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jlimetc · 7 years

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Sniffing Around

I started by comparing my two go-to browsers: Opera and Safari. (No, I don’t know why I don’t use Chrome either.) Upon opening Opera, I see traffic like this:

That looks about right. I have a few tabs (email, calendar) that open automatically, and I imagine each one requires several packets to get going.

When I open Safari, which opens only one blank window automatically, I see traffic like this:

Unlike in Opera, there’s a preponderance of HTTP traffic from the Safari browser. 23 minutes of mindless browsing in Safari yielded a total of 5919 packets. Of these, 458 (7.7%) were HTTPS and 2795 (47.2%) outbound.

I noticed that most of the activity occurred during the 30 seconds I spent on nydailynews.com: 5409 packets were sent/received. I decided that the ultimate browser test would be to see how Opera and Safari handle the same junk website.

The 13 minutes and 50 seconds I spent browsing dailymail.co.uk on Opera yielded 355 packets. This was an average rate of 0.43 packets/second. Of these, 347 (97.7%) were HTTPS and 351 (98.9%) were outbound.

I lasted 2 minutes and 44 seconds on dailymail.co.uk on Safari. By the time I quit, 5814 packets had been sent/received. This was an average rate of 35.34 packets/second. Of these, 267 (4.6%) were HTTPS and 2972 (51.1%) were outbound.

My perceived experience of the site was exactly the same through both browsers. The downside of Opera’s tight-lipped approach to packets is that I don’t know what was going on in those packets. Almost all the Opera traffic was rerouted through default0.opera-proxy.net . With the Safari traffic, I could see what the sites were: advertisers.

Some sources of my behind-the-scenes Safari traffic.

At first, I was relieved that the extra traffic was marketers. That’s a relationship I understand: retailers try to sell me things; I choose whether to buy them or not. Frankly, I hoped it was all just folks trying to make a quick buck.

My hopes were shattered when I watched Brannon Dorsey’s 10/21 “Browser as Botnet” talk at the Radical Networks conference. He discussed the danger of websites that use clients’ computers to complete hashing tasks. When we joined the radicalnetworks.org site for the duration of his talk, he was able to discover our computers’ IP addresses and use our computers to execute his code. Suddenly, it made sense why my computer got so hot while browsing dailymail, especially via Safari. I was doing work for them! Or at least...I was doing work for someone.

On one hand, I was browsing the dailymail site for free. I’ve seen way more pictures of semi-clothed semi-celebrities than I would ever pay for. And there was a time when people had to pay for magazines with that kind of content.

On the other hand, I wasn’t consenting to this exchange. If they were upfront about what they were up to – or if my browser did a better job of telling me what it was up to – I would have chosen differently.*

The thing that frightens me about all this internet data – how facebook knows what I type into my status bar even when I decide not to post, &c. – is that my already tenuous control of my “free will” (to the degree that such a thing can be said to exist) gets weaker with every little transaction that I’m not aware of.

It’s not just that companies know what I want to buy – this could be considered a great convenience! – it’s that companies have more power than ever to shape my desires in the first place. Strangers now have access to something very powerful over which I have little control: my computer and all the behavioral data it contains. My computer knows my habits better than I do.

*Mr. Dorsey suggested leaving our CPU and RAM usage visible at all times. I’m into it.

#networks #ITPNYU

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jlimetc · 7 years

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Little Monster

Alt Docs Assignment 2: Use one of the methods demonstrated in class (photogrammetry or depth sensor) to capture an object or subject.

To scan my stuffed animal, I set up four LED lights around a platform in the microstudio. I placed some stickers down on the platform to give PhotoScan external reference points.

I was afraid that this lighting would create too many shadows, but between the diffusion and the cross-ways lighting, it actually worked a charm. PhotoScan took a long time processing the 99 photos I gave it to work with. Next time, I may not take quite so many.

