Tuesday, January 28. 2014Djibouti migrants | #communicationWednesday, January 15. 2014Nice organisms finish first: Why cooperators always win in the long run | #selfish #evolution
Via phys.org ----- "We found evolution will punish you if you're selfish and mean," said lead author Christoph Adami, MSU professor of microbiology and molecular genetics. "For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn't evolutionarily sustainable."
Provided by Michigan State University
Tuesday, November 05. 2013The Top Five "Trend-Setting" Cities on Twitter | #territory
----- Twitter data reveals the cities that set trends and those that follow. And the difference may be in the way air passengers carry information across the country, by-passing the Internet, say network scientists.
One of the defining properties of social networks is the ease with which information can spread across them. This flow leads to information avalanches in which videos or photographs or other content becomes viral across entire countries, continents and even the globe. It’s easy to imagine that these trends are simply the result of the properties of the network. Indeed, there are plenty of studies that seem to show this. But in recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in the relationship between a network and the geography it is superimposed on. What role does geography play in the emergence and spread of trends? And which areas are trend setters and which are trend followers? Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Emilio Ferrara and pals at Indiana University in Bloomington. These guys have examined the way trends emerge in cities across the US and how they spread to other cities and beyond. Their research allows them to classify US cities as sources, those that lead the way in trends, or those that follow the trends which the team call sinks. Their research also leads to a curious conclusion–that air travel plays a crucial role in the spread of information around the country This implies that trends spread from one part of the country to another not over the internet but via air passengers, just like diseases. The method these guys use is straightforward. Twitter publishes a continuously updated list pf the the top ten most popular phrases or hashtags on its webpage. It also has webpages showing the trending topics for each of 63 US cities. To capture the way these trends emerge and spread, Ferrra and co set up a web crawler to check each list every ten minutes between 12 April and 30 May 2013. In this way the collected over 11,000 different phrases and hashtags that became popular throughout these 50 days. They then plotted the evolution of these trends in each US city over time. This allowed them to study how trends spread from one city to another and to look for clusters of cities in which the same topics trend together. The results are revealing. They say most trends die away quickly–around 70 per cent of trends last only 20 minutes and only 0.3 per cent last more than a day. Ferrara and co say they can see three distinct geographical regions that share similar trends–the East Coast, the Midwest and Southwest. It’s easy to imagine how trends arise at a low level and spread through the region through local links such as friends. But these guys say there is also a fourth cluster of influential cities that also form a group where the emergence of trends is related. However, these place are not geographically related. They are metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Chicago and so on. What links these places is not geography but airports, say Ferrara and co. Their hypothesis is that topics trend in these places because of the influence of air passengers. In other words, trending topics spread just like diseases. Ferrara and co have created a list of the cities that act as trend setters and those that act as trend followers. The top five sources of trends are: Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Washington, Seattle and New York. The top five trend followers (or sinks) are: Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, El Paso, Omaha and Kansas City. That’s a fascinating result. In a sense it’s obvious that the large scale movement of people will influence the apread of information However, it’s not obvious that this should happen at a rate that is comparable to the spread of trends across the internet itself. And it raises an interesting question that Ferrara and co hope to answer in future work. “Does information travel faster by airplane than over the Internet?” they ask. We’ll be watching for when they reveal the answer. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1310.2671 : Traveling Trends: Social Butterflies or Frequent Fliers?
Personal comment:
Interesting results (information travels by plane either, like diseases...), yet when only 0.3% of "trends" last more than a day, we can wonder if it even matters to have concerns about the 99.7% other ones (just some crap lolcats stuff ?)... or that on the contrary, it could possibly be the revelator of incredible "short time" pulses of "things/memes/subjects" in and in-between cities?
