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“Some people are nervous about trailing digital bread crumbs behind them. Sandy Pentland, however, revels in it. In fact, the MIT professor of media arts and sciences would like to see phones collect even more information about their users, recording ever
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The announcement last November of an “invisibility shield,” created by David R. Smith of Duke “University and colleagues, inevitably set the media buzzing with talk of H. G. Wells’s invisible man and Star Trek’s Romulans… It was arguably the most dramat
The first day of April
Some news stories that have caught the eye today:
- Avril de Poisson of the Guardian explains how Gordon Brown has enlisted Mme Sarko to inject more style into British life
- Metro reveals BMW’s war on dog wee
- The Londonist highlights a new ‘piggy-back’ plan to beat the congested runways at Heathrow
- The Sun reveals that Sarko is going for a ‘revolutionary treatment’ to gain five inches in height
- The Daily Mirror reveals that Dog racing on ice gets green light – Wembley to host first meeting
Some other topical links:
- BBC Natural World – Flying penguins
- Google’s “Virgle” mission to Mars
- Wikipedia article on the Jovian-Plutonian gravitation effect
- How Stuff Works explains the ‘hybrid’ fueled Air Force One
- NASA explains Dextre the Magnificent
- ReadWriteWeb uncover Google’s new ‘DreamAds’ scheme
- ThinkGeek have an array of ‘new’ products today, I particularly like: Personal Soundtrack t-shirt, Spazztroids cereal, and the Betamax to HD-DVD converter.
I also enjoyed reading Anne Galloway’s interesting and topical blog post today.
links for 2008-03-31
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A good discussion around the issues of designing an API/platform approach for encouraging participation in the development of your services – excerpts from interviews with key figures at Yahoo and Google, particularly with ref. to OpenSocial
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“…this year’s Arse Elektronika stands under the motto “future” — and the ways in which the present sees itself reflected in it. Maintaining a broadened perspective on technical development and technology while also putting special emphasis on its socia
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(tags: technology mod)
Finding a thesis title
Half-way through my three years of PhD research project I am still mentally searching for, and experimenting with, titles. Thus far I have had the following titles in chronological order:
- Practising Tomorrows’ Today – Examining the anticipatory logics and techniques of urban-ubiquitous computing development
- Practising the technics of disappearance: emergent spatialities and the experimental development of ubiquitous computing
- Mobilising the Socio-technical: The cultural politics of mobile communications technologies
- Socio-technical spatial formations: Living with the cyber-hybrid
- Cybrid Spaces
Bay area fieldwork
In the first week of March I travelled to the San Francisco Bay area. The purpose of my visit was to meet with key people relevant to my research. Continue reading “Bay area fieldwork”
The promise and problematic of Technology: (Re)thinking bodies, spaces and times
For the RGS-IBG annual conference 2008 my colleague James Ash and I are proposing a session on understandings of technology in geography. We welcome expressions of interests. I include the abstract for the session below.
Continue reading “The promise and problematic of Technology: (Re)thinking bodies, spaces and times”
Anticipating futures, engineering expectations
International Science Grid This Week, an online news source for those interested in grid computing and grid-powered science, recently asked me to write an opinion piece about ubiquitous computing, which is featured in this week’s edition. I’d like to thank Cristy Burne at ISGTW for their interest in my research.
Embracing entanglements
I am in the process of revising a paper that is in the process of review for publication entitled Embracing entanglements: Problematising the cosmopolitics of mobile communications technologies. I include below the abstract. If you are interested in this research feel free to contact me to discuss it more.
Anticipation, innovation and the narratives of technical development
Ubiquitous computing is an interesting yet peculiar (empirical) focus for study by virtue of there being no devices or systems widely available commercially or publicly. This is at the heart of my research interest, the point of friction I feel compelled to address: ubiquitous computing largely exists as a confluence of anticipatory, imaginative and research & development practices. It is these assemblages of practice and the fields of relations therein that I hope will form the empirical focus of my project.
Continue reading “Anticipation, innovation and the narratives of technical development”
Researching Ubiquitous Computing as a Geographer
How does one summarise the background to a research project when it makes up an entire research agenda in a different discipline? This is a task I must continue to engage in as my project progresses. I would currently guide social sciences readers from the familiar ground of mobile communications technologies to the less familiar, and experimental, systems and devices of my area of research – Ubiquitous Computing, or ‘ubicomp’. We might start then, with the well-documented and wide-ranging rise in popularity of the capacity to communicate on the move, with mobile telephones and other mobile technologies (see: Harkin 2003, Ito et al. 2005, Ling 2004, Plant 2001).
Continue reading “Researching Ubiquitous Computing as a Geographer”