Author Archives: Egg Syntax

"The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. It takes an effort…" [feedly]

 
 

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“The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. It takes an effort…”
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The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. It takes an effort to shut it down, because Home’s whole premise is to be always on and be the dashboard to your social world. It wants to be the start button for apps that are on your Android device, which in turn will give Facebook a deep insight on what is popular. And of course, it can build an app that mimics the functionality of that popular, fast-growing mobile app. I have seen it done before, both on other platforms and on Facebook.

But there is a bigger worry. The phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time.

So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the location of your home. Facebook will be able to pinpoint on a map where your home is, whether you share your personal address with the site or not. It can start to build a bigger and better profile of you on its servers. It can start to correlate all of your relationships, all of the places you shop, all of the restaurants you dine in and other such data. The data from accelerometer inside your phone could tell it if you are walking, running or driving. As Zuckerberg said — unlike the iPhone and iOS, Android allows Facebook to do whatever it wants on the platform, and that means accessing the hardware as well.”

– Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy — Tech News and Analysis, via Tim M.

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Secret Files Expose Offshore’s Global Impact | International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

http://www.icij.org/offshore/secret-files-expose-offshores-global-impact

“I’ve never seen anything like this. This secret world has finally been revealed,” said Arthur Cockfield, a law professor and tax expert at Queen’s University in Canada, who reviewed some of the documents during an interview with the CBC. He said the documents remind him of the scene in the movie classic The Wizard of Oz in which “they pull back the curtain and you see the wizard operating this secret machine.”

Freehand Playable Circles, in Any Tuning, on iPad: New Orphion Editor

[Boy, this looks like a very cool iPad controller. -egg]

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“I can’t think of another interface at the moment that provides this much free experimentation. You could, theoretically, make up new pitch layouts for each performance. You could find a single layout and get really good at that, practicing it as you would a new instrument. Or, you might use this as a canvas with which to experiment with different designs, perhaps even realizing your favorite later in hardware and letting the iPad be the prototype.”

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http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/04/freehand-playable-circles-in-any-tuning-on-ipad-new-orphion-editor/

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Neil Freeman Gives a Tour of Bushwick, Brooklyn : The New Yorker

Neil Freeman Gives a Tour of Bushwick, Brooklyn : The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/03/neil-freemans-alternative-geography.html

Broadly, the goal of Freeman’s stuff is to visualize geography in surprising ways. Using publicly available data sets and software tools to manipulate them, he cuts familiar places into pieces and tiles the pieces into new patterns. Three years ago, for instance, he had the idea to draw a map in which every street in a city is centered on the same point. Viewed this way, New York takes on the shape of a sea urchin; Chicago, Freeman’s home town, is a four-point star; Los Angeles shoots out jellyfish-like tentacles across several axes. Often he generates a new work by messing around with scale: “Scale is a convention in maps that people take for granted and don’t notice.” In 2003, he created a deck of playing cards featuring maps of all nuclear-capable nations, rescaling the maps so that each of the sixty-seven nations was the same size; the following year, he took the subway grids of dozens of cities—Tokyo, Berlin, Shanghai, Madrid—and fit them to a single scale, revealing distinctions that weren’t as visible before.

(via Instapaper)

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