Author: Fred

  • I should have posted this yesterday

    but I hadn’t seen it until right now.

    You must watch this, perhaps every year during this week.

  • The Modern Conscientiousness of Mad Men

    I’ve become a big fan of Mad Men. Its style and writing has captivated me in a way I haven’t been since I started watching The Wire or The O.C.

    But Mad Men is arguably much darker than both shows. Sexist, racist, and socially imprisoned characters play out plot after plot of sexy deceit against stylish yet drab modernist office spaces and claustrophobic suburban vignettes. It can start to grate on you, but in a way, these components create the substance of the conflict of the show.

    Mad Men’s characters and plots are set against the strict constraints of early 1960s upper-middle class white society. Our pleasure in watching the show derives predominantly from anticipating the brief flashes of modern conscientiousness in characters, or at the least, observing their reckless treatment of situations and other characters in contrast to how we would have handled it today.

    These are mores that American culture has since shed and evolved from, and it now gives us pleasure to reminisce about them in a removed way. We take pleasure in fictionally distancing ourselves not only from others, but our past, and the substance of Mad Men hinges directly on this desire.

    That’s not to say that other shows haven’t tried or succeed in similar conceit before. It’s just to say that our pleasure in Mad Men is not merely nostalgic nor viciously voyeuristic, but both, at once, and that is precisely why it is such a good show.

  • Just to be perfectly clear, Michel Gondry is not missing

    Michel Gondry is missing.

    I ran into this poster walking around with Thessaly on Sunday. I took a photo and sent it to Flickr. I added a caption disclaiming it as being probably a hoax (I actually said it was probably a lame marketing ploy).

    Then Gothamist blogged about the posters the next day using my photo.

    Thankfully, today I received a message from Gondry’s office saying that no, he was not in fact missing:

    Hi. I would like to make it perfectly clear that Michel Gondry has absolutely nothing to do with this at all. It is not a marketing campaign. These postings are the independent act of someone not associated with Michel Gondry or any of his work or projects. We would prefer that these signs be removed whenever possible. Thank you. -Office of Michel Gondry.

    Does this mean I get to be in the next Michel Gondry music video?

  • Crowd Sourcing Crowd Sourcing (or self-referential Human Intelligence Tasks)

    I’ve created a self-referential Human Intelligence Task on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

    The task is to create more Human Intelligence Tasks that might be interesting or neat or funny. If I find any good ones, I’ll implement those.

    I’m currently paying participants $.15 per idea, though I have no idea if this is a reasonable amount of money to compensate someone for coming up with the brilliant kind of ideas already on the site:

    I’ve pleged $33 to this task, so that means I should have roughly 200 (minus some fees, etc.) ideas by the end of it. Go lazyweb!

  • Free Culture @ NYU Moves On

    I started Free Culture @ NYU as an undergraduate during my senior year at NYU. I had actually wanted to start a similar club in high school. I was so engrossed in the 2600 DeCSS case at the time that I thought I needed a venue to discuss such things, and philosophy (my father’s focus as an academic) seemed like a decent front to talk about the 1st amendment and computer code. I actually ended up attending the 2600 appeals trial at the Southern District Court of New York, and getting interviewed by the Wall Street Journal:

    I should have actually started Free Culture @ WHS, but things in the copyright activist world were just beginning, so starting the Philosophy Club had to do.

    When I got to college, as an April fools prank in 2004, my Junior year, I made this poster:

    The RIAA’s lawsuits against music fans had just began and the idea was to prank people into believing that they were coming to campus in order to offer immunity. Students could attend and ‘turn in’ any media with MP3s and receive immunity against copyright infringement suits. The conceit of the prank was that MP3s are not like physical objects, say guns, and even if you turn in a CD with MP3s on it, you could have just as easily made backups  beforehand. This was meant to demonstrate a) that the RIAA was stupid and didn’t understand this fact and b) that this problem was an intractable fact about digital media.

    After staying up all night plastering the posters on every floor of my dorm at NYU my roommate and I crashed. The following day we didn’t hear or notice much, we asked our roommates what they thought about them and they told us what they thought — having not been in on the joke, their responses were quite colorful.

    But a funny thing happened.

    The following week, and the week after that I noticed people in my dorm’s court yard still talking. It had resonated to a point where it was actually a topic of conversation. I wasn’t sure if my peers had actually understood it as a prank or not, but one thing was clear, they were annoyed with the RIAA and thought the fake campaign was stupid.

    At this point I realized that this subject was inherently political and that I should do what a lot of college students do at my age, and radicalize. I would start a club, a political club. I could do what people did on campuses in the 60s and 70s and protest and stuff.