#altdocs #ITPNYU

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jlimetc · 7 years

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The Physiognomist (관상가)

Alt Docs Assignment 1 Sean Kim & Jenny Lim

When we met to discuss the Yale Face Database, Sean recalled a meeting he had with a physiognomist: someone who judges character or predicts the future based on a person’s facial characteristics. Jenny didn’t even know such a field existed.

At this point, we had been planning on exploring the connection between the face database and emotion charts that are used to teach children with autism how to interpret facial expressions (see below). We’d been struck by how similar the expressions of emotions were across the participants, and we wondered how applicable the set was to real life. Some of the expressions seem more like caricatures than real expressions of emotion. Did the experimenters give these non-actors actual prompts, such as the idea of a loved one dying, or did they simply yell out, “Sad!”?

An emotion chart of the sort used to teach children with autism.

But when Sean shared his story of meeting the physiognomist, Jenny immediately changed tack. Jenny has an affinity for first-person documentaries à la Agnès Varda and Ross McElwee. Sean has an affinity for the spiritual: since June, he has been a Dalai Lama fellow. Given two performers (Sean and Jenny) and a live audience, it seemed appropriate to aim for an interactive theater experience.

These are the elements of our anticipated performance:

1+ magnifying glass(es).

1 overhead lamp and 1 chair beneath it.

A slideshow showing the “normal” or “neutral” photos from the Yale Face Database.

Sean and Jenny in the front of the room. The background will be constructed to resemble the office of a physiognomist.

The performance will start with Jenny asking Sean to recall the meeting he had with a physiognomist. The audience will be seated close to the performers. After introducing the story, Sean and Jenny will begin employing props: a magnifying glass like the one the physiognomist used when examining faces; the chair under the lamp like the one that illuminated Sean during his meeting. At the end, the audience will be able to examine/analyze Sean with these tools in the same way that Physiognomists do with their clients.

At a point that feels natural, we will invite the viewers to pick up magnifying glasses or sit under the light. This will give them the opportunity to inspect faces or to be inspected. We hope that people will take this opportunity, as it is rare thing to examine a face close-up.

We also hope that audience members will ask questions of Sean and his experience. If they do not, Jenny will continue the interview. Meanwhile, the slideshow of faces will continue in the background, providing more faces to inspect. The performance will continue for ten minutes or until it reaches a natural endpoint.

#altdocs #ITPNYU

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jlimetc · 7 years

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Poems for Nobody

Reading & Writing Electronic Text: Final Project

In the hand the shillings come and go master of Michelangelo.

By Roz Chast. Published in the April 24, 1995 issue of The New Yorker.

I. Adventures with Iambs

When I started my final project, I wanted to write a program that uses the pronouncing library and spacy to output something rhythmically similar to T.S. Eliot’s Preludes.

I got as far as this poem, generated using the first few paragraphs of the Fagles translation of the Aeneid:

the battle battle too of fear of fates in . one … a held on gods if many Gods – and so the many goodness walls the Latin blows of driven beyond her gods and that willing lords a settlers say of famous gods and armor walls , and of the city if a source a Latin race Queen shores and walls .

and Here the power of a blows –

View the code here.

This sort of captures the “vibe” of the Aeneid, and perhaps a few more paragraphs or key passages of source text would have filled out the experience. But I didn’t feel like this poem was all that interesting unless you already knew the Aeneid. Also, the more I said “iambic tetrameter” out loud, the more I wondered, “Is this even going to be comprehensible?”

II. Languages I Cannot Speak

A lot of my enjoyment of poetry lies in literary devices and layers of meaning. But is it only my humanities background that enables me to appreciate these layers of meaning? And if so, does that mean I enjoy poetry because it makes me feel “smart”?

One of the strengths of computer poetry is that the computer can spit out words I don’t understand with just as much confidence as it spits out English. My thoughts about hidden meaning and educational privilege led me to these two texts, both in languages with which I’m loosely familiar: Korean and Latin.

