This is made in order to gauge how prevalent the act of bullying has become within America’s current youth culture.  We hear about this maybe once every six months?  But we hear about it nonetheless more often now that before.

With the emergence of technology and social networking, bullying— so it seems, has reached a global level.  There are laws against this, but it would depend on which state.  They also put a lot of conditions per case in order for any of bullying to be actually considered a real threat for law enforcement to step in.  The “freedom of speech” allows actual words like “why don’t you kill yourself because you’re a looser” to be broadcasted on line at will and at any given moment.  Too much of this would get out of hand and wit would elevate to a high level enough for someone to kill themselves apparently.

Actual Teenagers Who Committed Suicide from BullyingPhoebe Nora Mary Prince, 15, who apparently committed suicide on January 14, 2010

Jamey Rodameyer Sept. 18, 2011

There are campaigns of anti-bullying and Lady Gaga has been one of the spokesperson for it.  But I don’t think it’s enough.

What I propose is to have a Feedback Loop that gathers data from reported news of teenagers killing themselves as a result from bullying here in the United States.  A map of the U.S. should be faded, it would then start to glow red wherever a teenager is reported dead from suicide from bullying.

As time passes and more information is gathered, it would be interesting to see which state has the highest rate and if the entire map would be in red.

This map should be plastered in every banner like a commercial, billboards and should also show up as ads on social networks, therefore there is some sort of awareness.

The major goal is enough “awareness” that it may behoove an individual to think twice about their action to go out of their way to bully someone.

Example 1:
This would be our current state.

Example 2:
Our state as time passes and bullying has not been regulated.

Program used, maybe Processing linked to CNN, MSNBC, and other news channels.

 Smart-Dwell is the new home for the future.

 It is a Mash-up of Eco-Systems, Smart-Sensors and a Feedback Loop all for a Healthy + Eco-friendly home.  Ideally this would be in an urban setting where space is scarce, full of pollutants and also where there’s much waste from energy and refuse.  But this could also be used in a suburban setting where a family would like a healthy home for their children and a home that regulates their energy consumption for economic reasons.

The approach is to have an already built-in  Smart-System (i.e. built in Air Purifiers, Trash Compactors, UV Sanitizer Closet, Vertical Garden, Solar Panel, lights that automatically shuts off when no one is in the room by the use of heat sensors, etc).  The idea is so the average dweller won’t have to buy these extra electronics, which would end up costing them more money and more energy consumption.  It would be better if these components (eco-systems + smart-systems)  would already be included, consolidated and controlled in one central area, like you would the temperature of your home.

In addition, to a Smart-System that regulates itself, I propose a “Nerve Center” located inside the house which gauges how much energy is being use and which rooms of the house.  It would also send out a signal to prompt the user if the Vertical Garden needs maintenance or if it’s time to change the filter for the Air-Purifiers.  Or if any of the Smart-Systems break down.  It could also be where you can control all your heating, temperature, radon levels, mold, carbon monoxide, pesticides and as well as security alarms for the house.

Images of a Smart-Dwell Housing

I really liked the articles on musical mash-ups since I listen to a lot of them on youtube, my favourite is this one:

Circus/PokerFace (aucostic)

possibly everything  pop mashup ever aspires to be:

United States of Pop

I love United States of Pop, it’s almost like a sound map of all the pop music top hits released in 2009. He’s got a really awesome one for 2010 as well (omg taio cruz!!!) I think half the reason why I love mashups music so much is because I adore pop – the more artificial it is, the more I like it (I’m also a non-closeted fan of Eurovision, a celebration of bad?no? taste and cold war politics) I never knew it was used for anything other than music though. Like before parsons, I thought ‘mashups’ were specifically for music, and everything else was ‘hacking’. One of my favourite projects I remember was an Amsterdam artist who hacked a camera so everytime someone tried to ‘shoot’ a picture, the camera would flash and another object/vulgar words would appear over the image (sorry can’t remember the link now)

I found the web mashups pretty cool, if a bit technical. I’m not really familar with writing for web, but some of the ideas in it are really cool…… although I was thinking that some of it isn’t really ‘mashups’ or what I would think of it as mashups; they just seemed like data visualisations to me especially the example of the Map of Internet (would the London tube map x internet be a better mashup? maybe?) I guess it’s all about collecting sensory feedback or user feedback, but a lot of existing systems already collect feedback…… so where do you draw the line of what is a mashup, and what’s merely a data visualisation of users?

