The creators of the project snap the photograph while the subject is saying what they want to do before they die, catching them in the act of expressing their desire. They then have the subject write his or her statement on the bottom of the Polaroid, starting with the words “Before I die, I want to ___.”

Follow-up e-mails will be sent out to participants in a certain number of years, asking about the status of their goal. They will then be asked to write a short story next to their photo on the website about fulfilling their expressed want. The creators’ desire is that seeing online that other people are fulfilling their desires will motivate participants to complete their own task and have a story to tell.

While the project aims to encourage subjects to accomplish their dreams, it also initiates a dialogue and analysis around the awareness of mortality, values, motivation to act on personal objectives – and how these may differ across societies and cultures. Originally focusing only on Americans, the project has since branched out to India and has recently started capturing images of Hospice patients as well.

The differences between the different groups included in the project are absolutely fascinating:

• Participants in India expressed a greater comfort level with death as not only an inevitable but integral aspect of life – some had even prepared for it by thinking about what they want  to say before dying, such as God’s name. Americans, on the other hand, generally expressed more fear, discomfort and avoidance at the notion of death.

• Americans generally desired that their answers be unique from that of other respondents; Indians were much more comfortable in giving the same response as others (or together with others) – likely stemming from a culture that holds the happiness and comfort of others in dense communities in high regard.

• After noticing that many Indians in shanty towns or slums had a difficult time conceptualizing what it is to “dream”, the photographers started to wonder if the ability to dream big is generally something that comes with financial security. Americans’ dreams of traveling, or owning a second home are in contrast with the more modest dreams of Indians who simply would like to study or own a shop, or maybe can’t even conceptualize the idea of dreaming at all.

• The creators concluded that – no matter whether rich or poor, Indian or American – the vast majority of people still “wanted” more. Very few people said they had done it all, or didn’t feel the need to do anything else before they died but be in the moment.

The project really makes you take a step back and look at the dissonance between what culture tells you is important, and what’s actually meaningful to you at the end of the day (or life).

What do you want to do before you die? Personally, I’d like to teach every child in the world how to read and learn how to walk in high heels.

Even without close-ups or details, the video and accompanying audio are chilling enough. The news was broken by WikiLeaks on April 5 – nearly three years after the event. You can watch the full video, with audio, on the WikiLeaks Web site.

However, if you were looking for news or information on news sources like CNN, you would have been left empty-handed. In fact, this is what CNN was covering on April 5 – notice the difference in focus on Al Jazeera.

This isn’t meant as a protest against the United States, our soldiers or their conduct. However, is this something that I feel should be reported on and investigated – offered up to public opinion?

Yes, I do.

Do I think that it should be the job of organizations like CNN to perform for us this service?

Yes, I do.

iPads and Tiger Woods may get the click-throughs and backlinks, but when I was a journalism student (not that long ago), we were told that journalism meant something more. We were told that the power to expose wrongdoing, propogate discussion and inform the public were the tenets our industry was built on. But it doesn’t seem to be that way anymore. In journalism school, the fore-bearers of  modern journalists are painted as revolutionaries, fighting to spark change. Today, a run through the headlines on CNN, Fox, MSN, etc. reveals a lot intriguing junk – human emotion and cheap thrills.

It’s easy to say that the Internet has introduced a free market in regards to news dissemination, but who has time to go looking for news of importance? It’s easy to look past the things that we have to find. It’s harder to ignore the front page of a powerhouse like CNN.

CNN is the third most popular news source in the world. Millions of people get their news from the Web site and, I imagine, many more from the television station. Still, on April 5, when video was released of American helicopter crews gunning down Iraqi “militants” and two Reuters cameramen, CNN thought it was more important to tell us that Jessica Alba was considering adoption. Tiger Woods’ reception at the Master was the “breaking news” of choice.

Let’s assume that the basis of every good decision, every positive step forward and every piece of common ground we land on is a by-product of the input we receive. If the information is good – if it inspires us to push for positive change, then it is news worth knowing.

I’m not saying there’s no room for casual human interest, but the death of two Reuters employees and 10 Iraqis – this is news we need. We can draw our own conclusions, but without reporters who are willing to break these stories, most of us won’t draw any conclusions.

