The Pains of Being Pure at Heart were at the Paradiso on Monday night. I met up with lead singer and guitar player Kip Berman before the show to chat about the tour and renting his apartment in New York City out to crazy POBPAH fans. The interview was published on the Amsterdam Event Guide site.

What have been some of the better shows on the European tour?
We had the most insane show up in Manchester at the Chorlton Irish, it was Morrissey’s birthday and everyone was rowdy. It was this tiny little room with no ventilation and people were just crowd surfing and cracking into the stage.

Pains of Being Pure at Heart has a busy tour schedule this summer, are there any bands that you are looking forward to seeing?
I’m really looking forward to our west coast tour with a band called Girls that I really, really like. The album isn’t out quite yet, but it will be soon, and they are amazing.

What have you got planned while you’re in Amsterdam?
We’re definitely excited to check out the city, but we have to leave at 6:30am tomorrow to take a ferry back to Dover. We’re disappointing – I know.

I had read an article where you said you were cool with people downloading your music: what has stopped you guys from releasing your music for free on the site?
It’s downloadable anywhere else, you can’t physically put it on the site because we have record labels that still actually need to sell stuff. Recently I was looking at something and noticed a torrent for Pains of Being Pure at Heart with 5 million hits.

Honestly, people can find it if they want to find it, so I’m not going to try to stop anyone. But I think that people are conscious of the fact that you have to do something for the band in return. We find that people come to our shows and we’d rather play for people than not play for people. And people are usually honest, they’re like, “Hey, I downloaded your shit. That was cool, I’ll buy the vinyl now or a t-shirt”. So you kind of have to roll with it, and we’re just psyched that people are listening to it.

When you guys are working on new songs how do you come together and share ideas?
I think that democracy is overrated in terms of songwriting. If everyone writes 25% of a song then it sounds like a bit, well you know.

There are certain types of music where complete and total collaborative ideas might be worth while, but for us I kind of write the structure and lyrics and the ideas for the song. It’s up to the band to play out those ideas and bring them to life, and offer themselves once the blueprint has kind of been drawn. The songs wouldn’t be good if they stopped with me because everyone contributes there ideas to them.

Kurt is a fantastic drummer and I can’t even program more than one drum beat. So, just from him the song has such a better feel, because I can only do so much. Like on my keyboard drum set! Our first EP sounds like that, it doesn’t have real drums they are all electronic drums.
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Ron Kok and I presented Shotspot yesterday at “Visualizing our World of Data” in Amsterdam. Here is a pic, I’m the white shirt to the left:

How ShotSpot Works to Improve Upon Flickr:

If you find a photo on Flickr the geographic data (from the camera or set manually) will sometimes tell where the photo was taken. But where is the photographer from? You can’t tell. Looking at the Flickr API we realized that we could find the location of the user based on the location of their user account. We could then assume that if a user is taking pictures in a country other than his own that he is traveling.

What we’ve done with Shotspot is allow users of the application to look for trends in travel and make comparisons of photographs throughout the year or at different times of day.

Shotspot is for anyone interested in filtered large amounts of Flickr photos. But more specifically we hope that it will be a useful tool for photographers that want to compare photos and travel trends. Based on the data we hope they can then make a more auspicious decision on when to capturing a particular shot.

ShotSpot Beta Release

Shotspot is still in development, but here is a sneakpeak.
(Minimum Requirements: Firefox 3.x, Google Chrome 2.x, or Safari 3.x)
http://www.ronkok.com/work/infvis/pub/

The Shotspot project was developed with the help of Ron Kok and Remon van den Bergh (Information Science @ University of Amsterdam) and Bohe Xie (MA Editorial Design @ MaHKU in Utrecht).

More Info

*Anne Helmond covered Shotspot and the event on the University of Amsterdam New Media blog.

*Also from yesterday’s event: check out the brilliant WorldMinder project that improves upon Gapminder - from my friends Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff, Arthur Stobbelaar and Lisa Ing.

We will be presenting our project ShotSpot at CREA Theatre on May 14, 2009. It’s free entrance (and there is rumor of some free drinks as well).

Looks like I won 3rd Prize and $500 in the UC Santa Barbara BlueSky Innovation Competition for my submission Anatomical Analytics. Here is the full announcement and some highlights from my entry.

The following is an abstract I submitted to Wiley-Blackwell Publishing for possible inclusion in their upcoming book Facebook & Philosophy:

Amateur Spies and Facebook Schizophrenia:

The News Feed Makes it More Difficult to Lie

The Facebook News Feed ensures that we will never be alone again—for better or for worse. By piecing together fractions of our friends’ lives, it sets the tone for a dystopian-style ‘ambient awareness’ in which we are constantly watching each other out of the corners of our eyes. The News Feed epitomizes media theorist Neil Postman’s outcry that we have become a culture controlled by our obsession with entertainment. Postman illustrates how our culture is less like that of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Big Brother controlled society by depriving the public of information, and more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where the public is “reduced to passivity and egoism” as they “drown in a sea of irrelevance.”