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology, Territory
at
11:21
Defined tags for this entry: communication, community, culture & society, data, science & technology, sharing, social, territory, urbanism, viral
Monday, October 21. 2013Have We Passed “Peak Automobile”? | #mobility
Via NextNature -----
You’ve heard about peak oil, but what about peak automobile? There is mounting evidence that society has already passed the years of maximum car use. Fewer young consumers are getting driver’s licenses than their parents, and they are also buying fewer cars. Numerous studies point to a significant change in consumption that is not explained away by the recent financial crisis. Over the past century, the automobile has been a dominant force, changing the way we build and connect cities, the way we live, and even the way we perceive distance. So why are we driving less? Over the past 15 years, the ways we communicate with each other have changed drastically. A study by U.S. PIRG notes that while the use of the internet and so-called smart phones has expanded rapidly, the amount of automobile travel in the USA has not only peaked but is actually declining; Americans drive about as much today as they did in 1996. This effect is more pronounced among younger generations. A likely explanation is that smart phones have done for the 21st century what cars did a hundred years ago. They make seemingly long distances much smaller, and they connect us to people and places we couldn’t reach before. Better communication technology has increased our ability to see and interact with our social networks without actually being there, which may be why we have not only reached, but long since passed peak automobile.
Personal comment: I was a "precursor" ;) Sounds obvious but this gives me a good additional excuse not to pass my driving license! An Inflatable Emergency Airborne Communications Network | #instantcity
Note: will the communication industry be the one to finally build the Instant City?
----- A rapidly-deployable airborne communications network could transform communications during disasters, say researchers
Most people will have had the experience of being unable to get a mobile phone signal at a major sporting event, music festival or just in a crowded railway station. The problem becomes even more acute in emergency situations, such as in earthquake disasters zones, where the telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged. So the ability to set up a new infrastructure quickly and easily is surely of great use. Today, Alvaro Valcarce at TRiaGnoSys, a mobile communications R&D company in Germany, and a few pals unveil a system that could make this easier. These guys have developed a rapidly deployable wireless network system in the form of airborne base stations carried aloft by kite-shaped balloons called Helikites with a lifting capacity of 10 kg and that can remain airborne at an altitude of up to 4 km for several days, provided the weather conditions allow. Valcarce and co say the system can be quickly deployed and provides large local mobile phone coverage thanks to a combination of multiple airborne nodes that link in to terrestrial and satellite telecommunications systems. Their idea is that these systems could be deployed by network companies during temporary events such as the Olympic Games, or by first responders to an emergency event to set up the vital communications infrastructure necessary to coordinate emergency services. One of the key challenges is to get the new equipment to work seamlessly with existing terrestrial networks. And to that end, Valcarce have been testing their airborne Helikite. The team has a number of challenges to overcome in its ongoing work. For example the altitude of the Helikite determines its coverage but also influences the network capacity and delays. Evaluating these effects is one part of their future goals. Having ironed out these kinds of operational problems, such a system will surely be valuable in a wide range of situations where reliable communication is not just a useful bonus but a life-saving necessity.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1307.3158 : Airborne Base Stations for Emergency and Temporary Events
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Science & technology, Territory
at
08:51
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, communication, community, mobility, science & technology, territory
Wednesday, October 16. 2013arkOS: Building the anti-cloud (on a Raspberry Pi)
Via TechWorld ----- By Rohan Pearce
arkOS is an open source project designed to let its users take control of their personal data and make running a home server as easy as using a PC
At the start of this year, analyst firm Gartner predicted that over the next four years a total of US$677 billion would be spent on cloud services. The growth of 'things-as-a-service' is upending enterprise IT and creating entirely new, innovative business models. At the same time, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have built massive user bases, and created databases that are home to enormous amounts of information about account holders. Collectively, all of this means that people's data, and the services they use with it, are more likely than ever to be found outside of home PCs and other personal devices, housed in servers that they will probably never likely to see let alone touch. But, when everything is delivered as a service, people's control and even ownership of their data gets hazy to say the least. Earlier this year NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden offered some insight – in revelations that probably surprised few but still outraged many – into the massive level of data collection and analysis carried out by state actors. arkOS is not a solution to the surveillance state, but it does offer an alternative to those who would rather exercise some measure of control over their data and, at the very least, not lock away their information in online services where its retrieval and use is at the whim of a corporation, not the user. arkOS is a Linux-based operating system currently in alpha created by Jacob Cook and the CitizenWeb Project. It's designed to run on a Raspberry Pi – a super-low-cost single board computer – and ultimately will let users, even of the non-technical variety, run from within their homes email, social networking, storage and other services that are increasingly getting shunted out into the cloud.
