Hacking the Good days…

This cracks me up – ironically I found this out on my ‘funwall’:

Even more ironically I’m feeling very very dreadful whenever I see all these pending ‘requests’ from my facebook. Weekdays we troll through thousands of work emails, and when we get home during weekends there’s another hundreds of stupid facebook apps out there – apps are probably just a phase, ultimately from a user’s point of view, I only care about how facebook helps us connect with one another:

Talking about application development, I was at the Over the Air hackday today and am really intrigued by how mobile can take on to become the next springboard of technologies connecting people together in an asynchronous manner (i.e. people are connected not in real time, instead our phones become an aggregating tool where users can choose when and who to respond to, just like our email, which is what the net is for). People often make parallel between facebook applications and mobile widgets, as in if there are many people using facebook applications, there can be a room of widgets for mobile.

One the contrary, partly stemming from my cynicism towards the facebook apps development trend, I see that a more timely and relevant comparison should be on how users discarding desktop computers and shifted towards a laptop paradigm for three reasons: the evolution between generations of technologies has much more to do with (1) hardware improvement, (2) providers’ cost reduction and (3) how users perceive new technologies. With the continuous price drop + expanding storage of mobile phones and flat rate for mobile internet service, next for the whole mobile/internet industry is why users should be using the internet on their mobile.

The key problem, as I learn from today’s keynote and our mobile engineer’s, Ricardo’s presentation*, is definitely compounded further by the challenge of interoperability – how can you create a functional tool that is workable on any mobile device? If I were to submit a hack tonight, it will probably be a knowledge-sharing platform that speeds up the mobile development process, probably a portal aggregating all resources as a directory in one place where developers share insights in the most efficient way they can, so that we can progress to a standardised, incremental approach more quickly than we are today. But how can we add value to the developers and what kind of functionalities this portal should possess, so that developers will look more than just their interested areas?

I quite like Yahoo! Go 3.0 bundle concept in this regard because once you created a widget and ensure it is supported by Yahoo! Go 3.0, we have a team of 200+ engineers making sure that your widget works with as many phones in the market as possible. When Ricardo was presenting this to the hackers they look pretty intrigued – hopefully by tomorrow there will be some interesting hacks coming out! :)

Updated: Ricardo’s presentation slides are available on his blog here

One thing I particularly like about working in Europe is the amount of holidays we get!  With my whole week’s off last week,  I have had been less productive than I’d love to, and instead, completely jumped into the world of films and comedies with both feet!

Of all the 10+ films I’ve seen, I particularly feel obliged to share with you a live comedy at the Soho Theatre (and I hope I do this in time!  The show is on until the 5th of Jan) – My brother and I are porn stars.

For people who find Borat unsettling but yet paradoxically enjoyable, you will also not be too sure about when and where to laugh during this comedy, which is very very anti-pc.   If Borat guts us because it treats race (and racism) with such deliberate contempts, My Brother and I are P*rn Stars flipped both sex and religion trump cards and makes you squeamish at time, feeling unsettled at the most, but still manage to crack you up at the most unexpected spots.

I suspect that all of my friends would love it, and if you don’t, you’re probably not very liberal haha.

Glad that I don’t have much religious affiliation…

:)

Recent controversies over whether the Indian actress, Shilpa Shetty, was bullied by the other British contestants due to racism on have sparked a new hype for the Celebrity Big Brother reality show. This incident has rasied even international attention as well as the £3 million withdrawal of commercial sponsorship of Channel 4. As the pretty, upper-class, Indian star gets bullied and boycotted by the three British girls, there are also talks in the US that the government (well, Bush to be exact) is planning to deploy more troop in Iraq… what gets more attention here? Times put it right on,

It says a lot about Britain today that a violent, non-fatal racist attack would generate only a few paragraphs of news coverage. But an on-screen, non-violent row, in which race is a dimension, gets the whole nation talking, and the media and some politicans into a frenzy.

That, though, is the curious power of Big Brother — a format that means little or nothing to the over-40s, but in the post-modern, war-is-only-on-the-news era, it is able to animate millions. Amid all the talk of the death of broadcast television, and the shift to advertising online, there is no clearer reminder of the incredible power of the small screen.

