Photosynth: Visually Tagging The World

Amazing Demonstration of Photosynth by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.



Photosynth Website.

The Alphabet Of Horror

Alphabet of horror by Jared von Hindman

For more cute and scary stuff visit who killed bambi?

For just merely cute, and a kick up the backside of website designers all over the world, look at this.

The Intricate Makeshift Signs of Mr. Sato

"If, over the past several years, you have had the privilege of joining the 3.3 million people that pass through Tokyo's Shinjuku station each day, you may have observed the work of Mr. Sato. A construction worker by trade, Sato uses strips of adhesive tape to create elaborate makeshift signs that help people navigate the temporary chaos of ongoing renovation work at Shinjuku station. Sato's signs, which feature a peculiarly attractive gothic font, are the focus of a 15-minute documentary video put together by TrioFour, a small group of independent filmmakers. The video, which can be seen in two parts here (part 1, part 2), consists mainly of a long interview with Sato, entirely in Japanese (no subtitles), but it also shows lots of photos of his work from 2004."

Via pink tentacle, with more at the link.

Dog Tail-Wagging: Left Is Bad, Right Is Good, Say Researchers

This is truly fascinating: Researchers from the University of Trieste in Italy have determined that dogs, which wag their tails to express both happiness and displeasure, wag their tails asymmetrically in a consistent manner to demonstrate whether their feelings are positive or negative. The New York Times reports:

When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left. ...

Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.

At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system. ...

When the dogs saw their owners, their tails all wagged vigorously with a bias to the right side of their bodies, Dr. Vallortigara said. Their tails wagged moderately, again more to the right, when faced with an unfamiliar human. Looking at the cat, a four-year-old male whose owners volunteered him for the experiment, the dogs’ tails again wagged more to the right but in a lower amplitude.

When the dogs looked at an aggressive, unfamiliar dog — a large Belgian shepherd Malinois — their tails all wagged with a bias to the left side of their bodies.

[Link]

Five Questions TV Turnoff Week Does Not Answer

Today marks the start of the official week dedicated to celebrating our national pastime by exhorting each other to abstain from one of life's great joys. Yes, it's TV Turnoff Week. Eat your heart out, Marshall McLuhan.

I love the original and modest goal of TV Turnoff Week: Be aware of how much TV children are watching, and limit it. Whatever else TV may or may not do to developing brains, social skills, or worldviews, watching seven hours of TV a day is guaranteed to make a child as fat and gullible as a Christmas hen.

But TV Turnoff Week is undergoing an identity crisis.

First, there was the change in the organization's mission to address all issues of "screen time," encompassing video games and all time spent online while acting as though this introduced no new issues, no alternative set of pros and cons. Then activists adopted TV Turnoff Week as a rallying cry against corporate culture and state-licensed brainwashing.

The end results have been damaging to both parties.

TV Turnoff Week, as mundane and invaluable a call to sensible parenting as the food pyramid or early dental checkups, was radicalized against its will, losing precious ground in a battle that never needed to be turned into a class war.

Meanwhile, the anti-corporate message that animates much of the cultural far left gets a yearly drubbing while attempting to bully the general public into making a pointless and symbolic gesture that does not reflect most TV-watchers' beliefs about the world. The general public is quick to appreciate the fact that anyone preaching to them about the benefits of living TV-free were asking them to do something they themselves could not relate to: giving up something they value and then getting it back, fully intact, a week later. It's nonsense, and what is true about the message - that TV will turn you into a consumer zombie if you don't manage it wisely - which is true! - is completely missed.

I'm tired of the passion play. TV is here to stay, and it ain't all bad. Here are five ways that the ethos of TV Turnoff Week does not reflect the complex relationships we have with our "screen time."

