I've posted our photos from Confluence in Pittsburgh, PA and from Archon/Nasfic in Collinsville, Illinois as well as photos from visiting earthworks at Newark, OH and at Cahokia in Collinsville. Enjoy.
As usual, we are behind on captioning.
We have posted some of our Boskone photos on Flickr. We'll post more later.
(Meanwhile, I have come down with something involving red spots which I caught from my daughter, and so am missing my afternoon panel.)
Another important thing to do on the internet:
Try out Petals: Fine Flickr Flowers. Watching its progress is sort of like watching snow fall. The same site has a similar app called Plumage that renders a series of photos as feathers.
Here is another really important thing you can do with your life on the Internet: Spell with Flickr!
Isn't the world a much better place since the advent of Web 2.0!
David has been a number of places lately that I haven't and has brought back big batches of pictures that I have posted for him on Flickr:
Fenn Sales Conference in Canada (quite entertaining—it had a 70s theme!), Rob Sawyer's party in Mississauga, Canada, featuring much of the Toronto science fiction scene; and the Tor Books Christmas Dinner (see editor Bob Gleason doing Tarot readings!).
To get a sense of the full horror of how bookselling sales conferences work, here is a shot of David, getting into the spirit of the event:
As usual, David hasn't written captions yet for most of the pix, but I'll try to get him to do that.
A photo taken by my four-year-old this afternoon:
Whatever the question is, the answer is fish.
(A Korean film crew was once sent to my house to interview me about one of my books for Korean television. I noticed that the cameraman made sure to take a shot of the fish decals on the sliding glass door. I never did find out if they made the final cut.)
One of the things I like to do on Thanksgiving is watch the Flickr feed on words like "turkey." You can watch other people's cooking progress over the course of the day.
9:19 AM: So far, there is a pic of a family trying to defrost a turkey that isn't fully defrosted yet.
Now. On to cooking!
12:51 PM: A couple of favorite Flickr photos so far: Dog meets raw turkey, and this one:
Here are my own Thankgsgiving pix so far. My turkey is in the oven. I stuffed it with limes plus and onion and a couple of bay leaves. I talked David down from a 20 lb turkey to a 10 lb one this year, so there's not much room in the body cavity.
I'm doing the stuffing separately. The house smells good and we've got a lovely fire in the woodstove.
3 PM: Turkey done:
David went to the party launching the new Orbit science fiction line, which was held at the Dream Hotel on 55th Street in New York. He brought home many pictures, of which this is just the tip of the iceberg. Click HERE for more.
UPDATE: See also Media Bistro:
It seemed like nearly everyone in New York's science fiction publishing circles came to the Dream Lounge last night to celebrate the American launch of Orbit, the formerly UK-based imprint that Hachette is grooming as a global player.
I've posted a bunch of photos from the Wolfram Technology Conference 2006. Enjoy!
This Brin family tortoise eating a flower strikes me somehow as an image that belongs on one of those motivational posters they sell in the advertising mags on airplanes. I just haven't figured out the caption.
Night before last, I was asked by a good friend to do a quick Google Earth favor. Yesterday morning, I finished a draft of the graphic. I was asked if the graphic could be given to "Bill" to post (i.e. Bill Roggio of the Counterterrorism Blog). Sure, I said. And a little while later, I tossed it up on Flickr as an afterthought. Then I decided to blog the pic myself: Being a goddess of Google Earth, I have a different constituency than Bill does.
This evening, Flickr reports that the graphic has been viewed 20,363 times. I'm a bit bewildered by this, since it was created to help with a discussion among a very small group of people. Sure it was topical and was picked up by BoingBoing, but I've done topical stuff in Google Earth before and had it picked up by BoingBoing and other major blogs. And this one is running at about 20 times the popularity of the next runner up in my Flickr account. And the Hezbollah bombing range graphic is now about 5 times as popular as my previous Greatest Hit, a scan of some fake Yu-Gi-Oh! cards from my son's card collection.
The way the graphic is supposed to be used is at full rez in coordination with the list of missiles and their ranges that appears in the upper right. There are also distance markers for the concentric circles that you can't read except at full rez. I suspect that the majority of my viewers are not looking at it full rez, and most probably pay no attention to the list of missiles.
When the graphic was thrown out there to the public, I was expecting its general assumptions to be questioned. Those circles are deliberately fuzzy to keep people from getting the idea that they represent a greater degree of precision than they do. Instead, what has been mostly questioned are my politics and my decision to orient the map from Lebanon looking south.
