Film

Road to Gauntanamo

Have you seen the film Road to Guantanamo yet? If not then go see it. I have put it off for some time but now that I have – it absolutly terrified me. The story is about four young men who travel to Pakistan. One is about to be married and the others are there to attend.

Through a mix of youthful carelessness, bad luck and the chaos of war they are detained and considered to be members of Al-Qaeda. The brutal treatment and torture they face at the hands of the US military is absolutly barbaric. They are abused and tortured to obtain confessions – something which the military fail to obtain despite their treatment.

Even if they had obtained forced confessions from the men – what are these results worth? They are not the truth. And the treatment makes those carrying it out less human. The US cannot claim to be the “good-guy” anymore. Their brutality does not make them better than any other “evil” torturer which we would condemn elsewhere.

Despite the torture being carried out at Guantanamo and the number of detainees and the number of years they have been held it is important to remember that the US has not achieved one single conviction. It is only brutality without law. To those who want to claim the honour of fighting for their beliefs and country – the actions of the men at Guantanamo put your actions, your country and your armed forces to shame.

See this movie!! It is an important movie about the horror of war, the madness of belief over reason, against the evils of torture and the strength of those who are subjected to evil treatment.

What terrifies me the most is the ability of countries to commit crimes while being able to maintain a rhetoric of peace and humanity…

The movie website contains both the trailer and information about the infamous prison. Amnesty International has a broschure to accompany the film: The Road to Guantanamo Action Guide.
About the detainees at Guantanamo Amnesty International writes:

None of the detainees have been granted prisoner of war status or brought before a â??competent tribunalâ?? to determine his statusâ?¦The US government refuses to clarify their legal status, despite calls from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to do so. Instead, the US government labels them â??enemy combatantsâ?? or â??terroristsâ??, flouting their right to be presumed innocent and illegally presuming justification for the denial of many of their most basic human rights.

Posted on by mklang

The Boredom of Programmers

I doubt that there is an authoritative history of boredom in the workplace but anyone making an educated guess would probably point to the factory and the division of labour as the point where large-scale workplace boredom became a serious problem. For those looking for a movie depiction of the problem of machine/man interaction need look no further than Chaplinâ??s film modern times where the character Chaplin plays attempts to keep pace with the inhuman rhythm of the machine.

When stuck in boredom many workers attempt to relieve the monotony in different ways. By searching code we can now see that bored and frustrated coders suffer from the same industrialised worker phenomena of boredom.

The results? Strange messages in the computer code. By using the search function in koders.com we can find lots of messages from programmers venting their frustrations by writing small messages. Here is an example:

ptr = buffer;
/* This f*cking sh*t is still giving problems downloading
* the f*cking images through the motherf*cker http, the only
* code we share with the other s*cking implementation is
* the code that follows, so I guess this is the damn sh*t that’s

or how aboutâ?¦

// I REALLY hate this kind of SHIT!
// yes I know MYSQL can be switched to ANSI bla bla but
// it is obviously not the default…

Nice to see that despite our developments we basically remain the same – humans dislike boredom and handle frustration badly…
(via TheRegister)

Posted on by mklang

Editable Free Film

The Brazilian film Cafuné has been simultaneously released both in the cinemas and on the Internet. It uses a Creative Commons license which allows users to create different story ends.

There are two versions of Cafuné are available for downloading at the Overmundo website: one 91 minutes long and one 73 minutes long. More info available here.

The license allows users to both watch the film – but wait there is more! With this license you can edit the film on your own. Why not add sub-titles in the langauge of your choice? Or adapt the language to your local dialect. Don’t like the ending – well edit the movie!

This license empowers the movie-watcher to go beyond the passive experience and become part of the creative process. Great work.

Now all I need is a translator…

Posted on by mklang

Steal This Film

Steal This Film is more than a website that seems to scream out its message! It is also the first part of a documentary series on filesharing. This first part focuses on The Pirate Bay and in particular on the raid on their servers. The documentary seems interesting â?? natural bias towards pro-filesharing but the creators are open about this:

In 2006, a group of friends decided to make a film about filesharing that *we* would recognise. There have been a few documentaries by ‘old media’ crews who don’t understand the net and see peer-to-peer organisation as a threat to their livelihoods. They have no reason to represent the filesharing movement positively, and no capacity to represent it lucidly. We wanted to make a film that would explore this huge popular movement in a way that excited us, engaged us, and most importantly, focussed on what we know to be the positive and optimistic vision many filesharers and artists (they are often one) have for the future of creativity.

Posted on by mklang

Nostalgia

Today it’s nostalgia. We are going to see the new Asterix and the Vikings film/cartoon. Already from the trailer I can see that they have not slavishly followed the book but that doesn’t matter. The series by Uderzo and Goscinny of the adventures of the Gauls surrounded by Romans has been a central part of growing up. The Gauls have also appeared occaisionally in my lectures.

