Category: del.icio.us

The Penn State 'Geospatial Revolution Project': "Geospatial information influences nearly everything. Seamless layers of satellites, surveillance, and location-based technologies create a worldwide geographic knowledge base vital to solving myriad social and environmental problems in the interconnected global community."

(tags: technology research locative geography maps geoweb GIS education data citizenscience place-space spatiality)

"Watch as Ian Sands, Director of Envisioning, steps through the video scene by scene and describes in greater depth the story behind the people and technology on display." Some interesting business-speak buzzwords used in this video, as well as an insight into the ways in which these videos are rationalised within Microsoft.

(tags: envisioning vision futurism anticipation video microsoft commentary)

"One startup, called Cloudkick, hopes to provide a simpler way to manage data stored across several different cloud-computing services. Cloudkick provides a unified, Web-based interface for monitoring data regardless of the cloud provider hosting it."

(tags: dataportability data cloud pervasive_computing technology ubicomp internet)

"The world's most popular wireless smart card… the Mifare Classic, which is used in public-transit systems all over the world and to control access to many offices and buildings, has been the subject of intense scrutiny from security researchers. Last February, researchers from the University of Virginia cracked the encryption used to protect data on the card. Then, in August, a team from MIT showed how to get free rides on the MBTA transit system by exploiting weaknesses in the card. However, in both cases, physical access to the targeted card was required. Next week, at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, researchers from Radboud University will demonstrate a new, even easier way to steal data from the smart card. Their attack, which requires only a cheap, off-the-shelf card reader and an ordinary computer, can pull sensitive data out of a card in less than a second–even if the attacker has no physical access to the card."

(tags: privacy rfid ubicomp mobile security)

A well-funded project, which got EU money. From the blurb: "In the near future, every manufactured product – our clothes, money, appliances, the paint on our walls, the carpets on our floors, our cars, everything – will be embedded with intelligence, networks of tiny sensors and actuators, which some have termed "smart dust". The AmI world is not far off. We already have surveillance systems, biometrics, personal communicators, machine learning and more. AmI will provide personalised services – and know more about us – on a scale dwarfing anything hitherto available."

(tags: ubicomp privacy security europe urbancomputing futurism anticipation speculation locative dataportability academic)

Speculative blogging about 'AR' following MS 'future vision of…' and some recent apps for Android: "There are many potential scenarios for AR. A popular one is doing your grocery shopping and checking information on your mobile phone (or AR glasses!) about price, specials, reviews, comparisons with competing products, etc. With the rise of RFID chips and technology such as that being developed by Microsoft, this type of scenario isn't too far away… Another interesting consideration is that social software will have a big role to play in future AR apps. For example when walking down the street, you could use your mobile phone to point to a restaurant, and overlaid on a photo of the restaurant would be customer reviews, recommendations, and other relevant user generated data."

(tags: futurism speculation augmentedreality anticipation envisioning technology ubicomp microsoft android)

Wikitude is described as "a mobile travel guide for the Android platform based on location-based Wikipedia and Qype content." It allows users to overlay information from Wikipedia onto a photo of a certain location, via Mobile Google Maps, in an AR/HUD style.

(tags: mobile maps google wiki android augmentedreality tagging geoweb locative)

HP Labs' 'cloud print' is: "a web service that allows you to use your mobile device to print documents to any available printer, and all you need is an internet connection to do so. The service was developed by HP's IdeaLab, a part of the company's central R&D arm, which features emerging technology made available for public use"

(tags: ubicomp wireless internet locative pervasive_computing hp)

"As opposed to the desktop paradigm, in which users directly and consciously engage a single device for a specialized purpose, ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) envisions the engagement of many computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, with users who may not necessarily even be aware of such an engagement. In that case, we have to rethink not only many ethical concepts, but also some very basic philosophical notions like reality and subjectivity. If the traditional reality of things develops into a computed ambience and if decisions taken in a certain situation are more and more dependent of artificial agents we may not even be aware of, then this will fundamentally change our basic understanding, not only of moral responsibility, but also of persons acting in the world itself. "

(tags: ubicomp information ethics privacy journal actual/virtual anticipation politics)

Near-advert for Cisco by BBC with interesting speculation about 'telepresence': "During my face-to-face interview with Mr Chambers we pointedly do not shake hands – because I am in London and he is in San Jose, linked up by a sophisticated bandwidth-hungry system of three huge screens that gives a hyper-real Star Trek-style impression of the two of us sitting at the same table. So far there are only some 550 Telepresence points around the world, but Cisco hopes that companies will be happy to invest in this expensive, no-delay, life-size video conferencing technology. After all, business travel is even more expensive."

