I saw this talk during my summer concept class. It’s a good perspective to keep in mind.

“Serious design, serious play is something else, for one thing, it often happens spontaneously, intuitively, accidentally or incidentally. It can be achieved out of innocence or arrogance or out of selfishness or sometimes out of carelessness. But mostly, it’s achieved through all the kinds of crazy parts of human behavior that don’t really make any sense. Serious design is imperfect. It’s filled with the kind of craft flaws that come from something being the first of its kind. Serious design is also often quite unsuccessful from a solemn point of view. That’s because the art of serious play is about invention, change, and rebellion, not perfection. Perfection happens during solemn play.”-Paula Scher

So, the title of this post gives you an idea where my head is at. Which is unfortunate, really. Not anything against Christmas, but my flight leaves 16 December for Ohio and I have a rough draft of a 15,000 word thesis and a 6,500 word memorial for moot court class to write in the intervening 16 days.

So, if you’re wondering over the next few weeks what I’m doing, it will be one of the following:

1. Drinking copious amounts of tequila coffee, trying to make it through hundreds of pages of research materials.
2. Writing about the Responsibility to Protect to the hopeful liking of my thesis supervisors
3. Writing a memorial as the lawyer for Georgia in its present case against Russia at the International Court of Justice
4. Repeating the first half of step one (which may, or may not, at this point actually have switched to tequila)
5. Trying to stay focused on steps 2-4 in order to make the 16 december self-imposed deadline(s).

As a follow up to the last post, I enjoyed Brussels immensely and had some time to do sight-seeing during the morning. I am still waiting to hear back from the organization in The Hague where I interviewed. That phone call should come sometime tomorrow or Wednesday. Stijn and I have plans for this weekend’s Sinterklaas festivities with friends on Friday in Amsterdam and during the weekend with his family in Heerlen. Otherwise, I’m just living life and relaxing with the help of much tequila coffee

Like I mentioned above, Stijn and I are heading out 16 December for the States. We’ll arrive in Ohio to hang with the ‘rents for a few days, then it’s off to NYC for a fun weekend away (including seeing Billy Elliot, which has one of my high school classmates in it, Jeff Kready!) before we head back to Ohio and ultimately on to Kansas for Christmas with the whole fam. We travel back to NL on New Year’s Eve. It should be an amazing vacation and I’m really looking forward to it. But now it’s back to step 5.

Hope you’re well!

Tot ziens!

“What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys? To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming? Is there an app for that?”

Better start producing…

3011811    วิทยานิพนธ์    Thesis

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With Monday and December rolling in a few hours, Week 9 is well in the horizon and just about official. That leaves three weeks to be done with what needs to be done. Here’s a list of what must be accomplished this week:

• Have a construction document ready for presentation for Furniture Design
• Create a physical model of my table for Furniture Design
• Print a presentation board for a mock presentation for Thesis Presentation
• Finish my physical model for Thesis Presentation
• Create a Milestone Chart for Business Management
• Study for a quiz

I have SO much to do and so little time… Gotta stay focused and not stress

Our group is exploring the ways in which politics, specifically campaigns, has been affected by the development and adoption of new media. Recent election cycles have brought about significant changes in communication, outreach, and activism. This blog explores these changes by examining the relationships between new media and politician-constituent communication, fund-raising, interest group involvement, and narrow-casting.

3014811    วิทยานิพนธ์    Thesis

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Wrapping up Thanksgiving Break and it’s been really nice actually. Got to spend a good amount of time with some good folks. Thanksgiving dinners were delicious as always. Got a tree up in Roanoke and in Blacksburg. We beat UVA for the 6th time in a row (I’m beyond spoiled on that one), and it’s just been nice getting to relax. I still got a good amount of work done too. Pretty spectacular I think. Looking forward to finishing off a lot of the remaining assignments in anticipation of final exams and the like. I also wanna try to get the last of my Christmas shopping done this week. I think I know what all else needs to be ordered, and hopefully for a pretty good price. Now I’m gonna try to finish a few more things tonight, get ready to get back into running tomorrow (maybe? no definitely) and get ready for a long list of to-do’s for Monday.

