Natalie Jeremijenko and Ángel Borrego, UrbanSpaceStation
This prototype of a parasite for urban buildings was designed to sequester the carbon dioxide emissions from buildings and return oxygen-enriched air in exchange. The "greenhouse-laboratory" for rooftops constitutes an intensive urban agriculture facility that reuses building waste streams to produce nutritional resources without burning fossil fuels.
eMarketer makes a strong case that location based services will have a tremendous update in the years to come.
“eMarketer estimates there will be over 63 million location-based service users worldwide this year, and 486 million in 2012″
Upon reading this article, think about how location based services could help increase the uptake of a “Smart Mob” culture and strengthen the foundation for broader mobile-activism.
An update to the company's touch screen technology adds another layer of information.
Friday, October 31, 2008
By Kate Greene
Over the past couple of years, gadgets have become much more touchy-feely. Apple's iPhone and Microsoft's Surface (an interactive table) are two of the most celebrated examples. Now, Microsoft has added a twist to Surface that makes for an impressive demo.
Microsoft announced the upgrade to Surface, called SecondLight, at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday. . As the video above demonstrates, in this new version of Surface, a secondary image is projected above the main display. A person views the second image by holding a semi-opaque object, such as a piece of paper above the display. The idea is to provide a second layer of information: labeled constellations on top of photographs of stars or street names on top of maps, for instance.
SecondLight uses a neat trick to produce this second layer. The original Surface used a projector below a glass tabletop to create an image and infrared cameras underneath to detect fingers and objects in contact with the surface. With SecondLight, Microsoft has replaced the glass top with a liquid crystal display (LCD), but kept the projector underneath. The LCD flickers on an off and, during alternate frames the projector sends the secondary image through the display. This happens too fast for your eyes to catch it unless you hold up an opaque object, like a piece of paper.
Talk about a great way to fill dead spots in your wireless network coverage: The Bullet, from Ubiquiti Networks, is a bullet-size (okay, shotgun shell-size) router that plugs into a network on one end and an external, omni-directional antenna on the other. Point it where you want, and you've got instant 802.11a/b/g broadcasting.
It's not going to work on just any network. The 10/100 Ethernet port requires Power over Ethernet (PoE) to get juice, and PoE is something you'll typically find on a corporate network. The other end of the Bullet has an N-Type Connector for antennas, complete with a custom gasket to keep out water. Inside is an Atheros chip, 16MB of RAM, and 4MB of Flash memory to hold the AirOS software that runs it (AirOS is Ubiquiti's own, but open source). With it, you get the full complement of typical router features.
Once it's plugged into PoE, the Bullet's output power goes as high as 1000mW. Coupled with the right kind of antenna, it's going to blast through a lot of walls to give you a nice range. That's pretty good, since the Bullet itself is only $39, but not surprising since Ubiquiti equipment was used last year to set the Wi-Fi distance record of 188.9 miles (350 KM) from the island of Sardinia to the summit of Monte Amita in mainland Italy.
Look abroad: Whole cities are planned, built, and inhabited in less than a generation. Artificial islands, indoor ski slopes, and the world’s tallest this-and-that are being constructed, not in the West, but in the Middle East, China, and beyond. The result: a sense that the West’s cities are falling behind and, increasingly, watching from the sidelines. A dynamic panel will discuss the accuracy of this assessment of today’s architectural situation. What are the urban implications of so-called offshoring audacity and how can the phenomenon be described without resorting to nationalism, nostalgia, or even uncritical celebration?
The panelists will be Joseph Grima, executive director of New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture and author of Instant Asia; Jeffrey Inaba, principal architect, Inaba Projects, and professor of architecture at SCI-Arc and Columbia University; and Sam Jacob, visiting professor at Yale University and founding director, Fashion Architecture Taste, a London-based practice. The discussion will be moderated by Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDGBLOG and senior editor of Dwell magazine.
The panel, called Offshoring Audacity, will begin at 2:30pm, lasting till 4:00, and it will take place at the Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark Street. It costs $5.
I hope some Chicago-basedreaders might stop by.
The overall theme for the Humanities Festival this year is "big ideas," inspired by architect Daniel Burnham's (possibly apocryphal) statement that one should "make no little plans." Since we're coming up on the 100-year anniversary of Burnham's urban plan for Chicago, not only does a "big
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