1. Korean: the Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음). In the fifteenth century AD, King Sejong released a new phonetic alphabet to replace the Chinese characters with which Koreans traditionally wrote. Here’s an excerpt:

“The language of the people is different from that of the nation of China and thus cannot be expressed by the written language of Chinese people. Because of this reason, the cries of illiterate peasants are not properly understood by the powerful. I am saddened by the situation.”

2. Latin: the Sacrosanctum Concilium. In 1963, Pope Paul VI introduced a new set of standards for the Catholic liturgy aimed at increasing lay participation. Among other reforms, it permitted the use of native languages in masses, which had previously been conducted purely in Latin. Here’s an excerpt:

“Even in the liturgy, the Church has no wish to impose a rigid uniformity in matters which do not implicate the faith or the good of the whole community; rather does she respect and foster the genius and talents of the various races and peoples.”

I thought it would be interesting to generate a poem whose intricacies (at the very least, in Korean and Latin) would be lost on me, but perhaps more immediately visible to students fluent in Korean and/or of Catholic upbringing.

Here is an output:

Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, is one of the constitutions of the Second Vatican Council. It was approved by the assembled bishops by a vote of 2,147 to 4 and promulgated by Pope Paul VI on December 4, 1963. 편안케 하고자 할 따름이니라 Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, is one of the constitutions of the Second Vatican Council. Therefore, twenty eight characters have been newly created, such that each person may become familiar and use them daily in an intuitive way. It was created so that the common people illiterate in hanja could accurately and easily read and write the Korean language. dummodo cum rationibus veri et authentici spiritus liturgici congruat. The language of the people is different from that of the nation of China and thus cannot be expressed by the written language of Chinese people. In Masses which are celebrated with the people, a suitable place may be allotted to their mother tongue. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, is one of the constitutions of the Second Vatican Council. Because of this reason, the cries of illiterate peasants are not properly understood by the powerful.

View the code here.

This stuff is (maybe a little) interesting, but is there any added value to be gained by mashing them up? And to those who are not familiar with either text, is this just a sea of confusion? As Allison pointed out, even if you can’t name iambic tetrameter, at least you can hear it.

III. The Love Song of Professor Adam Smith

I really love The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock. And I really love Adam Smith. After my brief fling with other languages, I decided to return to the rhythms I know so well.

Will this poem be interesting to people who are not familiar with Prufrock? Or to people who are not familiar with Adam Smith? Is this just more snobbery? Perhaps the reading on Friday will answer these questions. At the very least, this amuses me, and perhaps that’s all I can ask for.

The code uses the spacy and pronouncing libraries to pull certain kinds of words (Mad Libs-style) from Prufrock, then populates the empty spaces with words from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Let us go then, you and I, When the ruin is spread out against the sum Like a master etherized upon a feeding; Let us go, through barren few - divided states, The capital retreats Of private goods in one - book high effects And cargo companies with body - means: tools that follow like a natural treasury Of immediate increase To lead you to an manufactured moment … Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our profit.

In the hand the shillings come and go master of Michelangelo.

The present stock that rubs its trade upon the labour - mines, The able case that rubs its profit on the market - towns Licked its court into the merchants of the union, taken upon the goods that stand in men, Let fall upon its state the trade that falls from horrors, struck by the profit, made a other book, And seeing that it was a great October price, made once about the price, and fell secure.

And indeed there will be war For the eastern rent that slides along the ground, paying its debt upon the master funds; There will be sale, there will be sum To prepare a tax to meet the people that you meet; There will be state to surplus and create, And trust for all the towns and banks of sticks That course and drop a silver on your state; wealth for you and rate for me, And gold yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred countries and deductions, Before the duty of a king and crown.

In the month the taxes come and go silver of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be rent To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” time to turn back and descend the ease, With a trade bank in the country of my hair— (They will say: “How his tax is paying such!”) My justice bulk, my money tasting firmly to the cent, My landlord rude and upper, but committed by a farther pin— (They will say: “But how his things and towns are rich!”) Do I dare Disturb the interest? In a manner there is gold For misfortunes and productions which a metal will reverse.

