so since i’m trying to be ‘professional’ now that i’m in grad school, i’ve decided to keep my personal life separate from my art and research and work stuff. hence, i have created an art-oriented-research- work blog:
i’ll still be writing in this one, but just about my travels and random details of my life that shouldn’t be of interest to anyone anyway. if you want to know more about my artmaking process and work, then go to the artblog.
thanks for reading!
after how many years? anyway, it’s not as stripped down as the last one, but pretty clean i think. there are still a couple bugs floating around, bear with me. had a good time making minor edits to the code, found great satisfaction in knowing what the original deutsch link buttons meant when changing them to english.
just added a new sidebar item: shared items on google reader –>
excerpt from AISD Teacher Throws Fit Over Student’s Linux CD:
“…observed one of my students with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a confrence [sic] with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization.
Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.
These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.
This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer, and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all.”
very.
unfortunate.
situation.
i have to say. having used the same old phone for the past six years or so, i am really liking my new SE G900. it’s spiffy, with an interactive touchpad, but still with buttons that i can push and that light up to my delight (i can’t deal with phones that have no buttons and only one big screen - i am mentally incapable of not having buttons to push; besides, they are so counter-intuitive).
one great thing about this phone is that it is so user-friendly; it’s a great blend of touchpad and buttons, all based on human intuition. of course, i was uberexcited when i realised that the camera phone has the same 5.0 megapixel capacity as my canon ixus dcam.
i have finally tried it out. here are the results:
typhooning on our porch
day view from hung hom
night view from hung hom
typhoon no.9 view
i had a great opportunity to test out the yellows and the reds with this bowl of noodles my dad made me
one day i had to catch the first train on the subway to get to work. this was at 6:04am. at any other time of the day, tsim sha tsui station is packed full of people
the view from sassoon rd, pokfulam. this is outside the department of chinese medicine research center in hku
so i am really quite satisfied with my new toy. another thing i really like about it is that it’s black and slick, with a torch! i’ve always wanted a torch for my phone…
there is definitely a certain aesthetic to pictures taken with phone cameras though. perhaps the slightly blurry quality, the slightly drained out colours, or the shallow depth of field. the only way i can think of to describe it is that it has a ‘haruki murakami tendency’.
this article is really rather interesting. Males, using his background in mechanical engineering, created an art piece that quite clearly illustrates the patterns of surveillance by cctv cameras… that they are actually technologically advanced enough to detect the colour of people’s skin. the implications are quite disturbing, as he was able to expose the potentials of these cameras for some extreme ethnic profiling. but how do you interpret something like 90.3% black?
The eye of tech-artist Benjamin Males’ custom-made surveillance camera is engineered for a black and white world.
Black and white people, that is.
Males, 25, a mechanical engineer who recently graduated with a master’s degree from London’s Royal College of Art, wrote the software for a camera that determines a person’s race.
The RTS-2 (Racial Targeting System) is essentially an automated racial-profiling tool, one that governments and police have not dared touch due to privacy and human-rights concerns, even though the technical capabilities already exist.
However, Males built the camera in an attempt to raise awareness of such issues among the public, which often appears oblivious to how frequently it is surveyed by CCTV (closed-circuit television) due to the prevalence of the cameras, especially in the U.K.
Surveillance cameras “have a significant effect on our lives and civil liberties,” Males said. “We, as the public, aren’t really in a position to discuss them or critique them because they are developed behind closed doors.”
Males bought the CCTV camera on eBay’s auction site. He wrote the software for the program in C++, in part using the Open Source Computer Vision Library from Intel, a library of programming functions that can be used in applications where computers use vision.
Males built a motor for the camera, so when it detects a face, it moves as the person does. Males intended that people who are targeted by the camera have some indication they’re being monitored.
The camera supplies an image of a person’s face via a USB (Universal Serial Bus) cable to a laptop. The software then takes a color sample of a person’s nose and cheeks, and the pixel values are averaged to come up with an approximate determination of the person’s race, Males said. The output is shown as a percentage, such as 90.3 percent white, 9.7 percent black. Those percentages are a mathematical representation of the way a person’s skin has been sampled and classified by the computer.
All of the RTS-2’s components run on batteries, and the setup is portable. Males has taken it to places such as Covent Garden and Kensington High Street in London, both areas busy with tourists and shoppers. Nearly every one who passed by either didn’t notice the camera or barely paid attention, a finding that shows how people are quite used to being monitored, Males said.
Males later mashed the color samples from people’s faces together into one big color swatch, creating a collage of the skin tones seen in a neighborhood. The London neighborhood of Brixton - the scene of violent race riots in 1981 - was “very brown and quite white.” The collage for Kensington High Street, an affluent area in the West End, showed “rich oranges and terracotta,” Males said.
Males has also displayed the RTS-2 in Japan and at London’s Royal College of Art as an art installation called “The Target Project.”
When the device is displayed in a more controlled environment, people are more curious. Males said he was asked why he would create a racial classification device and what he would do if a government asked him to develop the system further.
The second question is irrelevant: The technology already exists, and it’s much more refined, Males said.
“The device isn’t that sophisticated,” Males said. “This software exists at a much more sophisticated and dangerous level in the commercial world. You can buy facial-recognition technology that looks at features and tries to match people.”
But using automated tools such as CCTV to target people by race raises questions about ethnic profiling, which some experts argue puts a person’s race as a forefront consideration in wrongdoing, even before suspicious actions have been observed.
After the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London, many Asians complained of increased police scrutiny and aggression in their communities, merely since some attackers were Asian. The issue caused heightened tensions between Asians and police, which could have potentially hurt the police’s chance to collect valuable intelligence from sources within those communities.
“Personally, I think there’s a place for these kinds of technologies,” Males said. “Technology has a role to play in our security and safety, but there needs to be proper discussion. There needs to be a bit more openness.”
i got my categories back, after much twiddling with wordpress php. i am not a coder, but thank goodness for internet forums, i am starting to get the hang of it. this is precisely how i picked up html a few years ago.
anyways. not everything goes well though, when it comes to trial and error. i have thus lost all my blogroll links. i guess that’s not a big deal though, i can add those back easily (or so i hope).
typhoon 8 officially over, back to work tomorrow…
typhoon 8, meaning that i don’t have to go to work, but that i still have to get stuff done at home. boo.
but, firstly, i finally deleted ALL the spam i had been accumulating in my blog for the past few months. the total number was 25 783. i obviously couldn’t load that amount on my browser in anything less than a decade’s time, so i went into phpmyadmin and put in a few prompts.
thank goodness that worked.
next, i decided to upgrade my spam filter because it is obviously no longer doing a its job. that required me to upgrade wordpress, too. i didn’t realise this, but after having used the same version for the past four years, i was very, very outdated.
being someone with no patience for upgrades at all, i decided to do the lazy thing, which was to jump directly from a 1.2.X version to the current 2.6 one, instead of first upgrading slowly and subsequently.
the result? i have lost my categories. they’re still there, floating around, but blank. can’t see them. i have noticed on the forums that other people have experienced this too, so when i feel up to it again (probably in another few years’ time), i will try to recover my categories.
for the meantime, i think i’ll just leave it the way it is. at least now i have a proper spam filter.
