Barcelona

I had my last holiday in marvelous Barcelona. One of the most beautiful cities I have visited so far. Its beaches, its culture and people make it one of the top tourist attractions on my list. Barcelona is the capital of the autonomous community of Catalonia. Even though it has a population of 1.6 million (4.7 million if urban area is considered), you still experience the serenity of a summer town. People are very relaxed and cheerful - something difficult to experience in many of the big cities.

The hearth of the city for most tourists is La Rambla. The one and a half miles in-length street with many shops and restaurants also hosts the mime and street artists. There is also a must see food market - La Boqueria - located on the street. Having variety of meat, fish and fruit options, the market appeals to variety of tastes. As all over the city, the variety of fruit juices in the market attract the eye (make sure you drink one of the varieties of these fruit juices before you leave Barcelona, they are tasty!). Even if you do not eat or drink something, it is also a pleasure to go around the market for a feast for the eyes!

        

The rich history of the city is goes back to BC, you can feel the traces of the Roman period in the historical center Gothic Quarter which is off La Rambla. You will see that many of the buildings date from Medieval times (if not older).As in most of the European towns, you feel the history as you go through the streets and see the architectural masterpieces in many locations of the town. 
The city has also eye-pleasing squares and gardens which you can come accross suddenly while walking in a small street.

The wonderful masterpieces of Antoni Gaudi and Lluís Domènech i Montaner are all around the city.  The most known of these is Basílica de la Sagrada Família of Antoni Gaudi. Its construction has started in 1882 and it has been contuining since then.  The other interesting detail is that it is is financed by private donations and fund raising.

You can see the works of Gaudi dispersed all around the city. I would recommend you to see the Park Güell, Casa Batlló (or Casa Milà or popularly known as ‘La Pedrera’ ) as the other sites designed by Gaudi. You will be able to observe his detailed work in all of these masterpieces.

Especially Park Güell is my favorite. It is a garden planned for the pleasure of the outdoor lovers. I also applauded the ergonomy in his designs. The door handles, the seats are designed for practical and easy use. Seeing his house in Park Güell would be a good opportunity to understand his designs better.


 

The other historical buildings that will be worth seeing is the Barcelona Cathedral, Gothic Basilica of Santa Maria del Pi (I would recommend you climb the stairs to see the view. It is very interesting to watch Barcelona from up the tower. Even though it seems very disordered as you first look, you will then observe that the roof tops and balconies are an important part of the Barcelona lifestyle. You will see that most of these cluttered seem roof tops are all well looked furnished with some seats, tables or umbrellas with flowers on the sides.

If you have more than two days, there are of course much more to see in this beautiful city. Mountain Tibidabo is one of the alternatives. You can go up the mountain with the historical Funicular. During this 5 minutes of nostalgic journey, you will also be able to watch the city as the Funicular carries you up the hill. Once up the mountain, you can enjoy the Tibidabo Amusement Park or visit the Sagrat Cor Church. The Tibidabo Amusement Park was opened in 1899 and it is one of the oldest in the World still functioning according to the sources. We took the 1928 Red Aeroplae ride. It is a single car carousel that give the impression of flight above the city. The other alternative is to visit the church. It is also open to the visitors and the prayers. There is also the possibility of going to the top of the church to have a 360 view of the area and the forests around.


 


The other place to visit is the Montjuïc Hill. The National Palace, Olympic Stadium, the fortress at Montjuïc, The Joan Miro Modern Art Museum, the Botanical Gardens, the Museum of Ethnology, the Catalan Museum of Archeology are also one of the few places to visit located here. In order to have a good view of the city, you can take the cable car linking the city to the top of the Montjuïc. It is a comfortable short ride with the city view.



   

You also have the opportunity of visiting The Fundació Joan Miró. Barcelona is a wonderful city if you enjoy visiting museums. The Museu Picasso is located in the Gothic Quarter in the city center. It will be a worthwhile journey to visit both The Fundació Joan Miró and  Museu Picasso while you are in the city.

  

 

Local public transport is very efficient in Barcelona. The public transportation options are the metro, bus network, tram networks, several funiculars and aerial cars. Even though it has many lanes, the metro system is easy to understand and easy to use with the metro map. Just watch out for occasional strikes or interruptions (even if there are, this would not effect your visit alot as you will be able to use other transportation methods). The other option is bike renting. Barcelona is a bike friendly city, there are bike lanes in most of the roads, and if not, you can also use the main roads. You will see lots of locals cyling in the city. So join the crowd! There are more than 400pick up and drop off  bike stations placed in the city. Or it is also possible to rent a bike for an hour or a day from one of the companies that provide services with offices around the city. If you do not prefer any of these options, you can also enjoy the city with the hop-on, hop-off bus tours.