I would recommend for those who have not seen the clips, please see it yourself to feel the ‘power’ of Celebrity Big Brother, if not mass popular culture: Clip (1), (2)

One exerpt of Jade, the main girl who had made touchy remarks directed toward Shilpa, may gave a full-fledge flavor on what this is about,

You need a real life in your life. That is what you need because you’re so stuck up in your ass you cannot think of anything except your own ass. You’re so stuck up in your own ass you can smell your own shit.

In an interview, John McCririck’s, the previous participant of this show sums it up,

‘Institution racism inside her and unconscious of it.. what people in this country who do come from another countries have to endure is the subtle nasty horrible continuous undercurrent of ill-feeling that Daniella is giving her […] Racism is so strong in the country that we ourselves do not understand it.’

You may not agree with what he says, and I have not stayed in this country long enough to make a fair judgement. But living outside my hometown for the real first time, I become much more aware of the attention simly because I am not ‘Western’. One main row in the Big Brother that made me empathize is on food. Shetty got teased at because she put onion in her curry, and that reminded me how some non-Asian folks I met looked at my food and actually said ‘yuck’ or ‘oh that doesn’t look too inviting’ _while I was digging in_. To me, I know that they are kind people, but it diffuses a hinted, subtle kind of ‘outgroupness’ that got to my nerve. But you also ask yourself if this is cultural misunderstanding, or they just do not know that saying things about other food, especially when others are still eating, is considered very ill-mannered in Chinese culture. Also could it be sheer curiosity, and are these legitimate justifications as well?

Finally – I think what the local press have not raised yet is the classism exposed in this incident. The register UK, depicts Jade, the supposedly bully of Shilpa as follow,

Specifically, “Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Jo O’Meara have ganged up on Shetty in the past few days”, while Goody’s mother Jackiey couldn’t pronounce the star’s name and referred to her simply as “the Indian”.

The way this article describes the mother of Jade hinted ignorance of Jade mothers, whether that stemmed from her indifference or class status, we don’t know.
At the end, I just feel severely disturbed by the classism hidden where people were not talking about. As much as Jade has been mean to the other girls, and as much as the other girls ganged up against her, I feel that it is the TV company that capitalize on the constrasting scene between the high-class Indian and ill-manner (which could mean lower-class as well) contestants who happened to be Brits. What do you think of this use of insecurity? On our own class? Gender? Appearance? Or even race?
London is going to get colder soon.

Notes: The title of this blog, ‘race is the new sex’, is a direct quote from the essay Prof. Richard Howells wrote on Borat, which is a fun read as well if you’re interested in this topic.

“Is it Because I is Black?’ Race, Humour and the Polysemiology of Ali G” in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Volume 26, Number 2, June 2006, pp. 155- 177. ISSN 0143-9685.

I love to spend more time enjoying the holiday – but the two essays have been bugging me – I hate writing and I am admittedly not a good writer… There is this sloppy-personality of mine that I have not come to terms with.  I guess most students are like that though, you write, ponder, and go back to your drafts and then you’re like – I have enough of you guys…

The good thing is, I am informally a MPhil!  That sounds really cool because I never expected myself to study more than a Bachelor since I was a kid.  Not that I don’t want to, but as I said, I am sloppy.  Hence to this date there are a few people that I have to thank, especially Dr Ng, Andrew, M and A, who gave me a lift (actually numerous lifts) when I was lost and confused.  I have to admit my superficial side – sometimes getting an extra degree doesn’t help much in terms of personal growth, but it does bring a sense of security… Though I don’t know how exactly a research degree in Wikipedia is going to help!
And my two weeks in Hong Kong had been completely bomblastic (is there such a word??).  It was really nice seeing all my mates and family, while there are weird ad hoc computer problems that happened during my stay, and unfortunately most of them were outside my range!  For example M’s ibook went through a phase of kernel panicks – from once every week to once every 2 minutes.. I tried everything I could, restarting the power management, ram and etc… Still it didn’t work – so probably there are times I just have to admit my limitations in IT :s

Also got hooked up with second life – well not that I am addicted, but it’s quite fun flying around… the learning curve was incredibly steep though; it took me a long while before I understand what’s going on there.  Meeting G from Romania here in london is nice, and she actually asked me if the avatars can take of clothes and…. of one another… Hm.. that sounds quite tricky, huh.. Potential suing and assault cases right there if these actions were possible.  /knock knock If Marshall McLuhan was still around, probably he would get quite excited about these possibilities

Hm.. I do want to blog about Hong Kong – was stroke incredibly by the familiar cultural environment and yet all the drastic recent changes, especially when I’m reading Lung Yin-Tai’s new book..  Will definitely blog more on that.

