One blogger seems to think so.

The ‘Colors…Pretty‘ blog recently featured an article in which the author claims to have proof that upon upload, Flickr saturates your photos’ colors a bit more and sharpens them a tad, thus making your photos appear ‘better’.

According to the author:

This is a capture of the exact same photo. On the top is a thumbnail of my photo rendered on Zoto (3.0 beta) . It’s blurry and the detail is lost. On the bottom is the same photo thumbnail rendered on Flickr. Notice how sharp the detail and color appear. Unlike Flickr, Zoto is rendering an ‘accurate’ thumbnail of my photo.

Here’s a link to the image. (opens in a new window or tab)

I’m wondering if the sharpening only applies to the creation of the thumbnail version of the image or the entire image. I’m guessing the thumbnail, although the author does not give the original link to their flickr page to allow us to judge on our own.

Continue reading ‘Is Flickr Editing Your Content?’

WHAT IS IT?

Orz is an emoticon that represents a kneeling or bowing person. The ‘O’ acts as the head, the ‘r’ as the arms, and the ‘z’ as the body and folded legs. It is popularly used by people from or in Asian countries.

USAGE

Proper context of use is during reverence of awesomeness. Here, I present one such scenario:

Person A: I can eat 5 packs of saltine crackers without water in under a minute!
Person B: Lammmmeeee. I can juggle bears. Observe!
Person A: You are too awesome. Orz

HOW TO ORZ

The following is a helpful diagram with steps to properly Orz. If you can’t read the Chinese descriptions, no worries — I think the images should suffice.

Thanks to Eric for the diagram!

ADVANCED ORZ

Here are just a couple of Orz variations:

or2
oΩ
囧rz
商rz

For more, visit here.

Wikipedia has fairly standard search functionality - full-text keyword matches, really. To enhance this functionality, some researchers in Germany have extracted various types of structured information from Wikipedia and used RDF to build semantic models to represent this information, organizing them for more intelligent retrieval. The result of this is a semi-Semantic-Web construct called dbpedia.

The benefit with this is that now we can make semantic searches. Some of the sample queries include searches to generate a list of notable scientists and their doctoral advisors. Another finds a list of notable films lasting longer than 5 hours.

Continue reading ‘dbpedia - semantic search for Wikipedia’

I just ran across a series of hilarious Japanese TV clips, any insights to what’s being said would be great, though not necessary to enjoy them.

Live action Pac-man, where you get beat on the head with foam sticks instead of getting eaten by a ghost:

Man Gets Punked by an Alien

Don’t Mess with the Egg or the Chickens Will Beat You Down

100 Person Flashmob Randomly Chasing After People

Lisa is one of my contacts on Flickr, and her partner, Robb, has been recovering from a spinal cord injury for about a year now. He has only recently begun to regain feeling in his feet, so they figured they would try to map out the regions where he could feel again (pink), and where he couldn’t (green). Here’s how she described their method in her blog post:

After some trial and error, we arrived at a method by which I would run a knitting needle along Robb’s foot, and he would tell me what he could and couldn’t feel. I would raise my left hand into Robb’s line of vision, and once I started moving the needle with my right hand, I would wiggle the fingers of my left hand. At that point, Robb would describe whether or not he could feel what I was doing by saying, “no….no….no….no….yes…..yes….no….no…..” I would run the needle softly over the same area a few times, and then apply colored tape to map where he could and couldn’t feel.

The result is beautiful, fascinating, and so wonderfully human. It’s the opposite of the depersonalizing medical markup you could imagine being applied in a hospital. Instead it’s vibrant, real, and inspiring. I think it has a lot to do with that fantastic quilt!

Thanks to Robb and Lisa for letting me write about them!

A 1000 text messages between the author and his friends as he resigns his job and goes traveling Europe and India. Thats essentially the plot and the contents of a new Finnish novel. The messages are to be listed in a chronological order in a 332-page book. Given that the messages are rife with grammatical errors and abbreviations, wouldn’t it be cool if the novel be distributed only via text messages? It can be a kind of living the characters, at least the receiving and reading part. But it can also be really tiring to live through somebody’s life for a 1000 messages and hence the novel may gain little popularity. Somethings change little even though technology keeps changing. Narration may be one of them.

Yesterday a rarely encountered deep-sea species of shark was captured and video taped off the coast of Japan. The 1.6 m frilled shark looks pretty fearsome, but was near death, and died in captivity.

Thanks Archie!

This post was originally written for my Social and Organizational Issues of Information class at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. We’ve been reading much to my (dis)satisfaction about social theories of technology, most notably Social Construction of Technology and Technological Determinism. The format of the original article was written for the class blog, which is available in the link provided above.

This ‘blog post has been socially constructed. Or has it? Some years ago, I decided that I needed a higher income, and a job I enjoyed more. My Bachelor’s degree couldn’t afford me the employment opportunities or mobility (or pay) I desired. Why? Because society has dictated what you can and cannot demand for work (or pay) with a lowly Bachelor’s degree. To get a ‘better’ job, I needed to conform to society’s expectations. A Master’s degree sets you in a different employment category, not for any reason, ultimately, other than because of society’s expectations. If I did not follow the compromise of giving two years of my life to study, in order to meet those expectations, I would not be here writing this post.

Or, wait, has my fate truly been a deterministic one?

Continue reading ‘Socially Construct This’

So now people are measuring the carbon footprint of your closet, both because of increased trend changes (some stylists claim that styles can actually change week to week and day to day in today’s modern communications world) resulting in waste, and because of amount of energy consumed for production, washing and drying of clothes.

Here’s the skinny from the NY Times:

Can Polyester Save the World?

Not that I can often afford it, but Patagonia is a supplier of organic cotton clothes and fabrics made from recycled goods (old plastics bottles, etc) in some of their clothes. I find their stuff really comfy and simple, but well designed. They also have probably one of the best satisfaction and replacement guarantee in the commercial clothes market. Of course, this doesn’t eliminate the impact of producing, cleaning, and drying, but if you can still find a way to justify the price here’s their site:

Patagonia

Skeptical about the offensive potential of a pillow, I had current PFL world champion and expert striker Champain blast me twice in the face, full force. The feeling is not unlike getting hit by an extremely soft, perhaps down-feathered locomotive.

I await the men’s league.

Thanks Trey!