CitizenWeb Project Cook is the founder of the CitizenWeb Project, whose goal is to promote a more decentralised and democratic Internet "It does this by encouraging developers that work on tools to these ends, offering an 'umbrella' to aid with management and publicity for these projects," Cook says "Decentralisation rarely gets any attention, even within the tech community, and it was even more obscure before the NSA scandal broke a few months ago," he adds. Atlassian taps crowdsourcing, open source for charity The best way to promote decentralisation "is to provide great platforms with great experiences that can compete with those larger providers," Cook says "This may seem like an impossible task for the open source development community, especially without the head start that the platforms have, but I believe it is entirely doable. "We produce the best tools in the world – far better than any proprietary solutions can give – but there is a huge gap with these tools that the majority of the population cannot cross. "When we tell them, 'oh, using this tool is as easy as installing a Python module on your computer,' for us geeks that is incredibly easy, but for most people, you lost them at the word Python and you will never get them back. "So the momentum toward using centralised platforms will not relent until developers start making tools for a wider audience. Experience and usability is every bit as important as features or functionality." arkOS is the CitizenWeb Project's first major initiative but more are on the way. "There are quite a few planned that have nothing to do with arkOS," Cook says. "I've been working on arkOS since about February of this year, which was a few months before the [NSA] revelations," Cook says.
The birth of arkOS There were two things that spurred work on arkOS "The first was my decision to set up my own home server to host all of my data a few years ago," Cook explains. "I had a good deal of experience with Linux and system administration, but it still took a huge amount of time and research to get the services I wanted set up, and secured properly. "This experience made me realise, if I have background in these things and it takes me so long to do it, it must be impossible for individuals who don't have the expertise and the time that I do to work things out." The second was the push by corporations "to own every aspect of one's online life." "Regardless of your personal feelings about Google, Facebook, etc., there have been countless examples of these services closing themselves off from each other, creating those 'walled gardens' that give them supreme control over your data," Cook says. "This might not bother people, until we find out what we did from Snowden, that this data doesn't always rest with them and that as long as there is a single point of failure, you always have to rely on 'trusting' your provider. "I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust a company that is tasked to sell me things to act in my best interest." "All that being said, the NSA revelations have really provided a great deal of interest to the project. In all of the networks and communities that I have been through since the scandal broke, people are clamouring for an easy way to self-host things at home. It shouldn't have to be rocket science. I hope that arkOS can represent part of the solution for them." The aim of the project is an easy-to-use server operating system than can let people self-host their own services with the ease that someone might install a regular desktop application "Hosting one's own websites, email, cloud data, etc. from home can be a very time-consuming and occasionally expensive endeavour," Cook says. "Not to mention the fact that it takes a good amount of knowledge and practice to do properly and securely. arkOS lets you set up these systems just like you do on your home computer or your smartphone, when you install something from an app store. It 'just works' with minimal configuration. "There is no good reason why server software shouldn't be able to have the same experience."
Making servers simple The OS is "all about simplicity" straight out of the box, Cook says. "For example, on the Raspberry Pi, hosting server software that routinely writes to log files can quickly wear out your SD card. So arkOS caches them in memory to make as few writes as possible, and it does this from its first boot." The team is building a range of tools that make it easy to manage an arkOS server. These include Beacon, which lets users find other arkOS servers on a local network, and Genesis, a GUI management system for arkOS. Genesis is the "most important part" of the OS, Cook says. "It's the tool that does all the heavy lifting for you – installing new apps and software with one click, automatically configuring security settings, giving wizards for navigating through lengthy setup [processes]. "The goal with Genesis is to allow you to do anything you want with your server in an easy and straightforward way, without even having to think about touching the command line. It runs locally on the arkOS server, accessible through the browser of your home computer." There are more tools for arkOS on the way, Cook says. "Any one of these tools can be made to work with other distros; the key is that they are available in the default working environment with no additional setup or bother on the user's part." At the moment the system is still very much in alpha. "It is minimally stable and still getting most of its major features piled in," Cook says. Despite it being early days the reception so far has been "very positive". "It's been downloaded several hundred times, ostensibly by intrepid people willing to try out the framework and see if they can produce bugs," he says. At the moment, Cook is leading the arkOS project and also doing the bulk of the development work on Genesis. "Aside from myself, there are other individuals who contribute features when they are able, like working on Deluge or putting together plugins to use with Genesis," he says. He is interested in finding more people to help out with the components of arkOS, particularly with Python and Golang experience, which are being used extensively. He's also interested in sysadmins or Linux veterans to help manage repositories, with an to expanding the operating system to other architectures. "Web design is also a big one, both for the Genesis front-end as well as our Web properties and outreach efforts. Even non-tech people can lend a hand with outreach, community support and the like. No offer of help will be refused so people can be in touch confidently," he adds.