A number of people have remarked that I (or someone) should do a graphic of what Israel can do to Lebanon. Here's the reason I'm not going to: that Israel maybe's got the bomb and could maybe transform Beirut into a green glass plain is not new information. Hezbollah's new-found bombing range into Israel is new information, and very important new information. Now, I don't think this would be a politic moment to explicate my opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of Israel as a nation state. But in the past, blogger Gary Farber has been quite articulate on the subject of my failure to appreciate Israel. So this graphic isn't about whether I value Israeli lives over Lebanese. One of the general tenets of my personal politics is that if it shouldn't happen here, it shouldn't happen there, and this certainly holds true for members of the general public having bombs dropped on their heads.
Now, about the orientation of the map: I am tempted to speculate that there may be a class of persons out there who keep their heads permanently oriented due north. However, that would be unfair: somewhere around here, we have a t-shirt bearing the slogan, "Australia: No longer down under," showing the standard Mercator projection of the world upside down. So I do understand. But stilll . . . .
First of all, this graphic was created to facilitate a small group discussion. And there was some conversation about how to orient it. I tried a number of things, but what seemed most appropriate was to orient it from roughly the geographic point of view of those launching missiles, so that those things easiest to hit were biggest and closest, and so that the most speculative targets were smaller and further away. Also, I opted for an angled view, taking advantage of Google Earth's simulation of 3-D reality rather than a flat-on top-down view, to give a sense of verisimilitude. Apparently, I succeeded.
But it bears mentioning that even maps generally perceived to be "properly oriented" may involve distortion. Check out the rather good New York Times map. Can you tell me what the distortion is? I know because I used a piece of it as a Google Earth overlay.
All this having been said, I'm glad so many people have found my map worth looking at. Flickr now reports it's been viewed 20,512 times. At bottom my project, and the project of this blog, is to explore and improve methodology. And I hope in all those visitors, someone got new ideas of how to better use GIS-based visualization. Because exploring the possibilities of visualization is what I think I'm on about. And guess I must be doing something right.
Every once in a while, I get in a mood and I want to radically reconfigure what my blog is and does at the information architecture level: the mood I described previously as "being tired of writing on a roll of paper towels."
Well, I'm in that mood again. Yes, I have a Typepad Pro account, and yes, in principle I can customize my CSS, but I stopped doing that some time back because I found that customized CSS in Typepad made me a whole lot less fleet of foot in making sudden changes to response to the flow of readerly traffic. If you use customized CSS, then you have to tinker with your customized CSS every time you want to make a change, rather than using the Typepad GUI.) When there are sudden changes of circumstance -- such as for a few hours having the best site on the planet concerning the NOLA levee breaks -- I down want to mess around with CSS. Those are precisely the times when I don't want to touch the code and instead want to focus on content. So instead, I do a lot of fancy things with Typelists and Flickr badges.
So whenever I'm in this mood, I google "blog design" and discover once again that what you are supposed to do when you design your blog is make a splashy graphic for the top of your page and figure out clever ways to make your sidebar items visually distinctive. And you are supposed to remove all excess information from your page (the same thing the clutter busting books recommend you do with your living room). But both at home and in my blog, I inhabit an irretrievably information-bearing space. So I am looking for the best ways to stuff in more info, not strip it down.
So although I am perfectly capable of making a lovely visually distinctive splash-graphic that would express the inner self I want you to know, I just don't have room for that kind of thing.
First of all, after several years of not, I finally made myself put up pix of my book covers. I am terrible about remembering to do self-promotional stuff. If I just put the book covers up, and a million-odd page views flow by, presumably I've done that job relatively painlessly, and I can get down to telling you what I'm on about today.
Secondly, most of my readers each day don't come in by the front door (only about 20%). So whatever messages I want to get across will be lost of the other 75% of my readers if they aren't on every page. So I work my sidebars very hard. I'm constantly creating new sidebar Typelists, and adjusting them, and turning them on and off. Today I want you to know how to donate to Pakistan earthquake relief finds, tomorrow, I want you to know all the best lines from the Kenya corruption scandals, and the day after that I may want to share my immense link farm having to do with military the Iranian military maneuvers.
One of the things the articles on blog design tell you to do is find your niche topic and stick to it, since readers want things made simple for them. I'm not going to do that, and so I need a blog design that will just deal with the fact that my interests change from day to day.
