You can also check the live threads at PageOneX.com updated daily:
Author: numeroteca
How ASUS is sadSUS and I could not repair my laptop: Unfortunately the documentation is not available
Days ago my U52F ASUS laptop stopped working. I tried to repair it: opened it, bought some pieces, but it didn’t work. I contacted, one more time, the ASUS support service. This is our chat:
TL/DR*: ASUS doesn’t provide their disassemble or technical information to end users.
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:23:24 pm
Hello pedro. How may I help you?
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:23:57 pm
my computer stopped working.
the AC adapter is now blinking.
the AC adapter LED blinks when is connected to the U52F laptop, and it doesn’t blink when is not connected to the laptop.
I have no battery. it died months ago
the light of the led is green
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:25:01 pm
I apologize about this issue your having and I’m more than happy to assist you with this.
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:25:20 pm
the laptop is out of warranty
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:26:02 pm
For hardware issue you would be required to have the notebook sent in for servicing
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:26:31 pm
did I talked with you before? the chat closed before I could answer
you were saying “It could be that the board was damaged in the replacement process”, but I didn’t touched the motherboard at all
ad the problem started before I replaced the jack board
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:28:02 pm
This means the issue is with the motherboard, since the DC port was changed
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:29:02 pm
I see
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:30:04 pm
Would you like an RMA to be created to have the notebook sent in?
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:31:39 pm
I am trying to avoidsending it and repair it myself. I can not afford the cost.
there is no other thing I can do?
it can only be the motherboard?
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:32:29 pm
Unfortunately the motherboard may need to be changed
You have changed the charger and the DC port, which leaves the motherboard
The motherboard is definitely the issue
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:33:52 pm
is there somethig to be seen in the motherboard?
are there users with the same issue: blinking adapter when switching in?
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:36:51 pm
This is the first I’m hearing of this issue
I haven’t heard from you for a few moments. Are you still with me?
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:41:43 pm
yes iam here
no report by no one else?
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:43:13 pm
Had issues where the light doesn’t come or the notebook doesn’t charge, but not a blinking light
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:45:56 pm
I was meaning: not only that you heard, but anyone at ASUS
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:47:08 pm
Unfortunately not, it’s recommended to have the notebook sent in
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:48:41 pm
I can not find any manual online about my notebook.can you provide one to me?
at least of the affected parts
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:51:01 pm
You can go to our support site http://support.asus.com/Downlo…5350_U53_43_33_UM_printing.zip
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:51:45 pm
where to look there?
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:52:21 pm
You can follow the link I provided
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:53:17 pm
mmm, this is just a user manual, I need something more technical
it doens’t have any info about what is inside
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:55:19 pm
Unfortunately there isn’t pedro
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:55:47 pm
there isn’t? so, how do you do to repair things?
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:57:18 pm
Only the technicians have those information
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 01:57:56 pm
I need to repair your product.
I need that information.
Can you contact the technicians?
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 01:59:44 pm
Unfortunately that information is not provided to the end users or to anyone apart from the technicians
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:00:19 pm
So, you mean that I can not get the information about a product that I bought and I own?
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:02:43 pm
There isn’t documented information on how to disassemble the notebook or on how the circuitry work, that is provided for end users
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:04:03 pm
Is ASUS going to change this any time soon?
it looks like a bad idea to help users repair your poducts.
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:05:13 pm
Unfortunately they wouldn’t
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:05:26 pm
they?
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:06:18 pm
Referring to the question you asked “Is ASUS going to change this any time soon?”
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:07:27 pm
That’s what I asked: it is not “they”, it’s you, ASUS.
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:09:07 pm
They meaning the technicians will not provide these information to end users, which that information is not provided you technical support as well
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:10:05 pm
As you can imagine, I don’t care about the different sections in your company, and your problems with information tranfer.
Christopher: my computer with all my data is dead. I need to work and you tell me that the info is there, but that you (ASUS, technicians, technical support, whatever) can not provide it.
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:11:23 pm
What would be required for you to do is to have it sent to us
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:12:40 pm
If the only answer you can provide is: “send it to us and we’ll repair it”, you are not understanding what I am saying. Do you want me to start again?
I need more information about the ASUS computer I bought, so I can understand the problem and repair it. You (ASUS) have the information, but you are not willing to share it with me.
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:16:10 pm
This information is not a documented information that can be passed on
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:17:06 pm
Why can not be passed on? I am your consumer, with your product.
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:19:46 pm
Correct and I do understand that pedro, but due to policies this information is only internal
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:21:12 pm
So I guess you have very bad policies. That will be my last ASUS product, and I will write about this, although I guess I am not the first consumer who faces this issue.
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:22:28 pm
I wish i had more options that i could provide you with i am truly sorry about that.
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:23:11 pm
I am sad that companies like yours promote e-waste.
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:25:32 pm
Sorry i couldn’t be of more assistance to you, Is there anything else I can help you with?
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:26:37 pm
yes, I want you to read what other people are saying about ASUS: http://www.tim.id.au/blog/tims…ptop-service-manuals/#toc-asus
really sad
” I’ve called ASUS again looking for manuals, and I could no longer get ahold of the wonderful tech who helped me before. Instead I had someone tell me quite bluntly that “those manuals are our intellectual property and we will not distribute them in any way, shape or form”; after mentioning I’d had someone help me out before, they asked if I remembered who that was, because “that’s a punishable offense in this company”.”
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:30:41 pm
Which the information to not provided to us to provide end users with
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:31:01 pm
?
I don’t understand your last sentence
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:33:11 pm
I was stating that the information you are requesting is not available
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:33:57 pm
…to the users
can I file a complain?
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:36:25 pm
You can go ahead to use the Escalation Mailbox
http://www.service.asus.com/in…id=7#!escalation-mailbox/c1scx
Is there anything else I can help you with?
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:39:06 pm
One last idea:
I know you, Christopher, are not the one deciding the policies of such a huge corporationASUS = sAdSUS
I know you, Christopher, are not the one deciding the policies of such a huge corporationASUS = sAdSUS
[I sent by mistake] I know you, Christopher, are not the one deciding the policies of such a corporation like ASUS. But I want youto remember, that from now on you read once: ASUS = sAdSUS
It is sad how your company not supports repairing.
I will also remember this talk. Do you want to say your last word for posterity?
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:44:25 pm
I do understand what you are saying pedro and also how frustrating it may be, but we are unable to provide the information you are requesting
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:47:22 pm
look for Joseph K. ASUS in google in the future! amazing help 🙂
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:47:31 pm
Is there anything else I can help you with?
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:48:25 pm
Yes, send the manual of the u52f to my email account, once you are out of the office.
I will not tell it to anyone!
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:49:02 pm
The document you are requesting is not available
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:49:11 pm
forgot to send you this link: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2…-manuals-planned-obsolescence/
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:49:29 pm
We can only provide a users manual and it is on our support site
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:49:45 pm
You might have some technicians friends
imagine: while having a coffee, do you happen to have the manual of the U52F?
it’s just a pdf
And everyone will sleep better tonight
imagine contributing in this way to the environment.
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:52:36 pm
Unfortunately the documentation is not available
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:54:35 pm
I know that. I was imaging a different ending to this story.
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:55:05 pm
Is there anything else I can help you with?
pedro Wed, 5/22/2013 02:56:20 pm
Maybe tonight I will receive that email?
do you have my email?
Joseph K. Wed, 5/22/2013 02:57:30 pm
Unfortunately there wouldn’t be an email sent, where this documentation is not available
You provided your email upon entering the chat
—
Connection lost. Please check your internet connection and then try again.
