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Jonathan Worth sez, "Four years ago when I first opened my photography classes online the big issue was 'free' - if you 'give your classes away for free then no one will pay for them'. My answer to those people was that the classes weren't what people paid for - they paid for the learning experience, of being in the room - this online version - this open and connected version just meant that the room they paid to be in now sat at the middle of a network. And that network is now significant. Yesterday it trended on Twitter - I don't know many classes that do that.

Here we are at #phonar's (Photography and Narrative) fourth iteration with hundreds of thousands of people having come by and the course is now the most oversubscribed in the Unakes it exploitative. For me, the key difference is intentionality. For an image to be empowering, the person who is the pinup must be in charge of the situation. She/he is aware of who is watching and who she/he wants to be watching. For me, what’s most relevant is not who is pictured: male or female, fat or thin, pale and blonde or dark and brunette. What matters is who is in control of the situation? Who has the power? Who is deciding what the viewer sees? And who is the viewer? But how can a single image convey an awareness that the woman is in control of her sexuality, that she has the power. How can that same image have a sense of humor about all this — since the best pin-ups don’t take themselves too seriously? Since I was working with a visual artist, I spent some time looking for images that related to empowerment, control, and who is looking at whom. I sent Lee five images. The first three were photos that I had torn out of magazines at least 30 yearsiversity, even with them charging the maximum amount they're allowed. And next year the whole undergraduate programme will open and available online - for free. Boom.

Every week we have a guest speaker and the global class listens along tweeting their notes, questions and comments, there's usually tips and tricks from the rockstars - we have a discussion about that then we set a task which everyone is invited to do. And of course all of the material is available for free online so you can run a local class of your own if you want, I have one opening in California this Friday and we're working on another for the Pathshala Institute in Bangladesh.

This week the task is to remix a portrait of some internet dude called Doctor Oh, or something, but you have to read some of his stuff to get a flavour of how best and most appropriately to re-present him. Apparently this guy gives versions of his books away for free too (which is crazy ‘cuz who the hell would pay if you can get it for free) so you can do the prep for free and then the pics to remix are some that I made (I'm a photographer and a teacher) and they're CC licensed to enable you to remix and transform them into something way better than I could ever imagine - but here's the kicker - you have to license it alike so someone else can remix your remix too, like this remix by the painter Paul Wright. Alan Levine of the open storytelling class DS106 made a special website called ForTheRemix where you can find more instructions and take part.

It has taken far too long for networks and the press to fully recognize that a television program can be a "hit" even if audiences don't watch it live. The time when overnight ratings should determine the popularity of a show ended years ago. When J.J. Abrams' "Almost Human" debuts on Fox on Sunday night, after months of build-up and anticipation, executives like Will Somers, Head of Network Research, will still be interested in the numbers the next morning, but he is fully aware that the story of success or failure is only in its first chapter the next day. With On Demand services and DVR usage making up an increasing portion of the viewership for every network, the concept of Time Shifting—watching a program at a time other than its initial airing through DVR or On Demand services—has become essential to the networks. In particular, the network's "Sleepy Hollow" has become arguably the first mega-hit of the Time Shifting era, often more than doubling its overall numbers in the 30 days after an episode airs. While advertisers may never fully warm to the idea of viewers fast-forwarding through their ads, forward-thinking networks have finally turned from a model in which people talk around the water cooler the next day to one where they promote via social media for the next thirty.

"Sleepy Hollow" was a hit in overnight ratings when it first aired but nowhere near the success it has become when other metrics are factored in. As Somers tells me, "the premiere drew a total audience of 12.7 million viewers, but 30 days later we saw that that total audience had grown to more than 26 million based on a consolidated metric encompassing linear TV, on-demand, and streaming." And the trend of massive growth when other platforms were included continued over the next few weeks for this incredibly bizarre but increasingly engaging show. For the third episode, airing 9/30/13, 10.4 million people watched "Sleepy Hollow" live, but another 5 million hit play on their DVR over the next seven days (a key figure for advertisers known as Live+7 in that commercials for time-sensitive subjects like film releases, for example, get less value after seven days.) Add in 2.6 million streaming views on VOD services like Hulu and Fox Now, and "Sleepy Hollow" is a smash hit. While live numbers have dropped over the last few weeks (7 million for the 11/11 episode), it's clear that those don't have the significance they once did. (Data source: TV by the Numbers.)