    Around that time I finished my copy of ‘Free Culture‘ by my future boss Lawrence Lessig and also read the NYTimes article about the Swarthmore students who had sued Diebold over a copyright battle, and who were also planning on starting a movement based on what they had learnt about the copyright world.

    We’d name the movement after Lessig’s book — the free culture movement. We’d focus on liberating culture from the strongholds of a maximalist and litigious copyright regime designed only to protect corporate revenue and stifle innovative evolutions of culture.

    Over the summer of 2004 I joined the newly launched and soon to be legendary fc-discuss list and got in contact with Nelson as well as many other budding activists. By the Fall of 2004 I was in contact with a friend of Nelson’s, Inga, who would be a freshman at NYU that Fall, and we decided to start Free Culture @ NYU. (Inga is now at Harvard Law school).

    We protested DRM with Richard Stallman, ran Creative Commons art shows, screened public domain films, held conferences, invited speakers, organized film remix contests, got fired from our jobs for civil disobedience, organized panels with some of the best people in our community, and generally had a great time educating and building out the free culture community on campus and in downtown NYC.

    Now, Free Culture @ NYU is no longer my project, and there are no original members left. But this is how it should be.

    The club is now lead by Parker, John, Max, Aditi, Wesley, and Gabe. These are photos from their most recent OSA club fest tabling event:

    They’re also having a club meeting on Monday at 8pm, so please visit the site and attend if you’re interested.

    Reaching sustainability of a project through people you know, trust and like, is the really the ultimate goal of a project like this, and now that I’ve moved on from NYU, I couldn’t be happier leaving it in their very competent and energized hands.

    Good luck guys!

  • Spore losing the DRM Fight


    Spore    , the long awaited evolved version of Sim City by game genius Will Wright has a DRM problem. As of this post, there are 14 “1 Star” reviews versus six 4 and 5 star reviews, by people who said that they won’t buy it (which admittedly isn’t quite the same as a review of the game itself) because it has DRM:

    Thus Spore now has an average of 2-stars on Amazon. The game as gotten good but not excellent reviews, so this is surely of concern for the makers as people will probably take the Amazon rating seriously and might not buy.

    Is this a concerted campaign to shame EA (Spore’s publisher/distributor) or a distributed disorganized consumer reaction against DRM itself? I tried Googling for “Spore DRM campaign” thinking I’d find a Defective By Design campaign about it, but couldn’t find anything.

    The moment concentrated actions like protests lead to dis-organized collective action and rebellion en masse is very exciting. If these are actual consumers acting in concert but without prompting from a centrally organized campaign then it means that our efforts at establishing DRM as an anti-feature have been successful.

    UPDATE: BoingBoing and Kotaku both linked here (thanks) and Spore now has 144 “1-star” reviews, but is #1 in games:

  • All is fair in love and war.


  • Cause Caller and Robocalls

    Cause Caller

    When I was developing my thesis project, Cause Caller, for my masters at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, I was routinely confronted with the idea of including a feature allowing ordinary citizens to have access to the auto-dialing capabilities that normally only telemarketers and political campaigns use.

    In other words, should I have created the functionality where users can “robodial” politicians similar to how politicians harangue citizens? The technology is still trivial to implement — users could simply record one message and have it sent to every politician on a list automatically.

    The Federal Trade Commission just passed a law “basically outlawing” similar telemarketing calls. But the  twist is that the law seems to specifically protect prerecorded political robocalls:

    However for those who have called on the FTC to help eliminate the other phone scourge – political robocalls  – the new rule will not help.  Calls from political campaigns are considered protected speech an FTC representative said.

    Somehow political robocalls are considered speech where business solicitations aren’t, and cannot be regulated by a trade commission. While this does give me better legal footing to launch such a feature, I’m still not thrilled about adding it.

    Part of what makes Cause Caller fun (and effective, I think) is because citizens are obligated to verbalize their ideas to politician’s offices in their own voice, repeatedly. This has the effect of bringing them closer to the democratic process, because even if they are simply reading a script, they are interacting with another citizen about an issue they care about. By removing that human element I would effectively remove the core element that makes the exchange meaningful. Cause Caller would annoy politicians offices and that is about it.

  • Outsource Your Plagiarism with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

    I saw “Amazing but True Cat Stories” on BoingBoing the other day and it inspired me to come up with some Amazon Mechanical Turk Human Intelligence Tasks. I’m looking into actually implementing some right now and will probably start running them soon, so I’ll write about them here when I have them up.

    The Mechanical Turk is a web service run by Amazon that allows you to pay hundreds, if not thousands of people to perform menial tasks that computers are not capable of. It takes it name from the true Mechanical Turk, a hoax from the 18th century that could play (and beat) people at chess, when in fact the pieces were being ingeniously controlled by a midget. But I digress.

