Call for Action! - Team Context

A public message transfer protocol

shwang1@gsd.harvard.edu — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 19:51:33 +0000

Jaekyung and I(Sohin) are developing an idea. Anybody interested is welcomed for collaborations!

A public message transfer protocol(PMTP) that connects internet and physical world

Why
During the last two presidencies in Korea, it becomes clear that there are two separate spaces of public opinion in Korea that don't communicate each other: the internet and the physical world. The younger generation's political inclination toward the former president Roh was revealed through the election result and also through a movement against the impeachment by the opponent conservative party. Especially the large number of young supporters in demonstration against his impeachment was a surprise to the older generation, who wasn't as familiar with the popular voice in online world as younger generation was, partly because the opinion of younger generation were simply unknown/invisible in the physical world. Same surprise happened to younger generation when President Lee was elected in 2007 with much more electoral support than the online atmosphere expected. Online younger generation didn't know about the landscape of opinion in the physical world. Both worlds assumed the imaginary consensus of political opinion based solely on the atmosphere of the space they mainly communicate in.

This lack of awareness and communication is not limited between internet and physical world, rather common among any kind of older and newer media where media literacy matters to accessibility. It is important to make a path among opinions based on newer and older media, to raise more awareness of existing diverse opinions and to make a seamless flow of public opinion regardless of the media literacy.

What
- A public message transfer protocol(PMTP)
In order to catalyze more awareness/understanding/dialogue between online and physical world, we need to connect these public opinions separated into different media spheres. As a first step, we would like to create a bodywear that displays public opinions from mobile network. It is a public message transfer protocol(PMTP) for introducing online opinion to the physical world in a form that is readable regardless of the media literacy. By wearing this electronic skin, the body of wearer would receive messages from people through mobile communication and, as a result, speaks out for them, making their voices visible in an anonymous urban crowd and facilitating responses from physical world.

- Safety
Using own body as a space for representing ideas is a safer way that would embrace easy and everyday participation of democratic process by a larger public. It does not intrude private/public property, avoiding breaking regulations and being accused. Often, the use of public or private space for expressing personal opinions can be very limited, because of legitimated and illegitimated regulations with unclear interpretations of security and privacy. With the reflection on our own experience of being forced to take off our installation in a public passage by security agents, we decided to use the body as a peaceful visual transmitter of remote, but present, voices. Disabling the identification of senders of message would also protect the wearer from responsibility and denunciation from people who don't agree, because the message is not from the wearer nor this wearer knows who the speaker is.

- Social media
This public message transfer protocol acts as an alternative social media. Primarily, we conceived this as being used in Korea's everyday situation. For example, suppose a college student wears this bodywear and lives a mundane day. Wearing it, he would have a breakfast with parents, commute to college located in underprivileged area all the way from conservative suburban area, attend the class, have lunch with colleagues, work part time, go to see a movie in downtown financial district, have drinks, return back home. He would deliver public opinions to various part of the city, raising more awareness of a certain opinion and facilitating more discussion among public including himself. However, it can be used in various contexts where more awareness of other voice is needed. The wearer of this instrument is a social-media agent roaming around from place to place such as MIT campus speaking for students and downtown Boston where more awareness of the underpriviledged's voice is needed. Anyone is invited and encouraged to send their message to the public message transfer protocol to be heard to a physical and larger scale, making their voice public.

How
System
PMTP consists of three systems: infoClime(SMS based listserv) system, wearable LED display, and a mobile phone for interfacing.
- The public message from mobile network will come primarily from infoClime kind of SMS based listserv system.
- A mobile phone is subscribed to the system. Upon the reception of text based messages from this listserv, python will send the message to LED matrix controller.
- LED matrix controller takes the text data and displays it.

Please see the attached image.

Using Mobile Technology to Tackle the Problem of Under-Reporting Health Statistics in Venezuela

interdocserv@yahoo.com — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:19:49 +0000

http://cfa.media.mit.edu/content/using-mobile-technology-tackle-problem-...

