The Washington Post ran an article last Sunday about the Air Force’s new surveillance drone. The bot can hang in the air for weeks, using all nine of its cameras to provide a sweeping view of a village. Its a commanding officer’s dream come true: near-total battlefield awareness. Recording the data however, is only half of the battle. This vast amount of real-time data is almost incomprehensible. No one is capable of making sense of that much visual data unaided by some sort of curation device. There is an entire industry however, focusing on providing viewers with up-to-the-second live coverage of large, complex environments: sports entertainment.

Pro sports have always been on the cutting edge of video recording. Being able to show an entire football field and, with a swift camera change, immediately shift focus and follow a fast-moving ball into the hands of a running receiver. The finished product is a series of moving images that provide the most pertinent data, at the right scale, as it happens.

The Pentagon is adapting ESPN’s video tagging technology to make sense of battlefield surveillance. more...

While many write about the various ways that the Internet makes us less safe, namely cyberbullying or being attacked by someone you met on Craigslist, it is also important to look at the new possibilities the web creates to ease suffering occurring in the physical world. When the Cyborgology editors recently spoke to WYPR about cyberbullying, we also discussed cybersupport, as is the case of Dan Savage’s It Gets Better YouTube project. The folks at WYPR also pointed us to another interesting example, the Egypt-based Harassmap created by a group of volunteer techno-activists. According to this report [.pdf], 83% of Egyptian women and 98% of female travelers to this country report being harassed. Given the very limited legal recourse for women in Egypt, this online tool is one way to provide voice to the vulnerable.

The map above is a screen-shot from the Harassmp site. Women in Cairo can report incidences of sexual harassment from their mobile phones via text message. The incident that occurred in the physical world is then digitized as a plot on the map using the phone’s GPS. This provides the masses a reality now augmented with a digital layer that seeks to “act as an advocacy, prevention, and response tool, highlighting the severity and pervasiveness of the problem.” The story of social media is not just how it harms people, but also how it helps.

View the map here. More information here (scroll down for English).

OK Cupid leads the way when it comes to providing analysis of user data in easy-to-understand charts and graphs. Facebook has done so less often, but provided some interesting new data last week. Lots of charts to dig into here. For instance, the types of topics that draw “likes” versus comments are especially interesting. Talk about religion and you’ll get lots of likes but few comments. Just the opposite for angry status updates which tend to garner lots of comments but few likes.

See all of the analysis here.

Should social media companies provide these quick-and-dirty, non-scientific and usually not all that well analyzed data on the web for all to see? The level of analysis is usually quite low (note that this Facebook data was posted by an intern for the site) and surely would not pass the peer review standards of a major social science journal. Are they doing a disservice by providing potential misinformation, or is this fulfilling a public duty to let us know a bit more about our own data? more...

The rant that anything digital is inherently shallow, most famously put forth in popular books such as “The Shallows” and “Cult of the Amateur,” becomes quite predictable. Even the underlying theme of The Social Network movie was that technology trades the depth of reality for the shallowness of virtuality. I have asserted that claims about what is more “deep” and “real” are claims to truth and thus claims to power. This was true when this New York Times panel discussion on digital books made constant reference to the death of depth and is still true in the face of new claims regarding the rise of texting, chatting and messaging using social media.

Just as others lamented about the loss in depth when moving from the physical to the digital word, others are now claiming the loss of depth when moving from email to more instant forms of communication. E-etiquette writer Judith Kallos claims that because the norms surrounding new instant forms of communication do not adhere as strictly to grammatical rules, the writing is inherently “less deep.” She states that

We’re going down a road where we’re losing our skills to communicate with the written word

and elsewhere in the article another concludes that

the art of language, the beauty of language, is being lost.

There is much to critique here. Equating “depth” to grammatical rules privileges those with more formal education with the satisfaction of also being “deeper.” Depth is not lost in abbreviations just as it is not contained in spelling or punctuation. Instant streams of communication pinging back and forth have the potential to be rich with deep, meaningful content. more...

Christina Campbell wrote an interesting piece for change.org promoting a slacktivism campaign that encourages Facebook to broaden the way it defines relationships and to give users the option of a write-in box to describe their own relationships.  She provides several examples of how the rationalization of our lives for marketing purposes via the online profile ultimately serves to privilege some lifestyles while marginalizing others.

Useful visualization of what social network sites different areas of the globe are using.

Via.

Yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a new set of rules regarding how Internet service provides (ISPs) must treat the data they transfer to individual Internet users.  The rules have been pitched as a compromise between the interests of two industries: On the one hand, content providers like Google, Facebook, or Amazon tend to favor the concept of “net neutrality,” which holds that all types of data should be transferred at the same speed and, ostensibly, creates an even playing field where start-ups can compete with industry titans.  On the other hand, ISPs like Verizon and Comcast want to charge for a “fast lane” that would bring content to consumers more rapidly from some (paying) sites than from other (non-paying) sites.  (A more extreme possibility is that ISPs would completely block certain sites that do not pay a fee).

The crux of compromise is that the new net neutrality rules will only apply to wired connections, leaving mobile connections virtually unregulated. more...

Life is rough for men wealthy enough to own an iPad: “how to carry it in a manner that is practical and yet, well, masculine.”

This is from a New York Times story that chronicles the danger of the iPad on a man’s masculinity, specifically, the need for a carrying case that does not look too much like –gasp!– a woman’s purse. The horror of appearing slightly feminine runs so deep that CNET ranks bags with a “humiliation index” (would be better to call it a “heteronormativity index”).

The story turns especially dark when we learn that Apple’s neglect has resulted in some men not being able to leave the house with their iPad. Or even worse, not buy one at all in fear of not appearing masculine enough. But there is hope for these rich males: “Scottevest plans to introduce an iPad-compatible blazer in time for Christmas.” See the manvertising here.

The Cyborgology editors dropped in on artist Jonathan Monaghan‘s studio to discuss his art and how it relates to technology and our contemporary world.

The impetus for my animation “Life Tastes Good” was seeing different depictions of polar bears on television. If they are selling soda, they are having a great time, if they are illustrating climate change, they are dying slow painful deaths. I decided to mix this disparate imagery into a new schizophrenic reality using the same 3d animation tools as those Coke commercials. These alternate digital realities I create in my work are both familiar and alien; playing with our desires, dreams and anxiety.

Jonathan Monaghan’s work is art in the age of hyperreality. Baudrillard offered hyperreality as a bloated, obese and dying environment liquidated of meaning, and here we see the simulated polar bear literally expiring on the screen. Monaghan has turned the simulated polar bear against itself by reintroducing it to the real. more...

Google Earth software [creates] a more realistic world that blurs the line between virtual life and reality and helps make the program look more like a variation of the Star Trek Holodeck.

Via.