Start the chat again
—
Duration: 01:34:49
Chat has been opened from website: E-mail from LiveChat
Joseph K. was used instead of the real name of the ASUS support person.
The links I sentt, Wired and Tim.id.au, thanks to voragine.net and his text on “distributed logic”.
—
*Too long/ didn’t read.
El sueño de Rajoy en la Prospe
Escribir, dibujar o grabar sueños es una actividad de lo más recomendable. Acabo de ver el último vídeo del Partido Popular y creo que podría ser el sueño de Rajoy después de haber pasado una mañana por La Prospe, mi barrio de toda la vida. Hay una gran cantidad de imágenes que están rodadas allí, entre otras la imagen del cielo inicial y diferentes casas alrededor de la Plaza de la Prosperidad (Madrid).
Lo que podría ser un sueño de Rajoy a su paso por La Prospe, no es más que una producción del PP para promocionar la enésima campaña de que “esto lo arreglamos entre todos” o “el curiculum de todos” de Campofrío, que esta vez se llama #juntossalimos. A ver si con esta sí que sí que sí salimos de la eterna crisis. Un montaje rápido, memeficable (buscando el viral) con muchas imágenes sugerentes, estética youtube de archivo y una voz en off que va ligando todo el discurso. Por las localizaciones que he detectado (La Prospe y Calle Fuencarral) parace un vídeo cuidado pero rápidamente hecho. No voy a analizarlo como un cabalista, pero hay dos imágenes, y el texto ligado a ellas que tienen poco de subliminales que me gustaría destacar:
![Su educación [de tus hijos].](https://numeroteca.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/130505_juntossalimos-educacion_1.00.png)
¿La parroquia como la educación de tus hijos? ¿Madrid 2020 (y van 3) como tu futuro? wtf
Para terminar, tras “eres lo que eliges, por tanto lo que eliges te representa” y mostrar a Adolfo Suárez, Superman, John Lennon, Steve Jobs y al Papa sale el 15M seguido de un corto fundido en negro. Se oye “pero si eliges no elegir, otros decidirán por ti” acompañando a dos imágenes de una manifestación en la Plaza de Neptuno (creo que la de “rodea el congreso” el 25S): gente frente a las ya clásicas vallas que impiden llegar al congreso (y una bandera republicana), seguido de la famosa escena street fighter del manifestante empujando a un policía.
Como era la enésima vez que leía/veía algo para desligitimar las movilizaciones sociales y a favor del sistema democrático actual, pensé que sería bueno dejarlo por escrito.
Chromosomes in the sky
Un día de playas
Guns, Wars and Terrorism in a PageOneX real size (photo essay)
I finally installed the PageOneX real size project with stories related to guns, wars and terrorism. Come visit the display this week to the second floor of building E14 at MIT Media Lab. Thanks all of you that helped in this process: Adrienne, Luis, Álvaro, Nacho and Matjaz! What follows is a photographic guide to the PageOneX real size installation. Continue reading
Breath in, breath out.
A quick test with Local / National / by Continent news
After yesterday’s Guns vs Sports vs Wars I wanted to test news by location: local, for news related to the city or region where the newspaper is published; national for US news; and continent (as Ethan suggested). This visualizations fits pretty well with the previous one, as it fills the gaps of the more locally oriented newspapers like The Boston Globe and LA Times.
I do not think I will use this approach in the final PageOneX real size version, but it is interesting to view the same newspapers coded by different ways. I can imagine a par of special glasses that would allow the viewer shift from one visualization to another.
Note: I have only coded the main news (the ones with bigger size).
I would have never thought it was so difficult to get the paper
It was one of those ideas that seemed easy: to build a real size 1:1 scale of a PageOneX analysis. I just needed to buy 4 newspapers during 4 weeks, highlight certain stories, and put them on the wall. However, as it usually happens, things are easier said that done.
Finding the newspapers
I thought that buying the newspapers everyday would be the easy part, a question of self-discipline, but things are not what they seem. My first idea was to get them from the public libraries, but at the Cambridge Public Library they told me that they are forced to destroy them after 4 months. The next approach was to go buy them.
It’s easy to find The New York Times at any corner. It costs $2.5 on week days and $6 on Sundays. It’s also easy to buy The Boston Globe, if you live in Boston. In my case, I am getting the Globe directly from them, as they have an open collaboration with the Center for Civic Media, where I am now based.
It got more complicated when I went to buy Los Angeles Times and the The Washington Post. It is not possible to buy them in Boston. I went to the bigger news stands and called the newspapers directly: they are not sold in the region, and I guess it would happen the same in other regions of the US. You can get Le Figaro or Le Monde with some days of delay, but not LA Times or Washington Post in the classical “Out of Town News” in Harvard Square. Anyone needing proofs that print press are having a bad time? So, my next step was to subscribe to those newspapers.
After a few phone calls I was able to subscribe to The Washington Post that Saturday for 4 weeks for $72, initially I had to buy at least 8 weeks. To get copies of the previous days I would have to pay the standard fee $10/copy. I also tried to get an online access as a subscriber, but it was not possible with my post subscription. They told me that I would receive the Washington Post told with a 2-4 days latency.
Los Angeles Times offices were not opened on weekends, so I had to wait until Monday to get the 8 week subscription, the minimum required, for $167. Luckily, I was able to get the papers from the days previous to my subscription. I would receive the papers with a 7-8 days latency, as they send them through regular post.
Newspapers at home
I hadn’t had the newspaper at home everyday since I was living with my parents. Finally directly in touch with the objects I’ve been studying all these past months: paper front pages. I could physically experience the overload of information and advertisement, piles of papers piling up on top of my closet. I could also see the above and below the fold news and experience the difficulties of the paper navigation. I find it really difficult to read these huge newspapers that are split into different booklets that fall apart when you open them. I also found the full page ads in the last page, which would be a great second phase of this project, a LastPageX visualization.
By now I have all NYtimes and Boston Globes since day one (March 26th). I am missing LA Times papers since April 9th (congruent with a 7 day latency), and from The Washington Post I miss the period March 26-29, April 8th, and since April 12th.
I have to start the installation this Wednesday April 17th. Therefore, for the newspapers that would have not arrived by then, I will have to use printed copies of the front pages, or maybe display a 404 error white page?
It’s being a good experiment on how difficult it is to get the paper copies of these newspapers. I can test now what I had written in the PageOneX description hundreds of times: that digital coding would avoid the problems of buying and storing newspapers.
One night the guy from the convenience store told me, when I tried to buy the NYTimes in his shop: we don’t sell newspapers, why would we when you can read them online?
What to code? Guns, Sports and Wars
After an initial test I’m exploring the possibility of coding: Gun control vs Sports vs International War Conflicts. Here is how it would look like:
I also coded Gay Marriage and Cyprus economic Crisis news, but I think there was not enough and continued coverage to include them in the graphic.
- International War conflicts: Syrian, North Korea, Afgahinstan, Iran and Isael-Palestina.
- Guns: the debate on gun control and killing by guns in the US.
- Sports: basketball, baseball, golf, wrestling, marathon.
I am still open to suggestions! Bear in mind that what ever topics I select, I’ll have to manually cut the transparent pieces of colored plastic to put on top of the newspapers.
Want to join the coding process?
I will be reading papers + cutting plastic sheets from this Wednesday until Friday. Contact me if you want to join. It’s going to be fun to have access to all these newspapers. I am envisioning more projects beyond this one!
–
PS: when I was about to close this post, the Boston Marathon explosions occurred. How will it influence press coverage these following days?
Cross-posted at civic.mit.edu
Sueño de color
Fuimos a visitarle a su casa, resulta que vive por aquí cerca, en Boston. Tenemos una amiga común, pero no recuerdo su nombre. Una mujer mayor de pelo cano que vive en una casa con nombre propio ¿que había diseñado él mismo?
