Bankruptcy by the Books: Visualizing Bankruptcy at the Seattle Public Library Between 2005 and 2010, use of the Seattle Public Library and guide books on personal law and bankruptcy reflect the financial instability and crisis throughout the United States. Do the transactions at the Seattle Public Library reflect the financial [...]
Tag Archives: globe
Journalism and our financial collapse
Maha Rafi Atal, founder of Public Business, discusses journalism’s failure as a root cause of our financial crisis below. She also describes how her new nonprofit works to resolve those failures. “The financial crisis showed the need for more serious, dedicated reporting on business actions. We are a small, independent [...]
UK Cops Using Fake Mobile Phone Tower to Intercept Calls, Shut Off Phones
Britain’s largest police force has been using covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network to intercept communications and unique IDs from phones or even transmit a signal to shut off phones remotely, according to the Guardian. www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/datong-surveillance/
Occupy the Department of Education
Here’s an inspiring video of people spreading Occupy Wall Street energy to take over a DOE community forum that fails actually respond to public opinion. Make sure you watch through to the a third grader’s use of the people’s mic.
Navigating Dissent
I’ve drafted a design for a mobile application to help protesters map barriers, gatherings, and other facets of a dynamic protest. This information can be gathered to provide the community with a real-time birds-eye view of the activity, helping them avoid arrest, stay safe, and create the most impact. As [...]
Time Magazine on Occupy Branding
Time picked up on an SF Chronicle story and wrote about the marketing of the Occupy movement. How Marketers Would Brand Occupy Wall Street is rather hilarious. They claim: To build a brand—or a movement—that is successful over the long haul, marketing experts say that it is essential to establish [...]
Sukey beat me to it
I had an idea: Fancy-phone app for protesters. It’s a map with 2 views: Submit & Browse. In submit, you have a small set of icons you can drag and drop on the map, including barricade, broken barricade, arrest, speech, meeting etc. In Browse, you see an aggregate of everything [...]
Hunger is the Best Sauce
Overheard in a gallery today: hunger is the best sauce. It’s an insightful idiom that probably makes no sense to someone who has ever been hungry for days in a row.
Not-so Safe Connect
The New School university requires [tries to require] Wi-Fi users to download Safe Connect to control wireless Internet access. Students and faculty are concerned that this software can gather users’ private information and transmit it freely as its private makers (Impulse Point) see fit. We are supposed to comply on [...]
enter WordPress
WordPress has an interesting place in the history and development of personal web publishing and of the open source movement. For better or worse, it has become one of the most widely used open source platforms of any type. It’s success and failures cannot be ignored. I have always appreciated how they [...]
autonomy
au·ton·o·my Noun (plural autonomies) Self-government; freedom to act or function independently. (philosophy) The capacity to make an informed, uncoerced decision. (mechanics) The capacity of a system to make a decision about its actions without the involvement of another system or operator. source: wiktionary.org/wiki/autonomy
Justice and the Information Economy
The following is an excerpt from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. His writing is thoughtful and prescient to the point of becoming obvious just a few short years after its publication. The text below is from the start of Chapter 9, Justice [...]
So-called Developed Economies are Terribly Inefficient
Only 1 percent of material flows in the US economy ends up in, and is still being used within, products six months after their sale. Hawken and his colleagues reckon that so-called developed economies are less than 10 percent as efficient as the laws of physics allow. – John Thacka, [...]