ago as reported by iraqi TV, Al-Hourrah
This is an international global story being played out [...]

THE NEW MISSION

I am trying to build a website. Anyone wants to help?

Okay, before I dive into the very cali Christmas, a short recap of “Mom Visits NY.” Mom came in for the ITP show, and stayed a couple days before we both took off back to California.  Mom’s a big finance nerd, so I took her i…

heres the you i knew before my shoulder hurts. it has been like this for six months. don’t know what’s wrong. i sit on my ass for 17 hour a day and don’t really move apart from going to pick up food. this is the ny city glamor i always heard about.

one more year. my birthday is soon. it will be even more strange. i will be alone in my room. i will get a cupcake and order some delivery and make a wish. i am almost positive. one more year. people tell me that i have so much going on and so many things to be grateful for / proud of. i just never see things that way.

not sure why.
it’s never enough.
it’s never good enough.

i look for people that are different from me. they are not hard to find in ny. most if not all are vastly so. i dont own 300 dollar jeans or carry purses with names on them. i am not skinny i dont smoke or do pilates. it’s close to impossible for me to get along with them when we speak different languages. they just float. day for day. most. not all.

how are you? are you well? are you happy?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. one more year.

I don’t like this whole naming style of the web 1.0, 2.0 etc. Then I was shuffling around articles from Kurzweilai when I read the third generation one. I remember I came across to the same debate couple of weeks ago. Here I came across to it again and I thought I’d share. I don’t [...]

James Brown died on Monday, Dec. 25th, and his 3 day resurrection is right on schedule. This Thursday, James Brown will be packing the Apollo Theater one last time.
“When you think about James Brown, you think about the Apollo,” said Denita Woodard, 33, of the Bronx, outside the theater Tuesday. Make sure you arrive early [...]

My daughter, who is four, says some pretty amazing things. Sometimes they are funny such as what she said to me in the car the other day, “Daddy lets me drink soda mommy because daddy is a liar.” And sometimes they are cute, “Mommy can you teach me how to drive tomorrow.” And sometimes they make you think. I bought her one of those fake laptops for christmas, she constantly wants to play with mine so I figured that even though it wasn’t the real thing she would enjoy it (ironic how she has a laptop now and I don’t). At first she seemed to really like it but then came the question, “Mommy I need to send an email to Sophia. Can you show me how to send an email with my computer?” Sophia is her best friend in school, who I am sure she has missed since she only goes back to school tomorrow. I had to explain to her that her computer couldn’t send email and that Sophia (being four of course) probably didn’t have an email address. Of course she asked why not, so I gave the routine answer that every parent gives to that type of question, “She’s too young.”

Amazing.

Tom Vilsack has posted a video on YouTube that is his first foray into “videoblogging”. He definitely has someone knowledgeable advising him as he says the right things, encourages conversation and wants to hear from us. Good deal.. Let’s see if he follows through.
Tom Vilsack on using the Internet and Videoblog

Richard came to us with an idea. In fact he titled his first email just that. That idea turned into bessbook.com with sections for his print, tv and design work. We really enjoyed the color scheme on this one, cool tones with a burst of a brick red here and there. The design of the spoltch as a logo is also a nice messy yet clean touch - does that even make sense?

Just check out bessbook.com

“Here at KingsRUs.com, we call our website our Kingdom, and any time our webservers serve up a copy of the home page, we record that as a Loyal Subject. We’re very pleased to announce that in the last two months, we have added over 1 million Loyal Subjects to our Kingdom.”

Put that baldly, you wouldn’t fall for this bit of re-direction, and yet that is exactly what Linden Labs has pulled off with its Residents™ label. By adopting a term that seems like a simple re-branding of “users”, but which is actually unconnected to head count or adoption, they’ve managed to report what the press wants to hear, while providing no actual information.

If you like your magic tricks to stay mysterious, leave now, but if you want to understand how Linden has managed to disable the fact-checking apparatus of much of the US business press, turning them into a zombie army of unpaid flacks, read on. (And, as with the earlier piece on Linden, this piece has also been published on Valleywag.)

The basic trick is to make it hard to remember that Linden’s definition of Resident has nothing to do with the plain meaning of the word resident. My dictionary says a resident is a person who lives somewhere permanently or on a long term basis. Linden’s definition of Residents, however, has nothing to do with users at all — it measures signups for an avatar. (Get it? The avatar, not the user, is the resident of Second Life.)

