Society / community

• Thursday, 19 June 2008

  • Music recommendations and information retrieval

    At the weekend, a friend gave me a list of musicians I might like, scribbled on a bus timetable. I was surprised to find I already had samples of most of them on hand -- no doubt picked up on sites like last.fm or Stereogum.

    As information becomes separated from physical atoms, we are shifting from the economics of famine to glut. Today, the problem isn't so much getting music as it is finding the good music.

    I was surprised though to discover I needed help finding the good music that was already on my computer's hard drive. The scrap of paper was like a path cut into a dark forest.

    Information retrieval has shifted markedly in the past 10 years from a categorisation model (Library of Congress) to tags, keywords, folksonomies, collaborative filtering, and personal recommendations (the mavens Gladwell talked about in the Tipping Point). This is a good thing as anything of interest transcends its boundaries.

    There have been two exceptional changes over the past ten years. The first is obvious: the democratisation of publishing and the resultant community of voices. This shift in the way we store and search knowledge is the second, and it is equally important.

    Posted by Matthew at 1:37:22 AM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | Email Matthew | Internet / Computers | Society / community | Back to top

• Saturday, 9 February 2008

  • Tired 2am tirades

    Turns out it's not the environment, peak oil, phony wars, religious zealotry, or stolen elections that are the problems of the world today. It's psychiatry.

    Wow, Scientology conventions seem like really, really bad SF movies. I am interested to see that the audience totally digs what is a fundamentally dreary speech. The speaker (David Miscavige) sounds like he is reading my 1990 VCR manual plus George W Bush's interpretation of what's going on in Iraq combined with the local weather.

    I am fascinated by the way people can know for certain they have attained deep insight and yet be so ludicrously misguided. It's a reminder to us all. There seems to be something within that is attracted to conviction and certainty.

    Unfortunately today, people all too often lack rational scepticism. The obscene popularity of The Secret is evidence of this: what you want will come to you if you just want it enough. Well, that's easy to say when you live a thoroughly comfortable middle-class life in the West. This is just another way of blaming people for their misfortunes. Ask, believe, receive.

    Finally, some nonsense from David:

    To quickly recap, those campaigns were specifically engineered to halt the dwindling spiral. Or more technically, to literally audit the planet from three feet behind society's head and thereby remove the surface charge before it builds up and blows the whole works.

    Nice explanation, although since society doesn't technically have a head, I think the literal description is more — um — not literal.

    By way of a recap, that campaign was expressly — maybe even diabolically — engineered to ignite both government action and media blizzard. It's also got an internal kicker: our Mental Health Budget Adjustment Kit, which essentially works like a 'smart bomb' in that it 'sniffs' out psych fuel lines and blows the funding mechanism. And in that way, to put it bluntly, we booby-trap the whole psychiatric eco-system. So, while only nine weeks have passed since global activation, here's the preliminary action report. CCHR Central has a tracking board designed to measure 'collateral damage' from our campaign roll-out.

    Leaving aside my confusion about how a smart bomb could also be a booby trap, let's talk collateral damage: the fashionable way of denoting the unintended deaths of civilians while pursuing another target. So...did the leader of Scientology just admit to a few accidental killings? I think there's a lesson for David there (and any other cult leaders for that matter) about reining in the jargon horses.

    Posted by Matthew at 2:22:27 AM | Permanent link | Comments (3) | Email Matthew | Politics / Media | Society / community | Back to top

• Tuesday, 15 May 2007

  • Post-feminist french fries

    There has been a wave of advertising in New Zealand that takes objectification of women's bodies to a new level. Ah but it's OK this time as it's ironic, and irony means that everything is the opposite of what you think it is, right? The Tui ads feature "hot" bikini-clad women working in a brewery. Burger King ads feature gratuitous shots of women riding horses on bikinis, a billboard near my work featured a taggline stating (yes, stating, not implying) that if you drive a certain type of car, you will be able to have sexual relations with hot hitchhikers. And the then there's that other ad for whatever it is with bikini-clad women bouncing around a warehouse on those inflatable bouncy toy things.

    Of course, all of these ads are intentionally gratuitous. That's the point. That's the hilarious joke. It's ironic. So it's OK. But is ironic sexism really OK? Isn't it still sexism? And if ironic sexism becomes the norm, is it really even ironic? 