(tags: technology business anticipation futurism innovation endofcyberspace)

"IDEO's human factors specialists conceived the deck as a design research tool for its staff and clients, to be used by researchers, designers, and engineers to evaluate and select the empathic research methods that best inform specific design initiatives. The tool can be used in various ways–sorted, browsed, searched, spread out, pinned up–as both information and inspiration to human-centered design teams and individuals at various stages to support planning and execution of design programs."

(tags: design research collaboration hci participation)

"San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Gina Basso has curated an incredible science fiction film series that's just started at the museum. The series, titled "The Future of the Past: Utopia/Dystopia, 1965-1984" presents a rich history of cinematic futures: Westworld, Logan's Run, Soylent Green, A Clockwork Orange, Fantastic Planet, Stalker, Alphaville, Sleeper, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984 (the 1984 version). The series is tied to the current special exhibit, "Patterns of Speculation," on the architecture of the J. Mayer H firm"

(tags: sanfrancisco scifi cinema futurism speculation fiction)

"The Bombe was the brainchild of Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, and the 210 machines manufactured by the British Tabulator Machine Company did vital work cracking encoded German military traffic – a feat which shortened the war by two years, Bletchley Park suggests. The original devices were destroyed after the war on security grounds, but in 1970 a set of blueprints turned up at Bletchley and the idea to reconstruct a Bombe was born. The rebuild team, led by volunteer John Harper, has finally succeeded in putting the beast together:"

(tags: history computing security science technology cryptography)

Article on 'hacker spaces': "Hacker spaces aren't just growing up in isolation: They're forming networks and linking up with one another in a decentralized, worldwide network. The hackerspaces.org website collects information about current and emerging hacker spaces, and provides information about creating and managing new spaces. There's also lots of information exchanged via IRC and a weekly telephone conference. They even enable extramural exchanges. "It's like an embassy for hackers," says Metalab's Boehm, who has been spending a lot of time at Noisebridge lately while here on a tourist visa. "If you are a member of a hacker space, you can go anywhere in the world. It's like instant family." That welcoming attitude is proving powerfully attractive to many geeks. "I can go to any hacker space anywhere in the world and be welcome there," says Altman. "You could too.""

(tags: technology collaboration community lab hacking learning arduino design participation experimentation)

"Black Rain is sourced from images collected by the twin satellite, solar mission, STEREO. Here we see the HI (Heliospheric Imager) visual data as it tracks interplanetary space for solar wind and CME's (coronal mass ejections) heading towards Earth. Data courtesy of courtesy of the Heliospheric Imager on the NASA STEREO mission. Working with STEREO scientists, Semiconductor collected all the HI image data to date, revealing the journey of the satellites from their initial orientation, to their current tracing of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Solar wind, CME's, passing planets and comets orbiting the sun can be seen as background stars and the milky way pass by."

(tags: science art video sensors space astronomy)

P. K. Dick's awesome novel is to be made into a comic book series.

(tags: comics illustration scifi futurism)

Although they are still lagging behind their colleagues in the US, British academics are slowly but surely moving into the blogosphere. The appeal of academic feedback, as well as the opportunity for public engagement and the potential for enhancing reputations, has those who blog hooked… Yet any sense that there is a united UK community among the academics who blog seems strangely non-existent. "I can see that I am (part of a group of UK scholars who blog) but I don't self-identify," says Prof. Mary Beard, of Classics at Cambridge.

(tags: academic internet blogs UK education participation community)

"An implantable device that alerts high-risk patients when they show signs of a heart attack could shorten the time it takes for the wearer to seek medical attention. The device, being developed by AngelMed, a medical-devices company in Shrewsbury, NJ, is already approved for use in Brazil and is now undergoing clinical testing in the United States."

(tags: health ubicomp privacy ubiquity identity)

"The Guardian newspaper in the UK has today launched its open API which will carry all the content the newspaper produces in print and online. That’s over a million articles which go back to 1999. The “Open Platform” will allow allow partners to reuse Guardian.co.uk content and data for free, in a clear move to try and make the The Guardian an all pervasive part of the Web"

(tags: API community technology internet media journalism copyright anticipation economy UK web2.0)

Interesting commentary on the use value of the burgeoning amount of visualisation of data concerning the urban… "info-porn"?

