Wednesday, May 23. 2012
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by Bruce Sterling
*Well, Pachube isn’t called “Pachube” any more, but no doubt these mostly-speculative “rights” will be even more malleable.
*I’m thinking all laws, contracts, nation-states, sacraments etc should have versioning numbers nowadays. Like “Marriage 1.0.” “Profession 1.3.” “House with White Picket Fence 2.7″ “Private Home Is Castle With Differential Permissioning 3.8″
“Pachube Internet of Things “Bill of Rights”
“Data ownership will continue to be one of the defining issues of this decade. As the Internet of Things matures, clear lines will be drawn as companies bring products and services to market.
“Business models will be built on one of two philosophies:
“Controlling a customer’s access to their data and limiting its use to a single service. Profiting through vendor lock-in and switching costs/hassle.
“Maximizing the value that is built on top of data and constantly innovating. Building a product that customers choose based on its own merits.
“The first of these models is far easier and cheaper to build and implement than the other. It also achieves greater immediate gains than the other. But that model also infringes on what we perceive to be basic consumer rights:
[updated June 09, 2011]
1. People own the data they (or their “things”) create.
2. People own the data someone else creates about them.
3. People have the right to access data gathered from public space.
4. People have the right to access their data in full resolution in real-time.
5. People have the right to access their data in a standard format.
6. People have the right to delete or backup their data.
7. People have the right to use and share their data however they want.
8. People have the right to keep their data private.
“Pachube is a company built on the philosophy that open is better than closed and sharing is better than hoarding. We want to propose this initial set of rights and get feedback from the community to see if we’re on the right track and if we’ve missed anything. We’ll come to a set of rules that we’ll pledge to abide by and that we hope will become an industry standard. However, in the end, industry take-up of these ideas won’t be dictated by us but by the market of consumers who will vote with their wallets. In the end, it will be up to all of you, not us, to make this a reality.
“Let us know in the comments what you think and what you’d want to see added or changed.”
*More stuff like this:
http://openiotassembly.com/document/
Personal comment:
And the problem here is of course that Pachube has been sold to a private company (LogMeIn), that states they subscribe to the open approach (the "bill of rights") of Pachube... until they won't. We are now all getting too used to these endlessly rewritten "terms of use".
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by Bruce Sterling
*In contemporary practice, I guess this Vurb verbiage from FutureEverywhere boils down to “my pocket keeps beeping all the time,” but, well, of course in a network society you can take everyone you know and everyone you own, and scatter them across the planet’s surface. Especially if they already did that with you.
http://juhavantzelfde.com/post/23506562343/the-aspatial-city
(…)
“In the background there are at the same time deeper, more systemic developments taking place: high-speed internet access, ubicomp, cloud computing, sensor networks, big data, etc.. And out of these, some weird, boutique threads that are relevant to spatial practice, like the 3D printing of rooms, robots weaving buildings, self-driving cars, domestic drones, urban operating systems and nonhuman cities.
“A few weeks ago, my dear friend Ben Cerveny stopped over in Amsterdam for a weekend on his way to Geneva. For a few years, Ben had been living in Amsterdam for some months a year, traveling back to San Francisco and Los Angeles after summer and returning to Amsterdam after winter. (((No wonder I keep running into that Cerveny guy all the time.)))
“It had almost been two years since we last saw each other, but because we have constantly been in touch via Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and iChat, I felt like it had been only yesterday. When I explained this to Ben, he immediately said, without stopping to think about what he was saying, ‘oh of course: the continuous partial everywhere.’
“And that is exactly it. The continous partial everywhere is the aspatial experience of simultaneity in immediate media. I am in the city where my friends are at the same as the one where I am myself. The city for me is no longer only a city in space, but now also a city in time. An aspatial city, without distances, in a kind of aspace….”
Monday, May 14. 2012
Via MIT Technology Review
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A mathematical upgrade promises a speedier digital world.
By Mark Anderson
In January, four MIT researchers showed off a replacement for one of the most important algorithms in computer science. Dina Katabi, Haitham Hassanieh, Piotr Indyk, and Eric Price have created a faster way to perform the Fourier transform, a mathematical technique for processing streams of data that underlies the operation of things such as digital medical imaging, Wi-Fi routers, and 4G cellular networks.
