That Burning Smell is Me Thinking…

People are social creatures. Before cities formed, it was natural for people to gather in tribal groups where everyone knew each other. In the age of large cities, people still gather in groups, but they do so in a different way. These new social groups can be a knitting circle, a neighborhood group, a soccer team, a church, a fraternal order, or a political party. Social Scientists refer to these group bonds as social capital–the trust people share when they know one another (Putnam 18-20). Social capital is at work when “your neighbor walks your dog while you are ill, or the guy behind the counter trusts you to pay him next time” (Shirky 192). Traditionally people built social capital through face-to-face contact with others during social activities, now people are starting to reach out to one another in new ways by using cheap and easy communications like the internet and cell phones. As more people communicate more often each day, the world is changing in ways not seen since Gutenberg introduced his printing press.

Lois Weisberg is a prime example of the traditional way to build social capital. In the late 1950s, she found herself hosting three future legendary science fiction writers in her home when an acquaintance of hers, a young writer named Arthur C. Clarke, co-author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, phoned her up while he was visiting Chicago. Lois (she prefers not to be called Mrs. Weisberg) recalls how she phoned a friend in the publishing business who told her, “Yeah, Isaac Asimov [author of I Robot, and the Foundation Series] is in town. And this guy Robert, Robert…Robert Heinlein [author of Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters]” (Gladwell). She first met Clarke when she decided to go to a science fiction convention in New York on a whim.

People like Lois are what Malcolm Gladwell calls a “connector,” those who have a knack of connecting, or bridging, different groups. She has a habit of reaching out to people outside her group, and through her contacts with many different people, she has built a large network of friends. Lois bridges many different social circles like theatre, she ran a theatre company; publishing, she once ran an independent newspaper; retail business, she started an antique shop after learning the business in flea markets; and local government, she founded Friends of the Parks in Chicago (Levy; Gladwell). Her ability to connect people from many different backgrounds led Mayor Daley to put her in charge of Chicago’s cultural affairs in 1989. As the “creative director of the city,” she is responsible for many creative civic projects including the Department of Tourism, Gallery 37, the International Press Center, and the Cultural Center in the old library building. One of her most well-known and loved projects was the “Cows on Parade” exhibit, in which artists painted fiberglass sculptures of cows that were placed around Chicago in outdoor public spaces (Levy).

At the beginning of his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putman recounts anecdotes about a bridge club in Pennsylvania that broke up because of shrinking participation; a fall off in membership of a local chapter of the NAACP in Roanoke, Virginia; the Charity league of Dallas holding their last meeting; forty marching band uniforms sitting unused in a closet due to lack of interest; and a VFW post in Illinois that could barely pay taxes on their building. Putnam found stories like these repeated all across America. Many of these organizations thought that their declining memberships were a local problem, but it turned out to be a growing national trend. The national membership director of the VFW put it clearly when he said, “kids today just aren’t joiners” (Putman 15, 16).

Before the decline in social activities in America, there was tremendous growth in participation during the 1950s and 60s due to people having more free time. Churches and synagogues were thriving and voter participation was at an all time high after increasing by 1.6% every four years since 1920 (Putnam 16, 17). Community organizations were expecting their memberships to swell in the 1980s when baby boomers reached the “peak ‘joining years’ of their life cycle,” but the opposite happened instead (Putnam, 18). Between the late 1960s and the 1980s, events happened that shook the confidence of Americans; the assinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, an unpopular war in Vietnam, gas shortages caused by politics, the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of president Nixon, and a long hostage crisis in the American Embassy Iran. All these events were brought into American homes through television.

Television has also shown us good events like the Apollo moon landing in 1969, and the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years later. Josh Eisenberg had contemplated getting rid of his TV for several years, but he realized that he was hesitating because he was “afraid of missing something.” His greatest fear was that the day after he disconnected his TV, a big historical event would happen and he would miss it. He believed that television was mostly a waste of time, but he kept watching. After much hesitation, he decided to disconnect his television and internet access in his home as an experiment (Eisenberg 32).