Okay okay, enough procrastination from Adorno.  Happy new year to everyone, and may your new year’s resolutions (mine seldom) come true!  xx

It’s been a while since we get to talk about Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important thinkers of the time who coined ‘medium is the message’. Talking about his theories actually reminded me of some good times of sharing ideas and ideals back then in my good-old teens… I guess time flies, and the passion about the medium dies, literally and naturally. In today’s seminar we were revisiting McLuhan, not just about the medium is the message, but also about the ‘temperature’ of the message.

Pardon my lazy and not-so-academically-precise paraphasing – medium gets hotter if they deliver information on an one-way street, such as books. Authors decide the narratives and the rythm of wich the stories are being told. On contrary, medium gets colder if users are given more discretions in responding to it, such as the Internet, which can be quite user-oriented if you think about it.

Incidentally my movie-guru mate, Ed, had kindly reminded on tonight’s BBC program, ‘Imagine’.

It explores the potential of the Internet and interviews some of the main key figures, such as the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales; David Weinberger, the author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined (great overviews of the New Media and its potential). It was nice seeing them as a reminiscent to the Wikimania conference last summer (actually Weinberger has kindly posted about my presentation :D) (I know I know, I’m being, well to some, a geek)… Over all it’s balanced and informative documentary on how the Internet provided opportunities for user-generated content, with prominent examples like youtube and myspace. But – their criticisms or suggested potential threats about the Internet remain a bit over-simplified by viewing the corporations as the monsters. I do hesitate to agree with this traditional dichotomization of commercial-as-being monster versus participatory-as-the-saint argument.

There are, well, various degrees of ‘evilness‘, so as to speak. For example, although Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all agreed to bend their corporate practices in China, they did it substially differently. While Yahoo had been accused of leading to the imprisonment of the Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, by giving out his personal information, Google vowed to do no evil – and so far – apart from imposing censorship, Google has not given out personal information of its users. In Zuckerman’s words,

In launching Google.cn, Google made an interesting decision – they did not launch versions of Gmail or Blogger, both services where users create content. This helps Google escape situations like the one Yahoo faced when the Chinese government asked for information on Shi Tao, or when MSN pulled Michael Anti’s blog. This suggests to me that Google’s willing to sacrifice revenue and market share in exchange for minimizing situations where they’re asked to put Chinese users at risk of arrest or detention.

Obviously I also understand that for an one-hour program, they have done what possible to fill in the information matrix. What I like in particular, is that I get to see the author of the 1 millionth article on Wikipedia as well as Clay Shirky in ‘real’ for the first time. And may I say – he’s actually quite charming. (Yes I like reading his blogs on many-2-many).

Finally – hm everyone is talking about second life now.. I downloaded it months ago and never have time to play with it. A quick yardstick would be there are already 17,723 photos on flickr. For those who are interested in knowing what it is but dont’ bother to start one for yourself, flickr is a good way to start your exploration. The only question I have is the copyright policy of the secondlife – how far can I play around with the screen captures? One prof was kind enough to share a moment of having a meeting with grad students on second life,

For more information, please visit their wiki.

Got invited by Paul (the founder of yellowikis) to the BBC innovation labs today in Brighton – was so happy to see such a green and nice area of England! I must travel more now that I am in the centre of everything (a ten-minutes walk from the London Bridge rail station). No excuse anymore:

The Innovation Labs are a series of creative workshops for interdisciplinary teams of professional creative technologists, application designers, software developers and interactive media designers. We are inviting independent new media companies from across England and Scotland to pitch ideas in response to a briefs set by New Media commissioners across the BBC. Up to 10 projects in each of four regions – Scotland, N England, London and S England - will then be selected to attend a 5-day long Lab. During the Lab, they will work with BBC commissioners and other mentors to develop the idea and prepare a final pitch. On the last day of the Lab, the ideas are pitched to the BBC commissioners for further development funding.

