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Rita 0106285

Jan 11, 2010

HARVEST THE ARTISTS-logo

by Rita 0106285 — last modified Jan 11, 2010 02:00 PM

harvest

Nov 25, 2009

Steve Mann

by Rita 0106285 — last modified Nov 25, 2009 03:26 PM

Steve Mann (born in Hamilton, Ontario), is a tenured professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann

Ideas and inventions This article is in a list format that may be better presented using prose. You can help by converting this article to prose, if appropriate. Editing help is available. (September 2009) Chirplet transform, 1991: Mann was the first to propose and reduce to practice a signal representation based on a family of chirp signals, each associated with a coefficient, in a generalization of the wavelet transform that is now referred to as the chirplet transform. Video Orbits, 1993: Mann was the first to produce an algorithm for automatically combining multiple pictures of the same subject matter, using algebraic projective geometry, to "stitch together" images using automatically estimated perspective correction. This is called the "Video Orbits" algorithm. See also US Patent 5,828,793, Method and apparatus for producing digital images having extended dynamic ranges. Comparametric Equations, 1993: Mann was the first to propose and implement an algorithm to estimate a camera's response function from a plurality of differently exposed images of the same subject matter. He was also the first to propose and implement an algorithm to automatically extend dynamic range in an image by combining multiple differently exposed pictures of the same subject matter. See also US Patent 5,706,416, Method and apparatus for relating and combining multiple images of the same scene or object(s). Hydraulophone: Mann invented an experimental musical instrument that uses pressurized hydraulic fluid, such as water, to make sound. The instrument is played by placing the fingers in direct contact with the sound-producing hydraulic fluid, thus giving the musician a high degree of control over the musical expression in the sound. Sousveillance and CyborGLOGGING Mann also works in the fields of computer-mediated reality. He is a strong advocate of privacy rights, for which work he was an award recipient of the Chalmers Foundation in the fine arts. His work also extends to the area of sousveillance (a term he coined for "inverse surveillance"). Mann and one of his PhD students, James Fung, together with some of his other students, have been building a cyborg community around the CyborGLOGGING concept. Mann, together with Professor Ian Kerr at the University of Ottawa, have written extensively on surveillance, sousveillance, and equiveillance. "Sousveillance", a term coined by Mann, along with the concepts that he and Kerr have developed around these ideas, have created a new dialog for cyborg technologies, as well as related personal information gathering technologies like camera phones. He has created the related concept of Humanistic Intelligence Joi Ito, a leading researcher in moblogging, credits Mann with having initiated the moblogging movement by creating a system for transmission of realtime pictures, video, and text. In particular, from 1994 to 1996, Mann continuously transmitted his life's experiences, in real time, to his website for others to experience, interact with, and respond to. His CyborGLOGS ('glogs), such as the spontaneous reporting of news as everyday experience, were an early predecessor of 'blogs and the concept of blogging, and earlier than that, his pre-internet-era live streaming of personal documentary and cyborg communities defined cyborglogging as a new form of social networking. Mann as cyborg NOW, The Globe and Mail, National Post, and Toronto Life have all described him as "the world's first cyborg", from his early work with wireless wearable webcams. Mann's publications include the book Cyborg: Digital Destiny... and the textbook Intelligent Image Processing, describing his early adoption of an alternative life style with significant and interesting ideas. In 2001, filmmaker Peter Lynch directed Cyberman, a film about Mann's life and inventions. While some describe him as the founder of the field of wearable computing based on his early work in personal imaging, there is controversy surrounding the exact definition of wearable computing, and whether any one person can be considered to have invented it. For example, wearable computer imaging systems were described, hypothetically but not actually reduced to practice (i.e., not actually invented) by Vannevar Bush in his essay "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. Wearable devices for timing the trajectory of the balls on a roulette table were built and used by Ed Thorp and Claude Shannon who first published their work in 1966, but it is uncertain whether these devices could be considered computers, in the modern-day interpretation of a computer as a general purpose device (any more than one might consider a windup wristwatch to be a computer, i.e., although it computes and displays time, what makes something really a computer is its generality of purpose). Likewise, an abacus worn around the neck on a string could be called a wearable computer, but it's not quite in the spirit of Mann's idea of a general purpose device worn during all waking moments. Predecessors like the wristwatch, the shoe-based gambling timers, etc., were used for computation of specific tasks, whereas Mann's invention was a general-purpose field programmable computer inserted into the visual reality stream of all day-to-day tasks.