1. John, a young parent, meets several fellow toddler dads at a bar. They all watched the season finale of their favorite reality television show the night before, which they enjoy mocking but simply couldn't stop watching. Most of them got interested in the show because one of the contestants was a friend of a friend who has been blogging about the show since she got kicked off early on. In addition to swapping a few recent parenting stories, John and his friends discuss the ramifications of the show's final challenge, how the contestants responded to the pressure, and what the blogger thought about it. Can television inform, harness, or even boost social engagement, or only diminish and impoverish it?
2. College freshman Sam begins attending a friend's "Lost" viewing parties midway through the season, and started reading a lot of online commentary to help catch up with all of the plot strands. His girlfriend, who has a night job and doesn't watch much TV, mentions that she always thought that show looked interesting, and Sam ends up renting the first season on DVD and watching the entire thing with her in a marathon weekend. The next week, Sam has plenty of theories of his own to share with others at the party. No one wants to hear them, so he decides to start his own blog about open-ended mysteries, starts pirating "Twin Peaks" episodes from a bittorrent client, and shells out cold, hard cash for Umberto Eco's "The Open Work," which he loans to three people in six months. Can television engage and stimulate our intelligence, or only deaden or distract it?
3. Sixteen-year-old Vivian gets a digital video camera for Christmas and starts creating short video sketches with her friends and posting them on YouTube. Other kids at her high school see them and think they're pretty funny, and they end up getting written about in the school paper. Before long, other kids at school are making their own response videos. A group of black students publishes a video that highlights what they see as their ostracization from school life, which surprises Vivian, who thought that the black kids at her school didn't want to have anything to do with the white majority. Other students follow up with videos that are deliberately offensive and intend only to heighten conflict, and the principal decides to ban YouTube access from school computers. A programmer at the local cable access channel hears about the situation and invites students to organize a variety show, which could draw from the already-produced videos and be only lightly censored for television. "Why?" Vivian asks. "People can just watch them online." Who here needs to brush up on their media literacy? Who speaks the language of television - and how did they learn it?
4. Eight-year-old Anna doesn't have much time for TV - she's too busy playing video games. Sometimes kids from her neighborhood come over to play on her Wii, which a lot of other neighborhood parents can't afford. Other times she plays live multiplayer games on her computer, working to slay virtual dragons, solve mental puzzles, and share information with other players to develop the talents of her virtual persona. She did start watching one show last year because her friends started talking about how there were parts of the show you could only learn about online, but she found the format too restrictive and quickly abandoned the PR vehicle for more open-ended games. Is "screen-time" really equivalent to TV-watching time, as TV Turnoff Week's campaigns in recent years have suggested, or is there something fundamental that is changing about the way visual media impacts children?
5. Seventy-four-year-old embittered former faith healer Frank used to sit and feed pigeons all day in the courtyard of his nursing home. Once a passionate birdwatcher, he spent years in his retirement community with his hobby sustained only by the the incessantly-chirping finches his son misguidedly gave him for his birthday, which Frank has devotedly worked to slowly poison with negative mental effluence and cold, hard stares. But a few weeks ago his son brought over a computer, and Frank discovered an interactive and competitive birdwatching site which invites viewers to help identify birds in San Francisco's Sutro Forest. Frank is rapidly climbing through the ranks and fantasizes about the day he will surpass the point total of Morgan, the site's top contributor, at which point Morgan will collapse and die of shame. How do personal values impact the relative importance and resonance of TV for individuals?
   

I'm currently finishing this post while watching the new episode of "The Riches," one of the best dramas I have yet seen on cable television. Eddie Izzard's confident slur is a small revelation. Half an hour ago I was debating with my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter about whether we should listen to a CD storyteller recount the story of the "Three Little Pigs" or read a fairy tale from the copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales I just dug out of a box of books we've been saving. On nights when we read stories involving complex machines or unusual animals, we might take a quick break to look up images on Google to see what something looks like, or search for a video on YouTube to show her how something works. In a world where Americans struggle to silence their TVs for a week to justify their year's worth of regular TV-viewing habits, there may seem to be a disconnect here. But not in mine.

Tomorrow, the TV you should be turning off. Plus a first - a Think In Pictures product giveaway. Stay tuned!

A Brief History of the Emoticon

CNet delves into the history of the emoticon. From the article:

The origin of the ASCII smiley face is typically traced to September 1982, when Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science, suggested that the :-) symbol be used in the subject line of an online bulletin board post to denote a humorous or non-serious topic.

"Nobody ever guessed that this would catch on. I certainly didn't," said Fahlman, who is still on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon. But as he recounted, the trend spread, initially to other Internet-pioneering universities like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then beyond.

"As the Internet grew, it escaped this little closed community of computer scientists and made it into first other universities, a much larger group, and then out into the general public," Fahlman said. "It's been interesting to see (smiley faces) trickle from place to place, and now it's showing up in postings from Russia and China and all over the world. It's been fun to watch that."

More at the link.