Infant health--what to do with height and weights?

pokharel@fas.harvard.edu — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:19:00 +0000

For young babies, height weight and age information in aggregate can serve as excellent proxies for health. Malnutrition and defective growth of babies in the developing world (example: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/world/asia/13malnutrition.html?em) motivate the existence of a scale that is linked to a data-collection network, so one can measure infant heights and weights, and report these to a central server.

For another class (D-Lab II), I'm working with a team that is developing the client side of this application. That is, we are working on developing a scale and a communication mechanism so that height and weight data can be collected and then sent over the GSM network, in the form of either SMS or voice data. What I won't be working on in that class is the server-side aspects of this system: what can one do with such a scale? Can you make systems that automatically process height-weight-age data to make nutrition recommendations (in real time ideally)? Can you use the data in other ways, make informative visualizations, or provide it to researchers in health?

The project is a little bit off the CFA beaten path, in that the main focus wouldn't be working on developing the cell-phone technologies directly, but leverage those existing to do some interesting data distillation and use. Well, there is definitely room to think about how to do feedback given a certain system of incoming messages, and other things CFA-like as well.

Real Time Flood Warning System

shyamprasads@cdm.com — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:10:38 +0000

A few hundred to several thousand people die every year from annual monsoon flooding in the Ganges-Brahmaputra river delta. There is always a few days of lead time between the rainfall and the flooding that results from all these rainfall. Also, from upstream most point in a river to downstream point, there is "some" time available for the river stage to get to dangerous levels. I am thinking of a real time flood warning system based on input either from various local weather stations or common people equipped with mobile phones to call back the "system" and based on those input, a warning SMS or a voice instructions can be broadcasted back in real time.

I do see a great potential and a possible interests from governments for something like this. The Rainfall-Runoff modeling field of hydrology is fairly well advanced and science part of the prediction can be taken to new heights if enough interest is generated from right sources.

While working on our initial assignment, our group came up with an idea [file:InfoClime.pdf=INFOClime] - a basic structure of many to many broadcast system with an added web form interface for real time information sharing. We were also thinking of a very simple menu system with numbers to retrieve the information from the system. I don't see why this set up cannot be used for this application.

Any interest in Lawrence Yes We Will Campaign?

d_martin@mit.edu — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:46:07 +0000

Just wondering if anyone felt compelled to work with the local political engagement campaign I described in class, Yes We Will? AND if not just in this class, but maybe over the summer or in the fall? There are some folks who would be very willing to work with folks around developing a tool for distributing information about local candidates and voter engagement, especially real-time during the campaign and at community meetings.

-Danielle

water quality mapping

mesteno@mit.edu — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:21:43 +0000

i've been working on a project with a friend dealing with low-cost water quality testing and mapping in developing countries (right now we are doing lots of working eastern china/tibet). historically water quality indexing has been done by the UN and has required samples and labs and expensively prohibitive equipment so that citizens cannot carry it out remotely, nor find anything intelligible about the obfuscated results. however, some more recent innovations and developments have led to significantly lower cost equipment that can give a finite amount of good indicators of water quality, such as turbidity, coliform counts, etc etc. we're looking at providing citizen testing kits that are CHEAP to people in various regions so they can test their water and report remotely via cellphone to our database. this database then helps communites access appropriate infrastructure by connecting them w/ necessary resources (including ngos/universities/researchers etc looking to do work on these topics/regions). the database will provide information on areas of concern and enable researchers to query for regional water quality parameters to serve as guidelines for the development and implementation of locally-targeted intervention technologies. long story short, im looking to delve into this project and get some of these technical items done. i still need to talk w/ said friend about specifics, but its a project worth considering....environmental mapping is the future! (also, intelligible data visualization for this and local statistical hydrology would be ammmmmmaaaazing).
brad.

Alternativa

alajous@mit.edu — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:39:20 +0000

This post about the organization I told you about in Mexico. Hope you are interested.
http://cfa.media.mit.edu/content/alternativa-overcoming-obstacles-non-pa...

Check out the following blog post for info on Vzla.

interdocserv@yahoo.com — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:37:05 +0000

http://cfa.media.mit.edu/content/imagine-a-country-where