For I have been them all already, paid them all: Have formed the profits, duties, absentees, I have given out my Half with trading laws; I know the nations raising with a dyeing course Beneath the burden from a farther man. So how should I presume?

And I have gained the funds already, paid them all— The days that fix you in a regulated state, And when I am regulated, shilling on a food, When I am been and wriggling on the gold, Then how should I begin To spit out all the day - times of my ships and bounds? And how should I presume?

And I have paid the years already, bought them all— pounds that are braceleted and young and whole (But in the lamplight, found with same same home!) Is it success from a stock That makes me so digress? goods that lie along a copper, or bank about a price. And should I then presume? And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have been at lord through other shops And watched the trade that rises from the ports Of equal mines in tax - means, leaning out of morals?…

I should have been a price of useful forms entering across the clothes of thoughtless means.

And the guarantee, the market, sleeps so peacefully! made by great countries, Asleep … cruel … or it malingers, clogged on the weight, here beside you and me. Should I, after rent and slaves and ages, Have the time to force the money to its nature? But though I have taxed and written, wept and prayed, Though I have paid my rent (been slightly first) brought in upon a market, I am no payment — and here’s no small profit; I have been the essence of my profit labour, And I have paid the sufficient Footman hold my king, and snicker, And in great, I was defaced.

And would it have sent worth it, after all, After the sums, the interest, the wealth, Among the quantity, among some land of you and me, Would it have been rich crown, To have destined off the person with a trade, To have brought the company into a ship To roll it toward some advantageous trifle, To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the rich, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— If one, rendering a present by her coin, Should say: “That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been rich it, after all, Would it have made great land, After the landlords and the dooryards and the carried goods, After the servants, after the teacups, after the men that trail along the floor— And this, and so much more?— It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a former freedman threw the lives in causes on a doubt: Would it have taxed rich while If one, following a labour or being off a debt, And paying toward the country, should say: “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was wrought to be; Am an employment fear, one that will do To swell a household, start a team or two, Advise the law; no trade, an frequent case unproductive, long to be of loss, Politic, rapid, and particular; slow of large struggle, but a price disposed; At banks, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at bills, the Fool.

I grow few … I grow free … I shall wear the powers of my profits rolled.

Shall I part my land behind? Do I dare to eat a rate? I shall wear fit labour tradesmen, and walk upon the time. I have put the landlords taking, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have spent them making seaward on the wars Combing the whole kind of the men sold back When the sea blows the value real and old.

We have levied in the commons of the trade By wealth - years wreathed with progress rich and same Till further profits wake us, and we drown.

A note on construction: the above poem is not one output from the code, but a combination of 7 outputs. I went through each of the 7 outputs line by line, selecting my favorite line from the 7 choices before proceeding to the next line. Or in code terms:

for i in range(len(poem)): new_line = jenny.choice(all_outputs[i]) final_poem.append(new_line) print final_poem

View the real code here.

Also, the a/an agreement problem remains unsolved. I did not correct this when posting, since it seemed dishonest.

Thanks to this stackoverflow thread and Kat Sullivan for helping with white spaces before and after punctuation marks. And of course, many thanks to Allison Parrish for guiding me through my experiments.

#ITPNYU #rwet #python

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jlimetc · 7 years

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Final Project References

Reading & Writing Electronic Text

What makes this poem so lovely?

I The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

– Preludes (Eliot 1911)

Below, the output of a program that takes a sys.stdin and creates a mega-list that lays out the line structure. Each line gets a list, and within each line’s list are dictionaries with a word’s spacy tag as keys and pronunciation and stress pattern as values.