The obvious costume-party assumption is that there is one avatar per person, but that’s wrong. There can be more than one avatar per account, and more than one account per person, and there’s no public explanation of which of those units Residents measures, and thus no way to tell anything about how many actual people use Second Life. (An embarrassingly First Life concern, I know.)

Confused yet? Wait, there’s less! Linden’s numbers also suggest that the Residents figure includes even failed attempts to use the service. They reported adding their second million Residents between mid-October and December 14th, but they also reported just shy of 810 thousand logins for the same period. One million new Residents but only 810K logins leaves nearly 200K new Residents unaccounted for. Linden may be counting as Residents people who signed up and downloaded the client software, but who never logged in, or there may be some other reason for the mismatched figures, but whatever the case, Residents is remarkably inflated with regards to the published measure of use.

(If there are any actual reporters reading this and doing a big cover story on Linden, you might ask about how many real people use Second Life regularly, as opposed to Residents or signups or avatars. As I write those words, though, I realize I might as well be asking Business Week to send me a pony for my birthday.)

Like a push-up bra, Linden’s trick is as effective as it is because the press really, really wants to believe:

“So far, it’s signed up 1.3 million members.” — David Kirkpatrick, Fortune

Professional journalists wrote those sentences. They work for newspapers and magazines that employ (or used to employ) fact-checkers. Yet here they are, supplementing Linden’s meager PR budget by telling their readers that Residents measures something it actually doesn’t.

This credulity appears even in the smallest items. I discovered the “Residents vs Logins” gap when I came across a Business 2.0 post by Erick Schonfeld, where he included the mismatched numbers while congratulating Linden on a job well done. When I asked the obvious question in the comments — How come there are fewer logins than new Residents in the same period? — I got a nice email from Mr. Schonfeld, complimenting me on a good catch.

Now I’m generally pretty enthusiastic about taking credit where it isn’t due, but this bit of praise failed to meet even my debased standards. The post was a hundred words long, and it had only two numbers in it. I didn’t have to use forensic accounting to find the discrepancy, I just used subtraction (an oft-overlooked tool in the journalistic toolkit, but surprisingly effective when dealing with numbers.)

This is the state of business reporting in an age when even the pros want to roll with the cool blogger kids. Got a paragraph that contains only two numbers, and they don’t match? No problem! Post it anyway, and on to the next thing.

The prize bit of PReporting so far, though, has to be Elizabeth Corcoran’s piece for Forbes called A Walk on the Virtual Side, where she claimed that Second Life had recently passed “a million unique customers.”

This is three lies in four words. There isn’t one million of anything human inhabiting Second Life. There is no one-to-one correlation between Residents and users. And whatever Residents does measure, it has nothing to do with paying customers. The number of paid accounts is in the tens of thousands, not the millions (and remember, if you’re playing along at home, there can be more than one account per person. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, how many logged into St. Ides?)

Despite the credulity of the Fourth Estate (Classic Edition), there are enough questions being asked in the weblogs covering Second Life that the usefulness is going to drain out of the ‘Resident™ doesn’t mean resident’ trick over the next few months. We’re going to see three things happen as a result.

The first thing that’s going to happen, or rather not happen, is that the regular press isn’t going go back over this story looking for real figures. As much as they’ve written about the virtual economy and the next net, the press hasn’t really covered Second Life as business story or tech story so much as a trend story. The sine qua non of trend stories is that a trend is fast-growing. The Residents figure was never really part of the story, it just provided permission to write about about how crazy it is that all the kids these days are getting avatars. By the time any given writer was pitching that story to their editors, any skepticism about the basic proposition had already been smothered.

No journalist wants to have to write “When we told you that Second Life had 1.3 million members, we in no way meant to suggest that figure referred to individual people. Fortune regrets any misunderstanding.” And since no one wants to write that, no one will. They’ll shift their coverage without pointing out the shift to their readers.

The second thing that is going to happen is an increase in arguments of the form “We mustn’t let Linden’s numbers blind us to the inevitability of the coming metaverse.” That’s the way it is with things we’re asked to take on faith — when A works, it’s evidence of B, but if A isn’t working as well as everyone thought, it’s suddenly unrelated to B.