Looking beyond alpha arkOS is under active development but the OS is still at a "very experimental" stage. Most of Cook's time is spent working on frameworks for Genesis, with a goal of completing its major frameworks by the end of this year and releasing a beta of arkOS. A major sub-project the team working on is called Deluge: A dynamic DNS service and port proxy for users who don't have access to their own domain name or static IPs. "This would make putting your services online truly simple and hassle-free," Cook says. "I am working on the security framework right now, allowing users to easily segment their services based on the zone that they should be available to. For example, you can set your ownCloud site that you run with arkOS to only be available on your home network, while your Jeykll blog should be available to everyone. "Then comes the certificates system, easily making SSL certs available to your different applications." "Beyond that, most of what I will be working on is plugins that do certain things. Email is a really big thing, something that nearly everyone who asks about arkOS is interested in self-hosting. With the NSA revelations it isn't hard to see why." Other features to be included in arkOS include XMPP chat server hosting, Radicale (calendar/contacts hosting), automatic backups, internationalisation, Tor integration, "and much, much more."
Contact Rohan Pearce at rohan_pearce at idg.com.au or follow him on Twitter: @rohan_p
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society, Science & technology, Territory
at
08:49
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, communication, culture & society, data, digital life, hardware, mobility, opensource, privacy, science & technology, territory
Monday, July 15. 2013Did Al Gore Invent the Internet? No, Nikola Tesla Did
Via The Huffington Post (via Nikola Jankovic) -----
What do you do when you have annoyed J.P. Morgan, the most powerful man on Wall Street? This question was very much on the mind of Nikola Tesla in January 1902. An electrical inventor, Tesla had been born in 1856 to a Serbian family living in what is today Croatia. In 1884 Tesla had emigrated to America to work for Thomas Edison, but he soon quit in order to pursue his dream of an alternating current motor. After selling this invention to George Westinghouse, Tesla had gone on in the 1890s to be one of the first to study radio waves, prompting him to perform demonstrations where he took shocks of 250,000 volts as well as to create 100-foot lightning bolts while working in Colorado Springs in 1899. While in Colorado, Tesla convinced himself that it would be possible to send power around the world without using wires.
Tesla in his experimental station in Colorado Springs, December 1899. He is seated in his magnifying transmitter (known today as a giant Tesla coil), with an electrical discharge passing from the secondary coil to another coil. This picture was a double exposure on a single glass plate; Tesla was first photographed sitting in the chair and then the magnifying transmitter was turned on.