The principle of the Fourier transform, which dates back to the 19th century, is that any signal, such as a sound recording, can be represented as the sum of a collection of sine and cosine waves with different frequencies and amplitudes. This collection of waves can then be manipulated with relative ease—for example, allowing a recording to be compressed or noise to be suppressed. In the mid-1960s, a computer-friendly algorithm called the fast Fourier transform (FFT) was developed. Anyone who's marveled at the tiny size of an MP3 file compared with the same recording in an uncompressed form has seen the power of the FFT at work.
With the new algorithm, called the sparse Fourier transform (SFT), streams of data can be processed 10 to 100 times faster than was possible with the FFT. The speedup can occur because the information we care about most has a great deal of structure: music is not random noise. These meaningful signals typically have only a fraction of the possible values that a signal could take; the technical term for this is that the information is "sparse." Because the SFT algorithm isn't intended to work with all possible streams of data, it can take certain shortcuts not otherwise available. In theory, an algorithm that can handle only sparse signals is much more limited than the FFT. But "sparsity is everywhere," points out coinventor Katabi, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science. "It's in nature; it's in video signals; it's in audio signals."
A faster transform means that less computer power is required to process a given amount of information—a boon to energy-conscious mobile multimedia devices such as smart phones. Or with the same amount of power, engineers can contemplate doing things that the computing demands of the original FFT made impractical. For example, Internet backbones and routers today can actually read or process only a tiny trickle of the river of bits they pass between them. The SFT could allow researchers to study the flow of this traffic in much greater detail as bits shoot by billions of times a second.
Copyright Technology Review 2012.
Personal comment:
A faster digital world certainly means a faster (intertwined) world in general. It is fascinating to consider how important algorythms have become in this contemporary world and therefore, how mathematics are! Can a "tiny" piece of math (FFT?) modify the world? (of course it can, as it in fact already did many times --from Pythagore or Thales to Turing or more recently Wiles, through Euler, Descartes or Newton and many many more...--). It therefore also happen at the "atomic level" of the code (a math formula), and that's even more fascinating.
Friday, May 11. 2012
Via Creative Applications
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Feel Me is a project by Marco Triverio that explores the gap between synchronous and asynchronous communication using our mobile device in attempt to “connect differently” and enrich digital communications. Whereas we draw lines between phone conversations and sms messages, Feel Me looks for space in between that would allow you to be intimate in realtime, non-verbally using touch.
Based on the finding for which communications with a special person are not about content going back and forth but rather about perceiving the presence of the other person on the other side, Feel Me opens a real-time interactive channel.
Feel Me first appears to be a text messaging application. When two people are both looking at the conversation they are having, touches on the screen of one side are shown on the other side as small dots. Touching the same spot triggers a small reaction, such as a vibration or a sound, acknowledging that both parts are there at the same time. Feel Me creates a playful link with the person on the other side, opening a channel for a non-verbal and interactive connection.
“Feel Me” was awarded honors at CIID. Marco is currently working as an interaction designer at IDEO.
See also concept development videos below.
Project Page
Wednesday, May 09. 2012
Via BLDGBLOG
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[Image: Illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; courtesy of the USGS].
In Charles Fishman's compelling exploration of water on Earth, The Big Thirst, there is a shocking statement that, despite the apparent inexhaustibility of the oceans, "the total water on the surface of Earth (the oceans, the ice caps, the atmospheric water) makes up 0.025 percent of the mass of the planet—25/10,000ths of the stuff of Earth. If the Earth were the size of a Honda Odyssey minivan," he clarifies, "the amount of water on the planet would be in a single, half-liter bottle of Poland Spring in one of the van's thirteen cup holders."
This is rather remarkably communicated by an illustration from the USGS, reproduced above, showing "the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth's water in comparison to the size of the Earth." That's not a lot of water.
Only vaguely related, meanwhile, there is an additional description in Fishman's book worth repeating here.
[Image: The Orion nebula, photographed by Hubble].
In something called the Orion Molecular Cloud, truly vast amounts of water are being produced. How much? Incredibly, Fishman explains, "the cloud is making sixty Earth waters every twenty-four hours"—or, in simpler terms, "there is enough water being formed sufficient to fill all of Earth's oceans every twenty-four minutes." This is occurring, however, in an area "420 times the size of our solar system."
Anyway, Fishman's book is pretty fascinating, in particular his chapter, called "Dolphins in the Desert," on the water reuse and filtration infrastructure installed over the past 10-15 years in Las Vegas.
(Via @USGS).
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