Finally, there is going to be a spike in the number of the posts claiming that the two million number was never important anyway, the press’s misreporting was all an innocent mistake, Linden was planning to call those reporters first thing Monday morning and explain everything. Tateru Nino has already kicked off this genre with a post entitled The Value of One. The flow of her argument is hard to synopsize, but you can get a sense of it from this paragraph:

So, a hundred thousand, one million, two million. Those numbers mean something to us, but not because they have intrinsic, direct meaning. They have meaning because they’re filtered through the media, disseminated out into the world, believed by people, who then act based on that belief, and that is where the meaning lies.

Expect more, much more, of this kind of thing in 2007.

Since the warm reception at the ITP Winter Show The Orb has been getting a good amount of attention around the blogosphere. Here are some of the mentions of which I’m aware (in rough order of appearance):

keeyool.com

MAKE Magazine

Hack A Day

notcot

Core77

Gizmodo

TodayNow

Ize.hu (can anyone translate?)

An Unreasonable Man

It’s also been YouTubed (thanks to MaximusNYC):

watch the videoThis video is one of the many videos that were made for the 2006 ITP wintershow.Daniel Liss had this really great idea to do a wintershow videoblog for the ITP wintershow, rather than the traditional walk around interviews! What a great …

We hope your christmas / kwanzaa / hanukkah / festivus / holiday season is a rich one for you and your fam. And by rich we mean both spiritualy and monetarily. And while we won’t be getting bonuses the likes of these guys, we hope they will donate to us in the New Year. It’s the season of giving isn’t it?
As the New Year approaches here is a quick run down of what we have been doing - in no particular order: Puttin on a play, creating websites here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, shootin’ some video here and here, working reconstruction in New Orleans and wrote some articles which were published here and here. Look forward to more in the coming New Year!!!

Whoah, facebook caught the AJAX bug. Fancy new javascript pop-ups for poking. Kind of a surprise. Maybe UI changes should come with a warning - “Don’t panic. This is how it’s supposed to work. We just don’t know how to tell you we changed things up.”

And still, I don’t like the interface. The site is still ugly. Microsoft FrontPage style ugly. Business school grads who wanted to make a website to run ads on ugly. And the main navigation still sucks. When will people learn to make the ui elements most people use most often BIG, EASY, and SMART? Slightly better than MySpace, but miles away from good.

Keep trying, guys.

it’s time to get off your butt and do something. or maybe simply get off. december 22nd is global orgasm day. (it’s also the winter solstice). Have a glogasm today. (i just made that word up)
apparently, if we all orgasm at the same time, it will bring about world peace. who knows? maybe it [...]

Yawwwwwwwn.  Just got into Cali.  Haven’t written in forever, but that’s just because I’ve been out trying to collect some good blog stories for you (oh and finishing finals and getting ready for the ITP show).  The l…

Needless to say going from multiple speaking events, directly to finals week, and then the Winter Show, made truth of the expression ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire and burned to a crisp’.The ITP Winter Show went really well. This time around the…

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

fallshow06, by doryexmachina.

Here it is..finally.

Download

I started working on this post quite some time ago. Sadly, it still needs to be written despite my hopes that Apple would get on the ball and do something in response to the massive growth of Flash video. Hell, even M$ is doing something..
By do something, I mean, look at why Flash [...]

This blog became something in the back streets of my mind. I started to collect everything on a wiki rather than a blog. Also the time to document things kind of forgotten in the sake of building the projects itself.

As I mentioned below, sLop has had a good run but must now retire. Essentially, I am moving to WordPress and decided that I would rethink the type content I publish along with the move. The new blog will have…

Another semester draws to an end with a terrific selection of projects at the ITP show!

There’s also a scrumptious video blog as well as a lovely Rocketboom episode.

The technological innovations of the 20th and 21st centuries has brought about [or at least brought to light] an interesting shift in the roles of privacy for individuals and organizations. Individual privacy is becoming a thing of the past while corporate and governmental bodies protect their privacy with tenacity. This distribution seems contradictory to some of the basic ideals of democratic society. More, the afore-mentioned distribution proves the innefectiveness in the current zeitgeiest of consumer-based market-economy.

Read Full Paper [pdf]

Yay! We made it!
Garden Electric came together in the nick of time - phew! We ended up modifying the layout on day 2 to fix the issue of air traveling upstream. The synchronized action of the bellows stole the show from our precious plastic flowers. Good feedback, kids loved it and we never tired of [...]