The challenge facing Tesla in 1902 was that, although Morgan had given him $150,000 to build a laboratory at Wardenclyffe, Long Island in order to send power and messages across the Atlantic, Guglielmo Marconi had beaten him to the punch. In December 1901, Marconi announced that the Morse code signal for the letter "S" had been transmitted from England and received in Newfoundland. Marconi, not Tesla, was the new wunderkind of radio. So what did Tesla tell his patron Morgan? Along with complaining how Marconi had stolen his circuit designs, Tesla proposed to Morgan in 1902 a plan for a "World Telegraphy System" in which a number of transmitting stations would collect news and broadcast to customers via individual receivers. As Tesla boasted to Morgan: The fundamental idea underlying this system is to employ a few power plants, preferably located near the large centers of civilization and each capable of transmitting a message to the remotest regions of the globe. These plants . . . as fast as they receive the news, they pour [it] into the ground, through which [it] spreads instantly. The whole earth is like a brain, as it were, and the capacity of this system is infinite, for the energy received on every few square feet of ground is sufficient to operate an instrument, and the number of devices which can be so actuated is. . . . infinite. You see, Mr. Morgan, the revolutionary character of this idea, its civilizing potency, its tremendous money-making power. Tesla confidentially told Morgan that they would make money by manufacturing receivers, and by far his most imaginative idea for a receiver was a handheld device connected to a short pole or even a lady's parasol so that it could pick up voice messages anywhere in the world. As Tesla promised in 1904, "An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered, or music played in some other place, however, distant." Here in the opening years of the 20th century, Tesla conjured up a device much like a transistor radio or cell phone, with the promise of providing instantaneous access to information anytime, anywhere. So what became of Tesla's vision of a World Telegraphy System? Ever the hard-headed banker, Morgan was not persuaded by visions of information flowing through the earth and he refused to invest further in Tesla's Long Island lab. Tesla struggled for a few more years, only to discover that it was incredibly difficult to "get a grip of the earth" and pump oscillating currents into the earth's crust. Distressed that he could not square physical reality with what he could see so clearly in his mind, Tesla suffered a nervous breakdown in 1905. A broken man, Tesla died in 1943 in a New York City hotel room, penniless and forgotten. Over the last 20 years, Tesla has enjoyed a comeback in popular culture, celebrated as a Don Quixote-like hero who did battle with business titans like Edison and Morgan. Late last summer, Matt Inman used his online comic, The Oatmeal, to raise $1.4 million by crowd-sourcing so that a private group, the Tesla Science Center, could save Tesla's laboratory on Long Island.
"Tesla's Wireless Transmitting Tower, 185 feet high, at Wardenclyffe, N. Y., from which the city of New York will be fed with electricity, and by means of which the camperout [sic], the yachtsman and summer resort visitor will be able to communicate instantly with friends at home." From "Tesla's Tower," New York American, 22 May 1904 in The Tesla Collection, 23 vols., comp. Iwona Vujovic, (New York: Tesla Project, 1998), 17:11.
More than seeing Tesla as a flighty crank who never finished anything, we should appreciate his early insight about the coming of the Information Age. Although he was certainly not thinking about the computers, software, and packet-switching necessary to create the Web, his fundamental idea that all information should be collected and disseminated around the world is very much what the Internet and World Wide Web has come to be in our time. "I think we all misunderstood Tesla. We thought he was a dreamer and visionary," wrote fellow engineer John Stone Stone in 1915. "He did dream and his dreams came true, he did have visions but they were of a real future, not an imaginary one." Stone understood only too well that without such bold visions practical engineers cannot build the future.
W. Bernard Carlson is Professor and Chair of the Engineering and Society Department at the University of Virginia. A historian of technology and business, he has published widely on invention and entrepreneurship, and his newest book is Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, published by Princeton University Press.
Related Links:Personal comment: Was Nikola Tesla a visionary scientist, a magician or an artist (creating "technologically sublime" artifacts --artificial daylight, artificial lightnings--)? Or all of them at once?
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
08:58
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, communication, culture & society, history, research, science & technology
Thursday, March 14. 2013First Teleportation from One Macroscopic Object to Another (would mean quantum Internet of atoms)
Via MIT Technology Review -----
Physicists have teleported quantum information from one ensemble of atoms to another 150 metres away, a demonstration that paves the way towards quantum routers and a quantum Internet.
