Serbia’s Republican Agency for Telecommunications - RATEL, published the Instructions for Technical Requirements for Subsystems, Devices, Hardware and Installation of Internet Networks which have shaken up our local blogosphere and Internet community in Serbia. Reasons are many, one of them is abuse of user’s privacy. I wrote an article for Global Voices today on this topic. In case you’re interested follow the link.

Similar cyber laws and technical instructions already exist in other countries. Formally, at least, it’s good to have such regulation on one side where privacy is protected – formally, but, on the other hand, I am wondering if the Republican Agency for Telecommunications in Serbia, national security and ISP will (or will not) violate and abuse privacy of citizens in the internet community in practice.

Radiohead just released a new video for its song “House of Cards” from the album “In Rainbows”.

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Watch the making-of video to learn about how the video was made and the various technologies that were used to capture and render 3D data.

For more information on data visualization (and how you can download it),  you can click on Google code page. It is interesting that this video is published under the mixture of copyrights/lefts: the code is open source licenced to Aaron Koblin, and the data (not the music)  used to produce the House of Cards music video is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

I hope that this wonderful Radiohead song and the video will inspire and gather other visual artists and IT people to use various technologies in making something innovative in the future.

Interesting video I really liked, presenting life ‘according to’ but also a world beyond Google.  It’s our collective memory, memory of the world placed in the virtual space that is not the information well anymore, but much more. You only need a computer and Internet connection to reach the Akkadian Babilu (Tower of Babylon).  Music used in this short film is Leonard Cohen’s - The Partisan.

This weeks’ event in Torino, Italy -  Frontiers of Interaction IV brought, beside interesting speakers, video talk with digital guru Howard Rheingold, interviewed by Robin Good on vision about the future of mobility and pervasive techs. Fantastic video link covers major topics on online collaboration, digital divide, net neutrality, interaction and future of mobile techs, e-learning and other major issues in the future of social media and web.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1049057&dest=-1]

I got email this morning from my old friend and colleague commenting, among other things, on my Flickr photo blog and 365days project.  One of the photos drew his attention to write these words that astonished me, because…:

I was very amazed about a picture from eating Serbian women. I’m not a psychologist, but sometimes when I often see this behavior, it comes up in my mind, that they are not happy, lack of love, attention and so, and as compensation starting to eat. And soon growing up their bums. And particularly what they consume: “ugly Mac-food”.”

…because these women are no fat, the context of this stolen click - photo (as the title says) they love to eat, they are not starving, they are healthy, normal women with [if so] a bit wider hips [but hey, why many men love those hip-hop and soul singers with hips, ‘bums’, and drool over photos of Monica Bellucci? And if you see below this photo, several people from different geo-spots made a comment and none of them (both female and male) mentioned that these girls are overweight or fat. I thought that curves make women feminine, and still think so. But this is not the end. When new information hits you in the morning, the other comes along with it, from the daily news. And it is a story of Czech supermodel who was attacked by Brazilian ‘fashion police’ that on recent runaway show she appeared to be fat, with the critiques on “back fat, love handles and cellulite”. Hello! Is this fat?

Maybe, these are the reasons why society and media push up young girls and women-to-be into sick state of mind and health: skinny, starving and sick go together. Recent article shows also that in the past two years there were two cases of girls who died from anorexia (eating for weeks only lettuce and Coke). After this story I got a bit intimidated by the photos of the food I posted on Flickr here and there, which makes me ‘fat’ and i guess ‘rich’ person according to the media.

I couldn’t help but wonder shall we live the healthy lives the best we can according to our set of standards or shall we follow the world ‘trends’, starve, die and be remembered as ‘beautiful and thin’ sticks without cellulite?  I guess many of us should re-examine our own values and listen to ourselves, our body and biorhythm trying to make a balance in life.

I’m suggesting you to watch this inspiring TED video staring key speaker Mark Bittman, and contemplate our eating habits, for the start.  As for me, I’m going now to have an apple for a snack, fish and veggies for lunch, followed by rich ice-cream for desert.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danche24/2626913505/