Fusion: Watch it buster, GPS watch for kids
9/13/2003WATCH IT BUSTER
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have launched “Camera Watch” to list Internet cameras that monitor public spaces.
The project is part of “Surveillance of Surveillances,” an effort by the school's Data Privacy Lab to monitor the exploding number of cameras watching the public.
The lab is in the process of posting links to 6,000 of the estimated 10,000 public Web cams in the United States, everything from gray stills of traffic in Rockville, Md., to video of students meandering across a campus in Washington D.C. and even lenses peeping on jail bookings in Tennessee and Louisiana.
http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/projects/camwatch
WATCH IT KID
The GPS Locator Watch for Kids links a satellite Global Positioning System (GPS) locator, digital wireless PCS cell phone technology and the Wherify location system letting parents track and determine their child's location no matter where they might be at any given moment. By going to Wherify's Web site, entering your name and password you can see exactly where your children are within a few feet. The GPS Locator watch can lock onto a child's wrist where it can only be removed by the parent's electronic key.
The GPS Locator Watch ($199.99) comes in Galactic Blue and Cosmic Purple. A monthly service charge ranges from $19.95 to $44.95 depending on features and services.
DEMOCRATIC POETRY
The goal of Darwinian Poetry is to create interesting poems by subjecting 1,000 randomly generated groups of words to a form of natural selection, killing off the “bad” ones and breeding the “good” ones with each other. Visitors are presented with two poems (admittedly, “abysmal pieces of nonsensical garbage” ) and must select between them. Eventually, some poems get dumped, and the better ones intermingle.
So far, nearly 55,000 votes have been cast and more than 5,200 poems killed.
www.codeasart.com/poetry/darwin.html
DEMOCRATIC COLOR
The Web site favcol.com displays this evolving color as its background. It is gleaned from submissions from visitors who send in photos of their favorite color by e-mail or camera phone. Colors are mixed together to get a favorite.
Colored bars representing the spectrum are displayed across the top of the page. The higher the bar, the more popular the hue. If you want to take part, send in bright close-ups, or you will dim your chosen color rather than emphasize it.
The site automatically displays the most recent photo submitted.
RAYNE FORECAST
Software publisher Majesco will take its popular action/horror video game, BloodRayne to the silver screen. Executive producer and director Dr. Uwe Boll, expects to begin filming BloodRayne in 2004 and estimates a budget in the $30 million range. Originally released for console on October 2002, with a PC release scheduled for this week, BloodRayne features the sexy, supernatural, huntress BloodRayne, an unholy breed of human and vampire.
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