One thing that Facebook does have in common with Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the other hand, is the concept of amateur surveillance. Importantly, it is the “amateur spies” of the Thought Police who pose just as great a risk as Big Brother, and who ultimately lead to the protagonists’ tragic fate. With Facebook we all have the potential to be amateur spies. The ability to monitor the lives of hundreds of people at a glance is reminiscent of Michael Foucault’s Panopticon, where the central guard can keep an eye on all the prisoners at once. On Facebook, the corresponding metaphor might be that each of us occupies the position of the central guard while at the same time being permanently visible as the prisoner.

Interestingly, due to our knowledge of this surveillance and the fear that any one of our friends has the power to broadcast into our News Feed, we are disciplined to be honest. Furthermore, struggles between our need to be the object of another’s desire (Jacques Lacan’s ‘paranoid knowledge’) and our fear of Foucault’s “inspecting gaze”, lead to a type of schizophrenia where we simultaneously divulge our most private details in the form of status updates, while being paranoid of being tagged in compromising photos. With every new friend we add we willingly sacrifice privacy for pleasure, and in doing so we become more accountable though paranoid.

PDF Version

Lawrence Lessig’s most recent book Remix: Making Art & Commerce Thrive In The Hybrid Economy was finally put under a CC license today and is not available for free on Lessig’s site.

Currently I’m working on my thesis researching issues of anti-capitalism, digital piracy and Creative Commons and how these forces are reshaping ‘the music industries’. As a result of the subject matter, a vast amount of my resources happens to be licensed under CC.  Often I’ll buy the book if I’m going to read it in entirety, but for research purposes accumulating a free library of PDFs has saved me so much time and lead me in directions I may not have stumbled upon.

Anyway, here are a few recommended (and free!) books I’ve been reading:

Remix, Free Culture, The Future of Ideas and Code 2.0 - Lawrence Lessig
Capitalism 3.0 - Peter Barnes
The Wealth of Networks - Yochai Benkler
The Pirates Dilema - Matt Mason

In addition, PDF Search Engine is really helpful for finding books:
http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/

And I’ve found that Mac Spotlight (the free search thingy on everyone’s Mac) is great research tool. I can comb through hundreds of PDFs instantly. It’s kind of like having a local version of Google Books search.

The following is a copy of my submission to the UC Santa Barbara’s Bluesky Innovation Competition: Social Computing in 2020 entited Anatomical Analytics.

The Basic Concept

I. The Anatomical Analytics interface is a personal report detailing up-to-date information about an individual’s body condition. Anatomical Analytics offers a wide-range of services that help prevent illness and diagnose ailments.

II. The Anatomical Analytics Trends interface is an aggregator of the data collected from the personal edition of Anatomical Analytics shown above. The interface below details potential influenza outbreaks in the United States.

Full Description and Theoretical Framework

Ubiquitous computing is a model of human-computer interaction in which small, inexpensive chips are embedded into everyday objects.  In contrast to popular futuristic visions of cyberspace where we immerse our bodies inside a virtual reality system, ubiquitous computing extends technology beyond the borders of our screen and works like reverse virtual reality. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags are commonly used in ubiquitous computing applications. RFID tags are already all around us: they are woven into our passports where they store bits of data about our identity, they connect products on the shelf to a database which instantly aggregates an inventory status, and they are used in certain libraries to map a book’s exact location within the library. My idea for a technology in the year 2020 is to embed RFID chips inside our body in order to monitor health. Connecting these chips across a global network will allow us to manage health trends and lead to new developments in what I will refer to as Anatomical Analytics.

The first step in this technology would be attaching microscopic RFID tags near a few vital organs. Perhaps this is best achieved by placing small RFID chips at locations closest to the organ and just beneath the skin; or the RFID could be administered as an annual pill that over time would organically disintegrate inside the body and be re-administered each year. The chips don’t store data, they communicate data. Each tag is a listener that transmits the current condition of the respective body organ to which it monitors. The data is then collected by a server and illustrated graphically by an online software application. The software interface would resemble something like Google Analytics, but for your body. A few examples of how this type analysis would be extremely helpful in the prevention and the detection of illness include:

• The analytics would display signs of high blood pressure putting a strain on the kidney and therefore warn of kidney damage.
• If you are consuming inordinate amounts alcohol the analytics could map out a projection to see if you are in jeopardy of developing liver disease.
• In the case of someone suddenly falling unconscious, before the patient arrives at the hospital the doctors could receive a Twitter-esque status alert and preparing for “A man in his late 50’s suffering from heart failure.”