Recording tapes, doing meetings, and getting some more thesis work done. Sounds like a pretty good way to easy back into things.

Oh and ordered Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 for a good price on Amazon today. Part of my wanting to get a whole bunch of assignments out of the way now is so I can enjoy a good day of that without any worries…we’ll see if I can make than an actuality though.

Pay no mind to the random sign behind the Christmas Tree. I just was trying not to get the dartboard in the background…

The break provided me with some much needed R&R. I was semi-productive (cleaned, worked on my thesis), but I mostly relaxed. With moving and working simultaneously, it was good for me to take a break. I have more energy now than I did before.

I can’t believe that the semester is over soon. Although there have definitely been moments or days where things couldn’t be done faster (dealing with plagiarism), the semester went by fast.

It finally started coming together in my head, so I went to the nearly desolate journalism school and comandeered a white board for half an hour. I have a dozen reporting checklists scribbled in notebooks, but this is the first time I felt like I know enough to make a writing plan.

Then I photographed it and erased it.

hindi ako makapagpatuloy sa pag-gagawa ng system.hindi ko kasi mainstall ang SQL server 2000.not compatible sa OS ko hehe!

Tớ hiện giờ đã bước vào giai đoạn chuẩn bị viết luận văn. Ngày xưa ở -Nhật nghĩ làm master vất vả vì cả 2 năm phải làm trâu bò cho giáo sư. Sang Áo thì thay cho chương trình 2 năm, tớ học hết các môn trong 1 năm và để 6 tháng này để làm luận văn. Nói là nhàn thì đúng là có phần nhàn. Nhưng cái khó ở đây là tớ phải tự chứng tỏ khả năng làm việc độc lập, advisor không ra nhiệm vụ mỗi tuần phải làm gì mà chỉ khi có tranh luận gì thì mới đi gặp advisor.

Tớ rõ ràng là quen với kiểu làm việc theo task, được giao cho làm gì thì làm đấy chứ chưa bao giờ tự làm gì theo ý của mình cả. Thế nên bây giờ gặp khó khăn trong việc làm luận văn.

Theo phương châm lùi một bước để tiến hai bước , thay cho việc lao vào topic của tớ một cách vô phương hướng,  tớ tự học thêm một số kiến thức có vẻ cần thiết cho topic của mình. Đây cũng là một cách làm việc độc lập.

After almost six months that I have delivered my thesis, I’m finally posting it here. It turned up to be a very extensive document (about 150 pages), but mainly because we first wanted to assess the capabilities of SIM cards, identities and finally trust frameworks. And as I was working together with the SIM Research Team at Telenor and I do have some experience with SIM from when I worked in Gemalto, we spent several pages on reviewing the SIM capabilities and trying to figure it out the future SIM.  We also touched an aspect that may start to become more present in the SIM cards which is the ability to sense context.

Other pages were spent in getting into the identity management world and this was one part of the thesis which in fact I wished I had more time to go through. I got very interested in going deeper in the field after finally understanding the identity frameworks such as Higgins, Cardspace and specially on the concepts in which they are based. At last we studied a bit about trust models and this was one of the most difficult parts of the thesis as none of us had much an idea of trust modeling and it is a topic that can get very complex if studied deeply.

After this long background, we finally chosen a new application that could be hosted in the state-of-art (or future) SIM cards, take advantage of the fact that the SIM represent one or more identities and that can be used to build trust. That application was what I have proposed in my paper mentioned in the previous post.

The idea is to use the future sim cards to sense each other (either through NFC,  location information and server interaction, wlan, etc), to sense the environment and based on that, attribute a situational trust value for that meeting between the 2 sim holders.  Then with a bunch of those situational trust value, you can infer the user relation. The more context information, the more you can infer.

Based on that idea, we made a small prototype using SunSpots representing those advanced SIM cards and with a simple trust inference model and a test scenario.  It  may sound a simple test and in fact it was, as the thesis focused a bit on bringing a new idea (which is extensively described) and the state-of-art research, having the prototype as a small proof-of-concept.

