Culture

Kevlar for Kids

The TimesOnline has a story about parents in the UK buying body armour for their children. What an incredible world we live in when they even make body armour for children let alone manage to sell it. Apparently the parents are concerned about the rise in murders among London teenagers.

This feels so wrong and as one of the comments to the TimesOnline story writes

Dressing up a small child in something that costs hundreds of pounds and sending the child out into a rough neighborhood doesn’t sound like it advances the child’s safety at all.

But where does the limit between paranoid parenting (Furedi 2001) and common sense really go? Obviously dressing children in bullet and knife proof clothing does not send out a good signal to the children or to others but then again it may save a life.

An interesting quote in the article was: “The cheapest version will stop any knife attack while the higher end will stop a bullet from any handgun or sub-machine gun.” Considering how fashion conscious children are today we are also running the risk of creating an attitude among children about who can afford the good stuff.

Posted on by mklang

The Third Draft

The third draft of the GPLv3 has been released. The draft is a result of feedback from various sources (general public, official discussion committees, and two international conferences held in India and Japan). The draft incorporates significant changes since the previous draft (July 2006). This draft is planned to be the penultimate draft prior to the formal release of the official GPLv3.

Changes in this draft include:

* First-time violators can have their license automatically restored if they remedy the problem within thirty days.
* License compatibility terms have been simplified, with the goal of making them easier to understand and administer.
* Manufacturers who include the software in consumer products must also provide installation information for the software along with the source. This change provides more narrow focus for requirements that were proposed in previous drafts.
* New patent requirements have been added to prevent distributors from colluding with patent holders to provide discriminatory protection from patents.

    The draft will be open for comments and discussion for sixty days. Following this the FSF will release a “last call” draft, followed by another thirty days for discussion before the FSF’s board of directors approves the final text of GPL version 3.

    Richard Stallman, president of the FSF and principal author of the GNU GPL, said, “The GPL was designed to ensure that all users of a program receive the four essential freedoms which define free software. These freedoms allow you to run the program as you see fit, study and adapt it for your own purposes, redistribute copies to help your neighbor, and release your improvements to the public. The recent patent agreement between Microsoft and Novell aims to undermine these freedoms. In this draft we have worked hard to prevent such deals from making a mockery of free software.”

    Posted on by mklang

    En tus brazos

    En Tus Brazos is a short animation about the Tango king and his partner. I will not tell you about it as anything I shall say would give away part of the story. The film is brilliantly done and the story is well chosen. The dance of life indeed!

    The film is moody and intriguing. It was released in 2006 and created by Fx Goby, Mattheiu Landour and Edouard Jouret.

    Posted on by mklang

    Is it really happening?

    Oh my god!!! This is the most recent strip from PhD comics. Slackerney is on his way! This is truly the end of an era.

     

    For those of you who are unable to see the significance of this event then either you are hopelessly lost… or you have a wonderful experience ahead of you discovering the work of Jorge Cham. The comic strip is called Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD in case you missed it) and features the troubles of ordinary PhD students struggling with writing, conferences, self doubt, procrastination, insecurity, supervisors, food and sleep deprivation in the futile quest for a title.

    The strip began in 1997 and the whole archive is available online. But beware it is not only highly amusing it is addictive and will increase your level of procrastination to new heights. I became hooked in 2002/2003 and since then I have read all the strips, bought the books, bought the t-shirt and included this strip (with permission!) in my own PhD thesis.

    The significance of the strip above is that Mike Slackerney is about to pass his PhD. He has been a student since before anyone else can remember – his supervisor is embarrassed to remember the date. So this event must be seen as an evolutionary leap forward.

    Personally I think it is great since I took way too long to finish writing my thesis – but remember Newtons First Law of Graduation: A grad student in procrastination tends to stay in procrastination unless an external force is applied to it. (PhD comics 3 March 2001)

    Posted on by mklang

    Stress Flag

    Adding a haphazard artistic touch to most cities are the street artists. They apply their art in many different ways here it is in the form of a small flag tied up to the railing of a bridge in Göteborg. The flag bears the word “stress” but is it for or against stress?

    Posted on by mklang

    London Snaps

    Time flies. Actually I think it leaks away like water in a rusty bucket. Anyway I was intending to put some of my London pictures online when I got back but I seem to have been rushing around with no time at all. Days where my calender has looked deceptively empty have turned out to be full of stuff that needs to be done. Anyway here is a limited selection of my pictures.

    The first is a picture of a Crazy Frog doll. I get the impression that it is more a dropped dolly than a statement but I do like the fact that the person who picked it up has placed it on the rim of a dustbin – somehow profetic of the move from obscurity to fame to obscurity again.

    This is followed by a series of street art – the yellow rat was on a lamp post on Oxford Street

    The next one was an interesting mix of shapes and colours, making the end result a collaborative work of art.

    This stencil of two men was in a quite alley just off Tottenham Court Road.

    The last one is significant of the lack of media plurality and was written in chalk on a newsagents box and bears the text “One source isn’t choice”

    Not sure if the collection is representative – but it is what cought my eye when I was walking around.

