Ma’ariv, one of Israel’s most popular newspapers (both print + web), has gone through a comprehensive site re-design. Its about time they changed their horrid color palette (reds and yellows), to a much cleaner set (grays) with a well structured UI, which actually feels somewhat like nytimes.com.
I saw this video by charitywater curing one of the Pangea day commercial breaks today and simply could not get it out of my head. After checking out their site and some of the amazing work they do around the world, I was sold on donating $20 for one of their projects. Clip and info below:
Most of us have never really been thirsty. We’ve never had to leave our houses and walk 5 miles to fetch water. We simply turn on the tap, and water comes out. Clean. Yet more than 1.1 billion people on the planet don’t have clean water.
It’s hard to imagine what a billion people looks like really, but one in six might be easier. One in six people in our world don’t have access to the most basic of human needs. Something we can’t imagine going 12 hours without.
Here, we’d like to introduce you to a few of those billion people. They are very real, and they need our help. They didn’t choose to be born into a village where the only source of water is a polluted swamp. And I didn’t choose to be born in a country where even the homeless have access to clean water and a toilet.
I invite you to put yourself in their shoes. Follow them on their daily journey. Carry 80 pounds of water in yellow fuel cans. Dig with their children in sand for water. Line up at a well and wait 8 hours for a turn.
Now, make a decision to help. We’re not offering grand solutions and billion dollar schemes, but instead, simple things that work. Things like freshwater wells, rainwater catchments and sand filters. For about $20 a person, we know how to help millions of people.Start by helping one.
Technorati Tags: charitywater, pangea day, donation, development, water
Carmel vaisman’s research is utterly fascinating. She is a phd student in Israel, writing a dissertation on the Israeli blogosphere, specifically the Isra-blog platform. Israel is considered a technology leader, quickly adopting widespread use of new applications and online norms. Blogs took off in Israel only in 2001, with the creation of Isra-blog, the largest of the existing Israeli blogging sites.
Israeli blogs are technologically different from their counterparts in the US, with two distinctions: comment spaces in US blogs are linear while in Israel they have a tree structure (similar to that of web forums). This format enables more constructive commenting since it supports numerous simultaneous threads. Secondly, Carmel claims that in the US the importance in a blog’s format is its text and links, while in Israel there is an emphasis on diversity and giving a user control over design features, while some of the options are given at a cost. She mentions that the Israeli media rarely covers the Israeli blogosphere, unlike the US. Those who DO mention Hebrew blogs are the tech writers and journalists.
Below is a video of her talk, focused on the rise of major Israeli political blogs and their effect on policy. She opens with a question - Why Israeli-political blogs are not as influential as their counterparts in the States? She claims that the Israeli model for influence and effect is culturally different than that of the US, and that the Israeli blogosphere might possibly be more influential than we think. She backs her hypothesis with some good examples (in Hebrew):
Passover is probably the only holiday that I get truly excited about celebrating. Not only because its great food, but for its many little customs. The Seder takes place on the first night of Passover. A time to get together with friends and family, eat well, drink lots of wine, sing and tell the story of the Haggadah — basically a great opportunity to get together!
The ‘Haggadah’, a text read in celebrating households, was written around the 2nd century and deals with some of the basic notions of freedom. Those which we easily take for granted. Seriously, had the Hebrews not been freed from slavery we would be living in a dark, dark world -
no New York Bagels, no Goonies, Seinfeld and… well… leaving politics out of this one.
The Haggadah has been “open source” for centuries, as families and communities created their own versions and additions to the story - contextualized it, and made it relevant to their social circles. However, many were kept within closed doors, usually purely for geographic reasons. With the ease of online communication, it is amazing how many people have been sharing their Haggadah versions. Over the past week, I’ve heard personal stories about people who were asked by friends to e-mail out their version of the Haggadah (complete with subtext, images and pop-songs). We are getting so used to the notion of personalizing every thing around us. So why not read a more relevant version of this story? The idea driving this Passover custom is to be thankful for our freedom, and “never forget” that our ancestors were enslaved in Egypt.
Douglas Rushkoff began a web-based project called open source haggadah that lets you pick and choose which parts of the long text you’d like to read (actually, I have never managed to get to the end of the text… definitely not after wine+food). There is a standard Hebrew format, but many radically different translations and adaptations are used (best-of-the-bunch is the hardcore feminist Haggadah, with no masculine reference to g-d. With all the sizzling hot trends supporting open source-ness, this was a perfect chance to get a bunch of friends together over a .
(note to self: read through all of the Haggadah text before the Seder)…
Although it DID make out for a very entertaining evening… Especially after the wine started kicking in. Here’s one result - Souris managed to sign up for L_RD on twitter, and already has 22 followers - much easier being a twitter god than helping the Israelites out of Egypt :: Oh dear
Here are some pix from the Seder:
and a link to the Haggadah we used.