  

It is always relaxing to be in a city with splendid beaches. You can enjoy a spot along the 4.2 km of sandy beaches in the Barcelona just 10mins away from the city center. If you are not in the mood for sun bathing, you can also have a drink in one of the restaurants or the beach bars while having the pleasure of the sea view.

The street art is an integral part of the city. The statues in the parks, the installations in the metro stations or arts/graffitis in the walls or street corners enrich the city.

  

Foods, Foods, Foods in Barcelona!!! There are variety of dishes to taste. Paella and Tapas,are the ones that most tourists taste. Paella is a rice dish. The most typical one is with the sea food, but it is possible to find also the vegetarian and the meat paella in most of the restaurants. Tapas are variety of appetizers. They can be cold and hot. You will find a list of tapas in most restaurants, some most known ones are croquetas, gambas (prawns in salsa), pimientos de Padron (small green peppers - tastt!!!!). The restaurants also have their own specialties, make sure you ask the waitress or waiter their recommendation. There are also variety of local foods that you can discover through asking in the restaurants or information booths. Barcelona is a great place to eat all kinds of food, so prepare your stomach for a feast! The most common beverage is Sangria; the drink consisting of red wine and chopped fruits. You can order in pitchers or in glasses. And desert! I enjoyed the Churros very much especially the ones with nutella! Try it if you like really sweet deserts. I highly recommend churros of  http://www.xurreriasagradafamilia.es/ .

  

                                   
  

Google I/O

As I been reading about different topics in order to progress with my thesis research, I came across the Google I/O 2016. Google I/O is the yearly conference held by Google in San Francisco. Google defines it as "Google I/O is our annual developer festival with hands-on learning, technical talks, and a chance to hear more about Google’s latest developer products" (Google, 2016). It is where the core technology is introduced. The conference also works as a platform where Google introduces new applications and Technologies for mobile devices. By introducing and pubblicing these Technologies they on the other hand desire developers to use/integrate these tools.
Well, I am not a programmer or a mobile web designer, but I always find listening to tech developments useful for my own interests and research. After all, most if not all of these technologies do tracking or monitoring by design.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, gave the keynote speech and he highlighted the direction the technology is evolving towards; mobile technologies, mobile apps, machine learning along with AI, voice recognition, image recognition, finger printing. The aim is to use the applications of Google to "get things done in real World" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=862r3XS2YB0 - start watching from 14.40). He also highlighted their desire to be one stop point for the whole home, the family. Following his speech, Mario Queiroz, introduced the Google Assistant for home in a hands free way. So they created the device Google Home. It is actually integration of the online World in to the home sphere without the need to go online. It is powered by sound recognition, and it continue the two way dialogue, so more machine learning.

So why is this important for surveillance studies point of view. We are already surrounded by all these Technologies that track us. It is the introduction of these Technologies within the home. What you do at home, is not anymore just your business but through voice recognition, it is also Google's business. The private/public space continue to be merged. You do not need to even leave what you are doing or type, it will recognize your voice, Google home will be one of the house inhabitants. You will depend on it, as we depend on Google now in most our daily activities (At least if Google home does not work, there will always be the same old Google in our mobiles and computers). Google is not just a search company, it has diverse variety of businesses. Through opening up the home, we will be also opening up our home to all the business of Google (or Alphabet Inc.). It will also depend on the privacy policy of the Google home how much the information collected within the home sphere would be used in other programs. It can be considered as bringing the immaterial labour or the free labour (of individuals as they produce knowledge as they use these technologies) from the individual to the household level. Thus the individuals (the children), who do not have a mobile phone of their own, become also surveillant subjects within the household. Thus, the ones in the household that used to be immune to the technological surveillance in the sphere of home, become also part of the monitoring. This is also similar to any of the monitoring/contolling(or surveillance) equipment brought to the home aiming to care/control.