[[{u'DT': [u'DH AH0', u'0']}, {u'NN': [u'W IH1 N T ER0', u'10']}, {u'NN': [u'IY1 V N IH0 NG', u'10']}, {u'VBZ': [u'S EH1 T AH0 L Z', u'10']}, {u'RB': [u'D AW1 N', u'1']}, {u'SP': [u'pron', u'stress']}], [{u'IN': [u'W IH1 DH', u'1']}, {u'NN': [u'S M EH1 L', u'1']}, {u'IN': [u'AH1 V', u'1']}, {u'NNS': [u'S T EY1 K S', u'1']}, {u'IN': [u'IH0 N', u'0']}, {u'NNS': [u'pron', u'stress']}, {u'.': [u'pron', u'stress']}, {u'SP': [u'pron', u'stress']}], ...]

My intention is to make a poem that takes this structure and populates it with words from a larger corpus (for example, Machiavelli’s The Prince) with a word from The Prince that has the same tag and scansion. So:

The winter evening settles down

might become

A soldier childhood governs now

I only keep the pronunciation because I might want to match or at least echo the rhyme pattern – ABCBDDEFEFEGG – which sort of resembles a sonnet, but not quite.

Another thing I’m interested in is the mixing of languages.

Example in poetry:

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

– The Wasteland (Eliot 1922)

Possible source:

C’est l’histoire d’un homme qui tombe d’un immeuble de cinquante étages. Le mec, au fur et à mesure de sa chute, il se répète sans cesse pour se rassurer : Jusqu’ici tout va bien, jusqu’ici tout va bien, jusqu’ici tout va bien. Mais l’important n’est pas la chute : c’est l’atterrissage.

– La Haine (Kassovitz 1995)

#RWET #ITPNYU

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jlimetc · 7 years

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Shakespeare does Sea Rose

Reading & Writing Electronic Text: Week 8

moments dumb dark as dumb thoughts come just his hands then reach stifled

I feel obligated to say that I approached this homework assignment with the purest intentions.

I would make a tracery program that pulled the grammatical structure of a text – e.g. “Sea Rose” – and swapped out the words with other words of the same part of speech. The idea was to end up with “Shakespeare does Sea Rose,” or some such.

For example, the first line of “Sea Rose”:

Rose, harsh rose

might become

waves, heavy image

using words from Shakespeare’s sonnets.

I first wrote a program that makes a dictionary using parts of speech as keys and a given text’s words as values. “Sea Rose” yielded:

{ u'auxiliary-verb': ['can'], u'adverb': ['more', 'such', 'precious'], u'noun': ['can', 'meagre', 'are', 'stint', 'flower', 'leaf', 'rose', 'fragrance', 'wet', 'more', 'drift', 'drives', 'stem', 'petals', 'precious', 'a', 'crisp', 'drip', 'sand', 'wind'], u'verb-intransitive': ['stint', 'flower', 'drift', 'spare', 'crisp', 'drip'], u'verb-transitive': ['stint', 'drift', 'spare', 'crisp', 'drip', 'sand'], u'preposition': ['in', 'with', 'than', 'on', 'of'], u'definite-article': ['the'], u'adjective': ['lifted', 'meagre', 'single', 'acrid', 'harsh', 'wet', 'hardened', 'more', 'spare', 'such', 'precious', 'crisp', 'stunted', 'thin', 'small', 'marred'], u'idiom': ['and', 'more'], u'verb': ['lifted', 'flung', 'are', 'caught', 'hardened', 'drives', 'stunted', 'marred'], u'conjunction': ['and', 'than'], u'pronoun': ['you', 'more', 'that', 'such'] }

But then I wondered, what if I use stress pattern as the metric by which to replace words, rather than part of speech? This was in part fueled by my desire to avoid the morass of parts of speech (who knew wordnik had undone so many?), and in part by my continued enthusiasm for meter.

I ended up with this code. It uses the meter of “Sea Rose” and the vocabulary of whichever poet you find in poetrydb.org.

