I wrote a medium post because I couldn’t post images here (file size was either too big or there was problems). Please see the post there.
Link to Post: https://medium.com/@rvunabandi/cms-631-sketch-4-6d09aff8ddaa
Link to Images: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/124E35alBbfw_sLXhgvOKZofbh3A7tcHT?usp=sharing
Team members: Claudia Chen, Sam Ihns, Robert M. Vunabandi
We explored the wine dataset (700 Years of Grape Harvests), and decided to take an approach where we are wine advertisers and our audience is made of wine and history enthusiasts. We advertise through wine labels, so we made 3 wine labels highlighting 3 specific points in history with interesting events related to the harvests of wine at that time.
The 700 Years of Grape Harvests dataset contains, for each of 27 regions in Europe (most of which were in France), the number of days since August 31 after which grapes were harvested in each of the years from 1354 to 2007. While the time range is huge, a lot of the dataset was missing for various reasons. The main reason were that not all regions started recording this information at the same time (the region of Burgundy is the one that was first). In addition, due to various historical events, some parts of the data were missing heavily.
For our sketches, we made wine labels. The idea behind each label is that the label will be attached to a wine bottle and will give specific details about the historical context under which the wine was made. We chose to focus on French regions because most of the dataset was focused on France and within the dataset, French regions had the least amount of data missing. So, each label presents a story in a specific point in time when a notable event took place and changed the history of wine in France. In addition to that, we chose to focus on specific regions (as opposed of looking at all the regions and comparing them) because it allowed us to better tell a compelling advertising story on a wine bottle.
So, here are the 3 sketches we have:
Great Wine Blights, 1868:
Champagne Riots, 1910:
World War II, 1941:
Overall wine production:
Wine Blight:
1910 Riots:
World War II:
I use a few apps daily. These are mostly regular phone messaging, WhatsApp, and Messenger. These apps have to store the messages that I send to other people (or at least move the messages from my phone to the other people’s phones), which creates insecurities both in storage and during transmission. Even if there is an end-to-end encryption, the event that “Robert sent some web request somewhere” is still potentially logged.
At MIT, we have to tap our card in many of the buildings we enter, especially dorms; in addition, many of those areas have cameras. This means that it can be fairly easy to track people.
I also have some friends who wrote an app that could detect high traffic areas using wifi signals. Just in the way wifi work (by probing wifi routers literally in all directions), the information that “I disconnected from wifi X and connected to wifi Y” can also be used.
I also worked on a project to design a system that could facilitate indoor tracking using bluetooth. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could combine all these signals to be able to track people.
There’s a game I play almost everyday (and I should stop…). That game logs pretty much everything, which in turn it uses to award coins or rewards. That’s a form of tracking. The game has in app purchases, which can be used as a proxy to discover someone’s financial status.
I think that cellular network is the least secure and most dangerous of all, including SMSs. We’re all kind of stuck to using it because we carry our phones everywhere. Now that phones don’t have battery removals, it’s almost impossible to know whether your phone is actually off even when you turn it completely off. This video from the Joe Rogan Experience with Edward Snowden is particularly telling.
The video uses the data shown in the image above to make the case that the US dollars is used in more global trades that any other currency, then it goes on to explain that because of that fact, almost all global trades technically touch US soil. That gives US a lot of power to enforce doing business in a way that is compliant with US laws.
This video is shared by the Wall Street Journal, so I believe that the target audience is probably just about everyone. However, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that its subscribers are likely left leaning, which would imply that maybe the content it releases is for slightly left-leaning individuals.
Overall, it appears to me that the goal is to show how much power US has and at the same time show that a growing number of countries are working to stop this kind of power that the US has. And to that, it’s up to the reader to form their opinions. If that is the goal, then I think this is effective. The video was very much leaning on an informational side, and so it let’s me make my own decisions about what I think should or shouldn’t happen.