Telepresence

For the second iteration of this project the primary back end functionality of the lazy son application described in Assignment 1 was built based on existing Java Server and Java Client applications written by Dan O’Sullivan.   Below I will list the primary functionality offered by this initial build of the application.

1. users can connect and uniquely identify themselves on the central server (local at this point).  if a unique name is not specified they are prompted to re-enter another name option.

2. users can request a list of all the other connected users.

3.  users can request any connected user for a ’snap shot’ of their environment.

4. users will receive notification of a pending request.

5. users can decided if they would like to record and post a new video upon request.

6. users are able to record a new video which is automatically posted to an online repository via ssh.

The entire interface was text-based at this point.  Please contact me if you would like to see code samples.

For my second assignment, I wanted to further explore the idea of third place. I was interested creating an anonymous, virtual, safe place. My inspiration was Elliot Spitzer’s hotel room and DanO’s post about the phone. With that I created ThirdVoice: a phone-based anonymous chat room.

Users can call into the system using their phone. They are given the choice to pose a question/discussion topic or address one already in progress.

I have posted the code here. Comments welcome.

this is the project collaborated with Rodrigo. the website of our Globline is:  http://itp.nyu.edu/~rd989/globline/globline.html

“We are smart journalist and editors for “GLOBLINE” news agency. We provide news efficiently, very very fast responding to what’s happening in the global world. We know how to use photoshop, We know how to guess what interviewees are talking about in another language, we also know ctrl+C, ctrl+V.”

– editors of Globline

1, We want to show how various of agencies broadcast the event all together, confusing audience by the different interpretations of the same video source by a tourist happening to be in Tibet then. It’s not the opinion that varies, it’s actually what was happening in tibet, the fact that varies a lot among different sources.

2, We want to imitate exactly the way how news agency edits this news: cropping, guessing without research, geotagging, mixing, translating incorrectly, etc.

3, We need more sources to be smart: big agencies, from local or international agencies, from grassroot eyewitness, people need to critically treat the news.

We want to find news from as many sources as possible, some from big news agencies which we get the google news aggregator rss: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=tibet&btnG=Search+News. so they have news from associate press, VOA, BBC, CNN,ABC, Reuters, and also XINHUA which is the chinese CNN. But ironically, a lot of them are from US, Canada, Britain, Some from India and China.

Plus, we collected and embeded the grassroot international blogs talking about this event, such as globalvoice, http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/-/world/east-asia/tibet-arc/feed/, even the eyewitness of this tibet event ’s blog: http://kadfly.blogspot.com/
http://feeds.feedburner.com/JOTMAN
http://www.zonaeuropa.com/weblog.htm
there are also some readings around media bias

The Market for News” (American Economic Review, 2005) and “Media Bias and Reputation” (Journal of Polical Economy, 2006). David Baron of Stanford also has a paper on media bias, and his focus is that news organizations tolerate bias of journalists if this can allows the latter to be hired at a lower wage. “Persistent Media Bias”, Journal of Public Economics, 2006.

meng & rodrigo

Here is the link for assignment2

teleglobe ver1.0

api lists which we use for this project now.
http://www.webcams.travel/
http://developer.yahoo.com/weather/
http://www.wefeelfine.org/
this one is unstable!

Noriaki, Jae Yoon

Here is a link to the documentation for Assignment 2.

Kacie

This whole telepresence thing might have made the world become really small, easy-to-learn and very close to each others. I’ve always been thinking this type of situation very negatively. Especially in my culture, now it is really easy to hurt people without using any weapons. Government even makes some kind of poster warning people “Your words might kill someone”. And even most websites including the biggest portal/blog website in Korea made people have to give their real name when they want to comment on something and even though there are comments they hide those comments so that people have to click on button to view those comments. The funny thing is there used to be lots of comments but not any more. It happens after some celebrities committed suicides because of the depression which their families claim that their children have had it because of those Evil comments on the internet about them. Well..maybe that could be the case and it’s not just the case of the celebrities.

Personally, I don’t believe telepresence can create a big beige global culture. I would say GIANT GRAY culture. The ‘globalization’ means to me is that people know about other culture and accept them as they are, not try to change them and judge them. The great case of letting the world know about their society is the one(Flash mobs) that Clay Shirky mentioned. These are the something that people can do and the government can’t. But once people started judging other culture based on the way of their living, then there won’t be the world containing the millions of unique culture. Again there will be the only big gray living environment.

What I thought as my project was the display of color of the map how similar to America is. Whenever the little country becomes very similar to the major one (maybe that would mean “similar to American culture”), the color becomes gray. It might be based on food, clothes, marriage…etc. There will be needed lots of statistics, but I think it would be very interesting to see how similar to each other we are.

jain