And these compete for space with my immense blogroll, various Flickr photo-feeds on subjects I'm watching, and my vast collection of tags. I've really heavily gotten into using tags lately. (A day or so I went looking for an easy way to do a tagcloud in Typepad and failed. The easy automated tagcloud thingie didn't like my RSS feed. I'm not sure it would have done what I had in mind anyway. I had been through this exercise before, it turns out.)
Whenever I'm in this mood, I find myself trying things I tried last time I felt like this. One thing I tried today that didn't work last time I tried it was making feeds to add to a blog out of RSS feeds from Connotea searches. Last time I tried this, it didn't work. This time it did. I don't know why. (The feed in question is added to password protected blog in my site for my own use for note-taking.)
One thing I did learn from spinning my wheels on this yet again (and puttering around in Connotea) is that there is a word for part of what I do with my blog. In addition to being a means of publication, it is also what's called a sensor web. While certainly my blog serves to give you information, one of its primary purposes is for me to be able to suck information in. I talked about this in my interview with Carol Pinchefsky:
Cramer says, "After a year or so, I began to understand that by blogging, I was actually receiving a lot more info than I was putting out. By this point, I regard my blog as rather like my tongue. Sure I can use it to talk with, but more fundamentally it is a sensory organ."
Who knew that NASA already has a Sensor Web Applied Research Planning Group? So. Here I am in Pleasantville reinventing the wheel, I guess. Here is how they define the term:
Sensor Web Definition
A system composed of multiple science instrument/processor platforms that are interconnected by means of a communications fabric for the purpose of collecting measurements and processing data for Earth or Space Science objectives.Sensor Web Concept
The following illustration depicts the principle Sensor Web concepts. Note that some platforms are shown having science instruments whereas others do not have instruments. An example of a platform with no instruments is a computer system that executes a numerical meteorological forecast model and that provides its results to one or more other platforms.
And they have this nifty graphic to illustrate:
Unlike NASA, I don't have millions of dollars of equipment with which to take data. But the model looks very familiar to me. The "Communications Fabric" is the combination of my email accounts and my comment sections; the "Data Synthesis/Fusion" is blogging in combination with consultation with others, and my primary end user is me, but you get to share.
So can someone out there help design the sensor web blog? That's what this is, and I know it is not optimally designed. (And yes, I'll keep banging away at it, whenever I get in this mood.)
I was looking at the Nigeria tag on Flickr to see if anyone had good pix related to the Charles Taylor arrest story, but found instead some nice shots of this mornings eclipse as seen in Nigeria. Neat, huh?
The photo is from jwolson's photostream.
This morning, I happened across a really subtle page on Flickr with a screenshot promoting the idea of going to China for one's organ transplants on the basis that it is easier to get a transplant match and is cheaper than a transplant in the US. All the photos on the site from which the screen shot is taken are of caucasians, and the target market for these transplant services seems to be Americans. I was seaching on the tag "censorship" and at first I didn't get it. When I did, I nearly choked on my coffee.
Here's the screenshot:
Though the issue of where the organs come from is never really addressed on the pages of the Yeson site I read, there is the general implication that matches are not too hard to come by in China as compared to the US. In his blog, Dr. Yeson remarks:
Currently, more than 17,000 people in the United States are waiting for liver transplants. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), about 5,300 liver transplantations were performed in the United States in 2002.
Also, there is a discussion of using living donors.
The site never does explain why it might be easier in China to finding matching donors for Americans than it would be in the US. The general implication is that there is a far larger pool of available organs to draw upon. But the fellow on Flickr helps out with this link:
Majority of China's Transplants Come from Prisoner's Organs
Increasing numbers of patients with liver cirrhosis or renal failure from regions including South East Asia, North America, Europe and Australia are flying to China for organ transplants. China has become the world's center for organ trade and transplants. But, what China may not be revealing to the world, is that the main source for organ transplants come from executed convicts.
According to the U.S.-based China Information Center, due to higher survival rates of liver and kidney transplants, China's hospitals are experiencing a boom in this business. As such, recently, there have been moves to expand facilities and make liver treatment and transplant more accessible to patients.
Think about this the next time you hear a story about Yahoo getting someone in China arrested.
See also this document, Sale of Human Organs in China, from the website of the US State Dept.
(On the other hand, sometimes grim tales of organ transplants are not true.)