Technologies behind a quantum internet will be quantum routers capable of transmitting quantum information from one location to another without destroying it. That’s no easy task. Quantum bits or qubits are famously fragile—a single measurement destroys them. So it’s not all obvious how macroscopic objects such as routers in a fibre optics network can handle qubits without demolishing them. However, physicists have a trick up their sleeve to help send qubits safely. This trick is teleportation, a standard tool in any decent quantum optics lab. It relies on the strange phenomenon of entanglement in which two quantum objects share the same existence. That link ensures that no matter how far apart they are, a measurement on one particle instantly influences the other. It is this ‘influence’ that allows physicists to transmit quantum information from one point in space to another without it passing through the space in between. Of course, teleportation is tricky, but physicists are getting better at it. They’ve teleported quantum information from one photon to another, from ions to photons and even from a macroscopic ensemble of atoms to a photon. Today, Xiao-Hui Bao at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and a few buddies say they’ve added a new and important technique to this box of tricks. These guys have teleported quantum information from ensemble of rubidium atoms to another ensemble of rubidium atoms over a distance of 150 metres using entangled photons. That’s the first time that anybody has performed teleportation from one macroscopic object to another. “This is interesting as the first teleportation between two macroscopic-sized objects at a distance of macroscopic scale,” say Xiao-Hui and co. Quite right. The goal in a quantum internet is that ensembles of atoms will sit at the heart of quantum routers, receiving quantum information from incoming photons and then generating photons that pass this information on to the next router. So clearly the first teleportation from one of these hearts to another is an important advance. Of course, there are hurdles ahead. Xiao-Hui and co want to increase the probability of success for each instance of teleportation, to increase the amount of time that the atomic ensemble can store quantum information before it leaks away (currently just over 100 microseconds) and to create a chain of atomic ensembles that will better demonstrate the potential of the technique for quantum routing. None of those challenges seem like showstoppers. Which means that practical quantum routers and the quantum internet that relies on them are just around the corner.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1211.2892: Quantum Teleportation Between Remote Atomic-Ensemble Quantum Memories
Monday, January 14. 2013Antarctic Island RadioVia BLDGBLOG -----
[Image: Deception Island, from Millett G. Morgan's September 1960 paper An Island as a Natural Very-Low-Frequency Transmitting Antenna].
Yesterday's post reminded me of an interesting proposal from the 1960s, in which an entire Antarctic island would be transformed into a radio-conducting antenna. Signals of international (or military submarine) origin could thus be bounced, relayed, captured, and re-transmitted using the topographical features of the island itself, and naturally occurring ionospheric radio noise could be studied. [Image: A map of Deception Island, taken from an otherwise unrelated paper called "Upper crustal structure of Deception Island area (Bransfield Strait, Antarctica) from gravity and magnetic modelling," published in Antarctic Science (2005)].
In the September 1960 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, radio theorist Millett G. Morgan, a "leading researcher in the field of ionospheric physics" based at Dartmouth, speculated that he could generate artificial "whistlers"—that is, audial electromagnetic effects that are usually caused by lightning—if only he could find the right island. "In thinking about how to generate whistlers artificially," Morgan's proposal leisurely begins, "it has occurred to me that an island of suitable size and shape, extending through the conducting sea, may constitute a naturally resonant, VLF slot antenna of high quality." [Image: Deception Island, from "Upper crustal structure of Deception Island area (Bransfield Strait, Antarctica) from gravity and magnetic modelling," Antarctic Science (2005)].
He looked far and wide for this "naturally resonant, VLF slot antenna," eventually settling on a remote island in the Antarctic. "Following this line of reasoning," he explains, "I thought first of the annular Pacific atolls, but knowing of the fresh-water lenses in them"—that is, aquatic features that would destructively interfere with radio transmissions—"[I] rejected them as being too pervious to water to be satisfactory insulators. Also, of course, they are not found in suitable latitudes for generating whistlers." Morgan's reasoning continued: "The Pacific atolls are built upon submerged volcanic cones and this led me to think of Deception Island in the SubAntarctic, a remarkable, similarly shaped, volcanic island in which the volcanic rock extends above the surface; and which is located in the South Shetland Islands where the rate of occurrence of natural whistlers has been found to be very great." Perhaps the island could be the geologic radio antenna he was looking for. [Image: Deception Island, from "Upper crustal structure of Deception Island area (Bransfield Strait, Antarctica) from gravity and magnetic modelling," Antarctic Science (2005)].