The decline in community participation occurred as Americans started to watch more television. People watch TV at the expense of “virtually every form of civic participation and social involvement” (Putnam 228). After unhooking his television and internet access, Eisengerg felt ashamed when his friends would ask him to turn on the TV to watch a show or look something up on the internet. He found himself getting out of the house more, hanging out with his friends, or inviting guests over for dinner; he replaced much of the time that he would have been watching TV with spending time with other people. While he feels that not everyone can follow his example, Eisenberg encourages everyone to go without television at least one day a week. After his “unwiring,” he decided to reconnect his internet access so he can better communicate with people. He still doesn’t watch TV (Eisenberg 32).

It’s doubtful that someone like Lois Weisberg would have been able to establish such a large network of friends if she had stayed at home and watched television. Instead of watching others live a make believe life on TV, Lois lived a life of her own. Eisenberg discovered that when he unplugged his TV.

The November 2006 issue of The New Yorker was published with 4 different covers that illustrate the stark contrast between families celebrating Thanksgiving before, and after, television entered the home. The second cover in the series shows two families in the same apartment. The family in the upper half of the cover, from the 1940s, have just finished their Thanksgiving feast and they look like they are carried away in conversation, except the son who is pushed away from the table reading a comic book. The present day family in the lower half also just finished their feast, but they are all turned towards the TV set watching a football game, except the daughter who is pushed away from the table talking on her cell phone. The next cover in the series follows the present day daughter as she meets with her friends to go eat at a diner (Ware).

Philip Tadros is a serial entrepreneur who is building social capital in a new way by adding a layer of online communications on top of his offline life. He started two cozy coffee shops on the north side of Chicago that are what he calls a “third place”–neither home nor work–where people can work on their laptops, read a book or just talk with others over a good cup of coffee (Crain). Tadros attributes much of the success of his businesses to the easy communication made possible by the internet. Eighty percent of the people he does business with he first contacted online, and he uses the internet to stay in constant contact with them. His coffee shops are also highly reviewed by his customers on websites such as Yelp.com, a popular site where anyone can review local businesses (Tadros). Tadros’ desire is to help others strengthen their “land based” connections with a layer of online social networking, much like he has been able to do in his own life. He decided to start his own social-based website, called MetroProper, combining the elements he likes on social networking sites like MySpace, user-driven news aggregators like digg.com, and the online community feel of Craigslist. His main goal for the website is to create on online coffee shop atmosphere where people can learn about each other so they can have stronger connections offline (Crain; Benkard).

In 1999, Norman H. Nie and Lutz Erbring conducted a survey to find how the internet affects social interaction. They concluded that with each hour spent on the internet per week, social interaction decreased. They also observed that time spent on the internet displaced the time people spent watching TV. When Nie and Erbring did their study, the internet was still a relatively new phenomenon; according to their findings, about half of Americans had internet access (Nie & Erbring). They failed to consider that the internet requires active input from the user, whereas television is passive, only requiring the user to turn it on and change the channel. Whether it is editing a Wikipedia article, sharing photos on Flickr, hanging out on MySpace, or “grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves [playing World of Warcraft online]. At least they’re doing something” (Shirky blog). The internet facilitates collaboration, sharing, communication, and group interaction, social things that are impossible through the one-way nature of television.

The most convient and universally used tool for social internaction on the internet is email. People can instantly send, reply to, or forward, any email message to more than one recipient. The “cc:” field and the “Reply All” button have broken down economic and geographical barriers to group discussion and formation in a way never seen before in our history (Shirky 107, 157). Bill Wasik decided to conduct an experiment to see if he could get a group of people to suddenly appear somewhere at the same time, perform a strange act, and disperse as mysteriously as they had formed. The phenomenon became known as flash mobs (Wang). To organize a flash mob, Wasik created a free webmail account, then forwarded a message to 60 of his friends. He encouraged the recipients to forward the message to their friends, starting a chain email. His first successful flash mob was in New York City when 200 people suddenly arrived at a Macy’s department store from different directions, gathered around a rug, and looked at it for several minutes. When sales people asked what they were doing the participants, following instructions, said that they were from a commune and they were shopping for a “love rug” (Wasik).