    Don't get me wrong. I have no problem with girls wearing bikinis. You could also argue there is nothing wrong with girls wearing bikinis and being used to sell French fries -- it's just pathetic (deep fried potatoes = unsexy food) but then pretty much all advertising is lame. So there is an implied male gaze in these ads. That's not necessarily bad. Men are the primary consumers of beer. Nothing new there. I would be surprised if women don't also consume lots of disgusting junk food. They don't seem to be immune from the (very sexy?) obesity epidemic. But I could be wrong.

    The problem I have is that it appears to be only the male gaze that is exposed to "ironic" images of scantily clad members of the opposite sex. The implication is that women are just too dumb to "get" the irony of pictures of scantily clad men riding on horses. Or perhaps the implication is that they're too sophisticated for it. Either way though it's sexist. Come on. Lets see more bikini boys.

    Posted by Matthew at 7:53:51 AM | Permanent link | Comments (17) | Email Matthew | Society / community | Back to top

• Wednesday, 14 February 2007

  • Who's Tom?

    Interesting anthropological experiment:

    1. Walk around Christchurch wearing a tee shirt saying, "Tom is NOT my friend." Result? Nothing.
    2. Walk around Westport wearing a tee shirt saying, "Tom is NOT my friend." Result? Everybody wants to know who Tom is. Gas station attendants, people sitting on the grass, people everywhere. I was sure to give each person who asked a different answer, since the actual answer is not very interesting.

    I sure will be sticking with the straightforward tee shirts when visiting small towns in future. For example: "Hi, my name is Matthew" or "May I pat your dog?"

    Posted by Matthew at 6:14:31 PM | Permanent link | Comments (1) | Email Matthew | Society / community | Back to top

• Tuesday, 30 January 2007

  • Comet spotting

    Dreary evenings of cloudy sky like pulled-down shutters on inner city shops meant the comet spotters were restless. A magnificent sunset on Sunday promised at least patches of clear sky between the cloud banks. Anonymously together, we migrated from the city plain to the hills by the harbour, arriving at a few distinct car parks and road ends as if returning to ancestral spawning grounds.

    I stopped at the road end above Worsley's Track. Somebody lined up a camera and tripod. Some girls took photos of each other. A man asked me where the comet was. Nobody seemed to know. I didn't know either. With the long run of uncooperative sky, I'd stopped checking.

    Eventually I left. But the night was too pleasant with the city laid out below like a glowing swamp so I wound along the hilltop, spotting comet spotters at every park or roadside space along the way. Notable clusters had formed next to Castle Rock and again by Broadleaf Lane beneath Mount Pleasant.

    Posted by Matthew at 7:59:21 AM | Permanent link | Comments (1) | Email Matthew | Nature | Society / community | Back to top

• Thursday, 11 January 2007

  • 女书

    Nü Shu is a syllabic writing system for Chinese that was invented in secret by women in the Hunan Province and kept secret from men for a thousand years.

    Nü Shu was discovered during the Cultural Revolution and suppressed. The women who practiced this writing were punished in public and their writings were burned. The scholars who decoded these secret texts were sent to rural labour camps where they remained until the 1980s.

    More about Nü Shu as well as an horrific description of foot binding as audio and transcript at the link above.

    Posted by Matthew at 12:00:52 AM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | Email Matthew | Society / community | Back to top

• Wednesday, 3 January 2007

  • This Film Is Not Yet Rated

    [W]e leverage protectionist rhetoric and "child safety" to uphold hegemonic moral values that will aid industry. This isn't actually about the children; it's about maintenance of power. One of the sections that really highlights this is a discussion on how the MPAA handles violence. Glorified violence (a.k.a. no blood) is PG-13 while imagery that shows the consequences of violence (a.k.a. blood) is R. In a country that is at war and with a generation of soldiers who think that war is like a video game, this bugs the shit out of me. God do i worry about those kids coming back - they're not doing so well. — danah boyd

    Posted by Matthew at 8:03:41 AM | Permanent link | Comments (2) | Email Matthew | Movies | Society / community | Back to top

• Wednesday, 29 November 2006

  • The lack of faith community

    A survey by the British Humanist Association discovers that most British are actually humanists.

    It makes the point that simply surveying people and asking what religion they are is not a good way of discovering what percentage of the population are religious. I know a number of people who would respond to that question with a religion who (in my view) are not actually religious in any meaningful sense. I think to many people it is much like asking what country you are from — it's a fact of history rather than a choice.

    So why don't we hear more of them? Because humanists don't join "communities" with other humanists. They just get on with their lives, try to behave morally as best they can, and pay attention as science makes new discoveries.

