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Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Culture of Old Europe Is Uncloaked in an Exhibit at N.Y.U.
Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.
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Rumyana Kostadinova Ivanova and Marius AmarieLIVING SPACE Artifacts from the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills are presented in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe,” at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. More Photos »
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For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.
The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.
New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.
The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display for the first time in the United States. The show will run through April 25.
At its peak, around 4500 B.C., said David W. Anthony, the exhibition’s guest curator, “Old Europe was among the most sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world” and was developing “many of the political, technological and ideological signs of civilization.”
Dr. Anthony is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and author of “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.” Historians suggest that the arrival in southeastern Europe of people from the steppes may have contributed to the collapse of the Old Europe culture by 3500 B.C.
At the exhibition preview, Roger S. Bagnall, director of the institute, confessed that until now “a great many archaeologists had not heard of these Old Europe cultures.” Admiring the colorful ceramics, Dr. Bagnall, a specialist in Egyptian archaeology, remarked that at the time “Egyptians were certainly not making pottery like this.”
A show catalog, published by Princeton University Press, is the first compendium in English of research on Old Europe discoveries. The book, edited by Dr. Anthony, with Jennifer Y. Chi, the institute’s associate director for exhibitions, includes essays by experts from Britain, France, Germany, the United States and the countries where the culture existed.
Dr. Chi said the exhibition reflected the institute’s interest in studying the relationships of well-known cultures and the “underappreciated ones.”
Although excavations over the last century uncovered traces of ancient settlements and the goddess figurines, it was not until local archaeologists in 1972 discovered a large fifth-millennium B.C. cemetery at Varna, Bulgaria, that they began to suspect these were not poor people living in unstructured egalitarian societies. Even then, confined in cold war isolation behind the Iron Curtain, Bulgarians and Romanians were unable to spread their knowledge to the West.
The story now emerging is of pioneer farmers after about 6200 B.C. moving north into Old Europe from Greece and Macedonia, bringing wheat and barley seeds and domesticated cattle and sheep. They established colonies along the Black Sea and in the river plains and hills, and these evolved into related but somewhat distinct cultures, archaeologists have learned. The settlements maintained close contact through networks of trade in copper and gold and also shared patterns of ceramics.
The Spondylus shell from the Aegean Sea was a special item of trade. Perhaps the shells, used in pendants and bracelets, were symbols of their Aegean ancestors. Other scholars view such long-distance acquisitions as being motivated in part by ideology in which goods are not commodities in the modern sense but rather “valuables,” symbols of status and recognition.
Noting the diffusion of these shells at this time, Michel Louis Seferiades, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, suspects “the objects were part of a halo of mysteries, an ensemble of beliefs and myths.”
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Friday, November 27, 2009
After social networks, what next? | Media | guardian.co.uk
Openness is important for the future of a company, says Biz Stone, CEO of Twitter
In digital media, as in fortune-telling, the future is pretty much treated as part of the present. "What is the next big thing?" is a question everyone who works with the internet asks continually. But after several years of boom, the question of what comes after social platforms is no longer so remote.
Luckily, some experts just gave us answers. On Monday evening, the Said Business School in Oxford had invited some very bright and successful entrepreneurs who spoke in front of a packed alumni audience as Silicon Valley came to Oxford for the ninth year. The event was chaired by the very lively and assertive Frances Cairncross, rector of Exeter college.
The first expert to confront us with an answer was Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and made early investments in Facebook and LinkedIn. He reminded us to evaluate first what stage we're at with social networks. "With digital technology there is a tendency to underestimate when things are getting mature, but to understand the financial and technological situation it is really important," he explained.
"If you look back from today, it becomes clear that in 2002 even experts missed that Google had already become the main search engine. If people would have understood back at that time that there was no chance any more to outrun Google, some investments would have been different. But back at these days we didn't discuss Google like this."
He asked the audience: "Where in the history of social network are we? Are we at an early stage, and most of the companies won't be around in a few years' time? Or are we in a late stage, when companies like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter are really mature and will be in business to stay?"