Soon, others used the power of organizing flash mobs over the internet for more serious purposes. In Minsk, Belarus, hundreds of protesters, and an opposition leader, were arrested in Oktyabrskaya Square after a disputed election. A blogger, going by the name by_mob on the website LiveJournal, proposed a flash mob in Oktyabrskaya Square. He suggested that the mob should show up and eat ice cream in an attempt to subvert the government crackdown on peaceful assembly after the election protests. The Belarusian authorities also knew about the protest beforehand, and the police were waiting nearby to arrest the ice cream eaters. Others arrived toting digital cameras and posted their pictures on photo sharing websites like Flickr, showing citizens being arrested for the ridiculous crime of eating ice cream. Political bloggers picked up the story, spreading it beyond Minsk and making the the rest of the world aware of their struggle (Shirky 166-171).

Sherry Turkle, a social psychologist and professor at M.I.T., took her daughter on a food and culture tour in Paris. She noticed that her daughter kept her cellphone turned on and felt obligated to answer every call and text message from her friends back in Boston. Her friends “didn’t even really want to talk. ‘They just want to know where you are,’ Ms. Turkle said” (Holson). In Egypt, pro democracy activists use their phones to report their whereabouts for more serious purposes. They send text messages to a website called twitter as they pass through government check points. If one of the activists doesn’t check in when expected, others assume that he or she may be under arrest prompting them to spring into action. They coordinate their search efforts through text messaging, and the internet, to find if and where their fellow activist is being held captive. The Egyptians have been able to pressure their government to release political prisoners because many people knew where and why they were being detained (Shirky 184-186). More recently, Egyptian workers protested their economic hardships by organizing a general strike through forwarded text messages on cell phones (Slackman).

The power of instant social communication is also changing the face of American politics. Barack Obama has effectively used the internet as an organizing, fundraising, and communication tool in his bid for the Democratic nomination. His website is used as a tool to make it easy for anyone to get involved with an email signup, a donation button, and easy to find links for information about his policy positions and getting involved as a volunteer. In a daring move, Obama made his calling list available on his website letting anyone with a little spare time place calls to potential voters (Obama; Carson). Traditionally, volunteers needed to go to their local campaign headquarters to make campaign calls. Obama’s campaign understands that people don’t always have much time to volunteer. By providing the online phone banking tool his campaign collapses the time and cost barriers of participation.

In another bold move, Obama delivered a speech, on March 18, 2008, that was specifically crafted to be devoid of ten or fifteen-second “sound bites” that can be easily replayed repeatedly on television news programs. To better understand Obama’s thirty-seven minute speech, filled with nuance and complex ideas, a viewer has to watch it in its entirety, or at least in chunks of several minutes. Knowing that many people would want to see the video for themselves, Obama posted the video directly onto his website and on video sharing websites. Within a month, the speech had been viewed almost 5.5 million times on the video sharing website YouTube alone (Alter).

Barack Obama’s campaign is not the first to extensively use the internet. In 2003 Howard Dean was the first major presidential candidate to use the internet for organizing and fundraising. Dean realized the internet’s potential when he attended a meeting in New York set up through a pioneering social networking website called Meetup.com. By the end of 2003 Dean had become a serious contender for the presidential nomination through numerous small campaign contributions and grassroots support on the internet (Wolf). His campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, but it demonstrated that with the right candidate, the internet can be a powerful tool for changing the way people participate in politics.

Scott Heiferman founded Meetup.com after he read the book Bowling Alone. He wanted to create a website to help bring people together face to face (Shirky, 193). Meetup, which today boasts over 3 million participants, inspired Howard Dean to create his online organization tool called Deanspace, which reminded Gary Wolf, writing in Wired magazine, of “a political movement that eerily recalls the cracker-barrel debates and the torchlight parades that characterized presidential campaigns of the distant past. Before television, politics was a type of active recreation” (“About Us”; Wolf).

People are communicating more than ever before resulting in a faster changing world. When Gutenberg introduced the movable type printing press, it became faster and easier to spread ideas through the printed word. In many parts of the world the result was a shift in power from religious leaders and governments, to the hands of common people as more people exchanged information and ideas. Now, the printed word is shifting from paper to the electronic realm where distribution happens in the blink of an eye, once again changing the way we communicate, and the balance of power.

Works Cited

“About Us.” Meetup.com. 28 Apr. 2008

Alter, Jonathan. “Adios, Sound Bites & Fat Cats.” Newsweek. (28, Apr. 2008) 19, Apr. 2008.