Morgan points out in detail that mathematical ratios amongst the island's naturally occurring landscape features, including its ring-shaped lagoon, are perfect for supporting radio transmissions (even the relationship between the length of the island and the radio wavelengths Morgan would be using seems to work out). And that's before he looks at the material construction of the island itself, consisting of volcanic tuff, which would help the terrain act as an "insulator." There is even the fact that the island's small lagoon is coincidentally but unrelatedly named "Telefon Bay" (alas, named after a ship called the Telefon, not for the island's natural ability to make telephone calls). [Image: Deception Island, from "Upper crustal structure of Deception Island area (Bransfield Strait, Antarctica) from gravity and magnetic modelling," Antarctic Science (2005)].
Morgan's "proposed island antenna" would thus be a wired-up matrix of transmission lines and natural landscape features, bouncing radio wavelengths at the perfect angle from one side to the other and concentrating broadcasts for human use and listening. You could tune into the sky, huddling in the Antarctic cold and listening to the curling electromagnetic crackle of the ionosphere, or you could use your new radio-architectural set-up, all wires and insulators like some strange astronomical harp, "to generate whistlers artificially," as Morgan's initial speculation stated, bursting forth with planetary-scale arcs of noise over a frozen sea, a wizard of sound alone and self-deafened at the bottom of the world. (Deception Island proposal discovered via Douglas Kahn, whose forthcoming book Arts of the Spectrum: In the nature of electromagnetism looks fantastic, and who also gave an interesting talk on "natural radio" a few years ago at UCLA). -----
Have also a look to Fence Phone, about a "rural telephone system" made out of barbed wire as well as Trees Receivers.
Thursday, October 04. 2012Publishing to the power of two
Via domusweb ----- The digital revolution has spawned a new generation of small, agile and hyperactive publishers who, over the last decade, have profoundly transformed how architecture and design are broadcast, both in print and online. An architecture report by Shumi Bose - This article was originally published in Domus 961 / September 2012
Top: Having worked for a long time as designers and product managers for companies and architectural practices, Birgit Lohmann and Massimo Mini moved to Bali, Indonesia. In 1999 they created Designboom with its head office in Milan, while during the summer months they relocate Designboom to a temporary office in an undisclosed seaside location in Sardinia. Designboom has a permanent work team, made up of architects and designers from around the world who select and publish (exclusively in English) information and articles on art, architecture and design. Above: Designboom publishes the latest press releases and topical readers’ proposals, as well as journalistic reports conducted by its own staff. Every year Designboom co-organises four to six design competitions with large international corporations. Alongside the Italian edition, over the years four Asian versions of Designboom have also been established in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese
The ease of exchanging information on the Internet allows individuals to engage in collective intellectual works of unprecedented scale. At the same time, seemingly collaborative modes of publishing are also a means for individual, previously hidden voices to gain voice and exposure, as in the case of Ethel Baraona Pohl and her partner César Reyes Nájera, who describe their endeavours at dpr-barcelona as the happy by-product of frustration. Perennially interested in the layers that technology adds to discursive and physical space, their occasional contributions to journals were the only outlet for critical thinking outside the studio; larger bodies of research encountered rejection and huge delays within slow-moving institutionalised channels.
Their experimental (and at the time innovative) digital publications pioneered new models of self- and collaborative publishing, experimenting with platforms that allow texts to be collectively manipulated by an online community. But the most rapidly-expanding branch of their company, dpr-barcelona, is short-print-run architecture books: no mean feat if one considers the crisis in book publishing (just five months ago, the famed Swiss design publisher Birkhäuser was placed in administration). "Many small-scale emerging ventures deal with the communal, hyperlocal or niche terrains, and are often run by couples"
Such a free exchange of ideas is not without its problems, however. At present, the virtual environment is a Wild West of sorts, in which the value of labour and production remains an arbitrarily defined quantity , and universal paradigms regulating attribution, control and agency are as yet absent. Many of the most successful emerging ventures in architectural discourse borrow on traditional modes of production: they are often concerned with hyper-specific or niche terrains. They are small, agile and, in keeping with the cottage-industry low-overhead model, a disproportionate number are run by couples.