(tags: cartography visualisation technology participatory_media sensors information futurism urban urbancomputing maps materiality)

"T-Mobile is working on plans to build several devices that run Google's Android operating system but can't really be considered phones, according to internal documents secured by the New York Times this weekend. The revelation appears to provide more evidence to the argument that Android isn't really a mobile phone's operating system because in the future there won't be devices thought of as phones."

(tags: technology future anticipation speculation futurism ubicomp urbancomputing wireless android google mobile)

"Every year IBM releases a "Next Five in Five" list, a list of innovations that "have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years". This is the third such list, and it mentions a "Talking Web" among the 5 items. You will talk to the Web and the Web will talk back, according to IBM. In the future "you will be able to surf the Internet, hands-free, by using your voice – therefore eliminating the need for visuals or keypads." In fact this is already starting to happen, as recent iPhone releases from Google and Say Where show."

(tags: technology future futurology anticipation prediction ibm semanticweb)

Metropolis magazine blog article about vision/anticipation in/for planning re. a recent book: "With traditional planning made impotent by capitalism and NIMBYism, rebuilding the city now requires a “new type of urbanist,” a designer Varnelis [author of book] compares to a computer hacker who reimagines a new use for the underlying rules and codes. It’s a compelling vision, but it’s darkened by a Marxist conviction about the malevolence of the corporation. Infrastructure has always been a public initiative that complements private investment. "

(tags: future politics urban architecture anticipation futurism post-marxism governance design)

Hoffmann get excited by his gadgetry… the "Uber boiler".

(tags: coffee technology)

Timo trys to create graphic language for making-visible wireless technologies: "An ongoing Touch theme is about making invisible wireless technologies visible, in order to better understand and communicate with and about them (see a Graphic Language for RFID, Dashed lines and Fictional radio spaces)."

(tags: technology mobile ubicomp visualisation nfc wireless ubiquity diagram cosmopolitics)

Google's blog launch of Latitude: "Latitude is a new feature for Google Maps on your mobile device. It's also an iGoogle gadget on your computer. Once you've opted in to Latitude, you can see the approximate location of your friends and loved ones who have decided to share their location with you. So now you can do things like see if your spouse is stuck in traffic on the way home from work, notice that a buddy is in town for the weekend, or take comfort in knowing that a loved one's flight landed safely, despite bad weather."

(tags: mobile social maps privacy google GIS android geoweb participatory_media ubicomp locative socialnetworking)

Some generally interesting commentary on interface design, lots of speculation about 'what next'.

(tags: interface hci MIT future futurism technology design computing software anticipation interaction technicity)

"A miniature telescope implanted into the eye could soon help people with vision loss from end-stage macular degeneration. Last week, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration unanimously recommended that the agency approve the implant. Clinical trials of the device, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, suggest it can improve vision by about three and a half lines on an eye chart."

(tags: technology health cyborg vision)

"radar for your iPhone puts you at the center of your news, showing you all the news stories, blog posts, discussion threads, and Twitter tweets happening near the places you care about. Find restaurants, dive into real estate gossip, get the insider view of local schools, track nearby crimes–radar shows you everything that’s happening right around the corner."

(tags: geoweb locative iphone ubicomp urbancomputing socio-technical privacy)

"Once pictures are posted on Facebook, they're there to stay. And it's not just Facebook–an interesting article from ComputerWorld shares the results of an experiment to try to help three people clean up their Google search results, and the results were dismal–only one attempt was successful. The takeaway point seems to be than an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Like some kind of drunken prisoner's dilemma, this throws the onus of good behavior on the individual–"because I cannot trust these acquaintances not to put these pictures up, I should avoid being photographed at all." "

(tags: internet commentary privacy identity facebook socialnetworking participatory_media participation community communication)

"Google says it has built the service from the ground up with security and privacy issues in mind, and that the service only stores the last known location of a given user. However, privacy watchdog Privacy International argues that there are opportunities for abuse of the system for those who may not know that their phone is broadcasting its location."

(tags: technology mobile privacy google geoweb locative place-space security ubicomp urbancomputing)

"Online game Entropia Universe has been granted a licence to be a bank. Issued by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, the licence means the game can be more closely tied to the real world finances of players."

(tags: technology internet games money economy payment actual/virtual)

"Small can mean big bucks in the world of gaming where micropayments are being seen as playing an increasingly important part in making money for the industry."

(tags: economy games anticipation micropayments internet payment)

Data shadows vs. information shadows and… ubicomp.