Benkard, Andrew. “Phillip Tadros - Dollop Coffee Co, Metroproper.com.” New York Times Small Business Summit Center. (Dec. 2007) 5, Apr. 2008.

Carson, Jon. E-mail to the author. 16, Apr. 2008

Crain, Brendan. “Community 2.0 and the Built Environment: Phil Tadros Interview.” The Where Blog. (18, May 2007) 5, Apr. 2008.

Eisenberg, Josh. “I Give Up: One Brave Soul Unplugs From TV and the Inernet - and Lives To Tell His Tale.” UR Chicago, April 2008. p. 32

Erbring, Norman H. Nie and Lutz. “Internet Use Decreases Social Interaction.” Opposing Viewpoints: The Internet. Ed. James D. Torr. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2005. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. City Colleges Of Chicago. 1 Apr. 2008 .

Gladwell, Malcolm. “Six degrees of Lois Weisberg. ” The New Yorker  11 Jan. 1999: 52-63. 30, Mar. 2008.

Holson, Laura M.. “Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK). ” New York Times  [New York, N.Y.] 9  Mar. 2008, Late Edition (East Coast): BU.1. New York Times. ProQuest. Cosgrove Library, Truman College, Chicago, Illinois.  1 Apr. 2008 

Obama, Barack. Home page. 1 Apr. 2008

Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody. New York: Penguin Press The, 2008.

Shirky, Clay. “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” Here Comes Everybody Blog. (26, Apr. 2008) 26, Apr. 2008.

Slackman, Michael. “In Egypt, Technology Helps Spread Discontent of Workers.” The New York Times [New York, N.Y.] (7, Apr. 2008) 7, Apr. 2008. Online Edition.

Tadros, Phillip. E-mail to the author. 20, April, 2008

Wang, Jennifer. “Mobbing the Scene.” Yale Globalist Website. (March 2007) 2, Apr. 2008

Ware, Chris. “Thanksgiving—Conversation.” and “Thanksgiving—Family” The New Yorker 27 Nov. 2006. Cover.

Wolf, Gary. “How the Internet Invented Howard Dean.” Wired. Issue 12.01. (January 2004) 7, Apr. 2008.

I like to touch my surroundings; It’s an odd behavior to many people. but I feel a need to do it. When I am riding my bike, I like to tap leaves on trees as I am riding past. When I walk down a hall, I like to touch the walls as I am walking. I like to tap on tables, or on my legs. When I am riding the bus or train, I tap out poly-rhythmic patterns with my hands and feet to a song in my head.

I found out that this behavior is not “normal.” But I have to ask, “What is normal?” I like to feel my surroundings; it makes me more comfortable. I like to play along to my “mental song playlist.,” or whatever is playing on my iPod. Is this so bad?

I used to think that being odd was a bad thing, but I have learned that my differences can be an asset. I found out fairly recently that I can channel my obsessions into something productive, instead of of making them trivial. I have always been interested in politics, economics, and history. “They” have a name for those things in academia, Social Science.

I have developed a talent for seeing the “big picture” while still being able to delve into details. This talent has led me to ponder unifying theories. Quantum physicists and social scientists have been grasping for a unifying theory in their respective fields. I can see a unifying theory in Social Sciences, but I am having a hard time expressing it. As I study political science, math, economics and history, I am seeing a big picture develop based on my knowledge of the arts; I am coming closer to unifying things. I may be completely wrong, but it sure is fun trying!

According to a team of researchers at Oxford, led by Dr. David Deutsch, parallel universes are a mathematical possibility. Their findings show that the universe is actually a multiverse made up of expanding parallel universes. The existence of parallel universes leads to many questions like, what if we could travel to parallel universes and observe the differences? Have people from other parallel universes already visited us? Can we exploit parallel universes for our benefit?

One theory in quantum mechanics holds that particles on the subatomic scale do not settle into a state until they are observed or measured. Before the observation or measurement occurs, all possibilities of the outcome exist simultaneously. An analogy would be a perspective student receiving a letter from a university he applied to. Before the envelope is opened, and the letter is read by the student, there may exist three possibilities; one in which the student will be attending the university in the fall, another where he is working at Burger World, and another where he decides to backpack across Europe for a year. If he is accepted to the university and decides to attend, then the burger flipping and backpacking universes end.