Time Shifting used to be a secondary concern for the networks. Get the live numbers to sell to advertisers and the rest is gravy. That's not the case anymore. Networks that are going to succeed in today's market have to embrace new viewership patterns, including the ones engendered by services like Netflix, which encourages watching multiple episodes in a row. "In fact," explains Somers, "we negotiated with our MVPD partners to ensure that all of our new series this season are "unlocked" on Fox Now and Hulu so that fans have multiple opportunities to catch up if they missed an episode and so that new viewers can check out the shows. Whether it's referred to as "binging" or "stacking," some viewers have adopted the practice of watching multiple episodes at a time, and it's good business sense to satisfy consumer expectations."

It makes the job of a network executive or TV showrunner much more difficult in that it may take time to determine the long-term viability of a program. And it's too soon to say how live ratings influence Time Shifting numbers and vice versa. It's not like no one is watching "Sleepy Hollow" live and it would be hard to believe that already-cancelled new programs like "We Are Men" or "Welcome to the Family" simply weren't given time over time shifting metrics. "Ultimately, viewing is going to accrue to the popular shows across the platforms on which they're available," Somers offers. "A clear hit will be a clear hit no matter what, and an outright rejection of a show is pretty obvious when it happens—it's the shows that fall in between that are trickier to evaluate in today's environment."

Which brings us to "Almost Human," premiering on Sunday night with a two-part debut, the first hour of which is directed by the great Brad Anderson ("The Machinist," "Transsiberian") and produced by J.J. Abrams. Starring Karl Urban ("Dredd"), Michael Ealy ("Think Like a Man"), Lily Taylor ("The Conjuring"), and Minka Kelly ("Lee Daniels' The Butler"), "Almost Human" is easily one of the most highly-polished new programs of the year. The action crackles like you wish it would on "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." and the chemistry between the two leads has the energy to keep viewers coming back. It's a simple set-up – "Blade Runner" meets "Lethal Weapon." Urban plays the future cop on the edge that is set up with a new partner who is part-machine, played with incredible charm by Ealy. It's admittedly overheated in a B-movie way but it's engaging in a manner that most new network programming has failed to be—it's fun.

Will "Almost Human" be a hit? It feels like no one will know for sure right away. I'll admit that it's the kind of show that one will be tempted to "stack": Save up episodes in the DVR and binge on as they have likely been doing with "Sleepy Hollow," a show that undeniably works better if you can get into its twisted sense of humor and bizarre aesthetic across multiple episodes. Perhaps that's why the network delayed the premiere and expanded it into two episodes instead of the planned one-hour premiere (only the first hour has been available for review, so my apologies if the second half isn't as much fun). Fox is recognizing that it's not just when people watch TV but how that's changing and they're no longer putting their heads in the sand when it comes to On Demand and DVR usage. The other networks better do the same.

You might remember earlier this summer when NASA released a striking image taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Earth as it appears from the dark side of Saturn. Yesterday the space agency wowed again with the first ever photograph of Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Earth all in the same shot. The image spans about 404,880 miles (651,591 kilometers) across and is made from 141 wide-angle photos taken by Cassini. You can learn more about the image over on JPL’s site where you can even download some wallpapers. This is a good excuse to watch an interpretation of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot monologue. Or this one. (via PetaPixel)

Shardcore writes, "The Tate recently released a 'big data' set of the 70k artworks in their collection. I've been playing with it and finding all sorts of fun to be had. The latest experiment uses the Tate data as a springboard to algorithmically imagine new artworks - 88,577,208,667,721,179,117,706,090,119,168 to be precise."