(tags: ubicomp data information shadow commentary terminology)

Mike K on why he calls ubicomp ubicomp: "Lately, I've been thinking about why "ubiquitous computing" has such problems as a name. When I talk about it, people either dismiss it as a far-future pipe-dream, or an Orwellian vision of panoptic control and dominance. I don't see it as either. I've never seen it as an end point, but as the name of a thing to examine and participate in, a thing that's changing as we examine it, but one that doesn't have an implicit destination. I see it as analogous to "Physics" or "Psychology," terms that describe a focus for investigation, rather than an agenda."

(tags: technology ubicomp terminology computing communication)

Mike K outlines a book on Ubicomp UX design…

(tags: ubicomp design computing innovation book interaction experience ubiquity technology)

A recent presentation on ubicomp UX design: "a combination of ubiquitous computing, wireless networking and item-level identification is changing the nature of people's relationship to everyday objects. This change, in turn, creates a number of deep user experience design challenges as objects become intertwined with services and as computation becomes a more ingrained part of how the object is designed."

(tags: ubicomp design technology experience)

Sterling on another new buzzword 'data shadows': "It's fantastic how well this blog-post captures the vibe of alpha geeks standing around blue-skying concepts at ETech. It's like it dematerializes startup culture and you're a fly on the wall. Dang"… it's a vaguely interesting idea though…

(tags: commentary data dataportability technology socio-technical internet computing)

Hmm… "I'm at a future of video workshop at the Institute for the Future today, and the topic of the participatory panopticon has come up. For people who are new to the concept, here's the original discussion of the participatory panopticon, the text of a talk I gave in May of 2005. I'd been talking about the PP since early 2004, but this was the best summary of the argument (at least as it stood in 2005)."

(tags: anticipation futurism future futurology participation surveillance paranoia p2p ubiquity)

Cascio suugests three scaffolds for the future: participatory, interconnected and leap-frog futures: "These are clearly not necessarily mutually-exclusive scenarios, but different ways of thinking about how anticipation, response, and resilience manifest in an era of crisis."

(tags: future futurism anticipation futurology forecasting foresight commentary)

"The UK's academy of science, The Royal Society, celebrates its 350th anniversary next year with a new report looking to the next 50 years. But, says Tim Radford, it should beware the perils of predicting the future"

(tags: future anticipation prediction science UK)

Segway and GM have worked together to create the slightly bonkers but also quirkily cool concept of the PUMA, a sit-down Segway for two…

(tags: anticipation mobility urban future segway)

Citysense is a downloadable application for the iPhone and BlackBerry. It provides a heat map of GPS activity in a major city. Maps show red patches that indicate higher activity, the user’s location (a solid yellow dot) and suggest popular destinations (yellow circles).

(tags: technology mobile maps iphone gps advertising urban urbancomputing socialsoftware cartography)

The Social Technologies Summit at futuresonic in May this year has amongst the speakers: Adam Greenfield, Jamais Cascio and Usman Haque.

(tags: conference futurism technology participatory_media socialsoftware socialnetworking UK)

Howard interviewed at 'Frontiers of Interaction' giving a broad commentary on the futures of social media and civic/social participation through an increasingly mobile set of social media technologies.

(tags: future futurism internet vision socialnetworking participatory_media technology socialsoftware)

"Dennis Crowley, one of the original developers of Dodgeball, has released a new location-aware social app for the iPhone: Foursquare. At its core, Foursquare is a location-based social network, but at the same time, it is also a nightlife game where users get extra points for being the first to visit a new place, going out every night of the week, and for adding new information about clubs and restaurants."

(tags: mobile socialnetworking socialsoftware iphone urban urbancomputing participatory_media)

Yet more physical-digital binary 'space': "This book explores the intersection and articulation of physical and digital environments and the ways they can extend and reshape a spirit of place. It considers this from three main perspectives: the implications for the public sphere and urban public or semi-public spaces; the implications for community regeneration and empowerment; and the dilemmas and challenges which the augmentation of space implies for urbanists. Grounded with international real -life case studies, this is an up-to-date, interdisciplinary and holistic overview of the relationships between cities, communities and high technologies."

(tags: academic book space place-space materiality geography ubicomp technology technicity urban urbancomputing endofcyberspace)

Office Labs (of 'future vision of…' fame) 'envisioning' strategy – "Take a step into the future and get a glimpse into how technology may transform the way we live and work in the years ahead. Explore some of our concepts for how leading edge technologies might be used in real world settings – such as health care, manufacturing, banking and retail – over the next 5-10 years."

(tags: anticipation futurism forecasting vision visualisation ubicomp pervasive_computing microsoft envisioning video technology)