The theory that Dr. Deutsch and his team proved mathematically is that when an event happens, the universe branches off into parallel versions of itself. His work is based on a theory put forward fifty years ago by a graduate student at Princeton named Hugh Everett. According to the branching theory, our perspective student reads the acceptance letter and the universe splits into many parallel universes, one in which the student decides to attend the university in the fall, another where he takes a year off and goes on his European adventure, and maybe another where he joins a hippy commune. These parallel universes continue on and keep expanding into more parallel universes as more events happen in his life.

Dr. Deutsch’s work raises many possibilities and, if we are able to someday find a way to reach these parallel worlds, we can better understand the consequences of world events. But would we really be able to learn from them, or would our presence in a parallel universe influence the outcome of events we are trying to observe? Science fiction fans are familiar with time travel in which the hero of a story travels back in time to observe, and possibly correct, something that went wrong in the past. During time travel, our hero may do something that seems innocent but sets off a catastrophic chain of events, like a butterfly flapping its wings in California causing a tornado in Kansas.

So what if, in the course of traveling in time, we could also travel to a parallel universe and stand over Lee Harvey Oswald’s shoulder as he pulled the trigger on that fateful day in November 1963? A time traveler from a parallel universe could push him right as he was taking his shot, causing him to miss, and then find out if a second gunman on the grassy knoll really was the one who made the kill shot. What if Oswald was the lone gunman and our traveler allowed Kennedy to get away that day? The world would be very different, at least in that version of the universe.

How do we know that there doesn’t already exist a secretive group of people who travel through space, time, and parallel universes gently influencing the course of human events? What if our version of reality is actually an experiment by this group to see how incredibly absurd humans can become? Extraterrestrial beings could actually be parallel travelers in disguise. The possible reason why the UFO crash that happened in Roswell, New Mexico many years ago has been kept so secret is that the beings, and their vehicle, are actually from a parallel version of earth where human evolution and technology took a different course. There are theories that the ancient Egyptians had help from extra terrestrials building the pyramids. Could the helpers actually have been a more advanced version of Egyptians from a parallel universe? Finding a portal to parallel universes could answer these mysteries.

There exists a physical law that states that no two objects can exist in the same place at the same time. Research into parallel universes could render that law completely false because if we would be able to have parallel universes within the same space, then we would be able to solve many problems in society like overpopulation. Imagine if we find a parallel version of Earth where the population of humans is significantly smaller. We could send people from our universe to colonize that universe and start large farms to feed our version of the universe. We could also set up a parallel version of Chicago and be able to have several apartment buildings on the same piece of real estate. One could theoretically reside in one universe and commute to work in another.

The proof of parallel universes by Oxford researchers opens up many possibilities. If we are able to expand upon their work, and someday find a way to other parallel universes and observe them, we can possibly find ways to improve ourselves and creatively solve many problems.

According to the Oxford American Dictionary, privacy is, “the state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people; the state of being free from public attention.” With cameras everywhere watching us, databases holding information about us proliferating, and governments listening to our telephone conversations and reading our email without our consent, we live in a time where there is no more privacy, according to the dictionary definition. Our every move can be observed and scrutinized by a group of mysterious watchers for many reasons. We have accepted more surveillance in order to feel safe and minimize property crime. Corporations keep track of our consumer behavior, at the expense of our privacy, so they can market their goods and services more effectively.

When people go to the grocery store, they are being watched from the moment they enter the parking lot until they leave. The cameras are there not only to prevent shoplifting, but to allow marketing people to observe customer’s movements so they can determine how to more effectively arrange the store in order to persuade the consumers to buy more stuff. If the consumer pays with a debit or credit card, the store can keep track of how often they visit, what they buy and whether or not they use the store’s discount card. The government can subpoena the store to find out if anyone is buying combinations of certain household items that can be used to make a bomb, or find out who bought a copy of a subversive magazine they planted on the rack.