Technorati Tags: haggadah, jewish, holiday, religion, culture, technology, cultech, open, source, passover
This is a poster right outside a Hot Pot restaurant in Shenzhen. You can also spot these types of images around Hong Kong - huge posters of full roast ducks smiling out from bus stations across town. The Chinese have absolutely none of the Western hypocrisy around seeing what animal their meat came from. On the contrary - they actually appreciate seeing its form on their dinner table (teeth and all…). There is absolutely no way such a poster would be used to advertise a roast in any American restaurant.
But you gotta admit, the cow (or goat?!) looks kinda happy with that grin. Heart-warmingly sickening!
Once I crossed into China at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border, I spotted these signs everywhere - ‘No U-Turns’ and ‘No Refluence’! I’m fascinated by just how the Chinese authorities chose these words. Definitely not a gwailo working there and most probably translated from a Mandarin-English dictionary. Mandarin is so poetic, seems reasonable that they chose this ‘flowy’ word instead of its straightforward English substitute - ‘NO ENTRY’! When will dictionaries have more cultural pointers like - ‘BTW, if you do NOT want to make a fool of yourself, absolutely DO NOT use this word when giving people directions!’.
This is a fashion store in Shenzhen, China. Lots of Hahley-Davidson fashion items for an L.A.BOY like me 
If I could be anyone at this moment, it would definitely be Jan Chipchase, Nokia researcher extraordinaire. Chipchase travels around the world and focuses on user centered design for mobile phone in third world countries. I’ve been following his blog for a while now, and was excited to read Sara Corbett’s article ‘Can the Cellphone Help End World Poverty?‘ published yesterday on the NYT website.
Mobile communications change the way we lead our lives, yet have a substantially greater effect on third world users, where they serve as an introductory communications device. In the majority of these locations it makes more sense to implement mobile phone networks rather than a land-line alternative. It took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions were in developing countries.
These numbers are just mind-boggling. And it is inspiring to see just how phones in developing nations are changing people’s lives for the better. It is remarkable that even very poor families invest a significant amount of money in ICT (information-communication technology). What they’re buying are cellphones and airtime, usually in the form of prepaid cards. Even more telling is the finding that as a family’s income grows — from $1 per day to $4, for example — their spending on ICT increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing. “It’s really quite striking,” Hammond says. “What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.”
Nokia is making all the right moves. Learning from its potential users and seeing how their technology is adapted within foreign contexts. The company is also working feverishly on a 5$ handset, which is planned to hit the African markets very soon. It is obvious that such a device will have a substantial effect in many parts of Africa and Asia, and help register an even larger slice of users and behaviours. In addition to hardware design, Nokia needs to put much work into its UI. Nokia’s menu systems are still difficult to navigate, clunky and hardly intuitive. The S60 platform very heavy on the phone’s memory, making the overall experience excruciatingly slow.
I am still a big Nokia fan, not necessarily for the current experience on its phones, but for its support and dedication to provide an open mobile development platform. Lets hope it keeps making the right decisions, as the company grows larger.
Below are quotes from the NYT article:
Chipchase gives example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.
Robert Jensen, an economics professor at Harvard University, tracked fishermen off the coast of Kerala in southern India, finding that when they invested in cellphones and started using them to call around to prospective buyers before they’d even got their catch to shore, their profits went up by an average of 8 percent while consumer prices in the local marketplace went down by 4 percent. Public health workers in South Africa now send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.
“For the first time, there are more people living in urban centers than in rural settings,” Chipchase explained as we sat in the shade outside the studio. “And in the next years, millions more will move to these places.” At current rates of migration, the United Nations Human Settlements Program has projected that one-quarter of the earth’s population will live in so-called slums by the year 2020. Slums, by sheer virtue of the numbers, are going to start mattering more and more, Chipchase postulated.
How do you make a phone that can be repaired by a streetside repairman who may not have access to new parts? How do you build a phone that won’t die a quick death in a monsoon or by falling off the back of a motorbike on a dusty road? Or a phone that picks up distant signals in a rural place, holds a charge off a car battery longer or that can double as a flashlight during power cuts? Influenced by Chipchase’s study on the practice of sharing cellphones inside of families or neighborhoods, Nokia has started producing phones with multiple address books for as many as seven users per phone. To enhance the phone’s usefulness to illiterate customers, the company has designed software that cues users with icons in addition to words. The biggest question remains one of price
Motorola now provides free solar-powered charging kiosks to female entrepreneurs in Uganda, who use them to sell airtime. The company is also testing wind- and solar-powered base stations in Namibia, which could bring down the cost of connecting remote areas to cellular networks. “Originally mobile-phone companies weren’t interested in power because it’s not their business,” Banks says. “But if a few hundred million people could buy their phones once they had it, they’re suddenly interested in power.”
