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
Tuesday, October 15. 2013Occupy.here: A tiny, self-contained darknet
Via Rhizome ----- Ed. — Occupy.here was supported by Rhizome as part of its 2012 Commissions program, and also received a commission from Triple Canopy in 2013. The project's new website launched yesterday.
Regardless of your feelings about Occupy Wall Street, we can all agree that its genesis was unlikely, to say the least. It appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in New York's Financial District (of all places). And it continued to exist only because of a lucky break: basing the protests in Zuccotti Park, formerly Liberty Plaza Park, was a fallback plan, following a failed attempt to protest in front of the New York Stock Exchange. It was the unusual rules for Zuccotti—as a Privately Owned Public Space (POPS), it is not bound by the normal city parks curfew, and is required by charter to stay open 24 hours a day—that enabled the encampments to get a foothold. This may have been a lucky break, but one that was earned through years of organizing, cultivating the expertise and tools and networks that allow a movement to grow and sustain itself. Occupy.here began two years ago as an experiment for the encampment at Zuccotti Park. It was a wifi router hacked to run OpenWrt Linux (an operating system mostly used for computer networking) and a small "captive portal" website. When users joined the wifi network and attempted to load any URL, they were redirected to http://occupy.here. The web software offered up a simple BBS-style message board providing its users with a space to share messages and files. Unlike most wifi connections, this one wouldn't let you check your Facebook. It was designed to run entirely disconnected from the internet. Only people physically close enough to the router can could reach the local web forum with their mobile phone or laptop. I imagined it becoming a kind of intranet for Occupiers, filtering users by proximity to specifically support the people at the park. During the Occupation, I was getting up extra early to visit the park on weekdays before work. I'd chat with whoever was awake and hear what was going on with the upcoming General Assembly, or who'd been making a ruckus the night before. When I described my strange wifi project, I was surprised at the encouraging reactions I got. "That's awesome, you should do it!" or "we were talking about building something like that—does it handle video?" So I showed up one morning and left my first prototype with the volunteers at the Info desk. Just keeping the router powered consistently was a big challenge; I'd plug it into whichever diesel generator I could find running in the park. After the park was cleared, I refocused my thinking about how best to support a decentralized movement. Since then Occupy.here has become my zen garden, a tiny self-contained internet I've been developing slowly and methodically. This past Spring, I began stashing wifi routers wherever I could find an electrical plug near a freely accessible space. For a few months, a friend hosted an Occupy.here router from his studio at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency in the One Liberty Plaza building. His 12th floor window looked down right onto Zuccotti Park, close enough to get two out of three bars of wifi coverage in the park. In this second, decentralized phase, I've seen a modest volume of use by internet standards, perhaps a handful of posts per week. There are patterns in how it gets used according to where the router is situated. The Zuccotti Park router was a popular venue for middle-aged men to upload selfies. Another one, hidden in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art (installed without permission), mostly receives multi-lingual variations on "hello world" or "why doesn't the wifi work?" A handful of users have written more substantially, but it amounts to a message in a bottle, floating in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum. It's been exciting to see Occupy.here used "in the wild," but it also has some shortcomings—its lack of visibility makes discovering the network difficult, and the slim likelihood that a user will return makes conversations difficult to achieve. As a growing digital library, the project can surely offer an alternative to "junk food media," but building a slow web movement is not enough. I'd like for the project to be fun to use, but ultimately I'm interested in fostering conditions that might credibly challenge the status quo. I need to destroy the zen garden and replace it with something more like a town square. Less tidy, more communal. I would like to create something you would want to use every day to share with people whose opinions matter to you. I'm interested in finding collaborators who have a stake in its development. It's becoming clear that, collectively, we all need online spaces that aren't undermined by the surveillance state. Whether or not the big tent incarnation of Occupy has a future, the 99% are just as dissatisfied as we were in 2011. Much like Napster gave us a taste of what a digital commons could be, Occupy showed us how massively distributed activism can materialize seemingly overnight. It's time to put in the hard work organizing for the next Occupy, to create the right conditions for a lucky break.
On Sunday October 6th I'll be participating in the PRISM Breakup event at Eyebeam. I'll be conducting a hands-on workshop as 12:30pm, followed by a talk later in the afternoon. Please come with radical ideas, and bring a laptop!
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology, Territory
at
07:23
Defined tags for this entry: activism, culture & society, data, electronics, hardware, localized, opensource, privacy, science & technology, sharing, territory, urbanism
Monday, October 14. 2013World's Largest Solar Thermal Energy Plant Opens in California
Via Inhabitat via Computed·By -----
The much-anticipated Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System just kicked into action in California’s Mojave Desert. The 3,500 acre facility is the world’s largest solar thermal energy plant, and it has the backing of some major players; Google, NRG Energy, BrightSource Energy and Bechtel have all invested in the project, which is constructed on federally-leased public land. The first of Ivanpah’s three towers is now feeding energy into the grid, and once the site is fully operational it will produce 392 megawatts — enough to power 140,000 homes while reducing carbon emissions by 400,000 tons per year. Ivanpah is comprised of 300,000 sun-tracking mirrors (heliostats), which surround three, 459-foot towers. The sunlight concentrated from these mirrors heats up water contained within the towers to create super-heated steam which then drives turbines on the site to produce power. The first successfully operating unit will sell power to California’s Pacific Gas and Electric, as will Unit 3 when it comes online in the coming months. Unit 2 is also set to come online shortly, and will provide power to Southern California Edison. Construction began on the facility in 2010, and achieved it’s first “flux” in March, a crucial test which proved its readiness to begin commercial operation. Tests this past Tuesday formed Ivanpah’s “first sync” which began feeding power into the grid. As John Upton at Grist points out, the project is not without its critics, noting that some “have questioned why a solar plant that uses water would be built in the desert — instead of one that uses photovoltaic panels,” while others have been upset by displacement of local wildlife—notably 100 endangered desert tortoises. But the Ivanpah plant still constitutes a major milestone, both globally as the world’s largest solar thermal energy plant, and locally for the significant contribution it will make towards California’s renewable energy goal of achieving 3,000 MW of solar generating capacity through public utilities and private ownership.
Personal comment:
After the project in Spain, early images and controversy dating back 2012, here comes a new amazing infrastructure / solar power plant in California. Welcome!
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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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