Wednesday, July 24. 2013Troubleshooting The Smart City
Via Forbes ----- By Anna Secino
Smart cities have been creating a lot of buzz lately—thanks, in no small part, to the recent controversy over NSA surveillance, which cast a rather sinister light over visions of cities made more efficient through data collection of public resources. “It starts with monitoring water usage,” the naysayers cry, “But where does it end?” This past week, two cities—Montpellier, France, and Dallas, Texas—released statements concerning their own attempts towards smartening up their infrastructure, which got us thinking about “Informed and Interconnected: A Manifesto for Smarter Cities,” a 2009 paper by Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter and IBM IBM +0.03% International Foundation President Stanley S. Litow. Its thoughts on and solutions for smart cities continue to be relevant four years later, as the cases in Montpellier and Dallas attest to. A major concern with regards to smart cities is figuring out who, exactly, is in charge of all this data collection? The government? The tech companies? As a city strives towards streamlined convergence, how does it avoid creating an especially unscrupulous monopoly? “It is important to note that new technologies have additional potential to make communities smarter by combining sets of data and making them available not only to immediate decision makers but to a much wider network of officials and agencies so that they can make more informed decisions,” Kanter and Litow write. Michel Aslanian, Montpellier’s Vice President of Innovation, believes that he has found the answer through making the $5.4 million research and development project a joint effort among stockholders, universities, startups, public utility operators, and Montpellier everymen. “The citizen is being made the author and actor in the development of the region,” he said regarding the “Ecocité” initiative, which hopes to collect data on public transportation, water usage, and other factors of city life that could lead to a greener, more efficient future. Other cities have not been quite so eager to jump on the bandwagon. In Dallas, where most corporate and municipal buildings operate on old, inefficient equipment, the switch to newer, more energy-efficient models has been ponderous. Europe requires that buildings be energy efficient, but U.S. politicians have been reluctant to pitch their support behind a similar initiative. And with the majority of office buildings dating back sixty to seventy years, updating existing structures can be costly. For all the money that cities and businesses waste every year through electricity, water, and other resources, many refuse to fund a never-ending progression of equipment repair. Supporters of both Dallas’s tortoise and Montpellier’s hare may want to acquaint themselves with Kanter and Litow’s vision for a city where high-tech advances help build efficient, egalitarian communities. Via a streamlined, interconnected approach, they argue, there would be less exclusion of racial or ethnic groups, as communities gather strength through individual differences, united in their efforts towards a better quality of life. In this scenario, technology serves merely as a tool for enhancing the very human pursuits of social- and self-betterment, with the monetary cost far outweighed by the environmental and communal benefits. To learn more about Kanter’s and Litow’s ideas for the snowballing smart city movement—including their list of the top eight problems commonly faced by smart cities, and how these can be avoided—read their full manifesto here, on the HBS Working Knowledge website. About the author: Writer Anna Secino is a student at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society, Interaction design, Science & technology, Territory
at
08:45
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, culture & society, data, interaction design, monitoring, public, science & technology, smart, territory, urbanism
Tuesday, July 23. 2013New system uses low-power Wi-Fi signal to track moving humans — even behind walls
Via MIT News -----
Illustration: Christine Daniloff/MIT
The comic-book hero Superman uses his X-ray vision to spot bad guys lurking behind walls and other objects. Now we could all have X-ray vision, thanks to researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Personal comment: This will probably restart the interests of private companies to provide "public" or private wifi "for free" or at least to equip large urban areas without charging for the work and the hardware (as you won't need to be connected to the wifi to be tracked, see?). As long as they'll be allowed to collect data, mine for crowd patterns and behaviors... (a new case for persons in charge of data protection).