Technorati Tags: mobile, jan, chipchase, design, third, world, development, phone, nokia
Playing the News is an educational/artistic project by Nora Paul and Kathleen Hansen, designed to teach journalism through a gaming platform, seeking to promote a more interesting, intuitive, and interactive method of teaching the principles of journalistic integrity and efficiency. The purpose of the game is to simulate the decision-making process inherent in journalism, as well as show the implications of those decisions. Through the nonlinear dialogue system, Paul’s team attempted to reinforce good reporting practices amongst journalism majors.
Creating a game that teaches journalistic processes is an ample endeavor, though the more I imagine the product of this project, I can’t help but fantasize about a parallel application (not necessarily ‘game’ per se) - a virtual world platform for news consumers like myself. Imagine a scene recreated by real facts from global events; fed from tens of thousands of news feeds from around the world. Imagine journalists and designers together translating the real-world data which comes in a multitude of formats (text, pictures, audio and video) through a spatial format into a 3d virtual scene. Once created, any viewer can interact within the space, experience the event, talk to witnesses and leave feedback. Virtual actors can act as narrators, taking us through the different perspectives. If a person wants to formulate a fresh perspective, a new virtual actor can be created and placed on the spot. Good films are memorable through meticulous creative writing, cinematography and direction. Wikipedia works as an aggregation of many people’s truths into one document space, supported by a healthy discussion. Put the two together, creative narration + perspectives through discussion, and the result is a fantastic way to engage more people with a daily experience of newsworthy events!
All I need to do now is develop the technology.
:p
Technorati Tags: news, knight news challenge, games, virtual, 3d
Saturday I gave a talk on Mediated Presence through Physical Objects in the Dorkbot-socal meetup at Machine Project gallery, LA. I chose to focus mostly on imPulse, the heartbeat sharing devices that Christian and I built and redesigned over the past two years. It is an artistic exploration of intimacy through mediated space, seeking a way for people to connect on a deeper level across a distance. I presented its various iterations and described the design choices we made along the way, as well as the technology & sensors which we used.
I continued to briefly talk about ubi.ach (the email doll) and ubiidu (physical emoticons) as another project exploring the physical manifestation of remote presence. As both of these projects related to person-2-person communications, I ended the presentation with a person-2-place display, kotel. This display extracts live webcam feeds from the wailing wall in Jerusalem, places them within a 3d space which is controllable through touching rocks - a display highlighting an intimate connection to a remote location through a haptic interface.
At the end of the talk I was asked if while showing imPulse around we noticed a difference between users who knew each other and were already intimate, and those who did not. I realized that especially during the crazy two year period that was ITP, we rarely had time to actually research and understand people’s behaviours with our projects. We were lucky with imPulse as we had several iterations to test and redo according to user input, but still, we had barely enough time to make it work. Would be extremely interesting to have that project setup somewhere and document different users, their behaviors and feedback after sharing heartbeats!
Here are the other presenters from the meetup:
= Thomas Edwards =
http://www.t11s.com
http://phy2phy.wikidot.com/
Thomas Edwards is a technology artist who is a recent transplant from Washington, DC (where he co-founded Dorkbot DC). He will be presenting “Phy2Phy”, his campaign to link physical objects to other physical objects using the Interent. Phy2Phy concentrates on de-localization of interaction through the use of affordable hardware devices, and parallels the displacement of his own recent transcontinental journey. I was truly impressed by Thomas’s live demo (always a crowd pleaser!). He setup his ‘touch’ object to communicate through IP (using an Xport) to a fellow device in Wash. DC. We watched the remote touch happen live through a simple webcam chat window.
= Make:Way Design Briefing =
The Make Magazine 24 Hours of LeMons race car project gave a presentation describing their project, Make:Way, which is Make Magazine’s entry into the 2008 24 Hours of LeMons race — an endurance race where each car must be $500 or less. The Make:Way team is in the midst of transforming a $300 1993 Ford Escort LX into a screaming brute of a racecar.
Project photos: http://flickr.com/photos/makeway/
Project blog: http://www.makewayracing.com
Race info: http://www.24hoursoflemons.com/
= Damon Seeley =
http://electroland.net/
Damon Seeley and partner Cameron McNall are Electroland, a team that creates large-scale public art projects and electronic installations. Each project is site-specific and may employ a broad range of media, including light, sound, images, motion, architecture and interactivity. Electroland is working at the forefront of new technologies to create interactive experiences where visitors can interact with buildings, spaces and each other in new and exciting
ways. Damon presented some gorgeous projects. I especially liked the ‘Target’ space (below) equipped with spatial scanning technology that creates a complete 3d reconstruction of the space and all people moving inside (real-time SEER TrackCam).
Technorati Tags: interactive, art, dorkbotsocal, diy
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