(image via i am bored)

“It’s meant to be a reflection of the community. It’s meant to be a reflection of one person’s love for another person in the community, but at the same time it’s meant to live beyond these distinctions and just be something for everyone, no matter where they’re at. You don’t need to know where Farson Street is, or where Conestoga Street is in relation to Market Street. What you need to know is love exists here, love exists in yourself. The city is a giving, nurturing place if you let it give to you and nurture you.” -

Over the past year, colorful graffiti has slowly, but steadily, started to adorn building facades across Philadelphia. Local hoodlums? Not quite. It’s actually the ambitious project “A Love Letter For You,” dreamed up by Steve Powers, an ex-graffiti artist. Partnering with the Mural Arts Program, Powers has taken it upon himself to create a 20-block long mural in his hometown, Philadelphia. The subject? Love. (Insert bad pun about the City of Brotherly Love here.)

Painted on the walls and rooftops of a neighborhood in West Philly, the murals  by 40 local and international artists address words of romance, thoughts of relationships and people’s ideas of what love truly is. Included are the phrases “I miss you too often not to love you”, “I want you like coffee” and “Prepay is on. Let’s talk till all my minutes are gone.”

Along with the 50 anticipated murals, the project is providing art training for youth in the community and free signage for businesses around the area. Community, art and love. So beautiful.

SENSEable City’s Flyfire project, a collaboration with the Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory (ARES Lab) at MIT, is about to make it possible for any empty space to become a fully interactive display environment. It does this by way of hundreds (maybe thousands) of tiny, “self-organized micro helicopters” – each with an LED light.

Think of these mini-copters as pixels in the sky. From here on, let’s refer to them as the “pixel swarm.” A remote controller is able to designate the desired shape from the ground, or wherever, and the pixel swarm creates the desired shape.

The pixel swarm is self-organizing, which means that they’re smart and can adapt to directed changes in real time. As the team behind Flyfire points out, this allows viewers to experience an animated display – with the pixel swarm moving fluidly from one shape to another.

To better understand what such a demonstration might look like, watch this brief video on Flyfire from the SENSEable City Lab.

Could projects like this spell the end of a fixed interface?

It’s certainly feasible that such technology could be developed to the point where it was possible to watch almost anything using the pixel swarm. Sure, it’s a long way off, but until then, it’s probably more realistic to imagine such technology being used at events to sex-up the user experience.

The potential for advertising is immense – for example, “mobile billboards” or other sponsored messages. Imagine being at a football game and watching an advertisement for an electric, turbo-charged sports car that zooms through the air, much like the Golden Snitch of the Quidditch game played in the Harry Potter stories. Perhaps the ‘Golden Snitch’-like pixel swarm would be a part of the half-time show, or programmed to hover over the seat of someone who just won the car….    the possibilities seem endless.

Pattie Maes’ Sixth Sense, featuring Pranav Mistry

Last year at TED, Pattie Maes premiered a new technology developed by Pranav Mistry in her MIT Fluid Interfaces Group. The physical hardware consisted of little more than a camera and projector, worn around the user’s neck. Functionally, it was a little bit Minority Report and a little bit RoboCop.

Say you’re looking for a book on CSS at Barnes & Noble. Having done this myself, I can safely say that there are about a dozen and, from what I can tell, each looks as good as the next. How do you decide which book is the best one for your needs?

If you have a smartphone, you can just look it up. If you don’t, you can ask one of the bookstore employees and hope they have a design background.

What if you could just pick up the book and have its Amazon rating projected right onto the cover? This would be much more efficient, no?

That’s just a start.

The goal of the Sixth Sense project is to allow any user to access relevant information wherever he or she happens to be. This is similar to augmented reality, save for the fact that it would be accomplished without a cellphone and, therefore, be much more seamless in regards to information gathering.

After consumer devices such as these are developed, our next step is surely embedded discovery tools, we we discussed in our post on augmented reality contact lenses last year.

It’s all terribly exciting, a little terrifying, and very promising. Stay tuned!