So the idea is to have a bunch of tech-savvy folks (well I’m not as hardcore, for sure) to sit together to envision the potential of BBC’s web-based contents, and how these visions can be implemented and facilitated. It is expected the actual technologies and means should be discussed as well during the pitching sections.

I was very impressed when Matt Locke, the head of the innovation unit, showed us a prototype of the BBC 2.0 (Radio 1) of which most contents were build from syndication of technorati’s blogs, flickr’s pictures as well as other live-feeds. Extremely sleek interface, probably adopting much of Ajax-like technologies. Love it.

But of course, that is a prototype; actual (as well as political) considerations are in place to hail up the implementation of such interface. For example,

• Corporate liabilities – stemmed from BBC’s respectability and as a public body
• Meta-filtering/Censorship – By opening up the content it may attract vandals and obscene content – so do you filter the information (risk being accused of censorship)? If so, how and who (to implement)?

I am also interested in actually teaming up to see if we can pitch on some ideas. But not sure if this is going to happen yet – will need to see how the ideas go… After all I am not a programmer at all. Still I learnt a lot today, especially on marketing and brain-storming; felt like I have been to a crash course today, such as the Stanford’s NABC:

Value propositions provide a common language for systematic, high-value innovation. SRI’s name for a value proposition’s four essential, defining ingredients is “NABC”, for Need – Approach – Benefits per costs – Competition:

• A statement of an important customer and market problem (Need)
• that proposes a way to use resources (Approach)
• to deliver superior customer features (Benefits per costs)
• when compared to others in the market (Competition or alternatives)

For our team I was kind of too over-caffeined and did not really touch on these four elements well enough, plus the atmosphere was quite reality-TV like (with a panel of ‘judges’) – but more fun. I particularly like the group on designing features for kids – not sure if the content of the meeting was supposed to be confidential – I better stop writing here! :D

I definitely want to go to the Battle of Ideas organized by the Institute of Ideas with RCA and other interesting parties,

The Battle of Ideas 2005 was an interdisciplinary festival at which hundreds of people had the opportunity to get to grips with and discuss the key ideas of our time. The Battle of Ideas 2006 promises to continue in this vein, presenting new issues and themes in urgent need of public debate. As the title Battle of Ideas deliberately suggests, this weekend of discussions avoids being anodyne in the name of consensus, reflecting instead the IoI’s commitment to open and robust debate. Taking ideas seriously means they must be interrogated, argued for and fought over. The weekend makes virtues of free-thinking and lively exchanges of views. We aim:

   · to showcase new arguments about the core issues of the day,
while avoiding getting bogged down in the minutiae of everyday policy

   · to initiate open-ended discussions regardless of the demands for
immediate practical outcomes, which too frequently act as a brake
on innovative thinking

Emulating the best of academia, the Battle of Ideas fosters an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and open-ended exploration of new ideas, innovative research and academic trends. Additionally we challenge academics to distil their insights for a public intellectual gathering, creating a truly accessible university. The IoI seeks to identify a new generation of thinkers, and create a space where they can meet and have their ideas held to account.

But then there is this friend visiting and I do want to show her around.  Would it be a good idea to take her to this kind of hardcore academic debates?

hmm….

/getting busier at school

So was just chilling out with my new Italian friend from my class, and she was so sweet to invite me to an art installation opening at Creshire St. At first I thought it was going to be just a few artifects and people popping champagn, but when got there I was absolutely blown away to no where….

To begin with we got into a little hotel like building, which was aparently tiny. Once you got in you see different tiny rooms, that resembled explorers’ and backpackers’ rooms, and I was thinking, so what’s so special about this??

Then I saw a room that looked like an explorer’s room, quite cute with all the ancient exotic displays,

While I was still thinking, well, that’s just furniture – I got blown away when I found that there was an entrace to a big cell underneath the building, about 5000 sq feet? In this lower ground cell, there were different patches of display, like computer waste, old SUV cars with TV and stale pizzas… Something that reminded me Kill Bill.

