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"What's the attraction of maps? I think it's a paradox. They are humanity's attempt to capture the world on paper. But as a cartographer you can capture only a micro-fraction of what exists. For a start, three dimensions must be elided into two, and the globe must be shown as a flat Earth. So you fudge. You are selective. You alter shapes and make crooked lines straight. You exaggerate features you consider important, and erase others."
links for 2008-11-14
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Stross highlights recent legislation allowing solely "virtual" companies in one US state, something he anticipated in a novel.
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"Mobile Multiplayer Trans-Reality Games is a new video game type like MMORPG , RTS ou FPS. MMTRG enable you to play in the real and in the virtual life with your mobile phone : Your city become your playground" – ARG on a wide-scale with LBS etc. Again, another Stross-like game a la 'Halting State'.
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Location Based Massively Multiplayer Games – echoing Stross' secret agents game in his recent book 'Halting State'. Augmented Reality Gaming with LBS?
links for 2008-10-27
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Nadine Faye James – superb illustrator, particularly with a typewriter! Nadine does amazing type-based portraits.
links for 2008-10-16
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Nik Baerten from Pantopicon interviews Nathan Shedroff on the tools design can bring to the application of foresight in various ways. As Shedroff says: "Design thinking and processes can be important contributors to the scenario-creating process but just as helpful for this implementation phase. In fact, alternate scenarios that build environments and artifacts can really help executives “see” how these scenarios might affect their business. Design processes bring a culture of brainstorming, critique, prototyping, and testing to the product and service development process."
links for 2008-09-04
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Cory Doctorow writes in Nature about peta-scale (bytes/flops/watts) data centres: "The mad, inconceivable growth of computer performance and data storage is changing science, knowledge, surveillance, freedom, literacy, the arts – everything that can be represented as data, or built on those representations. And in doing so it is putting endless strain on the people and machines that store the exponentially growing wealth of data involved."
links for 2008-07-31
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The Clover coffee maker, an extraordinary machine for making a great cup of coffee – and now in the hands of coffee’s “evil empire”.
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Article from ’06 that details the beneficial impact of CoE on excellent small estate coffee growers.
links for 2008-07-30
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Fortune article about research at HP’s ‘Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory’ around nanotech and ubicomp that would provide something like, what the journo called, ‘a central nervous system for the earth’. Interesting ‘visions’, promises and hopes
links for 2008-07-26
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Interesting research in California around the support for privacy of location data. Many Californians are willing to pragmatically ‘give up’ that privacy for perceived benefits:
“A majority of Californians understands that wireless phones can track th
links for 2008-07-25
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“Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.”
links for 2008-07-22
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“ThingM is a ubiquitous computing device studio. Here, networked electronics meet user experience design in products for everyday problem solving and self-expression. We bring together people’s lives with cutting edge technologies to research and develop
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UAVs are controlled by British Army operators using x-box style controllers and “at the Farnborough air show this week… arms-maker Raytheon showed off its new Universal Control System for robotic aicraft. It’s based on the same technology that drives Ha
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“…part of the urban computing vision are driven by the newly available data, with a “let’s map and see” trial and error approach rather than starting from human and urban considerations”
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” One thing about technology, is that it tends to make people generally lazy about their levels of commitment. Perhaps we should push instead for the development of technologies and applications that encourage people to invest time and effort in an activi
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Ubicomp may come in unexpected guises perhaps… “Reportedly, deodorant manufacturer Right Guard has created an armpit-based method of advertising which has cleverly been dubbed ‘pitvertising.’ “
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Ubicomp style project ‘cityware’ courts controversy with bluetooth sniffing techniques, privacy concerns are raised: “Tens of thousands of Britons are being covertly tracked without their consent in a technology experiment which has installed scanners at
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“Most people no longer look at the physical journal in the library, which the library clearly owns outright, but look at articles through online services. The questions then become: how is that paid for? What is owned? What happens to the “owned” content
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Nova picks up on the recent special issue of IEEE pervasive computing on ‘hacking’ – “hacking can play a powerful role in pervasive computing as it can inspire ‘thought processes and reduce the time it takes to create a viable prototype’. This process can
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“Valerie Cunningham interviews Jamis McNiven, the owner of Buck’s Diner, in Woodside, Calif. This is where many of Silicon Valley’s most famous companies got their start: pitching their business plans in breakfast meetings with local VCs” – a dreadful
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Nova crits a posting by Janne Jalkanen and throws in his 2p, describing three flaws with the vision (shoudn’t that be plural?) of ubicomp: 1) limited options makes the user feel smarter but constrains creativity; 2) building & maintaining an infrastructur