Marco De Cesaris

by Marco De Cesaris

I am going to try a new way to summarize information.

I just read an article very interesting about (once again) surveillance society and advertising. But this time is about billboards.

Few months ago I realized a project for the module “internet technologies” and this project is a website called “content analyzer“. It is a basic/easy/simple way to analyze text. Mainly it retrieves the statistics of a document (e.g. how may words in the document, frequency of each single word, sorting by Alpha or Frequency). You can try it by yourself clicking on the link above.

Here the analysis of the original article (that you can find on nytimes.com)

“Billboards That Look Back”

Unique words:595
Total words:1443

Freq. Word

12 CAMERAS
10 BILLBOARDS
9 PEOPLE
8 ADVERTISING
8 DIGITAL
8 BILLBOARD
8 QUIVIDI
7 CAMERA
6 COMPANIES
5 TECHNOLOGY

————————————–
21 IS
18 IT
18 THEY
15 ARE
13 SAID
8 BE
7 SAY
7 I
7 HAS
7 YOU
6 WE
6 HE
6 COULD

I decided to take the first 10 nouns and all the verbs and subjects from the top list down to the last noun i chose (in this case “technology”).

You can choose as many words as you like, but to keep it as a summarization, i decided to stop at the first 10 nouns.

This analysis is really a basic one, and it can be modified/improved in many different ways.

Below is the complete statistical result:

(more…)

An amazing article from guardian.co.uk about internet and the surveillance society.

Shadbolt says the risks of data spillage are greater than we’re led to believe: ‘”If you keep within the law, and the government keeps within the law, and its employees keep within the law, and the computer holding the database doesn’t screw up, and the system is carefully designed according to well-understood software engineering principles and maintained properly, and the government doesn’t scrimp on the outlay and all the data are entered carefully and the police are adequately trained to use the system and the system isn’t hacked into, and your identity isn’t stolen, and the local hardware functions, well, you have nothing to fear.”

Read this article in guardian.co.uk : Our surveillance society goes online

Just found a very interesting article about China and the “big brother”!

(image courtesy of jurvetson) - Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout Shenzhen.

Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as “Golden Shield.”

Read this article in Rollingstone