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Science & technology
at
07:57
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, monitoring, research, science & technology, surveillance
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
Voltage Impulse Generator
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Voltage impulse generator (far left), round aluminium shielding (centre, spheres) and hollow aluminium doughnuts (right, tower). Photo by ABB
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology
at
08:20
Defined tags for this entry: photography, science & technology
Thursday, July 11. 2013What Ant Colony Networks Can Tell Us About What’s Next for Digital Networks
Via Next Nature -----
Ever notice how ant colonies so successfully explore and exploit resources in the world … to find food at 4th of July picnics, for example? You may find it annoying. But as an ecologist who studies ants and collective behavior, I think it’s intriguing — especially the fact that it’s all done without any central control. What’s especially remarkable: the close parallels between ant colonies’ networks and human-engineered ones. One example is “Anternet”, where we, a group of researchers at Stanford, found that the algorithm desert ants use to regulate foraging is like the Traffic Control Protocol (TCP) used to regulate data traffic on the internet. Both ant and human networks use positive feedback: either from acknowledgements that trigger the transmission of the next data packet, or from food-laden returning foragers that trigger the exit of another outgoing forager. This research led some to marvel at the ingenuity of ants, able to invent systems familiar to us: wow, ants have been using internet algorithms for millions of years! But insect behavior mimicking human networks — another example are the ant-like solutions to the traveling salesman problem provided by the ant colony optimization algorithm — is actually not what’s most interesting about ant networks. What’s far more interesting are the parallels in the other direction: What have the ants worked out that we humans haven’t thought of yet? During the 130 million years or so that ants have been around, evolution has tuned ant colony algorithms.
During the 130 million years or so that ants have been around, evolution has tuned ant colony algorithms to deal with the variability and constraints set by specific environments. Ant colonies use dynamic networks of brief interactions to adjust to changing conditions. No individual ant knows what’s going on. Each ant just keeps track of its recent experience meeting other ants, either in one-on-one encounters when ants touch antennae, or when an ant encounters a chemical deposited by another. Such networks have made possible the phenomenal diversity and abundance of more than 11,000 ant species in every conceivable habitat on Earth. So Anternet, and other ant networks, have a lot to teach us. Ant protocols may suggest ways to build our own information networks… Dealing with High Operating CostsHarvester ant colonies in the desert must spend water to get water. The ants lose water when foraging in the hot sun, and get their water by metabolizing it out of the seeds that they collect. Since colonies store seeds, their system of positive feedback doesn’t waste foraging effort when water costs are high — even if it means they leave some seeds “on the table” (or rather, ground) to be obtained on another, more humid day. In this way, the Anternet allows the colony to deal with high operating costs. In the internet, the TCP protocol also prevents the system from sending data out on the internet when there’s no bandwidth available. Effort would be wasted if the message is lost, so it’s not worth sending it out unless it’s certain to reach its destination. More recently, I’ve shown how natural selection is currently optimizing the Anternet algorithm. I’ve been following a population of 300 harvester ant colonies for more than 25 years, and by using genetic fingerprinting we figured out which colonies had more offspring colonies. Colonies store food inside the nest as a survival tactic. On especially hot days, colonies that are likely to lay low instead of collecting more food are the ones that have more offspring colonies over their 25-year lifetimes. Restraint therefore emerges as the best strategy at the colony level. Long-lived colonies in the desert regulate their behavior not to maximize or optimize food intake, but instead to keep going without wasting resources. In the face of scarcity, the algorithm that regulates the flow of ants is evolving toward minimizing operating costs rather than immediate accumulation. This is a sustainable strategy for any system, like a desert ant colony or the mobile internet, where it’s essential to achieve long-term reliability while avoiding wasted effort. Scaling Up from Small to Large SystemsWhat happens when a system scales up? Like human-engineered systems, ant systems must be robust to scale up as the colony grows, and they have to be able to tolerate the failure of individual components. Since large systems allow for some messiness, the ideal solutions utilize the contributions of each additional ant in such a way that the benefit of an extra worker outweighs the cost of producing and feeding one. The tools that serve large colonies well, therefore, are redundancy and minimal information. Enormous ant colonies function using very simple interactions among nameless ants without any address. In engineered systems we too are searching for ways to ensure reliable outcomes, as our networks scale, by using cheap operations that make use of randomness. Elegant top-down designs are appealing, but the robustness of ant algorithms shows that tolerating imperfection sometimes leads to better solutions. Optimizing for First-Mover AdvantageThe diversity of ant algorithms shows how evolution has responded to different environmental constraints. When operating costs are low and colonies seek an ephemeral delicacy — like flower nectar or watermelon rinds — searching speed is essential if the colony is to capture the prize before it dries up or is taken away. In the face of scarcity, the algorithm that regulates the flow of ants is evolving toward minimizing operating costs rather than immediate accumulation.
