Hi readers,
My idea for project B is to create a geo-narrative of a story of the murder of an Indian student by a flag wearing racist. The geo-narrative will follow both character as they move toward the scene of the crime. The story will be satirise the flag wearing racist for his reasons for wanting to commit the murder. The flag wearing racist will be a stereotyped Anglo-Saxon young Australian racist, so he would be a satirisation of the sort of people who seem to fit into this category.
from
The Jumper of Candle Sticks
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
Downloadable games
Hi readers,
As I was procrastinating instead of thinking of a topic to write about this week I was playing solitaire on my ipod which got me thinking about how the internet and increased processing power has changed gaming. This is particularly obvious when I think about the first electronic game my dad played which was more like a pictureless choose-your-own-adventure-book than any modern computer game. And now we can become so immersed in a computer game we neglect real life the most obvious example of this is World of Warcraft, which has stories of people playing some much they didn't eat or sleep for days. Another recent and disturbing example of people losing interest in real world over a virtual world is a baby in Korea that died from neglect because its parents were busy raising an online baby. Click here to see the story from news.com.
Less disturbingly it is interesting how the iPhone and iTouch have transformed portable gaming. Particularly the iPhone which lets people have any game in an instant, this is part of the greater change brought by the iPhone which has completely changed the internet is used, because now it is something portable and not something just on your computer.
Until next week good bye from,
The Candle Stick Jumper
As I was procrastinating instead of thinking of a topic to write about this week I was playing solitaire on my ipod which got me thinking about how the internet and increased processing power has changed gaming. This is particularly obvious when I think about the first electronic game my dad played which was more like a pictureless choose-your-own-adventure-book than any modern computer game. And now we can become so immersed in a computer game we neglect real life the most obvious example of this is World of Warcraft, which has stories of people playing some much they didn't eat or sleep for days. Another recent and disturbing example of people losing interest in real world over a virtual world is a baby in Korea that died from neglect because its parents were busy raising an online baby. Click here to see the story from news.com.
Less disturbingly it is interesting how the iPhone and iTouch have transformed portable gaming. Particularly the iPhone which lets people have any game in an instant, this is part of the greater change brought by the iPhone which has completely changed the internet is used, because now it is something portable and not something just on your computer.
Until next week good bye from,
The Candle Stick Jumper
Friday, April 23, 2010
Datavisualisation
Hello Readers,This week I am going to tell you a bit about datavisualisation. Datavisualisation is basically taking dry and difficult to interpret data (normally numbers) and using shapes, colours, movement and position to display them in a manner that makes the information easy for humans to read. For example to the right is a datavisualisation of the daily CO2 emissions of the Icelandic Volcano, Eyjafjallajoekull, compared to the planes that would have been flying if Eyjafjallajoekull wasn't erupting.
Before I had seen the datavisualisation, I thought that the Volcano would probably have a negative impact on the the atmosphere's CO2 levels, but seeing the datavisualisation allowed me to see a bigger picture of all the CO2 emissions that Eyjafjallajoekull is having an effect on including the planes it was stopping from taking off and therefore stopping from emitting CO2.
I got the image from: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/planes-or-volcano/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InformationIsBeautiful+%28Information+Is+Beautiful%29
Thank you for reading,
The Jumper Of Candle Sticks
Friday, April 16, 2010
Fortunately there was Twitter, Unforunately...
Okay so we (me and my group in my tutorial) had to come up with an idea for a web site that made good use of collective intelligence, so we came up with "Fortunately There Was Twitter, Unfortunately…"
The idea is a game of ‘Fortunately, Unfortunately’ played on twitter.
Thanks to wikipedia for this instruction on how the game is played:
* One person begins with a sentence (e.g., One day Little Johnny walked to the local shoe shop).
* The next person tells of something unfortunate that happens (e.g., Unfortunately, Little Johnny was hit by a refrigerator.).
* The following person contributes a fortunate event (e.g., Fortunately, the refrigerator was made entirely of marshmallows).
* The third person will contribute an unfortunate event (e.g., Unfortunately, these marshmallows had poisonous spikes on them), and the process is repeated.