Writing in a recent issue of MAS Context—a scholarly Chicago-based journal produced by "the [invited] crowd", available both in print and for free low-resolution download — Javier Arbona aims to conceptualise knowledge-sharing and the rebroadcasting of content. He does this not in the context of privacy, authority and intellectual rights, but rather more interestingly in post-Fordist notions of labour. "Through a series of virtual devices common to most blogs (like 'apps' for quick reposting, emailing, retweeting, bookmarking on other sites, or, say, 'sharing' on Facebook, etc.), the work chores of circulating content are hidden by what seem like benign, abstract socio-communal acts."
Arguably, the simultaneous growth of DIY publishing and ground-up activism have resulted in the conflation of civic and political rights with the spatial, civic and architectural locale. In the online output of architects and architectural writers, such as This Is Not A Gateway, or in new event formats such as Venue (the "live" and peripatetic collaboration between Geoff Manaugh and his partner Nicola Twilley, from BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography respectively), one can see a direct opposition to existing capitalised forms of production, and a more grass-roots activist stance in terms of engaging with urban and landscape problems through publications, events, artistic platforms and more. Perhaps in this light, some argue that even the most prolific "news" sites have critical, even political impact by virtue of their mere existence and reach.
By disseminating architectural news to a wider audience than ever before, they shift access to knowledge from the hands of geographically marginal elites into the realm of the "real world". David Basulto — a qualified architect, teacher and co-founder of ArchDaily (the self-proclaimed "most popular architecture website today") based in Santiago, Chile — maintains, for example, that reaching a "housewife" demographic is intrinsic to his cause.
As every forward-looking action has its retrograde reaction, the rapid growth and proliferation of blogs, networks and websites has been paralleled by a more intense fascination with the physicality of print media. While much design discussion has moved online, the recent, globally roving Archizines exhibition, curated by Elias Redstone, showcased contemporary architectural fanzines and journals.
This followed Beatriz Colomina's archival Clip Stamp Fold, and preceded an installation dedicated to the 20th century's great magazines at this year's Venice Biennale of Architecture. The volumes on display in all three exhibitions are vibrant matter; they have the capacity to give rise to public spheres and imagined communities. Through the act of being printed, made permanent, books and journals provide punctuation points in the apparently endless production, discussion and evolution of ideas, thus reinforcing the truism that "printed matter matters".
But the nature of architectural books is also changing. Organisational structures and layouts have become more flexible, more determined by the visual, more accommodating of non-architectural content, and increasingly employing some of the tools of online paradigms. Julien De Smedt's 2010 monograph Agenda features images of Kanye West's blog, facsimile emails and diagrams tracking office workflow, echoing the tools of Web analytics familiar to any online publisher. The publication of books from blogs — such as The BLDGBLOG Book — has also reflected the growing recognition of online discourse within traditional print media.
Andreas Ruby, co-founder of Berlin-based offices textbild and Ruby Press, is cynical about the simple transposition between screen and page, confessing, "It's like with early cars: they all looked like horse carriages, until they found their own way." Instead, he speaks with passion and conviction about books as an enduring art form, with their own intrinsic possibilities, physically encoded in subtly corporeal nuances. Ruby Press books could be described as a reaction to the logic of the large-printrun media machine that has in recent years grown dramatically in influence within the realms of design and architecture publishing. They are characterised by attention to detail, carefully considering page size, paper weight and porosity, and exquisite graphic design—but also short print runs. Low overheads allow for agility and small scale, and small-scale publishing, in turn, legitimates not only a more finely tuned specificity and quicker production, but also a more artisanal approach and the ability to operate on lower margins.
What one finds today, therefore, is not that online formats seek to replace or supersede printed formats. Instead, the poly-vocal, movable and interactive capacity that is most amplified in online production is actually part of a wider change affecting both print publishing and architectural production itself. Pop-cultural, even ahistorical post-modern juxtapositions, achieved in print by Banham, the Venturis, Archigram and many others before and after, have not only continued online, but also extrapolated into an ever-expanding kaleidoscope of perspectives and media. Rather than being drowned in sound, as readers we are increasingly savvy in terms of what to see and how, at what speed, in what context and on which device. Shumi Bose (@tontita00), curator and writer of architectural history and theory.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society
at
10:17
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, collaboration, communication, culture & society, magazines, publishing, thinkers, writing
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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