(that's eighty-eight nonillion, five hundred seventy-seven octillion, two hundred eight septillion, six hundred sixty-seven sextillion, seven hundred twenty-one quintillion, one hundred seventy-nine quadrillion, one hundred seventeen trillion, seven hundred six billion, ninety million, one hundred nineteen thousand, one hundred sixty-eight possible artworks...)

We can imagine machines which spot the items within a representational work (look at Google Goggles, for example) but algorithms which spot the ‘emotions and human qualities’ of an artwork are more difficult to comprehend. These categories capture complex, uniquely human judgements which occupy a space which we hold outside of simple visual perception. In fact I think I’d find a machine which could accurately classify an artwork in this way a little sinister…

The relationships between these categories and the works are metaphorical in nature, allusions to whole classes of human experience that cannot be derived from simply ‘looking at’ the artwork. The exciting part of the Tate data is really the ‘humanity’ it contains, something absolutely essential when we’re talking about art – after all, culture cannot exist without culturally informed entities experiencing it.

It struck me that these are not only representations of existing artworks, but actually the vocabulary and structure required to describe new, as yet un-made, artworks.

Machine Imagined Artworks (2013) (Thanks, Shardcore!)

Dominoes masters Hevesh5 and Millionen Dollar Boy spent over three months planning, building,..(Read...)

Spain's Playoffice -- a design firm focused on kid-centric designs -- conceived of the "reading net" as a way of transforming "a traditional family library into a fun place for kids." It looks amazing.

Reading net | PLAYOFFICE (via That Book Smell)

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This is a poster recently on display in a Shanghai theater to promote the release of Thunder God 2..(Read...)

David Ortiz wasn’t on the ballot on Tuesday — only two men were: Marty Walsh and John Connolly — but the Red Sox’ DH got the most write-in votes out of anyone, so that technically made him the third place finisher. Not that it was particularly close. There were only 560 write-in votes, of which Ortiz got…

Why the Sandwich is the King of Food-Engineering by Doghouse Diaries...(Read...)

There are many things that identify a city–the location, the food, the weather, the music, the culture, the pace of life. All solid, wonderful indicators of the character and soul of a locale. Another one of those indicators, and often a big piece of the puzzle of any metropolis, small or large, is the local sports teams. It’s incontrovertibly true. You don’t even have to be a sports fan to acknowledge it. When the ball team does well, the heartbeat of a city quickens. 

The Boston Marathon bombing pierced the heart of the proud city of Boston. And, as with all tragedies, ordinary people rose up and became extraordinary. The cover of Sports Illustrated, the week after the bombing, featured three of those people, Boston Police officers Rachel McGuire, Javier Pagan and Detective Kevin McGill, responding immediately after the explosions.

Then came Big Papi and the Sox. A bearded band of brothers rose up, put a city on their shoulders, and made an unlikely charge to a championship. I shot the cover you see up top on Friday last week. It was an honor to be selected, and help create a visual memory of a special moment, when the emotional connection between sport and a city was at its most evident. The Bosox swept away the hurtful memory of panic and smoke filled streets, replacing it with a joyous, rolling parade of ducks winding through delirious crowds, and a third world championship in ten years.

But how do you show that connection, visually? It was a conundrum for an editorial magazine like SI, an astute observer of the world of sports. How do show the tragedy of the marathon, and the healing, transformative triumph of the World Series? The grouping above was not my idea. It sprang from the mind of the mag’s creative director, Chris Hercik, and immediately got the go ahead from managing editor Chris Stone. Find the police officers who were on the marathon cover, and put them with Big Papi. All those moving parts had to be assembled pronto, which was left to director of photography Brad Smith, and his formidably experienced department. Hard to do, but they came together quickly, and, Cali, Jon, Drew and myself found ourselves prepping late on Thursday night, and rolling to Boston at 6am on Friday.