Es el Picasso mayor, calvo, pero muy animado y activo. Es sorprendente haber ido a su casa a cenar. Le pregunto por cómo se siente con tanta retrospectiva ¿o es la pregunta que imagino haber preguntado?
Me habla de uno de sus últimos proyectos. En una de esas estaciones de tren en mitad de la nada él va con un traje de chaqueta. La cosa es que ese traje desprende pintura de colores, y según se va apoyando en el edificio, lo va pintando. Una especie de gamberrada o arte público que va llenando de color la pared y a él mismo. Recuerdo los rojos en la pared y sobre su corbata, camisa y chaqueta. Algún azul tal vez, negros cerca del suelo. La pared cada vez más coloreada mientras él sigue girando y girando para pintar la estación entera.
Una especie de arte furtivo, pero no tiene quien lo persiga.
April full of trash activities
Basura = trash.
ama = love.
-orama = wide view of.
Basurama = wide view of + love trash
I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow Wednesday April 3rd about Basurama. I am presenting the multidisciplinary activities we develop around/with trash and the paper Basurama: a framework for designing collectively with waste (just presented to the Reclaim + Remake Symposium next week in Washington DC).
It will be at the Mahindra Center for the Humanities/Barker Center invited Cultural Agents Initiative and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
What: Talk: Basurama: a framework for designing collectively with waste
When: Wednesday, April 3, 2013 – 6pm – 8pm
Where: Barker Center, Seminar Room 133, Harvard University. 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA.
Besides, for the end of the month, April 20th, I am preparing a waste installation How to picture 2 tons of waste? for April 20th. It’s going to be fun and… I need your help!
Who wrote the news? Gender in the front page
The best way to show the last improvements in PageOneX‘s development is by using them. After lasts Ed’s commits it is possible to draw as many rectangles as you need when coding a single front page, whereas before it was only possible to draw 2 rectangles per image.
I used this new feature to analyze the gender of the bylines: who is writing the news that are in the front page. It is inspired in the research that Nathan Mathias is developing about gender and the news. In his case, he’s written a script to analyze the byline automatically from online newspapers. Check Nathan’s posts about this topic: Gender in Global Voices, Women’s Representation in Online News, Data science for gender equality: Monitoring womens voices in the news and Women, news, and the internet: (almost) everything we know.
What is presented above is a visualization of the same kind of study, in this case, a infinitesimal portion (last week in two newspapers), and manually coded with the help of PageOneX. I only coded the articles that had the byline visible in the front page. The images that were not related to an article were left un-coded.
It would be interesting to compare the data obtained with this method with the ones obtained by a study by Women in Journalism “Seen but not heard: how women make front page news” (WiJ) that “found that 78% of all front page bylines were male; 22% were female”. Their research studied UK newspapers and their method was slightly different: they “counted the number of female and male bylines on each front page”, whereas PageOneX calculates the percentage of surface of the articles. Nevertheless, it might be interesting to compare results with a larger data set. WiJ’s study was a 4 weeks period and also analyzed the content of lead stories and photographs. It is worth checking the graphics based on these data by the Datablog (all the data are available) and the article by Jane Martinson.
I am particularly interested in how a tool like PageOneX might be able to make the coding process of news and its data visualizations faster, easier and more visually compelling. The coding process presented in this blog post took me less than one hour.
If you are interested in collaborating or using PageOneX you can join the developers’ listserv, the users’ email list or the newsletter.
PS: This new feature is not yet in the available in the alpha online version, but it soon will. Meanwhile you can download and install your own deployment. Continue reading
Newspaper coverage goes 1:1 scale
[Update: there is a post with all the photos related to the installation Guns, Wars and Terrorism in a PageOneX real size (photo essay)]
PageOneX keeps moving forward. We want to have it ready for the spring, but first we have to solve a large list of bugs and other issues. A lot to code! So much coding that we sometimes forget that paper newspapers are real objects. That’s why we want to make a physical visualization of newspapers, a 1:1 scale version of PageOneX for the MIT Media Lab Festival (April 2013).
We have yet to decide the topic/s we want to focus on and when we are going to start buying newspapers. Our original plan is having New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and The Boston Globe.
Do you have any suggestion about which topic we should follow? When to start buying the newspapers?
We are inspired by other people that have done similar displays with real newspapers that we have came across recently:
The film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) (available to watch in archive.org) by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick makes visual what the book Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Herman describes. They use as a case study the coverage of Timor war and Cambodia wars, that were happening simultaneously (1975-1979) by stitching together all the columns of text that The New York Times dedicated to each topic. Column inches is the measure that academics (and advertisers) have used to measure the amount of coverage. It was a way to show the different amount of coverage that state atrocities get, depending if they came from friend or allies states or from official enemies of the US. It is an empirical demonstration of the propaganda model.
Genocides coverage in column inches in The New York Times:
- Timor 1975 Indonesia occupation (left column: 70 column inches)
- Cambodia Khmer_Rouge, Pol Pot (right column: 1,175 column inches).
They also make a wonderful display of surface area dedicated to see the ratio of advertisement and news in a The New York Times newspaper (we are thinking on replicating this data visualization):
Inspired by the Manufacturing Consent film Siemon Allen made his Newspaper project. He was struck by the fact that during the same period 1975-1979 in South Africa another important event was happening “the Soweto uprisings, heightened police oppression, the expansion of separate development, and the death of many activists, including Steve Biko”. He made similar visual displays to show how was the coverage about South Africa in US newspapers:
Showing certain news in newspapers or cutting and pasting the news in long strips.
He also made standard data visualization (pie charts) when he analyzed the content of the news and classified it: aids, sport, culture, crime…
Note: The photos from the film are screenshots I took. The Siemon Allen images are all extracted from his website.
Cómo aumentar el tamaño máximo de subida de archivos en wordpress en gandi.net
Desde hace un tiempo en motnera34 estamos mudando todas nuestras páginas a un hosting en gandi.net. Después de superar los problemas de bases de datos de wordpress de más de 10Mb con BigDump, parece que todo estaba solucionado. Lo que pasa es que nos habíamos olvidado del tamaño máximo de subida de archivos desde el propio escritorio de wordpress, por defecto es 2Mb. Para aumentarlo, al menos en gandi.net, basta con incluir ahcer una pequeña modificación en el .htaccess. El .htaccess está en el directorio raiz de tu servidor, cuando lo descargues es probable que no puedas verlo, tendrás que dar en tu navegador de archivos a “ver archivos ocultos”, que son todos aquellos que tienen un punto delante.
Edita el .htaccess y añade estas líneas:
php_value upload_max_filesize 64M
php_value post_max_size 64M
php_value max_execution_time 300
php_value max_input_time 300
Vuelve a subirlo donde lo habías encontrado, en el raiz de tu servidor.
Encontré la solución tras probar las diferentes opciones que contaban en wpbeginner.
MIT from the Prudential tower panorama photo
Nemo snow storm photos
It took two weeks to publish them, but after another snowy weekend, I had to publish the photos of the quiet city after the storm (no cars, just people shoveling and walking on the streets).
3 steps to measure the corruption coverage in Spain
The fast-growing list of corruption investigations in Spain have involved almost every institution in the country: the major political parties, the royal house, the supreme court or the national bank, just to mention some of them. Everyday, new information and a new case is released/unveiled, provoking an increasing sense of indignation. It is also true that the levels of indignation have reached an apex, that they cause either incredulity or insensitivity.