The Disney Channel recently announced a brand new movie titled Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars. No longer content with her old-school secret notebook, Harriet is forging boldly into 2010 and competing against the most popular girl in school to become the official blogger of their high school class. Jezebel poked fun of the update by re-naming other classic children’s books for the MySpace generation. Instead of abiding by “the only book I read is Facebook” mindset, they suggested titles such as “margaret 48267: are you there god?”, “Little Blog on the Prairie”, “From the Mixed-Up Tweets of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” and “Wikipedia Brown, Boy E-tective” for the digital generation. Along with making me laugh, these updates to pop culture of yesteryear made me wonder exactly what sort of impact this constant exposure to technology and social media sites is having on children’s brains.

Search results revealed that almost every article on the negative effects of social media on developing brains referred back to an article written by Baroness Susan Greenfield. (No, I didn’t know that baronesses still existed either.) With the straightforward title of “Social Websites Harm Children’s Brains,” Greenfield argues that sites such as Facebook and Twitter shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centered. Backing that up, a different study found out that 30% more college students scored high on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory in 2006 than in 1982. (A fact that could potentially be proven just by looking at the sheer number of tagged photos on Facebook some individuals have of themselves.)

Anyway. The large majority of the baroness’s research seemed to be rather subjective, considering that one of her main points was that social interactions conducted through computer screens are fundamentally different from spoken conversations — which are “far more perilous” than electronic interactions because they “occur in real time, with no opportunity to think up clever or witty responses.” (I hate when that happens!)

On the opposite end of the spectrum are scientists who are studying brain plasticity – how the brain continues to dramatically change its wiring and function long after early development. Scientists are realizing that the brain never stops reorganizing itself in response to the world and that kids today need to learn new digital skills to survive and thrive in our fast-evolving society.

Research on young people shows that use of the sites is associated with a better social life in the real world because they use the services to enhance their existing relationships — just as anyone would do with the telephone. When researchers at the University of Minnesota  asked 16- to 18-year-olds what they learn from using social networking sites, the students listed technology skills as the top lesson, followed by creativity, and being open to new or diverse views and communication skills. Being a technophile, I could rave about the wonders of the Internet all day, but there are a lot of people who are genuinely concerned that this constant exposure to technology and social media sites is having a negative impact on children today.

Every generation is afraid of the effects of brand new technology on the next. An article on Neuroanthroplogy.net sums it up best:

If we search for analogies, we can think of countless previous techno-moral panics that now seem positively quaint: the dangerous effects of rock ‘n’ roll, comic books, music videos, television, the wireless, air conditioning, trains… Mesopotamian parents were probably fearful of the impact of the newfangled chariot, and German parents no doubt fretted about what horrors Gutenberg’s movable type was about to introduce into their homes.

Cecily brought up the point that adults solidify what they know instead of taking new in. (I like what I know and I know what I like.) It’s easier to stay inside comfort zones than it is to reinvent our notions of the world and the way it works. Younger generations, however, don’t have to reinvent their worldview — this much constant access to technology is all they’ve ever known. Youth today reference communicating online with the same terminology and naturalness as real life. They “talk” to each other when they are on online messenger systems. There is no real life or digital life, it’s the same place.

Baroness Greenfield said that “it is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations.”

And maybe, that’s the point.

Four years ago, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar set out with a lofty goal – to create a database of human emotions on the Internet. Twelve million feelings later, the two have put together the We Feel Fine project, which includes one of the coolest Web sites I’ve seen in awhile and an extraordinarily beautiful book that was recently released. (Most of which is available to read online!)

The two artists and computer scientists wrote an algorithm that scrobbles the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling,” essentially harvesting human emotion by recording the full sentence and context in which the phrase occurs and identifying the polarity (happy, sad, giddy, etc.) of the specific “feeling” expressed. Because the blogosphere is full of metadata, it is possible for them to extract rich information about the posts and their authors, from age and gender to geolocation and local weather conditions, adding a new layer of meaning to the feelings. Exploring this huge stockpile of information from the viewpoint of 6 different movements — Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds — has resulted in an ever growing portrait of our culture’s collective emotional landscape.

Some of the fascinating results? Moods hit rock bottom on the day that Michael Jackson died. The high-water mark was the day President Obama was elected, when the word “proud” was all over the blogosphere. People in New South Wales consistently feel far more awful than the rest of the world. Women are far more likely than men to verbalize their feelings. Human beings get happier as they get older. The most frequently expressed emotion on the Internet is feeling better.