    I’ve been investigating the HITs that are already on the site. I had looked through a lot a number of months ago, but they have only gotten better.

    This one struck me* as interesting:

    Rewrite 5 Sentences

    Please re-write the below sentences 3 times each.

    You should always start and end every meal with a flourish, and a delectable dessert is sure to make a splash. Now is the time to enjoy those tempting food baskets you have on hand, to sweeten up your dessert offerings. Try using the goodies from a gourmet gift basket.

    A fruit tart with a tender, buttery crust is a perfect complement to imported chocolates from a chocolate gift basket. Whichever gift baskets you decide to use, your picnic will sure to be delicious.

    A good rule of thumb is to start your meal with a bang and give it an impressive finish. A sumptuous gift basket dessert is just the finishing touch that your picnic needs. Gourmet gift baskets are filled with decadent goodies that you can pull out and use anytime.

    Tasty treats like imported chocolate gift baskets and fruit baskets, with a flaky, buttery crust will satisfy the love of your life when you bring them for the dessert of your next picnic. Whatever the menu you ultimately decide on, your picnic will be the most delicious part of your day!

    Otherwise, you can have fresh fruits, salted nuts and cheese after the meal. Nachos and crackers dipped in sweet sauce, likewise, complements your wine. Wine baskets or Fruit baskets tend to be the most impressionable!

    Please upload .txt file when submitting.

    The writer, by accepting this HIT agrees to extend an exclusive unlimited term license to the purchaser to use the original content developed. Once the article is accepted by the purchaser and paid for, the content written for this HIT may not be sold, traded or given away to any other individual or company, nor used for any other article writing assignment elsewhere. Moreover, the writer agrees that the purchaser has full rights to amend and modify the content at will and to use it wherever the purchaser deems fit.

    At $3.50 this was the most expensive HIT on the site as of this writing. Why would anyone need such mundane cooking copy rewritten?

    I’m certain its because someone is rewriting a cook book to resell commercially. But why is it just the text about a recipe and not the recipe itself? Recipes can not be copyrighted, so the actual ingredients and list of steps to make a dish can be freely copied.

    Thessaly and I have discovered many, if not all of our favorite chef‘s recipes are available on line gratis from various spammy recipe sites. This is convenient when we’re cooking at friends or away from home and don’t have access to her cookbooks but know the recipe we want to cook.

    The part of a recipe that isn’t copyable, however, is the text surrounding it or introducing it, or anything minimally creative about the recipe. This means that if Alice muses about how she came to discover the fact that grapefruit and avocado (can you tell I love this salad?) make a great combination when paired with a white wine vinaigrette and curly endive, you can’t copy that part.

    It’s pretty clear that this HIT is designed to route around this “feature” of copyright law by hiring a massive horde of re-writers to do the dirty and boring work of plagiarism. I tried Googling some of the original phrases supplied by the HIT’s creator but nothing came up. Let me know if you recognize any — I’d be curious to discover the source material.

    So just remember, the next time you want to blatantly plagiarize a book (or a college essay if you’re so inclined) you can hire hundreds of anonymous web users to do it for you.

    *UPDATE: Monday AM my example HIT no long seems active. I’m going to search a bit more for similar ones and try to get a screen shot but I’m sure more will crop up soon.

  • On SIEC, or Sudden Involuntary E-mail Cessation

    I had a dream this morning that I was about to be executed. I was in some kind of prison with padded beige walls. Somewhere else in that dream someone was showing me a long list of their e-mails and I was like “wow” I also lost my camera bag and saw big waves.

    After I woke up I frantically checked my phone to see if GMail was still down. It was. Then about half an hour later I had 30 unreads in my inbox. It had been almost 24 hours with no-access to my non-work e-mail and I thought I was going to die. I realized that I’ve gone offline for much longer but being online with no e-mail access and being unprepared (no vacation message) is much much worse.

    After tweeting (the irony that Twitter was up while Gmail was down was not lost on me) that I was unraveling I received a number of Facebook messages comiserating and suggesting remedies from people whom I haven’t talked to in a while (one was years — like a decade, sudden e-mai loss brings people together.) A suggestion was to setup gmail to forward to a yahoo account. While this wouldn’t have helped in this situation, it’s definitely a good way to do e-mail redundancy backups in the cloud. Maybe I’ll also have that account forward back to a separate Gmail backup. The only single thought that was worse than having to go another hour without e-mail was losing it all.

    Why all this fuss about e-mail? Why are you such an egotistical communication nut, Fred? The basic reason is that I find e-mail immensely more enjoyable and reliable than any other communication medium. Despite yesterday’s downtime, my e-mail reliability has actually been quite high compared to my phone or any other medium’s reliability. And I like asynchronicity.