The past few weeks have produced stunning news in the world of competitive cycling. But no news is more fantastic than the unprecedented victory of Taxman and the Lanterne Rouge in the Tour de Frolorado. Follow all the action on youtube:
Or, if you prefer, you can find the Tour de Frolorado on Google Video. Also, here’s a transcript covering all the stages.
This historic news video is freely available for remixes, mash-ups, abbreviations, extensions, and DVD burning. You can download it from the Tour de Frolorado page in the Internet Archive. Some fun projects to contemplate and perhaps even complete:
Add captions to the make the video more accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing persons.
Include a memorial for Ben Inglis. He was tragically killed in an accident in the last stage of the tour.
Include other cyclists, other teams …anyone who wants to be part of the Tour.
Think you should have won a stage, or the whole Tour? Go for it!
Please include the existing credits in your new video. If you get a chance, please send me a link to your work. Then I might feel a small measure of paternal delight and share your new creation with all my friends.
For your viewing pleasure, the prologue and stage 1 of this epic bicycle race are right here:
Note: This post has been updated as I’ve sorted out various problems.
Rather than showing up on your screen, it shows availability as a physical object in the world. That means that you can move the puppet out of view when you don’t want to be distracted, watch out for it when you’re working on other tasks, and have a background awareness of your friends from the corner of your eye. [availabot site]
The puppet is personalized with custom fabrication technology. A more cost-effective way to do this might be to have a custom image printed on the outside of an inflatable shape. Inflation is associated with human character, spirit, and mood (buoyant, inflated ego, fat-headed, depressed, drooping, etc.). With some cheap internal pneumatics, the object could provide a richer sense of presence.
Availabot is a practical application of the sort of general program that MIT’s fabulous Fab Lab has been promoting. Innovation in information technology over the past decades has been dazzling. But I don’t think it’s possible even to approach the value of the information in the order of matter in our real world. Information technology can create value most effectively by leveraging the value of the real world.
A lot of work on presence seems to be oriented toward services for alpha information geeks in their professional lives. Microsoft’s Business Division is taking the lead for its Unified Communications Strategy. Discussion of that strategy tends to focus on how to best manage information in communication:
It’s the intersection of the fundamentals of presence and business processes that will provide the value that customers are looking for. [Alex Sanders . Log]
Business executives may have a natural bias to underestimate the value of non-business communication.
About 1877, within a year after Alexander Graham Bell had publicly demonstrated telephony, the president of Western Union Telegraph Company turned down the opportunity to buy all the rights to Bell’s telephone. He is reported to have remarked, “What use could this company make of an electrical toy?” [Sense in Communication]
In the late nineteenth century, the Bell System primarily marketed its telephone to business users. Perhaps 90% of its subscribers were business subscribers. When the Bell System’s patent on the telephone expired in 1894, independent telephone entered the industry and flourished by providing residential telephone services that the Bell System had largely neglected. These independent telephone companies are now at the center of very important and contentious policy questions about universal service funds.
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes a right to freedom of expression. Article 10 of the European Declaration of Human Rights does likewise. Regulation of the use of radio devices can restrict freedom of expression. What sort of radio regulation is justified under human rights law?
Under the prompting of Open Spectrum, human rights organizations are beginning to consider this question. With respect to licensing requirements (one type of restriction on radio use), a human rights organization called Article 19 stated in a brief note (MS Word doc):
A licence requirement for wireless communications devices clearly constitutes a restriction and therefore it must be 1) provided by law; 2) serve a legitimate aim; and 3) be necessary for the attainment of that aim.
A necessary restriction for attaining a legitimate aim under law is no more restrictive than a feasible alternative, narrowly tailored, and proportionate to the aim.
Article 19’s brief but pioneering analysis seems to have at least one weakness. The analysis suggested that “preventing chaos in the frequency spectrum is a legitimate goal” under human rights law. Under Article 19(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, one legitimate aim for restricting freedom of expression is to protect public order. One might consider protecting public order to encompass preventing chaos in the frequency spectrum. However, focus on order among frequencies, like focus on relations between bodies of water, can lead to law with little connection to the facts of communication among persons. Particularly with respect to human rights, public order is probably better understood in terms of order among persons (the public). Compared to the extent of chaos in the frequency spectrum, actual personal freedom to communicate is a much more meaningful public issue.
Freedom of expression is directly related to the real circumstances of contemporary life. In an insightful response to Ofcom’s consultation entitled “Spectrum Framework Review,” Open Spectrum UK noted:
The justifications given in the current consultation for utilising market forces refer to maximising economic benefits and spectrum efficiency. However, one must not forget that the regulation of radio was instituted internationally not to control interference but to reign in the business practices of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company.
Knowledge of technology and examination of leading practices world-wide provides insight into what sort of communications capabilities persons could have at a given time. Radio regulation that deprives persons of these capabilities deserves to be assailed as a violation of human rights.
