Social Object: Peltier Unit

Peltier effect, also known as Thermoelectric Cooling, is commonly used in mini fridge, it acts as the cooling agent. The Peltier effect is the presence of heating or cooling at an electrified junction of two different conductors and is named after French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier, who discovered it in 1834. When a current is made to flow through a junction between two conductors A and B, heat may be generated (or removed) at the junction.

Peltier Module uses this effect, with two pieces of ceramic plates cover the each side of the junction, when a current flows through, one side becomes freezing cold (down to -30 degree Celsius) the other becomes burning hot (up to 70 degree Celsius). This effect can be used to generate electricity, measure temperature or change the temperature of objects. Because the direction of heating and cooling is determined by the polarity of the applied voltage, thermoelectric devices can be used as temperature controllers. 

The most peltier unit runs 12v DC, but with my experience, anything lower than 12v will still work, just the matter of how effective it will be. For this project I'm using 9v battery, a brief test confirmed that the effect will still take place with 9v input. And so the Peltier Module is my feedback mechanism.

Social Object: Radio wave Detector Prototype Three

After some research on DIY Radio Wave Detector, turns out it is not that easy. I both technical and component terms.

So to save time and budget, I went for a commercial product (hope this is not cheating), GSM Radio wave (Microwave) Detector. The detector was made to find radiowaves used in communication, which is perfect for my need.

What I did, was hack the detector slightly, so I can get a measure from it. In side the detector, there is a vibration motor, upon detection signals it will vibrate. I removed the motor and connect the negative leg to Arduino analog input, So Arduino could read the value of its detection. And from that value, I will be able to use it to trigger my feedback. 

Speculative Design: More about Cyber-warfare

After some researches, it turns out that cyber-warfare is such a grey area in legal term, United Nations has got international laws to cover human rights and laws of war. But there is none which specified activity such as cyber-wars. Since there is no a single agreement on what defines cyber-warfare, in the political sense this can be really tricky.

As the video describes. if somebody causes damage to a nation through internet and cyber-activity, does that qualified as an act of war? Anything done over the cyberspace is as clear as mud, there is nothing to restrict or prevent the possible cyber-crime. This clearly shows the lack of awareness over the issue of cyber-wars. Maybe is because the harm it causes is yet to reach the point where it can affect the general public in a dramatic scale, but there is a sign.Powerful countries worldwide have started establishing cyber-activity units, they have specialized army for cyberwars. And few documentaries have shown how much they have done already in the military.

It seems like cyberwarfare is really a thing we should look into

Social Object: Things Con Proposal

Nomo-Wearable (Eric Lin Yuan-Tang)

Context

A wearable whose purpose is to keep the user away from engaging social media by subjecting the user to unpleasant physical feedback on their arms/hands when operating a mobile phone.

Rationale

Nomophobia is a trend to society that could lead to negative results if leave unanswered. The project aim to bring people back from virtual world and virtual social contact into real social life.

Methodology/Technology

The methodology is quite simple, the device uses a passive radio wave detector with low sensitivity, which will only respond when the detector is near a radio wave transmitter i.e. Mobile phone. As the detector shows a signal, Arduino activates the physical feedback device applying unpleasant feeling to the user encouraging them to drop the phone.

Presentation

I am going to build several models with different feedback system to allow people to try the prototypes on location.

Things about Cyber-security

Chris Domas in his TED Talk explain how does he fetching the information he needs from a device. As we all know that our computer only recognizes two things, 1 and 0, on and off, which is binary codes. A huge series of 1 and 0 construct the softwares and digital information as we see today. Therefore to find some very specific data inside a sea of 1 and 0 is not the easiest thing to do and it would take enormous amount of time just to search one single word.

So he came up whit this idea of visualise the binary information in to a picture (more or less), and from that piece of picture he could tell what short of information that series of binary codes may containt, it is not perfect yet but it has save him a lot of time for his cyber-security job. 

This particular way is quite different from what I have imagine the cyber-security looks like, even I have no idea of how ordinary data fetching looks like when people talking about stealing data through internet, but I would have imagined it was done in the way of not so dissimilar to how we operating our computer, not exactly the same of course. But I thought there will be some sort of interface to work with and not just a huge load of 1 and 0.

I thought, at least, it would look like the picture above, to have some languages we understand and not like this