Tuesday, October 27. 2009
New Scientist Where's the remotest place on Earth?
Very little of the world's land can now be thought of as inaccessible, according to a new map of connectedness.
The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water.
The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors like altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel.
Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10% of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city.
What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20% of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province.
Via New Scientist
Monday, October 26. 2009
Paris by way of Street View
Noted at the excellent thingsmagazine.net is a new project from photographer Michael Wolf, who navigated his way through Google's Street View map of Paris to create some beautiful images of the city...
Those familiar with Street View will know that in addition to capturing the topography of a city at street level, the programme also, inevitably, captures its inhabitants. With their circular, air-brushed faces, the majority of the figures digitised for Street View are largely unaware of the Google cars with their rooftop cameras.
Now the inhabitants of Paris also find themselves in Wolf's artistic take on the Google mapping project. And he's retrieved some lovely moments of people and things caught for a single arbitrary moment on a particular day in the city.
By way of an explantion of his intentions with the Paris Street View project, thingsmagazine offers this quote from Wolf:
"The problem is that compared to Asia, Paris is a stagnant city – very little has changed architecturally since Atget's times, and the cliches are a nightmare to get out from under of. Strangely enough, it was Google Street View which enabled me to take any photos at all of Paris.
"I spent weeks going through the city on my monitor, street by street, looking into windows, discovering reflections, searching out interesting juxtapositions, topologies, trying various crops/styles (Frank, Doisneau, Ruscha, and so on). The lack of a third dimension wore me down at times, but it was quite an interesting journey."
To see all the images from the project, check out the Paris Street View page at photomichaelwolf.com.
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Via Creative Review
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Personal comment:
La société à travers le filtre ou l'"autre appareil photographique" qu'est Google (street view)...
Wednesday, October 21. 2009
Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Others Outline Support for Net Neutrality Rules
This week, the FCC is expected to reveal the details of its Net Neutrality plan, which Chairman Julius Genachowski has discussed numerous times over the past month.
Now, a coalition of 23 of the world’s largest Internet and technology companies are formally offering their support for the new rules in a letter to the Chairman, posted to the Open Internet Colaition website.
Signed by Eric Schmidt of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Evan Williams of Twitter, and other industry leaders, the group once again articulates the pro-Net Neutrality argument:
“For most of the Internet’s history, FCC rules have ensured that consumers have been able to choose the content and services they want over their Internet connections. Entrepreneurs, technologists, and venture capitalists have previously been able to develop new online products and services with the guarantee of neutral, nondiscriminatory access by users, which has fueled an unprecedented era of economic growth and creativity. Existing businesses have been able to leverage the power of the Internet to develop innovative product lines, reach new consumers, and create new ways of doing business.
An open Internet fuels a competitive and efficient marketplace, where consumers make the ultimate choices about which products succeed and which fail. This allows businesses of all sizes, from the smallest startup to larger corporations, to compete, yielding maximum economic growth and opportunity.”
While the major players on the Internet are seemingly united behind net neutrality, it could take “many months” for the rules to be formalized according to The Wall Street Journal. That’s because cable companies and ISPs will also have an opportunity to argue their case that a completely open Internet with no ability to cap bandwidth usage and costs is bad for business.
In any event, it would seem that a battle that has been many years in the making is finally about ready to take center stage.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, enot-poloskun
Personal comment:
C'est drôle, Google, Facebook & co parlent un peu comme si le web leur appartenait (et qu'il fallait le protéger), non? Cela laisse un sentiment contraire au propos qui est développé par ces "grands acteurs", nouveaux consortiums data-médiatiques.
The City Is Here For You To Use: (very) provisional bibliography
Monday, October 12. 2009
Now Planes are Tweeting, Too
We’ve seen Tweets posted by plants, a space shuttle and even a house, so we shouldn’t be particularly surprised to hear that commercial jets are now Tweeting and posting Facebook messages (sorta). In fact, we think the idea is ingenious.
Admittedly, it’s not the plane itself doing the Tweeting: it’s the airline. Lufthansa has set up a new service named MySkyStatus that automatically posts the current position of your flight to Twitter or Facebook so your friends can follow your travels (and your friends living in those cities can look up!).
Typical status updates read “flying over San Francisco Intl, California 94030, USA on United Airlines” or “flying over Grantsville, UT 84029, USA on United Airlines”. It seems the system posts the flight’s position around once per hour, pulling info from a database of flight information.
Here’s the really smart bit: I stumbled on the service because one of my Facebook friends was on a United Airlines flight today. Clicking the link in the update, of course, directs you to the Lufthansa MySkyStatus page with a Google Map of the flight’s position, meaning that Lufthansa is getting free social media promotion from people travelling on all airlines. Pretty smart.
On a long haul flight, of course, the system may post 20 updates or more, but the functionality is so cool that I’m prepared to give some slack to those Twitter and Facebook friends who have decided to put their updates on autopilot.
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Via Mashable
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Personal comment:
Real life & positioning & objects status, etc. to text... Interesting to see how Twitter becomes a sort of real time textual mirror to life and social life in general. A sort of textual and live version Google Earth (and more)!
I understand why developing a good and efficient search engine for Twitter or Facebook might compete with Google, at least on the (permanent) "real time" status of the planet.
fabric | rblg
This 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.