Since ant colonies compete with each other and many are out looking for the same food, the first colony to arrive might have the best chance of holding on to the food and keeping the other ants away. How does a colony achieve this first-mover advantage without any central control? The challenge in this situation is for the colony to manage the flow of ants so it has an ant almost everywhere almost all the time. The goal is to increase the likelihood that some ant will be close enough to encounter whatever happens to show up. One strategy ants use (familiar from our own data networks) is to set up a circuit of permanent highways — like a network of cell phone towers — from which ants search locally. The invasive Argentine ants are experts at this; they’ll find any crumb that lands on your kitchen counter. The Argentine ants also adjust their paths, shifting from a close to random walk when there are lots of ants around, leading each ant to search thoroughly in a small area, to a straighter path when there are few ants around, thus allowing the whole group to cover more ground. Like a distributed demand-response network, the aggregated responses of each ant to local conditions generates the outcome for the whole system, without any centralized direction or control. Addressing Security Breaches and DisastersIn the tropics, where hundreds of ant species are packed close together and competing for resources, colonies must deal with security problems. This has led to the evolution of security protocols that use local information for intrusion detection and for response. One colony might use (“borrow” or “steal”, as humans would say) information from another, such as chemical trails or the density of ants, to find and use resources. Rather than attempting to prevent incursions completely, however, ants create loose, stochastic identity systems in which one species regulates its behavior in response to the level of incursion from another. There are obvious parallels with computer security. It’s becoming clear (consider recent events!) that we too will need to implement local evaluation and repair of intrusions, tolerating some level of imperfection. The ants have found ways to let their systems respond to each others’ incursions, without attempting to set up a central authority that regulates hacks. Ants have evolved security protocols that use local information for intrusion detection and response.
Some of our networks seem to be moving toward using methods deployed by the ants. Take the disaster recovery protocols of ants that forage in trees where branches can break, so the threat of rupture is high. A ring network, with signals or ants flowing in both directions, allows for rapid recovery here; after a break in the flow in one direction, the flow in the other direction can re-establish a link. Similarly, early fiber-optic cable networks were often disrupted by farm machinery and other digging: one break could bring down the system because it would isolate every load. Engineers soon discovered, as ants have already done, that ring networks would create networks that are easier to repair. *** Our networks will continue to change and evolve. By examining and comparing the algorithms used by ants in the desert, in the tropical forest, and the invasive species that visit our kitchens, it’s already obvious that the ants have come up with new solutions that can teach us something about how we should engineer our systems. Using simple interactions like the brief touch of antennae — not unlike our fleeting status updates in ephemeral social networks — colonies make networks that respond to a world that constantly changes, with resources that show up in patches and then disappear. These networks are easy to repair and can grow or shrink. Ant colonies have been used throughout history as models of industry, obedience, and wisdom. Although the ants themselves can be indolent, inconsiderate of others, and downright stupid, we have much to learn from ant colony protocols. The ants have evolved ways of working together that we haven’t yet dreamed of. - Story via Wired. Image Shutterstock.
Personal comment: Not only do the ants build amazing architectures, they are also using algorithms and networks for millenia to achieve quite sustainable results and behaviors. As the article suggest, should we learn from ants?
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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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