    Posted on by mklang

    Game'in Conference in Göteborg

    For a short while in my doctoral years I was very tempted to go over to game studies. I find the topic fascinating. But that was not to be. Still a little tempted to try something for the Game’in conference which will be held at Göteborg University (home sweet home) between 13-15 June this year.

    Here is the conference blurb:

    In the history of mankindâ??s technological development the importance of computer games is underestimated. Even the first computer games, which by todayâ??s standards might seem primitive, allowed the user to control the flow of information on the screen, something that changes the relation between the media and the audience. Games do not have viewers they have users and are therefore radically different from media like cartoons or television. Online games, connecting gamers in a virtual play-ground, adds further complexity and makes it even harder to grasp games in relation to older forms of media. How computer gaming as a historically new activity influence different aspects of human life therefore becomes an urgent topic for the academic community. How do gamers construct identity and present themselves when playing games? What are the conditions for learning in the gaming activity? What forms of literacy is developed in gaming? How do socialisation of norms and values develop in relation to gaming? How do game practices change the everyday life of families and the roles between family members? How can we understand the game experience and the pleasure of gaming?

    These are some of the issues addressed at the academic conference Gameâ??in action at Göteborg University, Sweden 13th â?? 15th of June 2007. The conference aims at focusing on the research of different aspects of the activity of gaming and will accept papers in the following themes:

    • Gaming and identity
    • Gaming and conditions for learning
    • Educational gaming
    • Gaming and socialisation of norms and values
    • Online gaming as social practices
    • Fan-cultures as social practices
    • Gaming and families
    • Gaming in childhood and adolescence
    • Amateur game-making and machinima
    • Political perspectives on gaming
    • Gaming as a boundary practice between school, work and leisure

    Abstracts are due by March 15 – more information here.

    Posted on by mklang

    Virtual Property

    The worst thing about trying to catch up on my blog reading and writing is that some of the stuff becomes dated – but this is still relevant from Technolama.

    According to Slashdot, eBay has caved-in to increasing pressure from the games industry and has de-listed all in-game items from its database. However, I’ve made a search and you still can find some items. If you want to buy gold, rare items, swords of power and exotic pets, you will have to go to other websites. In many instances, you may have to go to officially sanctioned websites, such as Sony’s Station Exchange, in order to get your goodies. Why? Because this could be another profitable source of income for MMORPG providers.

    The economics of gaming is a fascinating subject which has just begun to be explored. Here are some interesting starting points:

    Lastowka, F. G. & Hunter, D. The Laws of Virtual Worlds

    Taylor, T. L.  Whose Game is this Anyway?

    Klang, M. Avatar: From Deity to Corporate Property

    Posted on by mklang

    Britannia Rules / Britannia Sucks

    Creative Commons’ UK film competition “Mix & Mash” in association with Google UK invites short video submissions mixing and mashing digital content under the theme: Britannia Rules / Britannia Sucks .

    Remixing digital content is the basis for this competition. Digital pictures, sound or films licensed through Creative Commons and Public Domain material need to be used. Entrants can use their creativity to remix the work of others with their own. The result will be a collage of original and re-used material.

    Films will be made available online under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license. For terms and conditions, and more details go to:www.MixandMash.cc

    Posted on by mklang

    Technology and Human Rights

    On Friday it’s time for me to give a lecture on Technology and Human Rights for the local masters course on human rights. The nice part about this lecture is that it gives me the opportunity to collect and explore different strands of my work and present them to a new audience. My interest in this area began some time ago and resulted in 2005 in the collected edition Human Rights in the Digital Age which I edited together with Andrew Murray.

    Discussing technology and rights can at times feel a bit banal. Human rights activists struggle to free people from torture and death so isn’t technology a small waste of time? There is no way in which it would be fair to compare technology and rights to the work of activists against the death penalty. But there is a major problem if all issues must be resolved in the order of magnitude. Speech rights may be less important to someone facing the death penalty but this does not mean that we should ignore speech rights until we have managed to abolish the death penalty.

    For the lecture on Friday I am planning to look at three different areas.

    The first area is going to be the use of the Internet as a “place” for political participation. I want to discuss the Internet as an area of political discourse and in particular show its possibilities and its fundamental flaws and limitations. This area should include freedom of speech and freedom of association.

    The second area is privacy. In particular I want to focus on the merging of online and offline data. Or to put it another way the combination of spatial information (where you are) with the information traces stored in databases (who you are) to show the advanced control mechanism being created.

    The final area is the aggregate use of technology. In this section I want to show the audience that with each piece of technology we may implement for our comfort we also form and shape our lives. In particular we also shape the way in which our lives may be controlled by others. This incremental implementation of technology does not bring large protests since no large rights are threatened overall. However the net long term result is darker than anything Orwell would have dreamed about.

    Eric Drooker

    The overall goal is to make the audience a bit paranoid about technology – to make them question the choices we are all making in our rush towards a more convenient way of life. Not bad for a Friday…

    Posted on by mklang