One of the other sessions gave the updates about Google Pay. I have not used Google Pay before as my phone does not download it as it is not available in Canada (or my phone setting does not allow me). But, it is the next dimension in the integration of different applications. The usage of Google Pay in the London Underground is effective, and the cash withdraw from Bank of America's ATMs are also effective as of today (18th of May 2016). The applications have been using Google pay (AirBnb) and more applications have been integrating it into their system (Booking.com). The other important issue for the surveillance scholars is the usage of biometrics (finger print scanning) as one of the steps of identity verification. So while our information/activities are being transformed from one application to the other, biometrics become an integral part of it.
Google already knows our lives and it continues to develop applications that know more.
(See https://www.android.com/pay/ for more info)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_I/O
www.android.com/pay/
Google. 2006. Attending. Retrieved from https://events.google.com/io2016/attend

National Identity Cards

Turkish Biometric Identity Cards:

So Turkey is in the process of introducing the new national identification cards with biometric information (with a chip) at a plot level. The biometric data stored in the chip is a combination of fingerprint and palm vein print data. The governing bodies indicate that the smart cards will ease the processes with official institutions, thus making life easier both for the citizens and the institutions. The introduction of these cards is also part of Turkey's fullfilment of the requirements of its visa liberalisation roadmap within EU (1). Yet the interesting issue is the citizens of most of the EU countries resist the mandatory use/distribution of National Identity cards and Biometric cards, thus their usage (if issued to the citizens) is quite limited. So one questions, their mandatory usage and naturalization within Turkey as part of the EU roadmap. 

For a good overview of the National Identity cards in Turkey, please see  "Citizenship rights in a surveillance society: The case of the electronic ID card in Turkey" by Alanur Çavlin Bozbeyoğlu.
(http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/viewFile/citizenship/citizenship)

1) http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-migration/proposal-implementation-package/docs/20160504/third_progress_report_on_turkey_visa_liberalisation_roadmap_en.pdf)

Facebook TrendingTopics

So, the news have been flooded with Facebook's trending topic feature for the last couple of days. The first accusation was that Facebook censors/suppresses the conservative news in the Trending topic that appears on the right hand side of the NewsFeed. That seems like not the issue as far as I read in different newspapers articles around the World. For me the interesting issue is the usage of human curotors in the selection of the news rather than the algorithms in a website that champions the usage of algorithms all over its applications.

The Guardian explains the situation as;

"In a series of documents laying out the editorial standards for the trending topics section, the company dictated to its journalists how they should deal with news reports. It did indeed suggest that a story shouldn’t be marked as important if it only came from an outlet such as Newsmax, but not for political reasons. Instead, the company expressed a preference for stories from a list of 10 large, mainstream political news sites, including Fox News, the Guardian and the BBC.

“I believe that what happened with these curators is that they wanted to avoid embarrassing mistakes,” said Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. “Particularly because they had no real power at the company, they had no authority. And so they wanted to only pick reliable news.

“The easiest way to do that – not a particularly smart way – but the easiest way is to only pick things that are being published by major news organisations. In an environment like that, a story that is only circulating on rightwing blogs and conservative news sites may in fact be left out for reasons of bureaucracy more than bias.”

The introduction of human hands in the selection of trending topics dates back to the summer of 2014, when two different stories were taking social media by storm. On Facebook, the Ice Bucket Challenge was taking over newsfeeds, proving the perfect type of content to ride to viral success, but on Twitter, a platform barely mediated at all, the Black Lives Matter protests were dominating the reaction to the shooting of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson.

Some worried that algorithmically curated newsfeeds could never fully capture important breaking news events, and it seems Facebook was convinced: the curation team was set up, and guidelines put in place that allowed it to override the algorithm if enough major publications were reporting a story....

And while Facebook has opened up about how it puts together its trending topics, the company remains taciturn about its main newsfeed, the feature that algorithmically pulls together a selection of posts to present to each individual user. Those algorithms are, however, still designed by humans."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/13/newsfeed-saga-unmasks-the-human-face-of-facebook

Several things are important here:

1) The algorithms are considered by Facebook not to be 100% trustworthy. They had the need to bring in editorial judgement (or curators) in to the process. Facebook unintendetly says through its structuration of Trending Topics that it does not totaly trust at algorithms in giving the good decisions.

2) In the process of selecting the news, there has been reliance on the main stream media to set the agenda of the trending topics. The issue of agenda setting by the mainstream outlets is one of the reasons why opposing or alternative voices are not heard and facebook becomes a tool in this, whether they realized it or not.

3) Algorithms are designed by humans thus reflects most of the time, same unavoidable judgements that humans do. So if the designer of the algorithm is white, living in the developed part of the world, then the algorithm will have parameters that reflect its designers. So it would be a misrepresentation to say that algorithms are objective.