On a macro-sociological level the data is aggregated by Anatomical Analytics Trends in order to predict local, national and global health trends. Once the RFID chips are in place it would be fairly easy to monitor an individual’s location by using RFID readers that could be installed in schools, the workplace and stores. Combining locative data we could potentially link an outbreak of E.Coli to a particular fast-food chain; visually segment the population based on nutritional intake data; or detect and track influenza activity in The United States.

Of course there are many ethical issues surrounding anatomical analytics, but I don’t think it is too difficult to imagine developments into this type of technology over the next 10 or 20 years. Consider other examples of placing technology in our body:

• It has been over 50 years ago that the first pacemaker was implanted into a human.
• Recently it has become popular to place RFID technology under the skin of pets.
• Filmmaker Rob Spence has begun plans to install a camera into his eye socket.

Furthermore, issues of privacy and Orwellian surveillance would be of concern to many. Yet again any intrusion of privacy made by Anatomical Analytics is not all that far off from many present-day scenarios. A notable example of a surveillance tool commonly used in our cars is the electronic toll RFID tags that, in addition to charging our credit card, transmit locative data each time we use a toll. The other - perhaps less obvious but more pervasive - example of a locative surveillance tool is the Internet. As Lawrence Lessig has shown through his research of “code as law” the Internet is actually one of the most controlling mediums that has ever existed. And despite the fact that we never know who or when someone might be looking at the data we leave on the Internet, we sacrifice privacy for efficiency in our lives.

Kevin Kelly in speaking about the future of ubiquitous computing has remarked, “Ten years ago the notion that all doors in a building should contain a computer chip seemed ludicrous, but now there is hardly a hotel door in the U.S. without a blinking, beeping chip in its lock. These microscopic chips will be so cheap we’ll throw them away.”  My theory is that in the future, the idea of monitoring human vital organs with RFID chips won’t seem so ludicrous. The definition of ubiquitous computing will eventually have to be expanded beyond ‘a network that connects everything’ as it will truly be ‘a network that connects everything inside everyone’.

Anatomical Analytics Brief Description
Anatomical Analytics Full Description

In general, I’m not a big fan of anything Yahoo!, but the Yahoo! Media Player is actually a really cool and easy way to stream music from your site. The only unfortunate thing is that there is a long list of to-do’s on the Yahoo! wiki (some of which should be standard).

Trackseek, Trackresume, Trackfocus Hacks

The good news is that this guy Eric Fehrenbacher developed a few amazing hacks, but for some reason the hyperlinks to the javascript files arent’ available and he hasn’t been replying to comments.

I’ve been trying to get these hacks to work on my other site, so I went ahead and extracted the .js files. Copy these files and then link to them in your HTML header:

This code is necessary for all 3 hacks:
http://www.danceatthepostoffice.com/js/ef.ymp.utilities.js

And then you can choose which extension(s) you want:
http://www.danceatthepostoffice.com/js/trackseek.js
http://www.danceatthepostoffice.com/js/trackresume.js
http://www.danceatthepostoffice.com/js/trackfocus.js

I’m not taking any credit (or responsibility) I just extracted the code. Please don’t deep link to these files, copy the code to your own server, and then also check back with Eric’s site in the future as he’ll hopefully be making updates.

How To Remove “Learn More About This Player”

Also, I couldn’t figure out how he got rid of the “Learn More About This Player” link. So I made up my own simple hack with CSS, just add this to your stylesheet or header:

<style type=”text/css”>
#ymp-relevance {
visibility: hidden;
}
</style>

1. Go to any login page where you have a password “starred out”
   Ya know, like this:
2. Copy and paste this code into the address bar in your browser
3. Watch as the password is decoded into plain text

I couldn’t believe this was possible, but then it started to make sense considering that in HTML source our passwords are plain-text in the value field:

<input type="password" value="1234spaceballs" />

But what a good way to decode old passwords you may have forgotten (or…uh….decode an ex-girlfriend’s gmail password). And as Lifehacker shows, it’s easy to save this code as a bookmarklet for easy access.

Click Here To Go To The Example Page

About a year ago I was using “Yahoo! Shortcuts” to add photos to my site musicneutral.com. Basically it scans your posting for keywords and suggests a photo (basically, saving me the time of uploading it to my server). Well, one month later I stopped using it because it was buggy, but now looking back I see this: “The Photo Is Currently Available”. Annoying!