Expect to see more regular content here about what exactly I’m up to. And you can find my portfolio in it’s new permanent location at portfolio.brooksguthrie.com

This project forced me to learn some of the finer points of CSS, as the original author had no intention of hand-holding any would-be editors. It really was an enjoyable experience and one I look forward to with both Busted Creek and others in the future.

Also accompanying their relaunch is a new song / video featuring their acoustic song “Down By the River”. I’d invite you to check it out below!

Nim is a two-player mathematical game of strategy in which players take turns removing objects from distinct heaps. On each turn, a player must remove at least one object, and may remove any number of objects provided they all come from the same heap. The person who makes the last move (i.e., who takes the last object) wins.

Java Applet | .PDE Source Code

Java Applet | .PDE Source Code

Utopias and Dystopias in Science Fiction: Battlestar Galactica

Since the beginning of the science fiction genre with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, authors, screenwriters, and directors have become fascinated with utopic and dystopic civilizations. Due to the thin line that separates these two ideals, most often science fiction will resolve to a dystopia. One television series that has attempted to at least slightly change the pattern is Ronald Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. This series represents a dystopia because it shows the transition of an advanced, organized people into a loosely aligned group of travelers trying to find a new home and establish their previous order.
The pilot episode for Battlestar shows the destruction of the Twelve Colonies of humans by a race of artificial people known as the cylons. These people were created many years before to aid in the mundane activities of everyday life. The machines became self-aware, resulting in the First Cylon War. Their race retreated to the far ends of space, only to return forty years later in an attempt to wipe out humanity. While the intricacies of the plot are many, one of the main devices is the creation of twelve cylon models that look, act, and in every way appear as human beings. Previously the race was limited to metal machines affectionately referred to as “toasters”.
The survivors of the attacks band together and pursue the dream of a new home, Earth, as described by the main religion’s holy book as the home of a Thirteenth Colony of humans. They face further attacks from the cylons, both machine and human, but soon discover a terrifying reality, that five of the models are operating amongst the people of the fleet. This raises obvious panic and disorder and is only eventually resolved through very detailed, if not genius, plot development.
What makes Battlestar Galactica stand out from the crowd of Terminator 2’s, Mad Max’s, and others is its ability to address the truly human aspect of being, in an instant, thrown into the deepest depths of destruction and organizational disarray. The people at the beginning of the series operate under rules and religion and many other social and governmental standards, only to be forced into anarchy by a race of people they created. This is the true essence of dystopia, yet the concept of “someone’s utopia” is still very present. By wiping out the humans, the Cylons were attempting to create their vision of a perfect world. Conversely, the humans were perfectly content in their life, only to be disrupted by the attacks on their planets. This theme can be seen in many science fiction settings, but is also present in the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and others.
This series directly addresses our fears of technology. The Cylons are both sentient and have the ability to blend in to the general populous, all the while harboring ill intent against their creators. Nothing could make a greater argument against the creation of artificial intelligence. However as the series progresses, so does the relationship between some of the cylon models and the human race. They identify common problems, and even a common enemy in some of the models who refuse to step away from the idea of a world free of humans. This provides hope for scientists and engineers, and also serves as a warning that any creation must be done with a moral compass.
Battlestar Galactica is without a question a fantastic television drama. But more than that, it serves as a guide for creating artificial life, as well as a warning against creation without control or discretion and taking for granted what technology allows us to do.

The Congressional Tweet: Transparency and National Security

Anyone in touch with the newest trends in the internet and social media is likely to know that the hottest thing on the block for 2008 was Twitter. The micro-blogging service allows users to enter 140 characters to answer the question “What are you doing?”. While Twitter has been popular with the “internet famous” like Kevin Rose, Leo Laporte, and others for some time now, President Obama’s explicit use of it during his campaign brought the service to the rest of the public. While most would agree that there is only so much information that could be packed into 140 characters, some members of the government and the armed forces are worried about its use as a terrorist communication tool, or its misuse to let the world know about secrets or plans.

A recent OSINT ( open-source intelligence) newsletter published by the Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion highlights the ability for terrorists to take advantage of the service for orchestrating attacks. Their belief and fear stems from the rate at which information was spread from recent natural disasters. From their article, “…,the earthquake that occurred in Los Angeles July 29,2008 was reported via a Twitter member approximately four minutes prior to the information being reported by the news and within minutes there were hundreds of Tweets from people experiencing the earthquake first hand” (304th MI Bn OSINT Team). The 304th MI Bn also use the 2008 Republican National Convention as an example of how terrorists may use Twitter to coordinate attacks. Protesters used the service to alert others about police action, providing safe routes for the locked-down city. The article then goes on to provide a number of scenarios in which terrorists may use the service, in conjunction with Google Maps, to alert members of a cell about troop movements.

Terrorist use of Twitter as outlined by the 304th MI Bn OSINT

While the 304th’s article presents a number of situations in which Twitter could be used by terrorists, it provides no direct answer to this “problem”.
Time magazine also highlighted a more real governmental / military “situation” when Representative Pete Hoekstra (MI-R) tweeted that he had “Just landed in Baghdad”. Doing this he effectively “alert[ed] the nearly 3,000 people who have signed up to follow him on the social-networking service of the trip that he and five others, including House minority leader John Boehner, had embarked on” (Newton-Small). While many people without any security clearance, including his wife, were aware of the trip, the Pentagon did not take the situation lightly. The heart of the security of the United States called for “reviewing its policies for briefing lawmakers in advance about trips to war zones”.