I decided to test PageOneX, a tool to visualize the evolution of stories on newspaper front pages, to see how the coverage on corruption was being made. It is a good moment to do so, now that we, at the Center for Civic Media, are currently developing it. We hope to have a fully functional version by the end of the month, but you can always test the online alpha version or install the code locally. You can also get involved in the testing and development, it is open source.
This post is based on another I wrote in Spanish Es lo mismo pero no es igual in my blog.
1. Corruption or not corruption?
The hypothesis and common ground knowledge is that every Spanish newspaper is usually aligned with a political party. They usually follow the corruption cases of the ‘opponent’ parties. Measuring the coverage in the front page seemed a good proxy to analyze their political agendas and to verify the hypothesis.
I selected 9 Spanish newspapers and highlighted the stories related to corruption cases in the last days until February 5th, 2013.
There are two big ‘black’ clusters: after Jan. 17th, when El Mundo published that the ruling party ex-treasurer, Bárcenas, had a $29 million swiss account, and after January 31st, when the excerpts from the party’s parallel financial accounts were published by El País. Both scoops drain all the other newspapers to talk about the same PP corruption case.
Continue reading
Es lo mismo pero no es igual
[Actualización del 4 febrero 2013: puedes ver más abajo la versión actualizada.]
Ayer publiqué la cobertura en la prensa española de casos de corrupción, pero hacía falta un análisis cualitativo para entender en qué tono estaban escritas las portadas. Creo que llevaba a error pensar que cuando todos los periódicos hablaban de lo mismo decían lo mismo: unos defienden y los otros atacan o simplemente informan. Algo parecido hice sobre las movilizaciones sociales del mayo pasado cuando clasifiqué según las noticias eran informativas o editoriales en primera página sobre el 15M.
Esta vez he hecho una nueva taxonomía: artículo que defienden o valoran positivamente la actuación de un partido político y los que dan la información de manera más neutra o negativa. El umbral entre uno y otro es subjetivo, así que el criterio ha sido incluir solamente los casos en los que veía claro que eran una defensa o valoración positiva de una determinada noticia.
Se puede apreciar cómo la valoración positiva o defensa (área rayada en diagonal) es, básicamente, de los periódicos más conservadores (ABC, La Razón y La Gaceta) que defienden la actuación del PP. Hay varios métodos: dar razones para situar a Bárcenas fuera del PP o apoyar los proyectos pro-transparencia de Mariano Rajoy y otros miembros del partido.
ABC, La Razón y La Gaceta coinciden también en dedicar al menos una portada a la ‘corrupción’ en genérico (área morada en el gráfico) en los cinco días posteriores del 17 de enero, que es cuando El Mundo publicó la noticia de los 22 millones de Bárcenas en Suiza. Es la táctica del “y el resto también”. El caso Bárcenas es demasiado grande como para ignorarlo, así que deben emplear otras tácticas diferentes de la del “avestruz” o el “y tú más”.
Cobertura en la prensa española de casos de corrupción
16:02h. 3 febrero 20013. Hay una actualización de este gráfico en Es lo mismo pero no es igual.
El mes de enero ha estado cargado de noticias de diferentes casos de corrupción que han afectado a los principales partidos políticos y a la casa real: Nóos, Pallerols, Baltar, Amy-Mulas, Gürtel, Pokemon, Lloret de Mar, Bárcenas… Es una oportunidad idónea para comprobar de una forma visual cómo cada periódico se alinea con un determinado partido o en contra de otro.
El mes tiene un marcado color azul (PP) por la cobertura de todos los medios del caso Bárcenas, pero también hay naranja (CiU) que con Pallerols y Lloret hacen doblete, rojo (PSOE) con el caso Amy-Mulas y el verde (Casa real) de Urdangarín y su Instituto Nóos. La cobertura es bastante desigual salvo cuando todo el coro canta al unísono en los estribillos del caso Bárcenas.
El método utilizado analiza las portadas de prensa y mide el porcentaje del total que dedican a una determinada noticia. De cada portada se han seleccionado las dos noticias relacionadas con las corrupción más importantes.
El País tiene una trayectoria constante: azul PP con algunos pequeños toques verdes Urdangarín y Revenga. Se mantiene constante su cobertura (10-20%)y, cuando llega su scoop, da toda su portada a los papeles de Bárcenas subrayados. El rojo PSOE no aparece por ningún lado, y los tejemanejes de Nóos y Urdangarín están pero en tamaño pequeño.
ABC, por las características de su portada con una imagen que lo ocupa casi todo, tiene siempre mayores porcentajes, superando a menudo el 50% de cobertura, hable del tema que hable, Es binario, o blanco o negro. Después de la aparición de la cuenta en Suiza de Bárcenas (17 de enero por El Mundo) le dedica dos portadas seguidas al tema, para luego hacer una, el día 20 de enero (morado), con un fotomontaje de corruptos de toda condición. Al siguiente, para compensar, saca a Griñán y sus EREs. Cabe señalar que cubrir una noticia de corrupción no significa que se esté criticando al partido en cuestión: el 22 de enero titula “Luz y taquígrafos” para anunciar que Rajoy realizará una auditoria externa e interna para “zanjar especulaciones”. Cerca del final dedica toda la portada a la fianza para los de Nóos, y cierra, como todos, con Bárcenas y sus papeles.
El Mundo es el más multicolor: le da a todo. Desde después de reyes no hay día que no hable de algún caso de corrupción. Al principo con naranja CiU, luego llega el periodo azul con la cuenta de Bárcenas en Suiza, toques de rojo con Amy-Mulas del PSOE combinados con verdes Nóos al final. Al final vuelve a los papeles de Bárcenas empujado por la exclusiva de El País.
Nota: se ha dejado fuera del estudio el caso de la caja NovaGalicia y el conflico del Banco de España.
La visualización se ha realizado con la herramienta PageOneX, actualmente en estado de desarollo.
Los 8 pasos para instalar WordPress en tu propio ordenador
Estos son los pasos que he seguido para instalar WordPress en local. Para ello necesitaremos tener un servidor, y mySQL para alojar la base de datos. Habitualmente suelo desarrollar los temas de WordPress en un servidor remoto, con la consecuente pérdida de tiempo que lleva tener que subir vía ftp o ssh los archivos para poder ver los cambios realizados. Ahora ya no necesito internet para desarrollar y probar temas. Algo básico, pero que no me había puesto a aprender hasta hoy.
Este manual ha sido realizado junto con @skotperez en Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, aunque muchos de los pasos son igualmente válidos para Windows y Mac.
- Instalar apache 2 (in ubuntu, open a terminal and type “sudo apt-get install apache2”
- Instalar mySQL (sudo apt-get install mysql-server)
- Instalar phpMyAdmin (vía Ubuntu Software Center)
- Crear base de datos
Hay dos caminos posibles:- Desde phpMyAdmin:
- Puedes acceder a la base de datos vía phpMyAdmin en http://localhost/phpmyadmin
- Haz login con el usuario y contraseña con el que hayas configurado mySQL (en mi caso es la misma que la contraseña para mi usuario de ubuntu). En mi caso el usuario es root.
- Crea base de datos “Create new database“. Pon un nombre a tu base de datos. Collation y utf8 están bien como opciones por defecto
- Entra en la base de datos a través del menú de la izquierda y vete a la pestaña “privileges” para crear un usuario y contraseña.