This is where, as a photographer, you need a good editor. Brad and I probably talked a dozen times over the course of Thursday night and then Friday morning. I was nervous, and playing in my head with the potential visual arrangement of four people in the relatively confined vertical space of a cover. Four people, room for type, room for logo–kept playing in my head. Brad called, and he suggested placing Big Papi slightly separate from the trio of officers, or on the side, and for some pictures, not having him look at camera, but regarding the police with a quiet, “job well done” smile. That clicked in my head, and gave me an anchor, a starting point.

(There’s a bunch of stuff on the web about how the magazine conceived and prepared for this job. There’s a BTS video. USA today did a piece on the pulling together the idea. Yahoo Sports had some thoughts as well.)

We rolled heavy on this job. Six Elinchrom Ranger packs and heads, backdrops, sandbags, apple boxes, grip stuff, multiple big Octa light shapers. We stuffed the Suburban. Of course it was raining, and really, really windy (hey, it’s me) so I set up a quick indoor studio as a safe zone.

You need a backup, and a Plan B, C, D and F, ’cause you shoot these things fast. I looked at Big Papi, and said, “Okay, how much time I got.” He came back and said, “Twenty minutes.” From that point, I played a game with him. I’d burn like twelve minutes and look at him and say, “Okay, I’m checking the clock, and I got 17 more minutes.” He’d laugh, and shake his head. He gave us more time. Truth be told, I think he was enjoying himself.

If I were a major league pitcher, the above face, which, even in repose, is radiating a certain kind of “I’m a big cat, and you’re just a little mouse” confidence, would not be a welcome one looking out at me from home plate. I saw the scoreboard, left in place from the last Series’ game, and I grabbed Big Papi for a single. I even styled his scarf for him, and took him by the shoulders and rotated him into position. It was like moving a large tree trunk. I asked him to go dreamlike as well.

All this stuff happens very fast. The drumbeat in your head is to give the magazine options in your allotted time, no matter how brief. Don’t belabor a single point of view. Stay mobile. So we tried a set by the “Boston Strong” logo on the Green Monster.

And played that old kid’s game with the bat, to see who’s up first.

And I asked Big Papi to throw his arms around everybody, which he is quite capable of doing.

Cali and Jon make pretty good sandbags. Half the time out there I thought I was shooting the America’s Cup races.

A heartfelt, visual tip of the hat to the city of Boston and the Red Sox, who pulled off an amazing worst to first miracle season. Despite the wind and the rain, it was a wonderful day at Fenway, and I was honored to be a part of it.

More tk….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A nursing student named Janelle asked Adventure Time character designer Matt Forsythe to interpret the "Wong-Baker Facial Grimace Scale" -- used to help kids describe how much pain they feel -- using Finn. The result is just great.

Finn Pain Scale (via Super Punch)

This is fun: a selection of pop songs separated into their component tracks (vocals, bass, drums, etc.). You can turn parts on and off as the songs play. Featured artists include The Beatles, Spice Girls, Radiohead, and Amy Winehouse.

The text/interface is in French...just click the dark grey link labelled "> Chanson" for the song listing. (via @ajsheets)

Tags: music

Jonny Gomes has started over Daniel Nava in left field for four out of the last six games and Red Sox manager John Farrell indicated to Scott Lauber of the Boston Herald earlier today that he’ll likely stick with the same arrangement for Game 1 of the World Series on Wednesday. However, that isn’t getting…

I’m really enjoying these new pieces by artist 1010 that seems to peel away layers from mundane urban walls to reveal a depth of colorful layers. The Hamburg-based artist had a number of similar works on canvas at the Stroke Art Fair in Berlin in September.

Katie Paterson's Fossil Necklace is a gorgeous piece whose each bead is a chronologically ordered artifact from a significant moment in our planetary history, signposting events like the cretaceous, the rise of hominids, and more. (this PDF has detailed, piece-by-piece labels)

‘Fossil Necklace is a string of worlds, with each bead modestly representing a major event in the evolution of life through a vast expanse of geological time. From the mono-cellular origins of life on earth to the shifting of the continents, the extinction of the Cretaceous period triggered by a falling meteorite, to the first flowering of flowers, it charts the development of our species and affirms our intimate connection to the evolution of those alongside us. Each fossil has been individually selected from all corners of the globe, and then carved into spherical beads in a secondary process of excavation.’ Guy Haywood, Kettle’s Yard.