* The fourth person will contribute a fortunate event (e.g., Fortunately, the spikes were made of Jello ), and the process is repeated
It would be useful for this site to use twitter because it would use less space than if it was just a site where people added posts directly to. It would also be easier to market and get people interested because every time someone posted their sentence to the story it would be linked in the twitter feed via a #tag and all of their followers would be able to see and click on the link, this will spread interest in the site at an accelerating rate. Much like in the exponentiation curve that Michael has shown to us in the lecture.
"Fortunately there was Twitter, Unforunately..." is like twistori but easier spread.
Fortunately of me we had this idea for a web site.
Unfortunately...?
The Jumper of Candle Sticks
The idea is a game of ‘Fortunately, Unfortunately’ played on twitter.
Thanks to wikipedia for this instruction on how the game is played:
* One person begins with a sentence (e.g., One day Little Johnny walked to the local shoe shop).
* The next person tells of something unfortunate that happens (e.g., Unfortunately, Little Johnny was hit by a refrigerator.).
* The following person contributes a fortunate event (e.g., Fortunately, the refrigerator was made entirely of marshmallows).
* The third person will contribute an unfortunate event (e.g., Unfortunately, these marshmallows had poisonous spikes on them), and the process is repeated.
* The fourth person will contribute a fortunate event (e.g., Fortunately, the spikes were made of Jello ), and the process is repeated
It would be useful for this site to use twitter because it would use less space than if it was just a site where people added posts directly to. It would also be easier to market and get people interested because every time someone posted their sentence to the story it would be linked in the twitter feed via a #tag and all of their followers would be able to see and click on the link, this will spread interest in the site at an accelerating rate. Much like in the exponentiation curve that Michael has shown to us in the lecture.
"Fortunately there was Twitter, Unforunately..." is like twistori but easier spread.
Fortunately of me we had this idea for a web site.
Unfortunately...?
The Jumper of Candle Sticks
Friday, April 9, 2010
Web 2.0 (whatever that is)
Hi Readers,
This week I am going to discuss Web 2.0, which is basically the name of the new school way that users, can use the internet. Which includes most of the stuff I have written about on this blog like blogs themselves, APIs, social networking sites, etc. And also all the different ways these are put together with each other. This is because they use either 'collective intelligence', 'AJAX' (Asynchronous Javascript And Xml) or a combination of both. A good example of a site that uses both collective intelligence, to pull tweets off twitter and AJAX, to be constantly putting up new tweets, is twistori. Which we saw in the lecture and I just had another look at it, and I have to say it has strangely hypnotic and highly distracting quality to it.
There is one more 'aspect' of Web 2.0 that I haven't mentioned yet which is actually what most people, if mistakenly, think of as Web 2.0, and that is the "cute shiny slidey stuff" as Michael put it. Which is actually just as it sounds a style of web design and is just there to make sites look easy to use and approachable. Though you could actually make a site that looks plain and deceptively like a Web 1.0 site but actually uses collective intelligence and AJAX. I don't know why you would do this unless you wanted to show people what Web 2.0 actually is and means.
Anyway, goodbye until next week readers!
The Jumper of Candle Sticks
This week I am going to discuss Web 2.0, which is basically the name of the new school way that users, can use the internet. Which includes most of the stuff I have written about on this blog like blogs themselves, APIs, social networking sites, etc. And also all the different ways these are put together with each other. This is because they use either 'collective intelligence', 'AJAX' (Asynchronous Javascript And Xml) or a combination of both. A good example of a site that uses both collective intelligence, to pull tweets off twitter and AJAX, to be constantly putting up new tweets, is twistori. Which we saw in the lecture and I just had another look at it, and I have to say it has strangely hypnotic and highly distracting quality to it.
There is one more 'aspect' of Web 2.0 that I haven't mentioned yet which is actually what most people, if mistakenly, think of as Web 2.0, and that is the "cute shiny slidey stuff" as Michael put it. Which is actually just as it sounds a style of web design and is just there to make sites look easy to use and approachable. Though you could actually make a site that looks plain and deceptively like a Web 1.0 site but actually uses collective intelligence and AJAX. I don't know why you would do this unless you wanted to show people what Web 2.0 actually is and means.
Anyway, goodbye until next week readers!