- Desde mysql:
- Si el comando
mysqlno te funciona, prueba con
mysql -h localhost -u root - Una vez dentro de la consola de mysql:
CREATE DATABASE sname_of_database;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON name_of_database.*
TO 'name_of_database'@'localhost'
IDENTIFIED BY 'databasepassword';
SHOW GRANTS FOR 'name_of_database'@'localhost'; - Puedes comprobar que la base de datos se ha creado con el comando:
SHOW DATABASES; - Sal de mysql con
exit
- Si el comando
- Desde phpMyAdmin:
- Descarga wordpress http://wordpress.org/download/ y descomprime el zip. En mi caso en la carpeta /home/numeroteca/wordpress
- Cambio el nombre de wp-config-sample.php por wp-config.php. Pongo los datos de la recién creada base de datos en el wp-config.php. Que quedará como:
define('DB_NAME', 'name_of_database')
define('DB_USER', 'name_of_database');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'databasepassword')
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); - El directorio por defecto de apache es /var/www/
Todo lo que hay en ese directorio es visible desde http://localhost. Para no tener que trasladar todos los archivos de wordpress a la carpeta /var/www/ (o a la carpeta /var/www/html) creamos una liga blanda (o enlace simbólico) desde allí:- Navegamos hasta ahí /var/www/
cd /var/www/ocd /var/www/html - Creamos liga blanda:
ln -s /home/path/to/the_files/where/wordpress/files/are
Por ejemplo
ln -s /home/numeroteca/wordpress
Probablemente tengas que usarsudo ln -s /home/numeroteca/wordpress, ya que necesitas permisos especiales para editar en ese directorio.
- Navegamos hasta ahí /var/www/
- Ahora si vas a http://localhost/wordpress podrás acceder al wordpress y realizar la instalación (si el wp-config.php está bien configurado).
Actualización 15 de marzo 2013: Si después de instalar worpdress añades carpetas al tema en que estás trabajando (me pasó añadiendo las carpetas de bootstrap a un tema), si estás no tienen los permisos necesario, el navegador no podrá leerlas. Asegúrate de darles permisos con: chmod a+rwx nombre-de-carpeta (lo vi en webtechquery.com)
Actualización 30 de marzo 2013: Esto de los permisos tiene más jugo. Para poder actualizar los plugins tienes que cambiar el propietario de los archivos de wordpress. (solución vía varios post, entre otros este).
Para saber quién es el propietario al que tienes que otorgarle los permisos, inserta <?php echo(exec("whoami")); ?> en cualquiera de las páginas de wordpress.
Mira en el navegador a ver qué sale como resultado del echo “who I am”. En micaso es “www-data”. Por lo tanto deberás cambiar los el propietario de la carpeta donde tienes instalado el wordpess a “www-data” (change owner = chown):
sudo chown -hR www-data carpeta-donde-tienes-instalado-wordpress/*
[no lo he probado, pero probablemente no haga falta cambiar el propietario de todas carpetas de tu instalación de wordpress, sino solo unas pocas].
Esta acción cambiará el propietario detodos los archivos y carpetas, de forma que cuando vayas a editar tu tema de wordpress o el wp-config.php no te dejará salvarlo. Para eso tienes que otorgarte de nuevo la propiedad de esos archivos o carpetas utilizando el mismo método. Por ejemplo, para que el archivo wp-config.php vuelva a ser de tu propiedad (tu usuario de ubuntu, en mi caso “numeroteca”):
sudo chown -hR numeroteca wp-config.php
También puede funcionar añadir al wp-config.php la línea, como sugieren por ahí cuando no tienes acceso ftp, me funcionó en otra instalación:
define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
Teaching WordPress with cardboard folders
It is a good time to give back all the things I have learnt from WordPress. Today I’ll be giving an introductory class with cardboard folder and data bases in the Festival of Learning 2013 at Media Lab. More info + session.
How to automate Googlemaps image capture: urban development ruins in Spain
Josh Begley developed a script that outputs a list of googlemaps images given a list of locations (longitud and latitude needed). It runs in Processing and uses the Google Maps API. It was originally used to get aerial images of all the prisons in the USA. I thought it could be interesting to get googlemaps images from all the urban developments that were built and unfinished during the real estate bubble in Spain. I’ve opened a spreadsheet http://bit.ly/listapaus with a few of them to test the script.
This is a side project to the 6.000km map, a kind of wiki to collect info about urban metabolism in the era of the real estate bubble in Spain. Soon, we will have updated photos of some of these places, that we just took in Madrid with balloon mapping techniques.
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- Ahijones
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- Arroyo del Fresno
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- Berrocales
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- Butarque
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- Reino de Don Quijote
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- La Encina (Bernuy de Porreros)
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- Majadahonda
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- Miramadrid. Paracuellos
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- PAU Vallecas
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- Polígono industrial Aeropuerto Ciudad Real
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- Rivas
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- Valdebebas
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- Valdeluz
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- Viválvaro
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- Villa Mayor de Calatrava
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- Villanueva de Gomez. Avila
Continue reading
El infierno real
El infierno real puede estar aquí (si tu navegador y tu conexión aguantan los n vídeos a la vez).
Acutalización 24 diciembre 2013: Puedes ver la versión El infierno real 2.0 mejorada Continue reading
Repairing a kite’s stick with a fiber glass safety marker
I just left my first superminiresearch note in the Public Laboratory website.
One of the sticks from Dani’s kite was broken, so we substitute it with a fiber glass safety marker 72″, like this one, that Jeff Warren had given me.
It was easy to cut it with a saw, and to give its shape to make it fit in the kite.
I think it is a great way to make easy for users/supporters to provide ideas or feedback. As it is a “note” it looks easier to post something than if it were a “post”.
The collaboratively Rosetta Stone of Tools
Working in Basurama usually means working in different countries with different tools and waste materials. When we have to prepare those actions/workshops/installations, we have to send a list of the tools we’ll need. Even for Spanish speaking countries, names of tools could differ a lot. A trolley (or is it a dolly?) could be a carretilla if you are in Spain or a diablito if you are in Mexico.
To try to solve this problem, I’ve started a spreadsheet with photos and names of different tools and materials, that we usually use: http://bit.ly/toolstranslate
This spreadsheet could then feed other websites or be copy-pasted (and removed the columns that are not useful) to serve as a template for a tools request.
Everyone can edit it. Thanks for collaborating!
Comparing multiple year bar charts methods and embedding options
Here it is a comparison among different ways of making bar charts and embedding them in a wordpress blog. I’ve testing them for kulturometer.org, a project devoted to research the cultural budget that the city of Madrid is spending.
The data used: Once a year the Madrid city hall publishes a pdf with these data in a non reusable format. We’ve been extracting manually these numbers in the last 5 years and published them in a google spreadsheet (see the data set in csv format at the end of this post).
The idea of this post is to compare and review these 4 5 different methods.
Update: added gnumeric after Madeleine comment. It’s the simplest and more customizable method (though not intractive).
Google Spreadsheets
Advantages
Easy to upload data, and collaborate with others.
Easy to generate simple bar charts and embed them as images (as interactive script you may have some problems when embeding in a blog ).
No programming skills needed.
Drawbacks
Even now, that it is possible to customize a lot of the visualization, it is still not possible to change bar height (or width), for example.
Libre Office -> Inkscape
Advantages
- No programming skills needed.
- High customization possibilities.
- Produces .svg code or .png images.
Drawbacks
- Need basic inkscape knowledge.
D3
Advantages
High customization possibilities.
Produces .svg code ready for the web.
(Interactive possibilities, I haven’t explored them yet).
Drawbacks
Javascript knowledge needed.
Processing
Advantages
High design and interaction customization possibilities.
Produces .svg code ready for the web.
Drawbacks
Processing knowledge needed.
You’ll need to export it with Processing.js, that makes your visualization work using web standards and without any plug-ins.
Gnumeric
Advantages
No extra program needed.
Highly customizable: colors, ticks in axes, units, fonts.