Then he floated a bigger and more daring possibility – that the development stage of the internet itself has come to an end: "Are we at the end of innovation of social networking? And is social networking the last innovation of the internet?"
"See, we went from the development of telecommunication to the internet and from the internet to social networking. Maybe there is no innovation left any more, and we have to look for it in a completely different direction. Maybe we have to go back to space and science fiction novels."
Being the CEO of Twitter, Biz Stone was quite sure that for him that wasn't the case. After having said to reporters earlier in the day that he was not thinking about selling the company but would rather go to the stock market if necessary, he started to relax the atmosphere, joking that he felt he was on a Seinfeld panel asking: "Social networks, what's the deal?"
Then he shuffled himself out of the responsibility of answering that question, stating that Twitter isn't even a social network. "Twitter never asked anyone to have a permanent relationship among each other. Indeed, we even changed the question we used to asked on Twitter 'What are you doing?' last week in 'What's happening?' because everybody was ignoring it anyway."
"I refer to Twitter as an information network rather then a social network. And here I believe in the trend of openness. Using an open technology, creating an open platform, and being more transparent that is where we are heading."
Stone believes that technology has a political impact that shouldn't be underestimated. Referring to Twitter's involvement in the Iranian election protests, he said: "On a large scale, the open exchange of information can even lead to positive global impact. If people are more informed they are more engaged, and if they are more engaged they are more empathic. They are global citizens, not just a citizen of a nation."
Ram Shriram, a founding board member of Google and one of the search giant's first investors, pointed discussion in a different direction. "Combining social and mobile – there is a new wave of oppportunities coming up, a growth of users, so mobile internet is clearly the next major computing cycle. And this time this didn't start in the US, but in Asia and Europe from where it is going to the US," he said.
"In China and India people always used their mobile as their PC; that was the way they accessed data. We face powerful new waves of publishing with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the social sits in the middle of this. There is a creation and production of information. There will be new distribution and consumption patterns which will impact society. This might even make newspapers even more irrelevant."
Then he made a number of predictions: "Facebook will replace email for a new generation. The chat is moving to a multimedia format. Gaming will move from devices directly to the internet. And Apple has a big future because of its strong mobile focus."
Otherwise, the coming mobile business opportunities would be taken by small young companies, because it was easy and cheap to build these applications, which would either fail or succeed at speed. Shriram also believes that advertising will grow less important: "Users tend to pay on the mobile internet for premium services."
LinkedIn-CEO Reid Hoffman believes that there is more to come of the data generated by social networks
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who graduated from Stanford University and Oxford with a master's degree in philosophy, tackled Thiel's social-networks-are-the-end thesis head on. "I actually think we are just beginning to see how people launch the eventualities of social networks into their life," he said, reminding the audience of the way that mobile phones had grown from a tool for bankers to a part of everyone's life.
"I think the phenomenon of the online relationship empowers our personal and professional life. You might think 'Who wants to consume all this useless information?', but with some information it is like with ice cream. It is not nutritious, but people still eat it. And to understand what will go on, you will have to switch that to business models."
For Facebook, Last.fm and Flickr applications, he argued, using live data would become much more important. "Today you have everyone generating data.I think these massive amounts of data are perfect for new applications. There will be a lot of new applications come out of it. Obvious ones, like whom you should meet professionally, and some we don't even thing about. There will be interesting mash ups liked LinkedIn and Twitter."
An Oxford lecturer, Dr Kate Blackmon put this in a nutshell in saying that the future was not about crowd sourcing but crowd filtering.
So is social media over? There are now enough social networks to fill all the obvious niches; but making use of the stream of information that pours into them is something we've only just started.
via guardian.co.uk
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Wednesday, November 25, 2009
The Google-TiVo Deal: What It Means For You - PC World
Google and TiVo are teaming up for a new deal that'll put your clicking habits into the hands of advertisers. Before you grab the nearest "privacy violation" placard, though, check out the specifics of this arrangement -- it's probably far less invasive than what you're expecting.
