Posted February 21, 2007 by John Menick
As a commenter on the Gothamist points out: “Imagine what would happen if this space-age surveillance and hardline police resources were put to use against actual terrorists, rather than bike-riding college kids.”
Posted February 21, 2007 by John Menick
I’ve rarely blogged about code-related technology here, but in an effort to break with my own insignificant tradition, I want to add to the chorus of voices decrying the discontinuation of the Google SOAP search API. Not only is the SOAP API going bye-bye, but it’s AJAX replacement is abysmal. Please, Google, bring it back. I’ve installed the SOAP API on every Web site I’ve worked on since Google released it, and now, when I was about to do so again, you’ve gone and discontinued it.
Why is the new code inadequate? Oh, let me count the ways:
1) I love the ads. Cute. My non-profit clients will love them too. How can we turn them off without a clumsy CSS solution? Can someone get back to this guy? He asked his question in October of last year.
2) Formatting? Anyone? Is anyone there? Can someone please update that “Coming soon” in the developer’s guide.
3) Most clients want text (i.e. web) searches of their sites. They couldn’t care less about video or news. Why does it seem like all the developer documents foreground everything except web search.
4) And, oh yeah: Why AJAX? AJAX is wonderful, if you surf the Web with javascript enabled, and if you can install any browser you want on your machine… but these two things aren’t always possible, hence, a broken search page. Why is this thing only in AJAX?
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to spend some time fooling around with an AJAX-based API for search. I would even spend some time messing with one in alpha let alone beta version, but please, Google, if you are going to replace a great product, replace it with one that at least has a complete instruction manual. Otherwise, Yahoo beckons…
Posted February 21, 2007 by John Menick
Got to love the little greenscreen demo in the article’s photo. I guess those two lamps behind the talking head help matte in the background. It also looks as if here background is not a physical place at all, but an info-graphic.
One of the things that is interesting about the article, at least from a US perspective, is that most of the cameras-in-the-courtroom anxieties rehash what was debated about Court TV years ago. For example: ” And in California, a judge said on Friday that he would allow full television coverage of the rock producer Phil Spector’s murder trial, declaring that it was time to discard ‘fear of cameras in the courtroom.’”
Unconsciously mimicking Court TV Primetime’s “Seriously Entertaining” tagline a representative from Datadiar, the tech company hosting the video, claims: “It may be difficult to understand why we do this for free,” she said. “We are objective. We are in the middle. We are only lawyers and professionals, and offering information. It’s not like television.”
Granted, Datadiar is online, and may be able to claim it is literally not television. (Even though the rep is making a qualitative claim as well.) But can this coverage ever be objective? Will it devolve into entertainment? Sure, it may not literally be TV, but is it worse, i.e. … YouTube?
Posted February 15, 2007 by John Menick
From the BBC:
Japanese firm Fujitsu is pushing a technology that can encode data into a picture that is invisible to the human eye but can be decoded by a mobile phone with a camera….The technique stems from a 2,500-year-old practice called steganography, which saw the Greeks sending warnings of attacks on wooden tablets and then covering them in wax and tattooing messages on shaved heads that were then covered by the regrowth of hair.
Posted January 17, 2007 by John Menick
From a description of “New Athens,” a future artists’ utopia in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End
The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest — and the greatest alarm. This was the team working on “total identification.” The history of cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old “moving pictures” more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become — for a while at least — any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. He could even be a plant or an animal, if it proved possible to capture and record the sense impressions of other living creatures. And when the “program” was over he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life — indeed, indistinguishable from life itself.
John Menick is an artist and writer living in Mexico City.
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