Links For May 12, 2014

Global Accessibility Awareness Day is May 15th.

The target audience of GAAD is the design, development, usability, and related communities who build, shape, fund and influence technology and its use. While people may be interested in the topic of making technology accessible and usable by persons with disabilities, the reality is that they often do not know how or where to start. Awareness comes first.


Meet the godfather of wearables

Being more fully immersed, as a matter of fact — joining the proverbial beavers on their romps — could actually hurt more than help: your newly formed prejudices would sway what the objective sensory data was telling you. All you really needed, Pentland concluded as he stared at those satellite screens, was a sensor that moved with each individual and took in her environment, from her physiological signs to her vocal signals to the sights and sounds that surrounded her throughout the day.

Apparently the dream of ubiquitous computing is just a step on the way to achieving the dream of a metrics-driven society.


Monetized Graphics: Uniquely valuable digital art

Monetized Graphics (or monegraph for short) is a way to verify that certain digital images are unique, and that they are owned by the person who says they own them. monegraph allows artists and collectors of digital art to create and share valuable work without worrying about it being devalued when the image is copied.... Monegraph is built around block chains, the same technology that enables a reliable public ledger for transactions in Bitcoin. Instead of being used to verify a currency, monegraph is designed to help people verify that a digital image is subject to a claim of ownership.


Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World

By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors.


Cicadas

As soon the Cicadas are turned on, they start interacting with the ambient they’re in, giving very different results depending on the sonic dialogue with the context. In a quiet and empty room, the sound installation will turn the focus on the insects themselves. But in a natural, more lively soundscape, the insects will just join in, lost in the millions of sonic events being created by man and nature.