Google and TiVo's Ad Data Deal
The Google-TiVo ad data deal, announced on Tuesday, is described as an "audience research agreement." In simple terms, TiVo will share anonymous viewing trends collected from its base of subscribers with Google. Google will use that data to help its advertisers understand who they're reaching -- and who they aren't -- when buying television ads through the company's AdWords TV Ads system.
"None of this is being used to actually target an individual," explains Google spokesperson Eric Obenzinger. "It's more about delivering more accurate reporting back to advertisers so they can inform their future budgeting decisions."
So what does the data actually include? First and foremost, absolutely nothing about who you are.
"When we say that this is all anonymous data, we mean that it is literally anonymous in the strictest definition of the term," says Todd Juenger, vice president & general manager of TiVo Audience Research & Measurement. "We don't collect anything about where it came from."
What TiVo does collect is a log of what commercials you watched and what commercials you skipped. It's like an advanced ratings system, taking TiVo's DVR functionality into account.
"We know that some set-top box out there pressed play on a certain network at a certain time -- then we know they hit fast-forward, hit pause, and hit play," Juenger says. "You do that across a million and a half set-top boxes, and you get a collective picture of what percentage of people were watching a certain commercial at a given time."
Google's TV Ad Platform
Unlike with Google's more widely discussed Web-based advertising platforms, the data collected by TiVo won't result in any information being tied to your account or any contextual ads popping up on your system. In fact, the program is actually no different from what Google was already doing within its TV Ads division.
As Google's TV Ads site explains, advertisers using the platform already had access to second-by-second data collected by set-top boxes. Up until now, Google's Obenzinger says, that data was collected solely through a partnership with Dish Network. With the new deal, TiVo's data will be combined with Dish's to give advertisers a more detailed picture.
So, that's the truth about the Google-TiVo advertising deal -- not quite as scary as some preliminary stories might have led you to believe. If you're still flying your "Google Is Evil" flag, though, fear not: The power to opt out is completely in your hands. Just head over to TiVo's Web site and sign in to your account to change your privacy preferences.
And for a detailed look at Google's other ad-related ventures, click over to "Inside Google's Advertising Empire." Your personal tour awaits.
JR Raphael is co-founder of geek-humor site eSarcasm. You can keep up with him on Twitter: @jr_raphael.
via pcworld.com
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
A New iPhone Worm is Here, And This Time it’s Malicious [WARNING]
A couple of weeks ago, the first iPhone worm appeared, spreading on jailbroken devices with the SSH application installed (vulnerability being the fact that many users haven’t changed the default root password). As far as worms go, this one was quite benign, merely “rickrolling” users; i.e., changing the background image on the device to an image of Rick Astley.
Now, according to early reports of strange activity by Dutch ISP XS4ALL, and later confirmed by Sophos, there’s a new worm in the wild, and this one is far more malicious.
The new worm is called “Duh” or “Ikee.B”, and it uses the exact same vulnerability as the first one. The fix is thus identical – change the root password in the SSH application to something other than the default, which is “alpine”.Failing to do so might result in very serious consequences. According to Sophos, Ikee.B is “designed to connect to a server in Lithuania and to follow orders from remote hackers.” It can find vulnerable iPhones on a wide range of IP addresses, including IPs in several different countries, for example the Netherlands, Portugal, Australia (
), Austria, and Hungary. Furthermore, it changes the root password on the iPhone to “ohshit” (as discovered by Paul Ducklin, head of technology in Sophos Asia Pacific.)
