viz.

Image Credit: Screencapture of graph created by the Collusion for Mozilla add-in.

I'd speculate that every instructor is familiar with the feeling that comes with anticipation and apprehension battling each other out before the first day of the semester.  Maybe I'm just too easily flustered, but the prospect of standing up in front of a group of heretofore-unknown students, while pretending to be the infallible instructor of heretofore-unknown material always rattles my cage a bit.

Image Credit: BBC News

Only a scant 23 days elapsed after TMZ leaked nude photos of Prince Harry that French tabloid Closer printed images of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless on the balcony of a Provence guesthouse. In addition to the frenzied speculation about the photos themselves (Is the queen upset with her grandson? Was Middleton truly in private, since she was photographed on a terrace? Are there more images that will emerge?) it’s interesting to note that the press itself has been the subject of equal amounts of scrutiny.

Image via TripAdvisor

As the first big travel week of the holiday season approaches, there has been much discussion about the TSA’s new body scanners and “enhanced pat downs.” There is a lot to be said about both the scanners themselves and the images that comment on the controversy, so in this post I will highlight some points of interest to inspire discussion about conceptions of the gaze and uses of the image.

Image Credit: We Feel Fine

H/T: Stephanie Rosen

I spent an inordinate amount of time today on Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s thought-provoking website, We Feel Fine.  This website scans, or in their words “harvests,” weblogs for statements with the phrase “I feel.”  Each of these statements is then represented as a colorful “particle” and organized into a variety of visual and statistical data.  The website generates fascinating examples of how people communicate about feelings and gives a powerful impression of both the diversity and similarity among affective statements online.  It also raises important questions about privacy.  The statements and images on We Feel Fine are from blogs, MySpace and Flickr.  Harvested statements whose writers’ also posted images are represented as a “Montage” with the text embedded in the image.  Site users can then save and send these postcard-like pieces.  For both its creative design and surveillance techniques, We Feel Fine provokes interesting questions regarding affect, privacy and online writing.

Mark Fiore has posted a satirical cartoon on the role of telecoms in the warrant-less wiretapping controversy. The cartoon stars Snuggly the Security Bear and CIA Director, General Michael Hayden.

via Boing Boing

This New York Times article discusses the implications of new online systems that allow parents to monitor their children’s grades and attendance.