Katie Paterson, Fossil Necklace (via Making Light)

This series of photos titled Géométrie de l’impossible (Impossible Geometry) from 21-year-old photographer Fanette Guilloud was created earlier this year in locations around Toulouse, Bordeaux and in the French Alps near Lyon. Guilloud employed a method of anamorphic projection similar to the work of Felice Varini to create the illusion of a painting superimposed on an image, when in fact there is no digital trickery whatsoever. The image is actually painted on numerous surfaces at varying depths and only appears like what you see here from a particular vantage point. (via Metafilter)

Funny...(Read...)

Ever since Lavabit, the privacy-oriented email provider used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, shut down abruptly in August, we've been wondering what, exactly, the Feds had demanded of founder Ladar Levison. As he wrote in his cryptic note, he felt that he was facing an order that would make him "complicit in crimes against the American people" but he was legally unable to say more.

But now, thanks to unsealed records, we're able to get some insight into what the NSA and the Feds demanded of Lavabit (and, presumably, of other companies that have not shut down): first they asked him to decrypt the communications of one of their customers (almost certainly Edward Snowden). When they were told that this wasn't technically possible, they demanded that the system be modified to make it possible, and when Lavabit balked, they got a court order requiring that Lavabit turn over its SSL keys, compromising all of the company's users' communications. Funnily enough, Levison "complied" with this court-order by turning over the keys as 11 pages of 4-point type, but the court didn't go for that.

Hilton ruled for the government. “[The] government’s clearly entitled to the information that they’re seeking, and just because you-all have set up a system that makes that difficult, that doesn’t in any way lessen the government’s right to receive that information just as they could from any telephone company or any other e-mail source that could provide it easily,” said Hilton.

The judge also rejected Lavabit’s motion to unseal the record. “This is an ongoing criminal investigation, and there’s no leeway to disclose any information about it.”

In an interesting work-around, Levison complied the next day by turning over the private SSL keys as an 11 page printout in 4-point type. The government, not unreasonably, called the printout “illegible.”

“To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2,560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data,” prosecutors wrote.

The court ordered Levison to provide a more useful electronic copy. By August 5, Lavabit was still resisting the order, and the judge ordered that Levison would be fined $5,000 a day beginning August 6 until he handed over electronic copies of the keys.

On August 8, Levison shuttered Lavabit, making any attempt at surveillance moot. Still under a gag order, he posted an oblique message saying he’d been left with little choice in the matter.

Edward Snowden’s E-Mail Provider Defied FBI Demands to Turn Over Crypto Keys, Documents Show [Kevin Poulsen/Wired]

Related coverage by Nicole Perlroth and Scott Shane in the New York Times. “You don’t need to bug an entire city to bug one guy’s phone calls,” Levison told the Times. “In my case, they wanted to break open the entire box just to get to one connection.”

And more from Cyrus Farivar in Ars Technica.

(Thanks, Sulka!)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn and Trevor Timm look at the NSA's Bullrun program, through which the US and UK governments have spent $250M/year sabotaging computer security. Cindy is the lawyer who argued the Bernstein case, which legalized civilian access to strong cryptography -- in other words, it's her work that gave us all the ability to communicate securely online. And so she's very well-situated to comment on what it means to learn that the NSA has deliberately weakened the security that ensures the integrity of the banking system, aviation control, embedded systems in everything from cars to implanted defibrillators, as well as network infrastructure, desktop computers, cloud servers, laptops, phones, tablets, TVs, and other devices.

Thankfully, the recent disclosures have led to at least some change. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the government agency in charge of one of the cryptographic standards the NSA has alleged to have secretly weakened, has reopened public comment on its standard and has even gone as far as to recommend people do not use it anymore.