A research article by Micah L. Sifry titled “A See-Through Society: How the web is opening up our democracy” highlights exactly how the internet and social network sites like Facebook and Twitter are affecting government and its transparency with the common person. From the individual, to the city, to the federal government, information is being provided at a rate and a scale like never before. In January 2008, Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York City made a public address about the city’s new service, Citywide Performance Recording, that would “put ‘a wealth of data at people’s fingertips—fire response times, noise complaints, trees planted by the Parks Department, you name it. More than five hundred different measurements from forty-five city agencies’” (Sifry). Sifry also references the concept of the “World Live Web”, with people “using everything from mobile phones that can stream video live online to simple text message postings to the micro-blogging service Twitter…contributing to a real-time patter of information about what is going on around them. Much of what results is little more than noise, but increasingly sophisticated and simple-to-use filtering tools can turn some of it into information of value.” He describes an election-day situation that involved filtering Twitter to decipher a real-time report on their polling experience.

While the article by Sifry touches less on the potential downsides of transparency and wealth of unfiltered information, the implications are obvious. As noted by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, an opportunity exists to use tools like Twitter to coordinate elaborate ambushes. However, it is important to factor in the entire situation, rather than soloing out a single service. As advances in technology continue to happen at an increased pace, so do the opportunities to use the web with ill intent. Terrorists do not need to rely on a service like Twitter when the technical knowledge of how to build their own communication method is widely available. At the end of the day, the advantages in transparency with government, corporations, and public services provided by Twitter and other social networks are too great to be tarnished simply by their ability to be used in a negative way.

Sources
304th MI Bn OSINT Team. “Sample Overview: al Qaida-Like Mobile Discussion & Potential Creative Uses.” 304th Military Intelligence Battalion Periodic Newsletter, October 16, 2008. http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/mobile.pdf (accessed February 18, 2009).

Newton-Small, Jay. ” Congress’s New Love Affair with Twitter.” Time Magazine, February 11, 2009. http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1878773-3,00.html (accessed February 18, 2009).

Sifry, Micah L. “A See-Through Society.” Columbia Journalism Review 47, no. 5 (January 2009): 43-47. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed February 12, 2009).

Processing itself feels like a hodgepodge of different languages. It is described by many as Java-lite, and I’ve found much of the syntax to be very similar to C. The main intent of the language is for visualization of a concept: audio, textual, or abstract. A number of examples can be found on Vimeo here. While I’m only on the ground floor of the language, I’m finding the challenge of manipulating shapes and variables and functions to do exactly what it is I want to be very enjoyable. Below I’ve linked the Java applet and source code for my most recent assignment. The goal was to create some kind of visualization using text. I chose to display the most used keywords from Steve Jobs’ 2007 Macworld keynote address. While the program is simple in operation, it demonstrates a number of essential concepts in using the Processing language.

Java Applet | .PDE Source Code

Earlier this week, every student and faculty member logged into OnCourse and was greeted by this picture. Earlier this week, IUware crashed.

For all its technological advances, IU was seemingly oblivious as to the effect that this announcement would have on its distribution servers. The brains behind the agreement did not plan for nearly everyone who had even an inkling of design interest to log on at the exact same time to try and download their product or suite of choice. They took some steps; the installation had been broken into a number of ~500MB chunks. The problem lies in the lack of a download speed cap. Thousands of people were logging in and the server(s) was pumping out installation chunks at speeds upwards of 500Kbps. The result? The site became essentially useless. Navigation, login, and access to the downloads themselves were extremely slow, and often resulted in a “Service Interrupted” screen.

Earlier today UITS introduced a cap on the downloads, peaking around 40-45Kbps. While mind-nubingly slow (and it stays just as slow when wired, on-campus), this assures the site itself can stay speedy, and give everyone fair access to the new software.

All of that said, I could not be more excited about what this means for Indiana University. This agreement has garnered massive amounts of attention to a university with a well-respected media arts and telecommunications schools, as well as an on-the-rise Informatics program. Although no details were released how Adobe is monetarily benefitting from this deal, the inception of the Adobe Education Enterprise License Agreement (Adobe EELA) is truly grounbreaking. I am excited to see what kind of corporate attention this will bring, potentially leading companies like Sony, Apple, Canon, and others to develop pilot education programs right here in Bloomington.

In the meantime, I’ll be downloading CS4 Production Premium 500MB at a time! Sarcasm aside, I am super excited to play around with Premiere, After Effects, and the new Photoshop.

UITS Article

UPDATE: UITS seems to have gotten it’s stuff together, and on campus I’m holding steady at ~215Kbps, and the site is just as speedy.

Don’t get me wrong, Antares puts out a truly powerful piece of hardware/software. It’s saved engineers, producers, and artists hundreds of hours. But this video perfectly describes just how ridiculously out of control things have gotten. Hip-hop has destroyed any integrity that Autotune had, making public use of it quite taboo. Another wonderful example is Kanye’s recent incident with a fan throwing something at him while on stage. His response was still being run through Autotune, giving a perfect example of just how ridiculous things sound, and how far out of control its use has become.

Please. Someone stop this.

Just giving some updates on where I’ve been the past month or so, and what I’ve been involved with. A new song with Landon Peck and IU Opera’s The Love For Three Oranges.