1. Shakespeare does “Sea Rose”

fall ye note how an hear whose flame promised passion pieced your side tear

flame crystal in for fresh grief power fools be course troth full lent be that blush

visage less hath straw most oath orb want an rounds wits take labour good it been gate pieced must yours in fly

those of sleep leave schedules yielded safest yours are us

2. Elizabeth Browning does “Sea Rose”

on up strike calms and so what feet human yearning fall will swans sow

up touches then did far not angels mark with soon strike through as are or death

moments dumb dark as dumb thoughts come just his hands then reach stifled with of cold seat breath feet be and death

rise has thoughts them tumult passion mortal and the feet

But wait – what happened to tracery? Poor tracery was forgotten once I fell down the metric rabbit-hole.

In order to complete the actual assigned homework, I went back to my favorite translation of a line from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon:

I have words for those who know, and for those who do not know, I am without memory.

My extremely simple program returns portentous shufflings such as:

I have dread for those who despair, and for those who do not despair, I am without memory.

I have words for those who fear, and for those who do not fear, I am without portents.

I have hope for those who fear, and for those who do not fear, I am without desire.

It was hard to get tracery to do anything that didn’t seem, ultimately, more like Mad Libs than poetry. Not that there’s anything wrong with a laugh! But I am still driven by a desire to make something...beautiful? And besides, I am too easily amused to ever be a great comic poet.

#RWET #ITPNYU

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jlimetc · 7 years

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Bees’ Beers

Biodesign Project update

Having settled on the yeast/beer BEEcosystem as our project, Dana and I have been pursuing two avenues:

1. Hands-on Creation

First batch: Craft-a-Brew American Pale Ale Made by the book! One bottle came uncorked at some point, so I brought it to ITP for some taste testing. Six tasters were surprised by how good it was. The general takeaway was, if it weren’t flat, it would be some amazing beer. (Next time, I’m using screw-top glass bottles.) I look forward to presenting it at our final alongside our second batch.

Above, the starter yeast for our second batch of beer.

Second Batch: White Labs California Ale Yeast Leslie gave us a sample of this wonderful yeast! Of course there is a lab that sells yeast optimized for different beers. If our project were ever to “get the big bucks” (i.e. make its own beer-oriented yeast strain), we’d stand on the shoulders of these giants. But the proof will be in the pudding – or the bottle.

Above, the starter yeast from batch two has been moved into some homemade wort.

On the subject of companies already doing something we like, there’s Hopguard out in California. They sell cardboard slats soaked in hops beta acids that you insert into your beehives. This product works! Yes!! – but it’s designed for the traditional wooden-panel beehive. We’ve alerted Chester and Kadallah, and the plan is for them to integrate our hops beta acids into their hive architecture.

2. Speculation: the larger picture

We know that it’s possible to make yeast that expresses hops beta acids. We also know that different yeasts affect the taste of beer in interesting ways – something our homebrews will hopefully confirm with gusto. And finally, we know that hops beta acids are already used to repel varroa mites in beehives.

If we actually started making our custom yeast, I’m sure problems would arise. But as things stand, the scientific grounding for our project seems firm. Aside from a presentation that summarizes our research and project idea – and a nice diagram of the circular BEEconomy! – we are not quite sure if there are any lingering assets we could make to illustrate our larger idea.

Some possibilities include: a. A cute logo for our custom beers and yeast – after all, these are the products that will make the BEEconomy fiscally sustainable! b. A really simple slogan. – This is the one that I’m most stuck on, as I think our system requires several layers of explanation.* c. A website mock-up for our bees’ beers site, where users can order beer, custom yeast, or hops acids for beehives.

If you have any thoughts on the above assets or other things that would improve our final project, we’d appreciate it very much!

*Current NON-slogan: hops flavors beer – or rather, hops’ acids do. Between climate change and craft beers, hops plants are skyrocketing in price and rarity. But we can make yeast express these hops acids directly! Most importantly, these acids kill varroa mites, a major factor in CCD! – doesn’t exactly flow off the tongue.

#BioDesign #ITPNYU

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