Produces clean .svg
Drawbacks
No interactive graphic.
Three updates about PageOneX: How to Heroku, mail list and users start using
Three updates about the PageOneX:
- A “How to manual” set up your own online version of PageOneX in Heroku. Check it in the PageOneX develoment blog.
- I’ve opened a mail list to have an open dialog for all of you interested in the PageOneX project or related tools for tracking news in newspaper front pages. Join the mail list!
- Rogelio Alejandro López has started using PageOneX for tracking news about immigration in newspaper front pages.
Buscando y fomentando remezclas
Hace poco descubrí la posibilidad de buscar imágenes similares en google images sin necesidad de un smart phone. Basta(ba) con arrastrar la imagen deseada a la caja de búsqueda de google images, puedes ver los resultados que salen: todas las imágenes que utilizan parte de la imagen que estás buscando. También vale pegar la url de una imagen que ya esté online. Estuve probando con las diferentes fotos panorámicas de 6000km.org a ver si había algún uso interesante o alguna remezcla. Me interesaba también ver cuales imágenes del proyecto sobre los paisajes basura pre y post burbuja inmobiliaria habían traspasado las fronteras de la sala de exposiciones o de nuestra web. Continue reading
Waste pickers theme the MIT waste reading group
On Monday Nov. 26th we’ll be talking about waste pickers in the MIT waste reading group. Continue reading
Pasando del papel: portadas post #14N en medios digitales
El siguiente objeto de estudio serán las portadas continuamente cambiantes de los medios en internet. Las portadas tradicionales, las “de papel”, tienen el interés de ser una condensación en espacio limitado del contenido editorial de un periódico. Son el lugar donde pueden ‘gritar’ y saber que serán escuchados, saldrán por la tele y serán retuiteados.
Sin embargo, en un ecosistema mediático donde las cabeceras digitales ganan cada vez más poder, parece lógico prestar también atención a los periódicos online ¿cada cuanto habrá que programar el crawler para que capture la pantalla? ¿imagen o html? ¿todo o una parte? Seguramente habrá que capturarlo todo y luego ver qué nos vale.
Aquí una muestra de algunos de los periódicos online del día después de la huelga general del #14N, entre las 1.15 y las 2.15 de la madrugada de España.
Método utilizado: zoom al 67%, print screen y recortar los banners de anuncios superiores y laterales. Se queda mucha página sin grabar, pero creo que es también relevante ver qué pasa above the fold ¿cuantas pantallas son eso online?
PageOneX: timeline for a work in progress
I’ve been reorganizing all the material related to PageOneX in this timeline, made with the amazing TimelineJS. The idea is to move forward and have a first beta version, the alpha is having too many bugs, report them if you see some!
Find more info about the project at pageonex.com
For better navigation you can see a full screen view of this timeline.
Acadia mushrooms
Like one year ago, I have submitted a photo to the Mushroom photo contest of the Mycology Society of Madrid. All the photos are from Acadia, Maine, USA, // Como el año pasado, me he presentado al concurso anual de fotos de setas de la Sociedad Micológica de Madrid. A ver si hay suerte.
Lessons learned about HurricaneHackers in Boston
I wrote a post with Denise Cheng about the HurricaneHackers hackathon that we both coordinated last Saturday at MIT Media Lab: HurricaneHackers in Boston – Sandy projects, lessons learned.
Casi voto (sin querer)
Esto que va un español y se encuentra con un colegio electoral en el hall de la universidad. Se pone a husmear. Qué curioso, se dice. Coge el ballot, una gran cartulina que es la papeleta electoral, y pulula por allí. Hace unas cuantas fotos, lee los 4 equipos de candidatos a presidente (libertarian, democratic, republican y green-rainbow), hace unas cuantas fotos. También se lleva el librito: information for voters y decide irse a casa a leérselo con calma.
Un policía le detiene: “no puede usted salir con la papeleta, tiene que votar antes”. Tras un momento de indecisión y a un paso de haber podido depositar la papelera en el buzón de la votación, reconoce que no ha ido a votar y devuelve la papeleta. Se queda en agradable plática con el policía, al cual le encanta España y ha estado en Chipiona, y que no entiende cómo he podido conseguir la papeleta si no estaba registrado. Me dan una fake papeleta amarilla, y a casa. Continue reading
Ilegal urban developments in Madrid, Supreme Court rules
Last week, the Supreme Court in Spain ruled in the case of the Madrid Urban Plan from the nineties. The case had been going during the last 15 years from one court to another until its last stop in the Supreme Court, since Ecologistas en Acción, an environmentalist organization, sued Madrid’s City Hall. Now there is no appeal possible. More than 135,000 dwelling are now at stake waiting for the answer of the Madrid City Hall.
According to the ruling of September 28th 2012, 22 two urban developments in the outskirts of Madrid have been declared illegal, as the land where they were built was specially protected (suelo no urbanizable de protección), and the plan had not provided reasons their rezoning. Nobody knows what will happen next, as 20 of the 22 developments have already been constructed or are under construction.
As mass media doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to this case I wrote a much longer post in Spanish talking about the case, and also opened an etherpad to encourage the debate around it, #sentenciaPAU is the hashtag. A facebook group from the affected neighbors has also been created (it has 91 likes today). What will happen next? Will this ruling be the answer (an punishment) after years of crazy speculative construction fever and the hadouken of the real estate bubble in Madrid? or just one stone in the way to continue the process of consuming all the land available?
Iron Blogger: bloguea por cerveza
Tras leer el post de Urbanohumano, en el que pone orden a su vida digital, me he animado a reflexionar sobre el papel que cumple este blog.
Escribir un blog es una tarea que requiere dedicación, cuanto más constante mejor, ¡obvio!. En mi caso, es una forma de ordenar ideas e imágenes que no tienen cabida en los otros blogs y plataformas en las que participo. Me planteo si incluir en numeroteca.org todo ese contenido generado en otras plataformas y blogs, si debería funcionar como archivo de la información diseminada por ahí. De hecho, esa es la principal duda que me asalta al leer a urbanohumano: ¿cómo mantener control y tener un back up en las varias cuentas de tumblr, twitter, etcétera que manejas?. En los próximos meses iré modificando el tema de wordpress y crearé unas categorías más consistentes. Sobre la estrategia a seguir con twitter y otras redes sociales, tengo que pensar todavía qué hacer.
Pero sigamos hablando de este blog: soy reticente a hablar de mi, a hacer de este espacio en internet algo autobiográfico, aunque todo al final acabe refiriéndose a cosas que hago. Me interesa sobre todo compartir ideas y proyectos en los que estoy involucrado. Ahora que vivo en Cambridge, la ciudad pegada a Boston, entre MIT y Harvard, quiero aprovechar para reflexionar y contar sobre las conferencias a las que voy, las que doy y los proyectos y gente que conozco. Las prisas del día a día hacen el siguiente evento haga olvidar al anterior, y no haya modo de saber por dónde ni cuándo empezar a escribir. Así que haré me lo pondré fácil y meta-bloguero y hablaré de Iron Blogger, el “truco” para forzarme a escribir.
Iron Blogger es un grupo de blogueros no anónimos que pagan por no bloguear: 5 dólares por cada semana que no escribas. El dinero se gasta en cerveza y comida cuando hay pasta suficiente en el bote. El organizador es Mako y está basado en la idea de Nelson Ehage, que hizo el primer Iron Blogger de 2009 a 2011. El código está disponible online sirve para llevar la cuenta de quién ha blogueado y cuánto debe. Puedes ver todo lo que está blogueando el nodo de Boston en Planet, un agregador de feeds, una forma de dar visibilidad a una comunidad ávida de lectura, y escritura. Según comentábamos en la última reunión cervecera, la idea es que un iron blogger pueda ir a otros meetings en otras ciudad, si coincide que estás por esa ciudad, en San Francisco, por ejemplo.