Then I spotted a room full of people – as well as hardcore porn posters in the container-coverted room – absolutely bewildered (if not blown away),

Well my instant reaction was, basically none. I was just kinda shocked – but then there was this huge line of people waiting by the fridge at the end of the room, and I thought people were trying to climb in the fridge for silly touristy picture – no… that was too simple – hell no!

They were actually climbing down to a secret dungeon from the fridge! The fridge is just a channel (well talking about Freudian, with this long entrance to the cave and all the explicit images on the walls..) to a dungeon,

This is how the hole looks like,

And the girl just went all the way down after signing the ‘if-shits-happen-the-organizers-are-not-responsible’ form. Dense, isn’t it? As chicken as I am (afraid of height, anything that required balancing) I didn’t go in. But the girls said it wasn’t that much of a deal down there.

I think what was brilliant of this installation is the idea of layering – You were standing on a random street in London thinking that there was a random hotel with random rooms – but when you got in you found that there was a huge cell inside of which there was secret entrance that resembled the little hole in the movie, being John Malkovich. That’s brilliant. I was rather blown away by this.

Gees. Still digesting what I saw today.

I’ve been busy these days – making my own bedside table with scrap cardboards, a glue and a cutter.

If you click this flickr link, you get to see how I created the whole thing from scratch – without a ruler… :)

I’m darn proud of saving up the money (and wasting that on other stupid stuff /sigh)

Had some great discussions today in class extending the notion of Enlightenment – ‘the quest of knowledge’. Been to the galleries this weekend – the King’s library of the National Gallery has provided a timely immersion into what enlightenment was like, as a historical and mainly Western legacy, for a foreigner like me in London. Oddly, I’m feeling like home now. Perhaps that explains my two life lines – hopefully one line stands for Hong Kong, one line stands for London?

As stated in this title, I do not intend (and don’t see myself adequate enough) to delve into the details of what constitutes human rights here. This post is a response to my particular interests in today’s question, ‘Is it possible to have human rights without the individuals to it?’ This mesmerizing question itself is twofold: (1) I am not sure what this question means itself and (2) it evokes my ‘Chineseness’: I know some are strongly antagonistic towards this touchy (and yet imperative) concept that mainly rooted in the West before it’s been raised to an international scale of concerns in recent decades. Well I better capitalize on this intellectual loophole ;) and my rough guess of the gist of this question would be – Can the notion of the individuals, as persons versus the collective, be set aside in the definitions of human rights?

Article 1 of UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that,

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

To do so I am quoting Article 1 of UN’s definition here, with more on their website. With reference to the question of today, I had this overarching tendency to pair this ‘spirit of brotherhood’ with the Chinese notion of ‘ren’ 仁 or 仁心. My rough translation of ‘ren’ would be empathy and compassion that inherently exists among us, with one popular story among us of which the Confucian teacher illustrated the idea of ‘ren’ by suggesting that most of us would offer a helping hand when we see a kid is falling into a well. It is the intolerance of suffering, whether on oneself or on another person, that constitutes the basis of Confucian teaching. As much as it doesn’t introduce individualistic elements in our social milieu, it highly resembles a sketchy conceptualization of human rights.

So is it possible to discuss human rights in the context of a collective, family-oriented culture? I do believe so. Ideally the Chinese way of looking after one another in the family provides an exceptionally strong social safety net, that perhaps, indirectly uphold some basic assumptions of human rights – with less emphasis on being ‘free and equal’, but more on ‘respects and responsibilities’ of which I see as the mirror images of ‘dignity and rights’. Basically the prerequisite of dignity and rights is that people need to respect one another and take up their own responsibilities – I somehow conceptualize them a bit like an input-output relationship, and I do think that the Chinese filial ways of dealing with human relationship provides tons of ‘input’ to generate dignity and rights.

However, as you may frown upon the major fallacy of this argument, is that nothing is such ideal. There are the problems of authoritarian, skewed hierarchies of power, limitation of individualities (hence, creativity and autonomy) and over-reliance on social network.

Yet, do we overlook what our cultures (after thousands of years of distillation) can offer?

I hate answering a question with another question, but I guess this seems appropriate, at least for the time being.

PS: Yes, I note my generalizations and don’t intend to fix them. So don’t complain. ;)