Concept: using Twitter as a flow regulator

(Engels)

great depression soup lineThis scenario will illustrate the possibilities of social media like twitter to have a positive and substantial influence on ordinary life. In this case, the “flow regulator tweet” will very efficiently regulate the flow of people waiting in line and therefor Twitter could make waiting obsolete.

Imagine this: You have an appointment at the local district for the application of a social benefit, because your boss hasn’t extended your contract you haven’t got an income. At the counter, an employee reads you the following instructions: Go to Twitter and search for: ‘adamlocalaffairs’. ‘follow’ this account and send this message: “dontbsquare: @adamlocalaffairs #form16″. Next, you’ll open your favorite twitter application on your mobile phone and setup the instructions. The first message you receive is “adamlocalaffairs: @dontbsquare you’ve got 18 people before you in line. This will take approximately 30min.” Now, instead of waiting in line, you take a walk to the nearest coffee shop. Because, you haven’t got the resources to buy a cup, you have to put up with watching people drinking coffee… Meanwhile, the following tweet is popping up: “adamlocalaffairs: @dikkidik please, show up at counter 6″. You are wondering how many people are still before you waiting in line. So, you tweet: “dontbsquare: @adamlocalaffairs ?number”. Immediately, you are receiving “adamlocalaffairs: @dontbsquare still 8 people before you in line. this will take another 15min.”

next, you are done looking at the people drinking coffee and you’ve decided to gently return towards the local district. Within a minute, you receive this message: “adamlocalaffairs: @dontbsquare please, show up at counter 4″. At this counter, the employee of the local district helps you with the appropriate administration and within a couple of weeks, you will be able to buy yourself a cup of coffee again.

I think that twitter or similar social media could make the ordinary life a lot easier and definitely more efficient. It is not being said that we should be totally depending on these technology, but a minor increase of new media adaptation is welcome.

November 3, 2009 | | Tags: , , | No Comments »

Concept: imaging this…

(Engels)

Studying like a hard drive?

Studying like a hard drive?

I just stumbled upon this definition:

“An image (from Latin imago) is an artifact, usually two-dimensional (a picture), that has a similar appearance to some subject, usually a physical object or a person.” (wiki)

and it triggered this analogy…

Have you ever, at an examination, had the experience of being able to reproduce complete sentences? Just recovering plain text without actually understanding what is written. I had the pleasure a couple of years ago when I had to scrutinize a bunch of articles. I was able to reproduce the key arguments by looking at the shape of the text rather then its meaning. Not the best way to acquire knowledge for long term memory, but it’s just another way to acquire and reproduce or recover information. Not that I have the luxury of photographic memory, I wish! By focusing at the shape and associating on different levels, I was able to come up with the exact answers.

This brings me to the analogy of ‘drive imaging’.

My PC has the ability to reproduce information in a similar matter. It recovers (reproduces) important data on the primary hard drive when required. It does this by copying the entire drive as an exact image, ghost or shadow. Regardless the context, hence the words in the sentence. This functionality is much faster then the ‘conventional’ method of copying (or recovering) files, folders and its directory structure. The process is the equivalent of (a)building a structure in a – ready to go – modular fashion and (b)building a structure, from the ground up, by millions of bricks.

Thus,

Recovering or coping information (text/data) by focusing on the shape of the entire object (sentence/hard drive) regardless its context (content/directory structure).

October 26, 2009 | | Tags: , | 1 Comment »

Concept: IWAGU

(Engels)

IWAGU is pronounced as: ‘I Wag You’ and stands for Identification by Webcam And Gesture Utilization. Not to be confused with ‘I kill you’. Lawrence Lessig mentions in his ‘Code V2′ the ‘architectures of identification’. He (Lessig 2006 p.42) states that we constantly are negotiating processes of authentication in real life, and in this process, better technologies and better credentials enable more distant authentication. In real space anonymity has to be created, in cyberspace anonymity is the given (Lessig 2006 p.45).

Contemporary methods of negotiating ones true identity is established by methods as fingerprint reading and password recognition. CAPTCHA is a contemporary technique to make sure that the object of identification is human not a computer program. This process is based on the underdeveloped property of computer programs to interpret images. We, as humans, are perfectly able to extract text from gibberish. As far as one is able to see and is able to distinguish colors.

I would suggest IWAGU as a (new?) method for identification. As far as I am concerned this concept doesn’t exist yet. It should be a fairly simple method to integrate into the daily life of the computer user (PC, MAC, smart phone) and the contemporary verification software. In the next scenario, I will try to explain the workings of this concept.

Scenario.

Imagine you turn on the computer (PC, MAC or smart phone) and after the operating system is loaded the system asks you to sit still and mimic a random gesture. You raise your right hand and show three fingers, just as the system would ask. Now the system uses the webcam to capture in high resolution your face accompanied by your gesture. Next, it determines your identity by comparing the distinct features of your face with the identifying features stored in the system’s database. (The technique to abstract the distinctive facial features is not yet determined. Maybe we can be inspired by Ed Ulbrich’s method.) The random gesture is to make sure this image capture is live and not a recording. After the required gesture is also confirmed positive, you will be able to get access to your personal files. If you’re trying to login to a website, this procedure will be repeated.

Advantage of IWAGU:

One of the advantages of this system compared to a biometric fingerprint is the fact that most of us have a video recording device (webcam) and a few of us have a fingerprint reader on the computer. This procedure will only take a few seconds.

Disadvantage of IWAGU:

Devices:

Not all devices are capable of capturing video. My iPhone does have a camera, but it is not capable of recording video. Ones, every computer is connected to a video camera, then, this concept is likely to work.

Privacy:

The recording of biometric information linked to an individual is fairly controversial. Thus, privacy is an issue. To overcome this issue, it’s necessary to make this personal information accessible to the person who it belongs to. But, then we are back to where we came from, because how do we now for sure that your are the person you claim to be…

For now, this method of negotiating identification or IWAGU beta is perfectly as an alternative or an addition for contemporary identification methods.

(Source)

October 6, 2009 | | Tags: , , , | No Comments »
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