Users who haven’t jailbroken their iPhone or haven’t installed the SSH application are not affected by this vulnerability.
via mashable.com
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James Cameron’s New 3-D Epic Could Change Film Forever | Magazine
12 years after Titanic James Cameron is betting he can change forever the way you watch movies
Photo: Art StreiberInside the 3-D World of AvatarIn 1977, a 22-year-old truck driver named James Cameron went to see Star Wars with a pal. His friend enjoyed the movie; Cameron walked out of the theater ready to punch something. He was a college dropout and spent his days delivering school lunches in Southern California’s Orange County. But in his free time, he painted tiny models and wrote science fiction — stories set in galaxies far, far away. Now he was facing a deflating reality: He had been daydreaming about the kind of world that Lucas had just brought to life. Star Wars was the film he should have made.
It got him so angry he bought himself some cheap movie equipment and started trying to figure out how Lucas had done it. He infuriated his wife by setting up blindingly bright lights in the living room and rolling a camera along a track to practice dolly shots. He spent days scouring the USC library, reading everything he could about special effects. He became, in his own words, “completely obsessed.”
He quickly realized that he was going to need some money, so he persuaded a group of local dentists to invest $20,000 in what he billed as his version of Star Wars. He and a friend wrote a script called Xenogenesis and used the money to shoot a 12-minute segment that featured a stop-motion fight scene between an alien robot and a woman operating a massive exoskeleton. (The combatants were models that Cameron had meticulously assembled.)
The plan was to use the clip to get a studio to back a full-length feature film. But after peddling it around Hollywood for months, Cameron came up empty and temporarily shelved his ambition to trump Lucas.
The effort did yield something worthwhile: a job with B-movie king Roger Corman. Hired to build miniature spaceships for the film Battle Beyond the Stars, Cameron worked his way up to become one of Corman’s visual effects specialists. In 1981, he made it to the director’s chair, overseeing a schlocky horror picture, Piranha II: The Spawning.
One night, after a Piranha editing session, Cameron went to sleep with a fever and dreamed that he saw a robot clawing its way toward a cowering woman. The image stuck. Within a year, Cameron used it as the basis for a script about a cyborg assassin sent back in time to kill the mother of a future rebel leader.
This time, he wouldn’t need any dentists. The story was so compelling, he was able to persuade a small film financing company to let him direct the picture. When it was released in 1984, The Terminator established Arnold Schwarzenegger as a huge star, and James Cameron, onetime truck driver, suddenly became a top-tier director.
Over the next 10 years, Cameron helmed a series of daring films, including Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and True Lies. Generating $1.1 billion in worldwide box office revenue, they gave Cameron the kind of clout he needed to revisit his dream of making an interstellar epic. So in 1995, he wrote an 82-page treatment about a paralyzed soldier’s virtual quest on a faraway planet after Earth becomes a bleak wasteland. The alien world, called Pandora, is populated by the Na’vi, fierce 10-foot-tall blue humanoids with catlike faces and reptilian tails. Pandora’s atmosphere is so toxic to humans that scientists grow genetically engineered versions of the Na’vi, so-called avatars that can be linked to a human’s consciousness, allowing complete remote control of the creature’s body. Cameron thought that this project — titled Avatar — could be his next blockbuster. That is, the one after he finished a little adventure-romance about a ship that hits an iceberg.
Titanic, of course, went on to become the highest-grossing movie of all time. It won 11 Oscars, including best picture and best director. Cameron could now make any film he wanted. So what did he do?
He disappeared.
Cameron would not release another Hollywood film for 12 years. He made a few underwater documentaries and did some producing, but he was largely out of the public eye. For most of that time, he rarely mentioned Avatar and said little about his directing plans.
But now, finally, he’s back. On December 18, Avatar arrives in theaters. This time, Cameron, who turned 55 this year, didn’t need to build half an ocean liner on the Mexican coast as he did with Titanic, so why did it take one of the most powerful men in Hollywood so long to come out with a single film? In part, the answer is that it’s not easy to out-Lucas George Lucas. Cameron needed to invent a suite of moviemaking technologies, push theaters nationwide to retool, and imagine every detail of an alien world. But there’s more to it than that. To really understand why Avatar took so long to reach the screen, we need to look back at the making of Titanic.
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