We Feel Fine does a dazzling job of turning the big, bad, cold-feeling World Wide Web into a warm, passionate portrait of the individual human and the human collective. I browsed through the book for approximately 30 seconds before mentally adding it to my Christmas list. It’s beautiful. So here’s to exploring the ups and downs of everyday life in all its color, chaos and candor, and here’s to human beings feeling better than fine.

Designing for reality: people won’t be hanging up their cell/smartphones anytime soon inside (what I refer to as) their traveling telephone booths. Microvision is working on ways to integrate social interactions while keeping your eyes on the road. It doesn’t help to focus attention, just your sight lines.

There wasn’t an easy way around rote, brain-numbing memorization of the Periodic Table of Elements when I was in school. I’d practice filling them in like a crossword puzzle, putting abbreviations and atomic weights of each element in the right square. There was absolutely nothing engaging about it, it was just a grind.

To transform a string of memorized data into something meaningful — the stuff of knowledge — is to give that data a context. Tell a story, show its utility, demonstrate something remarkable.  Which is what Theodore Gray’s new coffee table book, “The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe” has done for the Periodic Table. Suddenly elements are sexy little beasts, each with its own history and a glossy two-page spread.

You’ll recognized some, of course, like Calcium (Ca)  and Sodium (Na), but have you ever gotten a close look at Promethium (glow-in-the-dark paint on diving watches), Tellurium (even tiny amounts will leave you reeking of garlic for months), or how ’bout the honorific Einsteinium (which, unlike the man, has little utility). Beautiful photos and interesting tidbits make the world, at the atomic level, interesting and comprehensible….and memorable.

[via Boing Boing]

Number One: Why this universe?

“In their pursuit of nature’s fundamental laws, physicists have essentially been working under a long standing paradigm: demonstrating why the universe must be as we see it. But if other laws can be thought of, why can’t the universes they describe exist in some other place?”

I’ll be honest, I double-majored in philosophy because I was pumped up on French existentialist novels. Ironically, they were the last novels I ever read in a philosophy class. Instead, I ended up reading essays on multiple worlds and van Inwagen‘s Doctrine of Arbitrary Undetached Parts. While I’m flattered to have spent so many sleepless nights mulling over the same topics as professional physicists, I feel they may have been confused on a slightly higher level.

The question is this – if I postulate a set of laws for a world (other than this one), and I’m able to imagine/reason how things work in that world without contradicting those laws, then who’s to say that this world could not exist?

Though the scenario is rather complex, the exercise is as simple as imagining a world in which I start my day at 4:30 instead of 6:30(oops)….  Meaning that, though the concepts are over most of our heads, it’s a reminder that the ability to imagine different worlds is available to us all.

For a lighter look at parallel worlds, check out this Nova special “Parallel World, Parallel Lives,” featuring Eels frontman Mark Everett. (The rest of the show is available on YouTube.)

Number Two: What is everything made of?

“Ordinary matter” is classified here as “atoms, galaxies and stars.”

Ponder this: if ‘ordinary matter’ only accounts for four percent of the universe’s total energy, what’s the other 96 percent?

As evil as it sounds, dark matter simply designates matter whose light either does not reach us, or particles which are not emitting light to begin with. We know dark matter is out there because we can see its effects, such as the continued expansion of the universe. It’s not the stuff from the X-Files that lets aliens take control of you body … or scientists are keeping that part on the low.

So what else keeps physicists up at night?

3. How does complexity happen?
4. Will string theory ever be proved correct?
5. What is singularity?
6. What is reality, really? (see also: The Sixth Sense, The Machinist, Identity, The Fountain and others of
the “it was all a dream, or was it” ilk)
7. How far can physics take us?

This last question is the wildest one of all. What it suggests is that physics, the (scientific) language by which we make sense of our world, may have its own limits. I think I’ll mull that one over the next time I can’t get to sleep…

The good news is, the 3D TV of the future will be smoother, more efficient and come with cooler glasses. Better yet, it could be here by 2010!

Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising. Hollywood has been steadily releasing an increasing amount of films formatted for 3D. Think Coraline, Up, the U2 concert film and James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar. While Beowulf may not have been strong support for the need of 3D in the home, one has to imagine that film companies are hungry for the DVD market these films could bring.

Whether or not consumers will be able to afford 3D-enabled televisions just after upgrading to HD and plasma TVs is another question entirely.