¿Alguien se aima a ir montándo un Iron Blogger en Madrid? ¿o tendremos que pensar algo deslocalizado europeo con encuentros anuales? El aliciente de escribir por cerveza no es mala idea, si no ¿por qué estaría yo escribiendo un domingo por la tarde?
Imagen: remix de hastagcalabaza a partir de foto de @schock.
Syria civil war in Spanish newspapers
Testing the online version of PageOneX at pageonex.herokuapp.com.
News realated to the Syrian Civil War in the front pages of 4 Spanish newspapers: El País, ABC, El Mundo, La Vanguardia. Continue reading
500 days indignados, from #15M to #25S
Today is #26S and the protests continue, 500 days are gone since #15M in 2011.
Yesterday was #25S. It was a special demonstration day. Initially called “take the congress” and then changed motto “surround the congress” it raised fear in the polititians, police and many main stream media. 1.400 policemen were blocking the parliament to prevent its occupation. The change of government in November’11 has only made the austerity measures stronger and the social discontent bigger. The accumulation of days of discontent and protests is too large to be remembered (15M, 19J, 15O, 12M15M, 15S, 25S), but one more time there was a change in the tactics or at least in the expectations. If in the anniversary of the #15M movement there was a question in the air “And now what?” now people are asking directly congress men to go away and change the constitution, following the Iceland revolution model. Continue reading
Google Map Is Not The Map
Last June I gave an introductory workshop to digital mapping “Google Maps is not the Map” on Friday June 29th 2012 Detroit, Michigan at the Allied Media Conference. Before they get lost I publish here the notes I used for preparing it.
Slides and notes may make sense when read together (may not!). I must find a way of publishing this notes more rapidly.
Coding online is easier: help PageOnex find its bugs!
Now, coding newspapers front pages is easier than ever. You don’t need to have any programming skills to do it.
Not so long ago I was uploading my first script in github that allowed others to go to the process of scraping, downloading and scraping front pages of newspapers. It was kind of complicated, and almost no one did it until the end (thanks Ahmd). You needed to run it in Processing, and code it in Inkscape.
Half a year later, after a busy summer working with Ahmd, we can present a beta version of the online version of PageOneX (http://pageonex.herokuapp.com) We’ve launched it in heroku, before its definitive deployment at pageonex.com
Report bugs and suggestions
Try to create your own threads and report bugs at http://bit.ly/pageonextest
Find more info about the project in the PageOneX blog or fork the code https://github.com/numeroteca/PageOneX-ruby https://github.com/numeroteca/PageOneX
In the following images I am comparing the “old” method with inkscape whit the new one.
Compare the old a new tools
Below you can compare the two methods applied to this thread about the #15M mobilizations, indignados movement, on May 2011.
The PageOneX online method (runs on Ruby on Rails)
http://pageonex.herokuapp.com/users/Pablo/threads/15m_social_mobilizations
The former method (runs with Processing and Inksacape) https://github.com/numeroteca/PageOneX
In this case also twitter data are included.
How to make a newsletter in Hindi
It’s the second time I have to make a newsletter in Hindi. A short how to guide to make this process easier for next time.
I received a .docx in Hindi and copy pasting it didn’t work. That’s what I did:
- Install the font in Hindi to be able to see the text.
- Use converter to convert the Hindi text into Unicode.
- Select the font you are using (in my case
- Paste in the left box what you’ve copied from the .docx document. It’ll look something like “dukZVd ds fofHkUu Hkkxksa ls vk, dbZ o;kso`) ukxfjdksa lfgr”
- Select Hindi and clickconvert.
- Now you can copy the result and paste it in your blog.
- Some corrections were needed so I had to install Indec IME plugin in wordpress to be able to write with Hindi characters.
- To remove what shows up in your header change line 43 from the file indicime.php (find it at /wp-content/plugins/indic-ime):
- from “add_action(‘wp_head’, array(&$this, ‘add_css’)); “
- to “//add_action(‘wp_head’, array(&$this, ‘add_css’));”
now that this action is commented, no banner will appear.
- [update 25.09.12] To remove what shows in your footer
-
- Commented in line 71 “<!–div style=’float:left’><img src='” + indicime_bu + “img/pin2.gif’ id=’indicpin’ onclick=\”indictl(‘indicpin’,’indiccontent’);\” style=’cursor: pointer; cursor: hand;’ title=’Toggle IndicIME visibility’></div><div id=’indiccontent’ style=’DISPLAY:inline’> Type in <select name=’indicscript’ id=’indicscript’ onchange=’indicChange(this.id ,this.options[this.selectedIndex].value);’ style=’font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:10px;’—>”
- Commented in line 91 “<!–img src='” + indicime_bu + “img/help.gif’ id=’indichp’ onclick=\”indictl(‘indichp’,’indiccmc’);return false;\” style=’cursor: pointer; cursor: hand;’ title=’Toggle help description’—>”
- Enjoy.
See the results at the Alliance of Indian Wastepickers (AIW) Newsletter August 2012 in Hindi.
El Internet
Que quieres bajar una rola…
Que quieres tener una novia…
Que quieres hacer una fiesta…
Si quieres leer las noticias…
…búscala en internet.El Internet. Los Alguien.
Un día como hoy es un día cualquiera. Recapitulando lo que ha pasado he estado en contacto a través, por y para internet con gente en India, Francia, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Egipto, España y en la ciuda de al lado, Somerville. He llamado por teléfono a través de internet, hablado por skype, chateado, escrito emails y dejado unos cuantos sin contestar. He coescrito en google docs, etherpad, comentado código rails en github, twiteado, preparado dos newsletters, descargado un torrent, escrito en html y css. He mirado el precio de un vuelo, leído varios periódicos, algún blog, y buscado un dvd en la red de la biblioteca. Y no es solo que haya usado internet, parte del día ha sido construir plataformas, webs y aplicaciones para la web: dar los últimos retoques a una plataforma de innovación en arquitectura; retomar el proyecto de web para acabar por fin (si es que alguna web se puede dar por terminada) la alianza global de recicladores; o comentado el código de la aplicación que permite analizar portadas de periódicos.
Por eso digo que gran parte del día ha sido por, para y en internet.
Para rematar hemos visto el documental Catfish: sobre la relación de un tipo de New York con una niña pintora de Illinois a través de Facebook. El resto sería estropearos la película pero [spoiler] me ha dejado una sensación de desasosiego grande. Y eso sumado a que hace unos días reconocí en una foto de móvil en las escaleras de la biblioteca pública de Boston a un amigo que hacía muchos años que no veía (y al que no he visto todavía). Resulta que está viviendo en Boston.
Todo eso es internet. Todo eso es mi día a día. He “tocado” casi los cinco continentes, me falta Oceanía pero… ahora recuerdo que mirando las estadísticas de una de las plataformas he visto que había una visita de Nueva Zelanda, de unos pocos minutos antes: un amigo a quien acabábamos de enviar una newsletter está de viaje por allí.
Mientras esta mañana esperaba que un antivirus terminara el trabajo que comenzó ayer por la noche, leía un libro sobre internet. Y por no tener internet a mano no pude recuperar mi número de móvil, porque no podía acceder a mi perfil online desde la tienda de móviles para mirar el código postal que había metido. El dependiente, porque las “reglas” no se lo permitían, no podía mirarlo en el internet.