Akbil

http://mobil.hurriyet.com.tr/milyonlarca-yolcunun-kullandigi-akbil-icin-imza-kampanyasi-baslatildi-40104123?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=post&utm_term=post&utm_content=milyonlarca-yolcunun-kullandigi-akbil-icin-imza-kampanyasi-baslatildi&utm_campaign=milyonlarca-yolcunun-kullandigi-akbil-icin-imza-kampanyasi-baslatildi_ulastirma

Akbil kullanicilari bir imza kampanyasi baslatmislar. Akbilin internet uzerinden de banka hesbindan doldurulabilmesi icin. Ayrica imza kampanyasinda her kartin hangi otobuste kullanildigi da takip edilsin ki boylece kayip esyalarin takibi kolay yapilabilsin diyorlar.  Yolcular gundelik hayatlarini kolaylastirmak icin kendi istekleriyle takip edilmeyi kolaylastiracak uygulamalar istiyorlar. Bu biraz da Turk insaninin zaten her noktada bu sistemin icinde halihazirda olmasindan da kaynaklaniyor. Edevlet uygulamalari hayatimizi kolaylastirirken butun bilgilerimizi de bir araya getirdi bir platformda topladi. Suanda vatandaslar bunun faydalarini kolayliklarini gordu, baska yerlerde de bunu istiyor. Neden peki bircok ulkenin sivil toplum kuruluslari ve akademisyenleri bu tip vatandas takibine imkan saglayan uygulamalara tepki gosteriyor. Farkinda olmadan halihazirda her noktada yaptiklarimiz kayit altinda. Cep telefonlarinin sinyalleri her an nerede oldugumuzla ilgili bilgiler topluyor, gectigimiz yollardaki trafik kameralari, yurudugumuz yollardaki guvenlik kameralari bizleri kayit altina aliyor, devlet kurumlariyla yaptigimiz butun islemlerde TC kimlik numaramizi verdigimizde butun bu islemler kayit ltinda, kredi kartiyla aldigimiz urunler bankalar tarafindan biliniyor. Tamam ne oluyor yani denebilir, sakliyacak gizleyecek birseyim yok, olay bundan cok daha kapsamli degerlendirildiginde, hepimizin ozelinin aslinda aslinda artik ozeli olmadigi goruluyor. Saklanacak birseyin olmamasi degil ana nokta olay bu hakkimizin teknolojik gelismeler isiginda dunyanin cogu ulkesinde biz farkinda olsak da olmasak da elimizden alinmasi. Bu bilgiler hicbir yere gitmiyor, sistemlerde kalici olarak saklaniyor. Birkac yil sonra bir davada, saglikla ilgili yaptigiz bir sigorta basvurusunda kullanilma ihtimali var. Bilgilerin kimler tarafindan kullanilabilegi, kimlerin toplaya bilecegi ile ilgili kurallar suan icin bircok ulkede esnek. Ayrica korunmasi acisindan da sikintilar var. Bir de farkli gruplarin farkli sekilde etkilenme igtimali var. Amerika bazli bircok arastirma, elektronik alanda toplanan bilgilerin bircok sosyal esitsizlige sebep oldugunu gosteriyor. Teknoloji hizla gelisiyor, sebep olabilecegi durumlar ve yarattigi sosyal degisim bu arada anlasilmaya calisiliyor.

TV

So, I am the girl, who can watch hours of TV content without giving a break. I can watch the re runs or the marathons.
Lately, I can only watch these through the internet as i have not bought a Tv at home in order to make myself more productive in my job but i am not really sure it is working effectively. Anyways, i especially love watching tv series.
Everything starts with the imagination in tv shows. The creators put down their imagination into work, some turns out to be great, while others become plops. In addition to imagination, there are of course the usual recipes, the boy meets the girl, but of course there are always problems. We see the family relations or the functional or dysfunctional families (the funny ones, or the drama ones). Or, the mystery genre. You have to place a partners(better if a man and a woman) and give them something to work on each episode. So, once you know the frameworks or the guidelines, you can easily become disenchanted. For that reason, everyshow twists the familiar story in some way. But, it is possible to see similar characteristics in each show. All new show can be considered as the accumulation of all the previous ones. (There are all kinds of media studies literature on these topics.)
Once you start watching the shows based on what kind of general guidelines they follow, you can place them in the specific boxes. Once a type becomes successful, there comes all the similar ones. The vampire shows, the family shows, the detective stories. Of course each new year, the characters vary according to the changes in the political and cultural atmosphere. So, as 2000s are the years of female empowerment and the gay pride, these are reflected into the shows but mostly in line with the patriarchical guidelines. So the shows that have indipendent women as their protogonist, also shows them as one night standers. While giving them this freedom, these females mostly assume characteristics mostly attributed to men in order to be indipendent or powerful or intelligent. In most cases, they still have to be beautiful (But there are of course exceptions). So basically, most of the shows follow a certain framework.
I am writing this long introduction since - as a persistent tv watcher - i will be writing TV show evaluations from time to time.