When I was reviweing the thesis for the paper presentation, I read in Bruce Schneier’s blog about a paper from some researchers from the Santa Fe institute that used location information and phone calls information to infer the friendship closeness between the people involved in the experiment. The result was that they could predict the level of friendship with 95% accuracy! This pretty much confirm my thesis result =)

Pyramind Farm by Eric Ellingsen and Dickson Despommier

“We cannot go to the moon, Mars, or beyond without first learning to farm indoors on earth.”

I must admit, the idea of vertical farming reminds me of the sci-fi lore of the mid 20th century that imagined what the world might look like in the late 20th to early 21st century (see example above).

Vertical farming seems like a logical idea though, especially in Southern Ontario with its suburban and urban expansions.  I was just reading an introduction for the 1869 Ontario County Index (which lists Sylvester Mackey, my great-great grandfather) that mentions how great the land is in Ontario for farming.

“Ontario is justly regarded as one of the first Agricultural counties in the Province.  Of its area–estimated at 360,000 acres—there are upwards of 210,000 acres cleared and under cultivation, about 150,000 acres being under crop and the remainder are devoted to pasture.  The soil is rich and fertile, and very productive.” (pg. 2, 1869 Ontario Country Index)

Sky Farm for Toronto by Gordon Graff

I can assume the current amount of land in Ontario dedicated to agriculture falls short in comparison to the amount in 1869.  And so, with prime farm land being developed for non-agricultural uses, where else are we supposed to go if we want to create and maintain local farming and thus local food sources?

Sky Farm for Toronto by Gordon Graff

If vertical farming works, then even giant urban centres like the City of Toronto would be able to establish larger-scale local food sources.  The only way Toronto can grow is up, and perhaps this might be the reality for other areas in the GTA in the future.  I’m so interested to see what else develops from Sky Farm and for the concept of vertical farming altogether.

Other really cool links:

• The Vertical Farm Project and designs (all above images are from this website).

• Torontoist vertical farming article

• Gordon Graff’s Skyfarm for Toronto design – Inhabitant (Design that Will Save the World) website

3020811    วิทยานิพนธ์    Thesis

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Been busy of late, my thesis has had me pinned to my books on the reg. Here’s a quick Steve Aoki post to hold you over. This one is from his upcoming LP due out early 2010. Check it out after the jump.

ym.

MP3/Myspace:

• http://www.myspace.com/steveaoki
• Steve Aoki – I’m in the house [EP]

Some slides from yesterday’s thesis presentation. More images after the jump.

Its the mid way point of my thesis project and yesterday was the chance for Digital Fabrication Thesis Studio to present our current explorations and design processes. The panel gave a varied set of comments, it was good to run through the project with non tech based tutors from the urban and theory fields. Some questions were cast on the viability on the use of digital tools implemented, which was expected when one presents anything relatively new in design technology . All in all the critique was quite a confidence booster.

As a personal quest to distill ones communication techniques, i culled a large amount of detail since i figured that majority of the panel (the larger the more true) lose interest in the numbers game early on, therefore providing self explanatory images (or models) became a more powerful way to communicate your ideas rather than information overloading your audience.

Relating new processes with traditional linear strategies in design became a strategy itself to bring forward alternative ideas

Using a projector to blow up close up perspectives also gives one an advantage compared to the usual printed media. (As you can tell, i’m all for using technology to help)

Another aspect to the design were physical models, which were effective in giving the panel a sense of scale and space but also suggestive ideas on fabrication. 30-40 percent of the presentation went into giving a run down on the fabrication process of the models (which one inherently spends alot of time on whatever the architectural issue is, so you might as well display your effort)

also for a self confessed tech nut, it became a conscious effort not to overwhelm your panel with too much tech terminology, although lightly sprinkling some wordy terms like “finite element method linear static stress analysis ” threads the line between impressive and confusing.

All in all , there was positive feedback on moving to the next stage. Its been a long tiring month, but it was worth it. I’m quite excited now and after a short break its time to follow through with one’s ideas.  Execution and finishing is often much harder than the initial idea but always much more fulfilling as an end result.

On to the next stage of thesis work!

hay..ang hirap simulan ng system namin.nagsisimula na ko sa interface para mapacheck sa moderator bukas.sana matapos ko ng aus!hehe!

3040813    วิทยานิพนธ์    Thesis

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3043813    วิทยานิพนธ์    Thesis

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