Zapatistas

by Rita 0106285 — last modified Nov 25, 2009 02:58 PM
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Zapatista originally referred to a member of the revolutionary guerrilla movement founded about 1910 by Zapata.

zhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Revolution

His Liberation Army of the South (Ejército Libertador del Sur) fought during the Mexican Revolution for the redistribution of agricultural land. Zapata and his army and allies, including Pancho Villa, fought for agrarian reform in Mexico. Specifically they wanted to establish communal land rights for Mexico's indigenous population, which had mostly lost its land to the wealthy elite of European descent. The majority of Zapata’s supporters were indigenous peasants from Morelos and surrounding areas. But intellectuals from urban areas also joined the Zapatistas and played a significant part in their movement, specifically the structure and communication of the Zapatista ambitions. Zapata had received only a few years of limited education in Morelos. Educated supporters helped express his political aims. The urban intellectuals were known as "city boys" and were predominantly young males. They joined the Zapatistas for many reasons, including curiosity, sympathy, and ambition. Zapata agreed that intellectuals could work on political strategy, but he had the chief role in proclaiming Zapatista ideology. The city boys also provided medical care, helped promote and instruct supporters in Zapatista ideology, created a plan for agrarian reform, aided in rebuilding villages destroyed by government forces, wrote manifestos, and sent messages from Zapata to other revolutionary leaders. Zapata's compadre Otilio Montaño was one of the most prominent city boys. Before the Revolution, Montaño was a professor. During the Revolution he taught Zapatismo, recruited citizens, and wrote the Plan de Ayala for land reform. Other well-known city boys were Abraham Martínez, Manuel Palafox, Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, Pablo Torres Burgos, Gildardo Magaña, Dolores Jiménez y Muro, Enrique Villa, and Genaro Amezcua.

Understanding Media

by Rita 0106285 — last modified Nov 25, 2009 02:56 PM
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McLuhan's concept of "media"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media:_The_Extensions_of_Man

McLuhan uses interchangeably the words medium, media and technology. For McLuhan a medium is "any extension of ourselves", or more broadly, "any new technology".[2] In addition to forms such as newspapers, television and radio, McLuhan includes the light bulb,[3] cars, speech and language in his definition of "media": all of these, as technologies, mediate our communication; their forms or structures affect how we perceive and understand the world around us. McLuhan says that the conventional pronouncements fail in studying media because they pay attention to and focus on the content, which blinds them to see its actual character, the psychic and social effects. Significantly, the electric light is usually not even regarded as a media because it has no content. Instead, McLuhan observes that any medium "amplifies or accelerates existing processes", introduces a "change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association, affairs, and action", resulting in "psychic, and social consequences";[2][3] this is the real "meaning or message" brought by a medium, a social and psychic message, and it depends solely on the medium itself, regardless of the 'content' emitted by it.[2] This is basically the meaning of "the medium is the message". McLuhan, to show the flaws of the common belief that the message resides or depends on how the medium is used (the "content" output), uses the example of mechanization (machinery to assist the work of human operators), pointing out that regardless of the product (i.e. cornflakes or Cadillacs), the impact on workers and society is the same.[2] In a further exemplification of the common unawareness of the real meaning of media, McLuhan says that people "describe the scratch but not the itch."[4] As an example of so called "media experts" which follows this fundamentally flawed approach, McLuhan quotes a statement from "General" David Sarnoff (head of RCA), calling it the "the voice of the current somnambulism".[5] Each media "adds itself on to what we already are", realizing "amputations and extensions" to our senses and bodies, shaping them in a new technical form. As appealing as this remaking of ourselves may seem, it really puts us in a "narcissistic hypnosis" that prevents us from seeing the real nature of the media.[5] McLuhan also says that a characteristic of every medium is that its content is always another medium.[3] The impact of each medium is somewhat limited to the previous social condition,[citation needed] since it just adds itself to the existing,[5] amplifying existing processes.[6] Therefore different societies may be differently transformed by the same media[citation needed] The only possible way to discern the real "principles and lines of force" of a media (or structure), is to stand aside from it and be detached from it. This is necessary to avoid the powerful ability of any medium to put the unwary into a "subliminal state of Narcissus trance," imposing "its own assumptions, bias, and values" on him. Instead, while in a detached position, one can predict and control the effects of the medium. This is so difficult because "the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody".[7] One historical example of such detachment is Alexis de Tocqueville and the medium of typography. He was in such position because he was highly literate.[7] Instead, an historical example of the embrace of technological assumptions happened with the Western world, which, heavily influenced by literacy, took its principles of "uniform and continuous and sequential" for the actual meaning of "rational."[7] McLuhan argues that media are languages, with their own structures and systems of grammar, and that they can be studied as such. He believed that media have effects in that they continually shape and re-shape the ways in which individuals, societies, and cultures perceive and understand the world. In his view, the purpose of media studies is to make visible what is invisible: the effects of media technologies themselves, rather than simply the messages they convey. Media studies therefore, ideally, seeks to identify patterns within a medium and in its interactions with other media. Based on his studies in New Criticism, McLuhan argued that technologies are to words as the surrounding culture is to a poem: the former derive their meaning from the context formed by the latter. Like Harold Innis, McLuhan looked to the broader culture and society within which a medium conveys its messages to identify patterns of the medium's effects.[8] [edit]"Hot" and "cool" media In the first part of Understanding Media, McLuhan also stated that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, were "hot" - that is, they enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with "cool" TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.[9] "Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue." [10] Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement without considerable stimulus. For example, print occupies visual space, uses visual senses, but can immerse its reader. Hot media favour analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, linear and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason, hot media also include radio, as well as film, the lecture and photography. Cool media, on the other hand, are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, according to McLuhan cool media include television, as well as the seminar and cartoons. McLuhan describes the term "cool media" as emerging from jazz and popular music and, in this context, is used to mean "detached." [11] This concept appears to force media into binary categories. However, McLuhan's hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than as dichotomous terms.

