The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.
What an exhausting weekend…well Sunday really. Didn’t do much Saturday. But Sunday I got exercise for the first time in ages in the form of some Ultimate Frisbee. My feet are sore, my legs stiff but it feels great. Sadly, it saps a lot of my creative energy but I still managed to get some scribbles out.
Speaking of the many wonders of sketching, the lovely Ms. Sunni Brown of TED seems to be in the know.
And if that piques your interest, try the long form version.
And lastly, try this neat doodling HTML game Draw a Stickman, no Flash necessary!
Frankly I’m a bit deep fried after all the social media firestorm that was this week. Google+ goes live to the public, which is to say, it’s on perpetual beta. Facebook changed their layout, again, and the crowd goes wild. Just when the crowd was calming down then Facebook announces more chances, Timelines, and other social media extras that guarantee less of your life is private. (I think team member Roma is onto something, his response to all the talk? Delivered with a devilish grin and a glint in his eye, “what’s a Facebook?”)
It’s worth noting that all this transpired while the market plummeted, in what felt like a remake of a movie we’ve already seen (or if you are George Lucas remade and ruined.)
So rather than commentary, opinion and lists of updates I would like to leave you with this for deep thought:
The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information. In addition, the Ninth Amendment states that the “enumeration of certain rights” in the Bill of Rights “shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people.” The meaning of the Ninth Amendment is elusive, but some persons (including Justice Goldberg in his Griswold concurrence) have interpreted the Ninth Amendment as justification for broadly reading the Bill of Rights to protect privacy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments.
The question of whether the Constitution protects privacy in ways not expressly provided in the Bill of Rights is controversial. Many originalists, including most famously Judge Robert Bork in his ill-fated Supreme Court confirmation hearings, have argued that no such general right of privacy exists. The Supreme Court, however, beginning as early as 1923 and continuing through its recent decisions, has broadly read the “liberty” guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment to guarantee a fairly broad right of privacy that has come to encompass decisions about child rearing, procreation, marriage, and termination of medical treatment. Polls show most Americans support this broader reading of the Constitution.
…
The future of privacy protection remains an open question. Justices Scalia and Thomas, for example, are not inclined to protect privacy beyond those cases raising claims based on specific Bill of Rights guarantees. The public, however, wants a Constitution that fills privacy gaps and prevents an overreaching Congress from telling the American people who they must marry, how many children they can have, or when they must go to bed. The best bet is that the Court will continue to recognize protection for a general right of privacy.
I can’t help but wonder what the founding fathers would make of the internet, or Facebook. Would they like it?
The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.
The Sketching Mechanism – the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker.
A shrewdness of apes. A business of ferrets. A team of horses. A convocation of eagles. A parliament of owls. A company of parrots. An army of frogs. A group of animals always receives a name, and links being like animals in the wild, we’ve decided that a collection of links is called a library.
This week’s edition of The Thinking Mechanism is a library of links:
• RIM Off 19%: Year View Weaker; Margins Going Down. Some people we know, that in the past swore by their blackberries, are now awaiting the iPhone 5. Why put your faith into something that seems to be fading, they seem to be asking.
• Jensen Harris shows what makes a great Metro app, and demonstrates the future of Windows. Mind you the tablet and OS shown are early betas and will not be available to the public for a year. A lot can happen in a year. A lot will happen in a year.
• The Boston Globe implements responsive design on their site. Beautiful and clean information and visual design Are you watching NYTimes.com?
• The United States of Design: Fast Company selects the 50 most influential designers in America, while First Lady Michelle Obama honors National Design Awards Winners.
• The much awaited Google+ API is now available.
• 48 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute. And now that they’ve added a built-in editor to the site the number is sure to rise.
• Google+ wants to be like Twitter wants to be like Facebook wants to be like Google+. Next step: Facebook launches a subscribe button.
• To help all the marketeers that are questioning the value of Promoted Tweets, Twitter opens up their web analytics via a free dashboard.
• In the UK a fight to extend copyright is won. Are copyright terms on their way to being permanent? Disney sure hopes so.
• And lastly, using technology to do something just cause it’s cool: dynamic water signage/sculpture.
The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.