Tracking cellphone users' locations

Data Protection: Betrayed by our own data | Digital | ZEIT ONLINE

In a report prepared for Germany’s Constitutional Court in July 2009, the hacker group described what kind of information could in theory be collected according to the country’s data retention (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) rules and what could be gleaned from it. The court later stopped data retention as it was practiced at the time, but law enforcement officials and the government have by no means abandoned the concept. The possibilities offered by such seemingly harmless data are just too seductive. In the next few weeks, the German government is set to decide on new data retention rules.

Remembering Norman Horrocks

I had the good fortune to know Norman for a few years. In life, the dispensation by which we meet and know any other human being is mysterious. Fortune, good or bad, can lead us in unpredictable directions.

I reflect thus, because, knowing Norman was from Manchester, I once asked him about Thomas De Quincey. Thomas De Quincey was also born in Manchester, and he famously ran away from the Manchester Grammar School to begin the adventures which he describes with such poignancy in Confessions of an English Opium Eater. I asked Norman whether he too had gone to the Manchester Grammar School.

Well, Norman said, I was set to write the entrance exam, but … Manchester United was playing that day, so I went to the football game and didn't write the exam.

He mentioned his father's disgust and displeasure with his action. But Norman, looking back on his younger self, gave the impression of having no regrets. Norman enjoyed telling stories, and he enjoyed telling me this one. Others have lived in regret of such thoughtless youthful actions, imagining other paths that lost opportunities might have opened up. And, those of us fortunate enought to know Norman, can only be thankful that his choices allowed our paths to cross.

--
I have spent some hours today working on an html version of a page of recollections of Norman written by friends and colleagues. So, I decided I should add my own recollection of this remarkable person.

collecting

Watching the collectors | things magazine

Only Collect: ‘Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting” may explain the architect’s obsessions with books, but in the post-print era, what do we hoard?’. Mimi Zeiger in Domus on the state of the contemporary collector and the outlet for their obsession. Collecting has evolved: ‘But given the spate of books, exhibitions, Tumblrs, and websites that document and compile material appearing within the discipline and beyond, I suggest that the archive itself has become not a mode of collection, but the thing in itself to be collected.’

personal digital libraries

Ask Slashdot: Huge Digital Media Libraries - Slashdot

"Like many slashdotters, I have several TB of digital media: music, books, movies, tv shows, games, comics, you name it. I've put it all in a few HDs, but handling it all has proven to be less than optimal. I'm covered when it comes to music, since [pretty much any music player/library manager] allows me to quickly find songs by interpreter, album, genre... For everything else, all I have is a series of hierarchical folder structures, but hierarchies have limitations.

Gamification

SXSW 2011: The internet is over | Technology | The Guardian

Depending on your degree of immersion in the digital world, it's possible that you've never heard the term "gamification" or that you're already profoundly sick of it. From a linguistic point of view, the word should probably be outlawed – perhaps we could ban "webinar" at the same time? – but as a concept it was everywhere in Austin. Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world's leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft. So why not apply that expertise to all those areas of life where we could use more engagement, commitment and fun: in education, say, or in civic life, or in hospitals? Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn't some of that energy be productively harnessed?

Seth Priebatsch has more ideas for gamification:
His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly
designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation
when they fail. A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like
you've failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad
students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them
strive for the high score? This kind of insight isn't unique to the
world of videogames: these are basic insights into human psychology and the role of incentives, recently repopularised in books such as Freakonomics and Nudge.

stresses on journalism

SXSW 2011: Jay Rosen on bloggers v journalists | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Mainstream journalists' antagonism towards bloggers, he suggested, was sustained by the huge stress they find themselves under, which stems from five developments:

1. The collapsing economic model of newspapers.

2. Journalists having to face new kinds of competition.

3. A shift in power to the audience.

4. New patterns of information flow in which information moves horizontally from citizen to citizen as efficiently as vertically.

5. Erosion of trust and related loss of authority.

Sneering at bloggers was a way journalists avoided confronting these developments. In short "this is fucking neurotic."

Computers doing your work: reading

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software - NYTimes.com

The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents. More advanced programs filter documents through a large web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”

The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.