A vision inspired by the motion of lights in Mumbai, as seen on Flickr, a photo shot by an architecture student who lives there. The caption reads:
grungy evening in mumbai.... the lights have become violent dragons, and they want to be free souls.. so that they can fly and be on their own... see the energy which they possess... see their will to be free from rigid society around... the young brains of today wont remain silent spectators... their energies will blast someday soon... they too will fly like these violent dragons.. burning off everything what comes in their way.....
(I shot the photo with Cory's camera.)
My husband, David Hartwell, was awarded the Skylark last night.
The Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction (the Skylark) is presented annually by NESFA to some person, who in the opinion of the membership, has contributed significantly to science fiction, both through work in the field and by exemplifying the personal qualities which made the late "Doc" Smith well-loved by those who knew him.
And here's a nice shot Cory took of my hand, and of my eyes, both taken through the magnifying glass on the award.
Oh, yeh, I should probably also show David actually receiving the award:
As should be obvious, this was an event of deep seriousness.
I think this photo has such amazing atmosphere. It makes voting seem like a sacred act, which I suppose in some sense it is. The caption reads:
Haitians vote late into the night by candle light at a polling station on February 7, 2006 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Many voting stations were overwhelmed by the amount of people showing up to vote and stations had to be kept open all night to make sure everyone could vote. For the most part, the first election since Aristide went off with little violence. (Michael Orin Kleinfeld)
Here is the rest of the photoset. [UPDATE: I'm not sure what happened. That whole photoset vanished. here's the photostream it came from; maybe the photographer found a buyer.] FURTHER UPDATE: Now the photo is back up. HERE is a link to a big version, and HERE is a link to the photoset.
Here are two more pictures from Jishnu Das with long, informative captions. (Bigger view with legible captions is HERE.)
He says:
I wanted to put this picture up to show the dramatic differences between a "mohalla" (settlement) and a "mauza" (village). The entire photo shows a SINGLE village---Basantkot (as an aside, the village is named after a Sikh woman who used to live here before partition and means "the home of spring"). This is the largest village in the area. The way the road goes, it leads directly to the big pink house in the main settlement, and a consistent complaint is that more relief goes into this settlement compared to the other. We tried to see whether people in one settlement knew the others, and they do not. So for instance, starting from the right corner, people in Lavanseri could name the people in Jabarseri (the abandoned settlement in another photo), but no one else could. These village structures are leading to 2 problems--first, we are embroiled in a nightmare trying to sort out geo-locations of villages, since we have different readings at different points from different sources, and we have no way of knowing from the data that settlement "Jabarseri" is part of mauza "Basantkot". Second, and perhaps more critically, relief agencies in the area where we were would visit the main settlement. We consistently find that this is not enough, both for information and equitable targeting of relief.
He says:
One of the tasks in the near future is further compensation for housing damage, which may require further verification of structural collapse. A hard job at best, this picture suggests that the task may be harder given the way people have used material from damaged houses during the winter. The picture shows a small area that contained FOUR structures prior to the earthquake (I had gone in December, when these were clearly marked). The debris from these had been cleared up and stacked, and a lot of the wood had already been used for fuel and warmth. The circle on the left shows the debris from 2 structures, the one in the middle from a 3rd, and incredibly, the 3 pieces of wood in the right circle a fourth (the pile was much larger in December). The two intact structures were constructed AFTER the earthquake to take families through the winter. At this point, figuring out how many structures there were is completely dependent on accurate answers from the people living there.
Jishnu Das of RISE-PAK is just back from another trip to Pakistan for earthquake relief. I published his report of his previous trip not long ago. He's set up a Flickr account and uploaded pictures. Jishnu's day job is as an economist for the World Bank, so there's some fairly sophisticated information conveyed by the photos and their captions. Here's a brief selection:
Caption: In the union council where we were, all the schools, public and private were destroyed. While only one public school was semi-functional, all the private schools were back up and running within a fortnight, often in desperate conditions. We visited 4, all of which looked the same--a single tent, no books, no desks--but trying hard.
And here's another shot from the same school:
Caption: The bags were given by a relief agency (unfortunately with nothing in them...)
This picture was taken in Basantkot:
Caption: Sitting at one of the settlements. A lot of men in the area used to migrate to towns/cities during the winter months. The man on the bottom right for instance, has spent some time in the Middle East and used to work in Karachi. All of these people have come back--they feel that they cannot leave their families during the winter in tents to fend for themselves. One repercussion is that earnings in the area have dropped remarkably: in our surveys, we find that earnings are roughly a third of what they were the year before.