The adventures of Asterix appear in 33 main books (one of which is a compendium of short stories) and a complete set is a natural goal for the collector. Wikipedia has a lengthy background on the importance and popularity of the series.
Posted on by mklang

Social Innovation

It’s a sad truth that most of the world needs technology to resolve immediate serious mundane problems. But most technology development is focused on gadgets.

John Voelcker has chosen 10 innovative technologies which are aimed at solving chronic problems. The article Creating Social Change – 10 Innovative Technologies appears in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Summer 2006)

  1. A self-contained toilet that treats waste without water or chemicals, protecting precious drinking water from contamination. www.eloo.co.za
  2. An inexpensive kit that turns smog-belching two-stroke engines into cleaner-burning, fuel-efficient sources of power. www.envirofit.org
  3. Small-scale solar power systems that not only produce electric power, but also generate cash by enabling people to set up their own home-based businesses. www.selco-india.com
  4. An electricity-free food preservation system. www.malnutrition.org
  5. A prestigious U.S. university is making many of its academic courses available on the Internet where users can learn from them â?? free. www.ocw.mit.edu
  6. Volunteers have developed a solar-powered microfilm projector that will help tens of thousands of Africans learn to read this year. www.designthatmatters.org/k2
  7. A team of Cuban and Canadian scientists has invented an inexpensive vaccine that could save the lives of half a million infants each year. gndp.cigb.edu.cu/
  8. Low-cost eyeglasses that wearers can tune without the aid
    of an optometrist. www.adaptive-eyecare.com
  9. A Pakistani organization is selling ergonomically correct weaving looms that let adults create the same intricate rugs that children now make. www.ciwce.org.pk
  10. A Brazilian nonprofit is rolling out telecenters that provide Internet access, telephone service, computer training, and other technology-based services to the poor and working class. www.cemina.org.br, www.radiofalamulher.com

This is a good list. I disagree with nr 5 since there are several universities offering similar schemes. In addition I do not believe that it has the same impact and importance as the rest of the list. This is becuase I do not think that by making learning material available people will automatically learn.

Don’t get me wrong – I am sure that these kinds of material are of great value to teachers at other universities since they can take the ideas and adapt them to fit their own classrooms. It’s just that I don’t see that this is on par with clean water, waste disposal and helping poor people access technology.
Despite my complaints – lists such as these are important since they help us open our eyes to the fact that we could all be thinking about solving important everyday problems.
(via Question Technology)

Posted on by mklang

Social and cultural aspects of mobile phones

The social and cultural impact of mobile media has received too little study so here is an interesting call for papers to an international conference on social and cultural aspects of mobile phones, convergent media, and wireless technologies – The conference website Mobile Media 2007 will be up in August 2006.

Date: 2-4 July 2007

Place: The University of Sydney, Australia

…This relatively short history of mobile telephony is concurrently marked by the shift of the role of users from consumers to active producers – and mobile media is being heralded as a new site for consumption, democratic expression, individualism, citizenship, and creativity.

We also invite papers on all aspects of mobile media, including, but certainly not restricted to:

* what does it mean to talk about mobiles as media?
* how do we map and theorise the transformations underway with mobile platforms, applications, and networks?
* mobile art
* mobiles and photography
* emerging cultural and narrative forms for mobiles (such as mobile films and videos)
* intersections between mobiles and Internet technologies
* wireless technologies and cultures
* mobile television, radio, and other kinds of broadcasting
* video calling and communications
* sexuality, intimacy, and mobile media
* mobile media and national or regional cultures
* subcultures, minority cultures, majoritarian cultures, and mobile media
* how do gender, sexuality, disability, socio-economics, cultural and linguistic contexts inflect cultural practices in the far-from-even-and-even terrain of mobiles?
* mobile media and political economy
* mobile gaming
* what are the implications of mobile media for our concepts of culture, communication, and media
* mobiles, community, and public sphere
* mobile media, place and space
* ramifications of mobile media for creative, cultural and media industries
* challenges of mobile media for policy, regulation, and legislation.

Posted on by mklang

Amsterdam

It’s Sunday and it’s Amsterdam! This is a fantastic city with great architecture. Unfortunately today has been spent in an all day meeting. A strange aside is that the meeting room overlooks the same garden that Anne Frank‘s room overlooked. The courtyard still has the same chestnut tree which she looked at. Here is a quickime film of the chestnut tree. The tree is unfortunately dying and the city is spending time and money to keep the tree alive.

Posted on by mklang

Boy Who Never Slept

Boy Who Never Slept is a free full length movie about an insomniac writer who meets a girl online and a friendship that grows into an unlikely love story wrapped in harsh reality.

The cool thing about this movie is that it is “Open Source”. The filmmaker Solomon Rothman both licensed the movie under the Creative Commons Attribution license and provides the source files.

Not too long ago the Elephants Dream was released by Blender and now with the release of Boy Who Never Slept we can see that the movie business is not going to go unchallenged by the more amatuer content creators who have already begun to seriously affect both the text and music industries.

Posted on by mklang