Y todo esto ha pasado sin tener internet en casa, escribiendo estas palabras en un archivo .txt que no estará en internet hasta que tú lo leas, o hasta que tú no lo leas no estará en internet. Hoy me he conectado en la biblioteca, o en las oficinas o casas de amigos. De hecho, se hace raro escribir sin estar conectado, cuando ya todas las wifis que hace unos días pirateábamos ya no funcionan. Se hace raro escribir sin el respaldo del salvado automático de google docs. Pero la tranquilidad se agradece.
Y todo esto con la wifi de mi ordenador que falla, habiendo enviado solamente un twit, sin facebook y con la mitad de la gente que conozco de vacaciones o alejados de el internet.
¿Que qué quiero decir con esto? No lo sé muy bien. No es la exégesis de Philip K Dick, ni ningún tipo de revelación mística, pero sí se me han abierto lo ojos esta noche para darme cuanta de cómo me rodea internet, y de cómo, si la red cayera, viviría mucho más tranquilo y por fin podría dedicarme a la música, pero ¿dónde subiría mis canciones para que tú las oyeras?
Ups, ahora no puedo enviar este archivo a nadie. Tendré que esperar a mañana. Bendita no internet.
Buenas noches,
p
Visualization of usage of different types of sources for news about Occupy movement
I’ve made this graphic for the book “We are many, they are few: Call out for movement stories Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation” (AK Press) to be included with the article about the General Demographic and Participation Survey, research by and for the Movement: Key Findings From the Occupy Research General Demographic & Participation Survey (ORGS) by Christine Schweidler, Pablo Rey Mazón, Saba Waheed and Sasha Costanza-Chock, for Occupy Research and DataCenter. Continue reading
GPS everywhere
Packaging Waste Index
I’ll be playing with waste, products and scales in the Dissecting Objects hands on workshop today July 19th 2012 at 2.30pm in Berlin. A workshop with Basurama and Dietmar Offenhuber. Related posts:
More info on the hashtag in Twitter: #dissectwaste
Google AdSense es demasiado bueno: Hazte policía #quesejodan
Hace unos días @BurningJak nos puso sobre la pista de los anuncios contextuales en YouTube para hacerse guardia civil o policía nacional en vídeos de disturbios y agresiones policiales:
Viendo un video de @la_tuerka sobre lacarga policial a la #marchaminera y flipando con los Google ads twitter.com/BurningJak/sta…
— BurningJak (@BurningJak) julio 11, 2012
Esta noche ha habido mucho movimiento y protestas por Madrid protestando por los recortes aprobados en el consejo de ministros del viernes (sigue #quesejodan para más información). Estaba viendo vídeos de lo ocurrido esta noche y la entrevista a la mujer retenida por la policía unas horas antes en Ferraz (vía @juanlusanchez) y me encontré con este anuncio para las oposiciones a policía nacional, too much. Continue reading
Fireworks under the water
European Future Flag
These are a series of posts thinking about the future of Europe in relation to the economic and financial crisis.
Europa 2013
Fuente: FMI, UE, BCE
These are a series of posts thinking about the future of Europe in relation to the economic and financial crisis.
PageOneX, ready steady go!
View this datavis full size at gigapan and the related post about May 2012 social mobilizations in Spain.
Today’s post is to present the tool we are building this summer: PageOneX. The idea behind is to make online and easier the coding process of front page newspapers. Make this visualization process available for researchers, advocacy groups and anyone interested. I’ll will give some background about this process.
How things started
Approximately one year ago I started diving in the front page world. It was days after the occupations of squares in many cities from Spain, and I was living in Boston. I made a front page visualization to show what people was talking about: the blackout in the media about the indignados #15M movement. You can read more about Cthe story in the ivic Media blog. Since then I’ve been making more visualizations around front pages of paper newspapers, testing different methods and possible ways to use them. I’ve also made a tool, built in Processing, to scrap front pages from kiosko.net and build a .svg matrix.
- Gallery of different twitter-newspaper visualizations. https://numeroteca.org/cat/frontpage-newspaper/
- Post: Analyzing newspapers’ front pages to interpret the Mainstream Media ecology.
http://civic.mit.edu/blog/pablo/analyzing-newspapers-front-pages - Presentation: Approach to a User interface. http://www.slideshare.net/numeroteca/arab-spring-spanish-recolution-and-occupy-movement-mainstream-media-vs-social-media-coverage and more presentations at http://www.slideshare.net/numeroteca
- Code for the semi-automated process built in Processing: https://github.com/numeroteca/pageonex-processing
https://github.com/numeroteca/PageOneX
PageOneX: first tool
Before starting with the new tool, I’d like to present the present one I’ve been using this past moths: a semi-automated process with Processing and Inkscape. The code is available at https://github.com/numeroteca/pageonex-processing https://github.com/numeroteca/PageOneX.
The process is segmented in two main actions: 1. Get the front pages and 2. Code articles.
- Get the front pages
Open the pageonex.pde file and open it in Processing:- Select newspapers and starting and end dates (be aware of adjusting the size of the newspaper)
- Run the program to scrape front pages from kiosko.net. It automatically downloads them.
- It will construct the matrix of front pages in a .svg (Scalable Vector Graphics) file.
- Code articles
- Open the matrix.svg in Inkscape. It is a file with 3 layers:
- Highlights (multiply option to show transparency)
- Filter to make images look lighter.
- Images of front pages.
- Now highlight by hand the news we want by drawing rectangles (merging of rectangles for news with non-rectangular shapes) on the news.
- Export the file to a pretty .png file
- Open the matrix.svg in Inkscape. It is a file with 3 layers:
That was the process until now. It works, but it is not easy for not tech savy people: you need to have Processing installed, change the parameters and be able to ‘play’ with Inkscape at an intermediate level. That is how we decided to make this tool online, to broaden its use.
PageOneX.com
PageOneX.com (now temporary redirected to this blog) is an online platform for analyzing and visualizing coverage of news in newspapers’ front pages. We’ll be coding this summer to have at least a part of the tool available by August-September. We’ll be having some beta tests, so if you are interested, just ask for it! The idea is to open a co-design process where future users take part in the design of the tool.
Why analyzing front pages? Some ideas behind the project:
1. 
It seems that analyzing front pages is a good method, a shortcut to follow how news are being covered in the media. Front pages are a very special piece of the media ecology: newsrooms spend a lot of time deciding what goes in their A1, fighting which news have to be in their page one.
2. 
With this kind of visualizations we are able to show the data and the analysis at the same time. We can show in a bar chart quantitative data regarding the coverage, but also the data source it self: the front pages. We want to offer a visual and direct way to visualize all the coding. Check the The Global Media Monitoring Project Report methodology to see which other interesting approaches to this coding process. We have tested with Gigapan the possibility of exploring this huge graphics, to be able to read the newspapers and also have a sense of the whole data visualization.
3. 
We’ll be using the percentage of every front page, instead of the actual size: it will allow us to compare newspapers with diferent sizes as we did with this example of US and Spanish newspapers covering the Japanese Tsunami in 2011.
Here there are slides about the project and basic draft for the User Interface.
Arab Spring, Spanish Revolution, and Occupy Movement: Mainstream Media vs Social Media coverage
The project is incorporating new collaborators: Ahmd Refat as coder, thanks to the Google Summer of Code programm; Sasha Costanza-Chock and Nathan Mathias from the Center for Civic Media at MIT Media Lab. Nathan is developing is also developing Mediameter with more people at the Center for Civic Media, we might be using their framework to build our tool and not start from scratch. Mediameter is used for crowd-source analysis of articles. We are also looking at Mapmill by Jeff Warren, built in Ruby on Rails, as it is a system to code image as well.
Stay tuned!