Caption: In food rations, all the villages in our area received either 75Kilos (165lbs) or 50Kilos of flour from the WFP and some additional rations from the army. They received the flour around December 8th or so and have not received any additional rations after. As a calculation: if flour is the only staple, 50 kilos for a family of 7 (average) finishes in around 12 days. Some complained about the quality of the flour, but this was not a consistent complaint...
MINUSTAH in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as seem on Flickr this morning. The photographer's caption reads:
Self-portrait with Brazilian peacekeeper, taken with my little Canon point-and-shoot. Though shoot is probably the wrong word....
The photographer is Tony Allen-Mills, a journalist for the Sunday Times of London.
He's also got a shot of the view from the terrace of the Hotel Montana:
I just noticed via my Flickr photo-feed for the tag earthquake that there has been an earthquake in Tokyo (5.1 magnitude). I looked at my earthquake Flickr badge and saw all these photos of the Tokyo subways, And sure enough, there was an earthquake today.
This reminds me of something I've been meaning to mention for a while: how easy it would be to document human rights violations using systems like Flickr. And to some extent this is already being done. I wrote this up a while back in private correspondence, meaning to revise. But I think I'll just put this out there now. The world needs to know that there are much better ways to document human rights violations than sending documents via email to Westchester housewives like, say, me. Here's a rough outline of what I was thinking:
I am working from how I tracked info on the situation in Pakistan following the earthquake, but this would work just as well for human rights violations. There's some really gruesome stuff in Flickr documenting the arrival of medical teams in remote places weeks after the earthquake that had had no relief whatsoever. I had never seen three week old untreated wounds before. And the people in the pictures look so grateful to finally be getting help.
To document human rights violations, all they have to do is take digital photos and upload them to Flickr; tag them with relevant tags, like say HAITI and MASSACRE and such; geotag them: i.e. give lat and lon coords, or street address, or other really specific info. The photos come in date stamped in the first place with the data from the camera, but sometimes the camera is set wrong, so they want to be sure. And my additional advice to any one doing that wold be to add little or no political rhetoric, because what is important is for the objective observer over the Internet to ascertain that something happened and what it was.
In Flickr, one can make what are called Flickr badges. I have a couple on my site. You can make Flickr badges with feeds for specific tags. I've got one for "earthquake", and one for "Google Earth" and also that's how the photos at the top of my page work.
So you get the photos uploaded to Flickr. Then you can set up blogs all over the place with Flickr tags that will broadcast those pix. You can, at your leisure, add info to those blogs to go with the pix. Also, you don't have to have just one Flickr account. You can set up a new one each time you want to upload if your really want to. And there are other photo uploading services. That's just the one I know best and used to get hard info out of Pakistan after the earthquake and out of NOLA before that.
One of my new years resolutions is that certain things are going to be different and better in the 21st century. This is a start, and it's only February 1st.
I suppose I should have thought to look for it before. I just discovered the magnetic poetry on Flickr.
My goodness.
Our own magnetic poetry, generated at Sarah Smith's house in Brookline in the big blizzard of February of 2003, is collected here, in a post entitled Great Minds Sink Ships, though not typeset in the original magnets.
I think there's something very poignant about this photo from Balakot in Pakistan of a barber giving a haircut in the rubble: an attempt at civilization in the face of the disaster, made more meaningful by the everydayness of the act.
MEANWHILE, the incidence of pneumonia in the quake zone skyrockets.
UPDATE: The photographer, Ejaz Asi, sends a few more shots from the same sequence:
About the pictures, he says
Just thought to send few more shots from the same series as well as two more 279 and 744. I thought both of them make the same point stronger.
He also send along several from the sequence of people cooking, with the remark:
Just like any other family, this man and boy were also provided food by the camp but they rather chose to make their own, I think, only because they are not used to sitting idle and this is only how they are going to move on with their lives.
A photo taken across the Line of Control from the pakistan-controlled side of Kashmir to the Indian-controlled side. The caption reads:
These little girls -- who live across line of control (LOC) near Titwal Sector, of AJK, thought that my long L-shaped camera (Sony F727) was a sort of Gun and they expected to here a big bang sound out of it, so they were scared.
The caption reads:
2nd Lt. Kristy Bischoff gives a balloon to a young earthquake survivor at the 212th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. Photo by Airman 1st Class Barry Loo.