The Jumper of Candle Sticks
Friday, March 19, 2010
Taxonomy and Folksonomy
Hi Readers,
In this week's post I'm going to try to explain taxonomy, the old fashioned way of categorising information and folksonomy, the new school way of categorising information. Folksonomy seems to be so new school my spell checker doesn't even recognise it as a word! So the difference between the two forms of categorisation is that taxonomy is do by putting things in metaphorical boxes. Say for example putting 'riding a bike' in a box labelled 'exercising'. Now the problem with this is that 'riding a bike' could also go in a box labelled 'transport'. This is where folksonomy makes itself very useful because folksonomy isn't about putting things in boxes, instead it 'tags' things so they will come up under as many categories as the thing has tags. So 'riding a bike' could be tagged with both 'exercising' and 'transport'. This is very useful on the internet, for example on flickr users can tag their photos with many tags like 'friends' 'football grand final' 'party' etc... and someone could search any of these tags and find this image instead of only being able to find it in one place. Another example is Blogger.
I will leave you now to think about the irony of my tagging taxonomy,
The Jumper of Candle Sticks
In this week's post I'm going to try to explain taxonomy, the old fashioned way of categorising information and folksonomy, the new school way of categorising information. Folksonomy seems to be so new school my spell checker doesn't even recognise it as a word! So the difference between the two forms of categorisation is that taxonomy is do by putting things in metaphorical boxes. Say for example putting 'riding a bike' in a box labelled 'exercising'. Now the problem with this is that 'riding a bike' could also go in a box labelled 'transport'. This is where folksonomy makes itself very useful because folksonomy isn't about putting things in boxes, instead it 'tags' things so they will come up under as many categories as the thing has tags. So 'riding a bike' could be tagged with both 'exercising' and 'transport'. This is very useful on the internet, for example on flickr users can tag their photos with many tags like 'friends' 'football grand final' 'party' etc... and someone could search any of these tags and find this image instead of only being able to find it in one place. Another example is Blogger.
I will leave you now to think about the irony of my tagging taxonomy,
The Jumper of Candle Sticks
Friday, March 12, 2010
Internet ISP filtering
Hi All,
Okay so it was an easy week this week because we didn't have a lecture, so for me this meant the added benefit of a four day weekend! Lucky me!
So anyway, this week in my tutorial it was suggested that I do this week's post about the new internet ISP filter that Kevin Rudd says we need to protect children from pornography and paedophiles. Whether that is what it will actually do is something else altogether. The biggest problem with the way the filter is that it wont stop people accessing content from the websites the government does not want us to be able to access. This is because most of the people who access it, do so through peer to peer networks and sharing encrypted websites neither of which will be stopped by the ISP filter. And when paedophiles groom children for sex they do it social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace.
The second biggest problem with the filter is that the banned sites have been put together on a blacklist, which is not accessible to the public and because we don't know what's on it we wont know when completely innocent sites have been blacklisted by mistake. For example a Queensland dog kennel was found on a leaked copy of the blacklist.
Given that the internet filter fails to do what they say it is meant to do could it have another purpose, like say if the government didn't want us to see something because it would hurt them politically? Like in George Orwell novel?
Thanks that's all for now,
The Candle Stick Jumper
Okay so it was an easy week this week because we didn't have a lecture, so for me this meant the added benefit of a four day weekend! Lucky me!
So anyway, this week in my tutorial it was suggested that I do this week's post about the new internet ISP filter that Kevin Rudd says we need to protect children from pornography and paedophiles. Whether that is what it will actually do is something else altogether. The biggest problem with the way the filter is that it wont stop people accessing content from the websites the government does not want us to be able to access. This is because most of the people who access it, do so through peer to peer networks and sharing encrypted websites neither of which will be stopped by the ISP filter. And when paedophiles groom children for sex they do it social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace.
The second biggest problem with the filter is that the banned sites have been put together on a blacklist, which is not accessible to the public and because we don't know what's on it we wont know when completely innocent sites have been blacklisted by mistake. For example a Queensland dog kennel was found on a leaked copy of the blacklist.
Given that the internet filter fails to do what they say it is meant to do could it have another purpose, like say if the government didn't want us to see something because it would hurt them politically? Like in George Orwell novel?
Thanks that's all for now,
The Candle Stick Jumper
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