I took a long time to think about what to write for this post, and honest truth – I haven’t really came to any solid conclusion yet.

Norman’s essay on design of everyday brings about an interesting concept about material affordances; that the material itself has inclinations towards a certain action/use. At first it seemed really similar to Latour’s concept of agency, then I realised that there’s a crucial difference between the two: affordances deals specifically with material inclinations, while agency is more on object inclinations even though both deal with how things act. I think even more interesting is how Norman describes how some materials are ‘meant for’ – like the wood example and the glass example; if wood is meant for drawing on, does it mean the essence of wood is to be drawn on?

Csikszentmihalyi’s essay is really interesting, and it reminds me of this episode of Hoarders (I think it was the first ep?) when one of psychologists makes a comment about how ‘people need things to navigate’ and while Hoarders is an extreme case of this – I think it’s true for most people. I feel really uncomfortable when I’m in unfamilar surroundings, or faced with unfamilar objects or even unfamilar software. Even now, I sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable writing on xcode or processing (like if I think too hard on it or someone is watching me, I’ll go ‘omg i’m not a programmer, why am i doing this?!’) and the unfamilarity will make me freeze and blank out. I guess it really depends on the individual, but I think most people require some form of stability to ‘set point’ or reference from. Like why do people use landmarks? Landmarks are basically buildings – or if you think about it, really giant objects where we can organise our paths around with. It’s one thing to say ‘new york is laid like a grid’ but in truth my first few weeks here, I used landmarks i.e. train station is at whole foods, left of whole foods is the school; 6 East 16 has a giant neon coffee sign at the street entrance etc etc to navigate my way around.

It’s also interesting to note that one of the first symptoms of dementia is the inability to recognise objects which *later* degenerates to a loss of balance/self – might that not be related to Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of schizophrenia?

Alan Kay’s talk is amazing, and I pretty much agree with everything that he;s said because I totally believe that too. The whole point of object-oriented programming isn’t so much creating an object, but using the object as a messenger across many many patterns. It reminded me of this debate that I gpt into with another classmate during bootcamp – both of us were coding our final projects, and [ ] was like ‘why not make classes for everything, so you can control each and every specification?’  and I was like: ‘why would you want to do that?’ I think sometimes people get too caught up with programming itself, instead of programming for – you don’t really need to control everything and put them all into seperate boxes (for instance each shape into a seperate class, each rotate/transform/whatever on a seperate class) when what you can do is create similar classifications (i.e. all the shapes into a single object/datatype) and then applying the movements all to the same class instead of seperating them – and if you have differences you can extend the class instead of creating seperate zillions of classes. You don’t really need control over every single thing, it’s really much more efficient to group stuff together, classify them and manupialate that instead of each individual object.

————–>>>>tl;dr version: I really like the guy, everything is so true and when he said ‘who here still uses compilers?’ and then I was thinking uh oh, doesn’t xcode/openframeworks require compilers before running?? only processing as a compiler wrapped in it!

Group: Galina Rybatsky, Jason, Yong Lee

Project Name: Sound Wave

Description: Our concept for this piece was a sailboat that plays music as it sails across the water. The wind would propel the sails activating different musical notes. The tempo of the music would depend on how fast the ship is going.

The way we built this was by taking apart a radio/CD player. We wrapped the edges of a CD in aluminum foil and placed it on the turntable. We soldered conductive wires around the CD and attached an input wire that touched the aluminum edge of the CD and another output wire on top of the soldered wires so when the CD was spun the wires would play at set intervals. In order for the CD to spin we made a small mast using a mixer from a kitchen utensil. It needed to be turned manually for the CD to rotate. In order to have multiple musical notes, we constructed a larger mast with 3 conductive aluminum strips. We connected wires to the small mast and ran them to the large mast where the tip of the wire touched the aluminum strips. Each note had its own input but one output because there is one long wire that ran up the large mast under the aluminum strips.

Junk used: Radio/CD player, wires, CD, aluminum, tape, plastic tubes of some sort, and soldering wire.

Result: I am very happy with the way Sound Wave turned out. I have never made anything with input output operations before. The whole experience was very rewarding.  As a result I am not that intimidated by DIY projects anymore, I am really excited to experiment some more and make more interesting interfaces in the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FxsgOUImco