And we’re beginning to see the international computer security community come to grips with this disturbing news.

But we must do more. 

* We must rebuild the broad coalition that fought the first crypto wars, including investors, businesses, civil liberties groups, scientists and ordinary people. 

* We must expose the vulnerabilities that have been secreted into our technologies. We must expose them and we must demand that they be fixed.

* We must ask standards bodies, companies and individual developers to pledge, publicly and unequivocally, to reject efforts to build backdoors or insert known vulnerabilities into their products—and create transparency so that they can't secretly cooperate with these efforts in the future.

* We must build our own tools, and support the tools that already exist that are independently verifiable as secure (most prominently, open source tools). 

* We must support efforts in Congress to rein in the NSA and bring it back under the rule of law, and we must make sure those efforts ensure that our technologies are safe.

* And we must not succumb to privacy nihilism.

But the public debate must start from a fundamental principle: The NSA has been making us less safe and it must stop.  Now. 

The NSA is Making Us All Less Safe

I love Girls, I love Saturday Night Live, I love Tina Fey, so this was pretty much perfect for me:

An Albanian girl named Blerta moves to Brooklyn and offers sage advice to Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna.

Tags: Girls   Saturday Night Live   Tina Fey   TV

Unfolded, it's a stylish infinity scarf with two hidden zippered security pockets that discreetly..(Read...)

Disney and JJ Abrams are rebooting the Star Wars franchise. This two-minute video outlines four simple rules that could make Star Wars great again.

The rules are:

1. The setting is the frontier.
2. The future is old.
3. The Force is mysterious.
4. Star Wars isn't cute.

Tags: JJ Abrams   movies   Star Wars   video

Ray Villafane is visionary and patriarch of Phoenix, Arizona's Villafane Studios, one of whose specialties is carving incredibly impressive pumpkins. They also create jaw-dropping sand sculptures, props and toys.






From carving for the President at the White House, carving for Heidi Klum’s Annual Halloween Party and along side Martha Stewart, Ray’s pumpkins have made their way across the world. Ray partnered with the awe inspiring Andy Bergholtz, and together they built a “Dream Team” of amazing sculptors and have been carving away ever since. Other talented team members include Trevor Grove, Chris Vierra, Alfred Parades, Patrick Burke and Sue Beatrice. The beautiful pumpkins I'm sharing with you in this post have been carved by all of the aforementioned sculptors.















The exposure of Ray’s style, talent and creativity amassed an all-new appreciation for pumpkin carving, and his artistic take on the traditional jack-o-lantern has granted him invitations from across the globe for VIP Galleries (Very Impressive Pumpkins). From the President’s quarters in the White House to Bermuda’s Sousa’s Gardens, Ray’s pumpkins have gathered a cult-like following.


above: Ray and some of his team of expert carvers at Villafane Studios

above: Ray Villafane poses in front of the studio built for him and his team in Hong Kong.

Note: Andy MacDonald meets Ghost Rider. What could be better? – Chris A.

"Your job will never love you back."

— Unknown

The terrific humorist and cartoonist Doogie Horner, who wrote last year's hit Everything Explained Through Flowcharts, has a new book out called 100 Ghosts, which consists of drawings of well-known people and characters depicted as cartoony ghosts.

Doogie emailed me and offered to draw some exclusive ghosts for Boing Boing. I suggested Orange is the New Black. It turns out that Doogie loves the show as much as I do, and he drew 12 of the characters from the show as ghosts (13 if you count Little Boo). He did a fantastic job! Check out all of Doogie's OITNB ghosts below.

Buy 100 Ghosts on Amazon

Board skating.....(Read...)

This pirate cat may not have the facial hair of Blackbeard; instead he has the whiskers of a..(Read...)

This is a great new mural by Polish artist and graphic designer Natalia Rak that was painted as part of the Folk on the Street art festival in Białystok, Poland. Rak is known for her extremely vibrant large-scale paintings, much more of which you can see on her blog. (via StreetArtNews)