Anyone’s movements can be tracked through security cameras, debit card transactions, mobile phone records, electronic toll tags, email logs, or plain old fashioned stalking. In the movie Enemy of the State, Richard Dean, played by Will Smith, is hunted by the NSA using sophisticated technology. It seems like a Hollywood fantasy, but those with access can abuse surveillance technology in the same way. If the government decides that you are their enemy, then they can freeze your assets, and find you very easily by pinging your cell phone.

The only way to achieve the state of complete privacy is to live in a remote location, severely limit contact with other humans, and not engage in activities that would attract too much attention. But humans are social animals by nature, so complete privacy is not possible if one decides to interact with others. As people engage more with society, they must sacrifice a little more privacy until the last area of complete personal privacy is ones own thoughts.

Everyone, from a hermit who lives in the woods to the President of the United States, has a private and a public life. The extent of a hermit’s public life may be rare glimpses as he is chopping firewood or shooting a squirrel for dinner. President Bush, on the other hand, seems to live under the watchful eye of anyone in the world who cares to observe. Most people would think that the hermit has more privacy than the president, but the hermit may have less due to the fact that he doesn’t have a team of people carefully crafting his public image and guarding his personal information. With a little persistence, one could gather enough personal information about the hermit to find out where he went to school, what his ex-wife’s name is, or how much much money he makes each year. A little more digging can reveal what movies he likes to watch and what magazines he reads. Meanwhile, our president has the capability to practically disappear, and re-emerge serving Thanksgiving dinner in Iraq, thanks to the diligent work of his staff and the Secret Service to keep his movements secret.

Whatever is written down, entered into a computer or spoken is no longer private. As long as there is ubiquitous surveillance technology and invasive law enforcement, there will be no privacy. As long as people are suspicious of one another and live in fear, privacy will continue to erode until we are all forced to live completely transparent lives. The only way to take back our freedom is to turn the cameras around and watch the watchers.

I have been snapping a lot of pictures on my phone. I am growing to like the crappy quality of the camera, it challenges me.

Someone posted a message on a bulletin board asking anyone to explain the appeal of fixed gear bikes. The following is my response (slightly edited):

Fixed gear bikes are not for everyone, they are for people who want to experience being one with the bicycle, it’s a very pure form of riding. It is one of those things that has to be experienced to be understood.

I rode bikes regularly for several years before trying one. At first it was scary but as I got used to it, I came to prefer it. I ended up selling all my other bikes.

The fixed gear bike is elegant in its simplicity. There are no extra bits on it to distract from pure and simple riding; it is basically two wheels, a frame, pedals, chain, cogs, a seat and handlebars; nothing more (I added a front brake for emergency stops).

I liked it because there are fewer things to break, so maintenance is quick and simple. I called my fixie my Maintenance Free Bike. I also found that the flywheel effect of the pedals moving with the drive train made it easier to ride in strong headwinds. I also had an incredible amount of control due to being directly connected to the back wheel.

There is also the challenge of learning to ride a fixie well. The goal is not speed as much as it is grace and flow. One challenge I had was to make a trip across town without putting my foot down. I learned how to anticipate traffic, how to slow down for an intersection, and how to anticipate the changing of the traffic lights. I became more aware of my surroundings and I even felt safer on my fixie.

I recently sold my fixie, and I am currently riding an old English 3 speed (built like a tank and ugly). I will probably get another fixie before the year is over because I am starting to miss it already, but it was a little hard on the knees. Writing this makes me want to get another one!

Some people ride fixies to be a part of a crowd, kind of an elitist thing for some, but I rode one because I like simplicity.

The old farm seems like a dream, so long ago. Sometimes I feel like it never happened, but I see these old pictures and I start to remember, it was real. There was something wrong with the camera (or maybe the photographer), and the pictures turned out overexposed. After some fiddling around in Photoshop and iPhoto, I have been able to make them look like the fuzzy memories in my head.

I have a cell phone that actually allows me to get my pictures off the phone, for free, via Bluetooth. Before I was on Verizon who intentionally cripple their phones so they can charge you to get to your own stuff. Now I am able to use the phone as I see fit. I have been using the camera more often. It is not the best camera in the world, but I am able to get many shots I otherwise would miss because I didn’t have a camera with me. So now my primary camera is a cell phone. It is a cool challenge to learn the limitations of the camera phone and work within them. Enjoy!