    Posted by Matthew at 11:17:55 PM | Permanent link | Comments (4) | Email Matthew | Society / community | Back to top

• Monday, 18 September 2006

  • Tagging

    So I've been feeding my pet, my community framework, the thing-that-is-currently-used-on-only-one-site-but-just-you-wait-buddy, my social networking application. I've been stripping out a rather complicated keywording system wherte there were both free text and predefined heirarchical keywords, and I've been replacing all that with "tags." I've also been stripping out what was becoming a rather ccomplicated system of bookmark folders, which I'll replace with . . . yes, tags. And that's why I know I'm doing the right thing. When you take two complicated things out and replace them with one simple thing, then you know you're on the right track. I thrive on simplicity. 

    OK so tags are just keywords or categories with a different, edgier name — nice rebranding job. But there are some key ideas to tagging.

    • One is that it's a non-prescriptive taxonomy, or "folksonomy."
    • Another is that the tags themselves have a presence — you can see the most popular tags (these are "tag clouds"), share tags and surf tags. You could do all this with keywords only nobody thought of it.
    • Tags, being non-prescriptive, open themselves up to emergent behaviours, that is: people will use systems in ways you didn't specifically design for.
    • Users apply their own tags rather than being ruled by one definitive set. In this way, objects are more comprehensively indexed, given that different users are likely to select different tags when both assigning and searching.
    • Users' tags become an organisational tool. The tags are not just "for" the object but are also for the tagger. they become a form of bookmark.
    • Finally, a user's tags with a system become a form of self-expression. Other users can explore the objects you have tagged and the tags you have used.

    There is a fascinating article linked above which described different tagging systems in place today and the resulting effects on the quality and nature of tags. This is great stuff — it's practically a handbook for me.

    Tagging rights is an interesting question — who gets to tag what? My plan is that content creators or content enditors can assign tags, but that site members may also apply their own tags (and in this way create effective bookmarks of items that interest them).

    Posted by Matthew at 9:07:24 PM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | Email Matthew | Internet / Computers | Society / community | Back to top

• Thursday, 10 August 2006

  • Changing the world

    In the past two days I have seen both An Inconvenient Truth and Black Gold. 

    The first is Al Gore's global warming story — the slideshow he has been taking around the world for the past few years. And you can tell — it's very polished, very clear, very thought-provoking. He makes the point that scientific opinion is not divided on global warming — only public opinion is. Global warming has been rebranded like evolution as a theory by parties interested in carrying on their pollutin' ways.

    He presents a funny slide from the opposing lobby, explaining the need for balance rather than "environmental extremism." On a pair of scales sits a stack of gold bars balancing a globe. Yes that's right — the anti-environmentalists want to sacrifice the world for some shiny yellow metal. So ironic. 

    The second is about coffee and the Fair Trade movement in Ethiopia, the home of coffee. Farmers there struggle to earn a living due to a recent slump in coffee prices and are ripping up their fields to plant chat, a narcotic which earns them more money. Fair Trade attempts to remove the many intermediaries between the coffee farmers and the roasters around the world by dealing directly with farmers' cooperatives.

    Posted by Matthew at 9:57:35 PM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | Email Matthew | Politics / Media | Society / community | Back to top

  • Cheap airport novels -- tools of terror?

    With immediate effect, the following arrangements apply to all passengers starting their journey at a UK airport and to those transferring between flights at a UK airport.

    Passengers may take through the airport security search point, in a single (ideally transparent) plastic carrier bag, only the following items. Nothing may be carried in pockets:

    • pocket size wallets and pocket size purses plus contents (for example money, credit cards, identity cards etc (not handbags));
    • travel documents essential for the journey (for example passports and travel tickets);
    • prescription medicines and medical items sufficient and essential for the flight (eg diabetic kit), except in liquid form unless verified as authentic.
    • spectacles and sunglasses, without cases.
    • contact lens holders, without bottles of solution.
    • for those travelling with an infant: baby food, milk (the contents of each bottle must be tasted by the accompanying passenger) and sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight (nappies, wipes, creams and nappy disposal bags).
    • female sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight, if unboxed (eg tampons, pads, towels and wipes).
    • tissues (unboxed) and/or handkerchiefs
    • keys (but no electrical key fobs)

    Posted by Matthew at 9:11:09 PM | Permanent link | Comments (0) | Email Matthew | Politics / Media | Society / community | Back to top