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TED Talks: Taryn Simon

October 24, 2009 in Photography by Ezra S F | No comments

My favorite quote from Taryn is, “Photography threatens fantasy.” Disney uses intricate interior design, photography, and video to construct fantasy. Advertisements, magazines, weddings, and portraits are about showing others the ideal instead of the reality. Have you seen the Dove Evolution video? (This one has music and singing by a Baha’i musician Devon Gundry.) What about the Ralph Lauren photo?

Reality bites. Hard.

(See Taryn Simon photographs secret sites on the TED site)

TED About this talk: Taryn Simon exhibits her startling take on photography — to reveal worlds and people we would never see otherwise. She shares two projects: one documents otherworldly locations typically kept secret from the public, the other involves haunting portraits of men convicted for crimes they did not commit.

Also: Taryn on Charlie Rose, Discomfort Zone (Telegraph)


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Information Should Be Free

February 15, 2009 in Interweb, University by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Mark Guzdial makes the point teachers add value to the learning process. Normally, I would agree. However, I got hung up on a misquote from a Walter Isaacson article How to Save Your Newspaper in TIME offering micropayments as the solution to newspapers finding a working model to survive since advertisements are not the right one.

Mark said it was ”information must be free.” TIME said, “[T]he Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free.” Mark correctly attributed it to Steven Levy who said, “All information should be free,” but in the context of: “Access to computers — and anything which might
teach you something about the way the world works — should be
unlimited and total.” 

Higher education provides such access. However, we hide the access behind beaucracy and tuition. Is it worth it?

Another thought on all this came from a Dorothy E. Denning quoting Richard Stallman:

I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses. … When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.

This reminds me of the concept of Creative Commons and open source. Restrictions to information like copyright ensure the creator makes money. At the same time copyright provides some opportunities for reusing it. (CC and open source just do it better than the Copyright Office.


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The DVR Trap

January 10, 2009 in Movies / Films / TV by Ezra S F | No comments

Recorded an episode of Psych because I know people who like it. Its okay, but I probably won’t make a season pass for it. 

Skipping past the commercials, I recognized the characters, so I stopped. Only to find myself watching a commercial featuring the show’s characters.

That is SO wrong. Smart way to catch those of us skipping past the advertisements. Guess I’ll just have to get better as skipping with the TiVo.


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Cancelled

June 11, 2007 in Gov't / Law / Politics, Science by Ezra S F | No comments

You’d think a city would make life hell on venue owners and fine advertisers for making them spend thousands of employee man hours cleaning up advertisements pasted onto walls of buildings, benches, etc. Punishment is only effective with the subject notices and can tie back to the cause-effect relationship. Tracking down, fining, and hearing appeals of “who is responsible” takes time as well. This… This is so simple its elegant!

Glasgow’s clean-up squads are tackling illegal bill posters with a little creative vandalism of their own…. the city’s litter wardens are cancelling illegal ad sites by pasting up stickers over unlicensed ads.

A few seconds with a paintbrush is enough to render the ad useless until a clean-up team arrives to tackle the site. They have already had an impact on some rogue promoters who have been inundated with complaints from music fans. People who have bought tickets to some of this summers big gigs have complained, thinking that an event, rather than the advert, had been cancelled.

The source said: “If people start phoning concert promoters complaining that they thought the gig had been cancelled, then the promoters have no-one but themselves to blame for having the posters put up in the first place.”


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