Chalayan

by Rita 0106285 — last modified Nov 25, 2009 02:55 PM
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Hussein Chalayan MBE (given name Hüseyin Çağlayan) (born 1970) is a British/Turkish Cypriot fashion designer who graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1993.

CHALAY

Hussein Chalayan was born in Nicosia (Lefkoşa in Turkish) in 1970 and graduated from the Turkish Maarif College of his hometown. He moved with his family having moved to England in 1978, obtaining British citizenship and proceeded to study design in London. His graduate collection in 1993, titled "The Tangent Flows", contained clothes which he had buried in his back yard and dug up again. An instant sensation, the whole collection was purchased and displayed in luxury designer store Browns in London.

Frankfurter Schule

by Rita 0106285 — last modified Nov 25, 2009 09:42 AM
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Max Horkheimer (vorne links), Theodor Adorno (vorne rechts) und Jürgen Habermas (im Hintergrund rechts) im Jahr 1965 in Heidelberg Als Frankfurter Schule wird die Gruppe neomarxistischer Wissenschaftler bezeichnet, die um das in Frankfurt am Main angesiedelte Institut für Sozialforschung versammelt und Vertreter der dort begründeten Kritischen Theorie sind. Kern der dialektischen Kritischen Theorie der Frankfurter Schule ist die ideologiekritische Auseinandersetzung mit den gesellschaftlichen und historischen Bedingungen der Theoriebildung. Mit der Kritik gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhänge ist hier zugleich der Anspruch verbunden, die Totalität gesellschaftlicher Verhältnisse und die Notwendigkeit ihrer Veränderung begrifflich zu durchdringen. Die Bezeichnung Kritische Theorie geht auf den Titel des programmatischen Aufsatzes Traditionelle und kritische Theorie von Max Horkheimer aus dem Jahre 1937 zurück. Als Hauptwerk der Schule gilt die von Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno 1944 bis 1947 gemeinsam verfasste Essay-Sammlung Dialektik der Aufklärung.

Nov 18, 2009

Pics from the past

by Rita 0106285 — last modified Nov 18, 2009 03:56 PM
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Proteste der 60er

by Rita 0106285 — last modified Nov 18, 2009 03:55 PM
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Schutzwaffen

by Rita 0106285 — last modified Nov 18, 2009 03:30 PM
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Bundesrepublik Deutschland verbietet § 17a Versammlungsgesetz das Mitführen als Schutzwaffe geeigneter Gegenstände zu einer Versammlung unter freiem Himmel (Kundgebung/Demonstration), sofern sie den Umständen nach dazu bestimmt sind, den Träger vor Zugriffen durch die Behörden zu schützen. Ausgenommen sind ausdrücklich Gottesdienste und Brauchtumsveranstaltungen. Der Strafrahmen für Verstöße gegen § 17a Versammlungsgesetze beläuft sich auf Freiheitsstrafe bis zu einem Jahr oder Geldstrafe. Nicht verboten sind passive Waffen also, wenn sie den Umständen nach nicht dazu bestimmt sind, einen Zugriff durch beispielsweise die Polizei zu verhindern. Problematisch stellt sich an der Definition die Auslegung des Tatbestandsmerkmals „als Schutzwaffe geeignet“ dar. Unter anderem könnten zu passiven Waffen gezählt werden: * Lederhose oder jede Art von Kleidung, die Schläge dämpft oder gegen Elektroschockwaffen isoliert * jede Art von Schutzhelm (Motorrad oder Fahrradhelm, Industrieschutzhelm, Bergsteigerhelm, Anstoßkappe usw.) * Schutzbrille oder Gesichtsschutz (Gesichtsschutzschirm) * Atemschutzmaske * Protektoren wie Knieschützer, Ellenbogenschützer, Motorradkombi * Mundschutz für Boxer * Schutzweste

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzwaffe