Tuesday, January 05. 2010Pan Am’s Helvetica dreamtime. How I unearthed a forgotten chapter in corporate design historyI came across six Pan Am posters while visiting the ‘Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, writes Frederico Duarte At the time I was looking for a subject for my ‘Design as Protagonist’ project, part of Steven Heller’s Researching Design class at D-Crit (the MFA in Design Criticism at the School of Visual Arts). Also known as the ‘No Google Class’, this course urges students to find more about a designed object without recurring to Internet search engines, in order to build a narrative around its manufacture, design, application and influence. When asked if he knew these designs, Heller replied: ‘I don’t know the posters, but would love to know more. It also goes to the heart of how “modern” Pan Am was in its approach to graphics. Worth a book.’ I knew I was on to something. At MoMA’s Architecture and Design archive, cataloguer Paul Galloway found ‘a whole lot of nothing’ on the posters apart from the 1972 shipping receipts. At the Chermayeff & Geismar (C&G) collection at SVA’s Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives, archivist Beth Kleber showed me other posters and materials from that period, which proved MoMA’s six were part of a larger set, but nothing else. I never got a reply from the Pan Am archives at the University of Miami. I simply had to go to the sources to find my answers. Below: Opening spread from ‘Flight of the imagination’, Frederico Duarte’s article about the Pan Am posters in Eye 73. What followed could be an experiment on the six-degrees-of-separation theory. On the week I contacted the C&G studio, Michael Bierut told me during his first class he knew the posters and how to reach Bill Sontag, a designer at C&G who worked on them – via Joseph Bottoni, a professor at the University of Cincinatti, Bierut’s alma mater. I later met with Ivan Chermayeff himself, after speaking on the phone with Bottoni, Sontag and Bruce Blackburn – another designer who worked at C&G and whom MoMA – still – wrongly credits as an author of the Bali poster. While looking at the posters for the first time in decades (including one which according to him could not have been designed at C&G and was swiftly thrown away), Chermayeff told me a few interesting anecdotes about the redesign, but not the whole story. The same day I met with George Tscherny, who also worked for Pan Am and whose work is also in the SVA archive. He gave me Patrick Friesner’s email and told me to get in touch with him: our correspondence began that evening. Friesner, a Briton now living in northern Dordogne, was at the time – under CEO Najeeb Halaby – Pan Am’s Head of Sales Promotion (not of Sales and Promotion, as I wrongly stated in the article). In his many witty and insightful emails, he revealed to me the fascinating process behind Pan Am’s short-lived Helvetica dream. But I still wanted to understand how these posters ended up in MoMA. Chermayeff told me he was not involved in the acquisition process, despite being a trustee and consultant at the time. I then wrote to Christian Larsen, who while at MoMA’s A&D department almost included the Hawaii poster in the 2007 Helvetica exhibition he curated. Larsen got me thinking if Mildred Constantine, MoMA’s Associate Curator of Graphic Design from 1943 to 1971, had acquired the Pan Am posters during her last year at the museum, as part of her many other ‘Swiss school’ acquisitions from the likes of Armin Hofmann, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Manfred Bingler, Tomoko Miho and Massimo Vignelli. That would explain why there are no posters from 1972, only from 1971, in the collection (an easy way to tell the date: Logo + Pan Am = 1971, Logo + Pan Am’s World = 1972). Connie Butler, MoMA’s current Robert Lehman Foundation chief curator of drawings who included the Chermayeff’s posters in an exhibition dedicated to the past 40 years of the museum’s collection, told me on the phone how surprised she was with their success: she got more feedback from fellow curators and artists about them than about any other of the more than 100 works on show. Then, on the day we handed our research results (in the form of posters and books) to Steven Heller, Emily King visited our department on West 21st Street. While looking at my poster, she said ‘I think Alan Fletcher did work for Pan Am, too.’ Friesner had never mentioned Fletcher, but I also didn’t ask. By then I could finally Google the words “Pan Am Posters”, so I did. Not only I got immediate proof Fletcher had indeed worked for Pan Am, I later learned from Friesner how he got the job – another six-degree-of-separation-story, worthy of its own blog post: think Mad Men with extra air miles. Another thing I learned from Google was that none of the people running the many Pan Am memorabilia websites, dedicated as they can be, seems to have even heard of these posters. Few have found any of the materials designed between 1971 and 1972. Judging by these sites (or eBay, for that matter) it was as if this redesign never existed. Pan Am is no longer. But the story of its redesign, as told by the people behind it, proves personal connections, proximity and chance are all makers of (design) history. How many other great design stories are left untold? You can read Frederico Duarte’s article ‘Flight of the imagination’ on the Eye website and in Eye 73, a photography special issue. Eye is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop. For a taste of the magazine, try Eye before you buy. ----- Via Eye Magazine Personal comment:
I found this old PanAm ad campaign interesting. For many different reasons: both for its quality and nowadays old flavoured "dream destinations". But it tells something to me about the early ages of tourism and globalisation where distant location where still strange, mysterious and "magical". The ad was about that at least, and it sounds now old flavoured isn't it?
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Design, Territory
at
10:43
Defined tags for this entry: design, design (graphic), globalization, photography, territory, tourism, typography
Friday, October 09. 2009InfodemicsIn a 2007 study on global risks, a group working on behalf of the World Economic Forum identified a collection of highly interconnected risk factors, and explored various scenarios in which these factors often influenced each other and in some cases amplified the effects of others. The scenarios worked through are chilling, such as a world pandemic which leads to heightened militarism and authoritarian controls lead to drastic shifts in global geopolitics. However, their second scenario, "Out Of The Global Warming Frying Pan (And Into The Fiscal Fire)", shows the contribution of bottom-up social communication -- anti-government text messaging in China -- to the cascade of events leading to a global financial collapse. Information asymmetry also plays a key role in this scenario, which illustrates the knock-on effects of a major shift in risk perception: namely, that climate change has arrived.
While you may not agree with all aspects of the scenario -- I am personally terrified that acceptance of climate change could precipitate such negative outcomes -- the point I am drawing your attention to is the use of text messaging as a social accelerant for change, which in this case hastens a scramble away from fossil fuels. The authors make the case that the 'rapid spread of inaccurate or incomplete information can amplify the effects of the core risk event." They call this amplification an "Infodemic", where the power of a communication medium spreads tainted information and causes people to undertake actions that could spread and thereby increase the negative impacts of the core risk event. In the scenario explored above, the information being spread by the Chinese workers was possibly complete and accurate, however, and it still contributed to a dangerous, and perhaps inevitable, cascade of events. We can sometimes act like well-intentioned bystanders who run into a burning house to save its occupants, and become trapped ourselves. Or worse, we escape in flames, and run down the street, setting the entire neighborhood on fire. Social tools have the ability to amplify or counter the spread of information: it's built into their very nature. We can speed the spread of toxic info when the social system is an unreflecting mob, when mass broadcast prevails. However, when people act as people -- thinking beings -- and not like cattle, an budding infodemic can be cut short. However, to do so we have to rely on actual social relationships and social reputation. In the case of the Chinese workers, what was really the case? Their growing perception of the pollution being caused by a rapidly growing, unchecked economic expansion was accurate, and their demands that something should be done was reasonable. So taking rational actions in an irrational context can lead to giant amplification, which can can lead to good or bad final outcomes depending on what transpires downstream. So, what do we do if we want to be informed actors in this interconnected world? How can we avoid acting as a carrier of diseased information, an agent of the infodemic? One solution is to rely on social scale. Consider the bearer of a snippet of news: do I know and trust her? Has she jumped off the cliff with the lemmings in the past? Or is she more likely to use her discerning judgment to weed out bad information? We, the people living in the network, the living breathing nodes of this social universe, we are both the early warning system and the immune response to infodemics. No one will be better able than us to slow the spread of dangerous unchecked feedback in the world infosphere. But the chance exists that we could unwittingly become an accelerant, mindlessly retweeting out partial information without considering the impact of our actions, and setting a larger fire than the one we are warning people about. It's even possible that striving to spread insight in an attempt to motivate others to do the right thing, like awareness of climate change, can lead to unintended consequences, especially in a world that seems intent on pretending it isn't happening. We could be like the text messaging Chinese in the Frying Pan/Fire scenario, who precipitate a global fiscal collapse because they wanted to stop pollution. ----- Via /Message (Stowe Boyd) Personal comment: Your "friends wheel" into the "frightening wheel"? Interesting "speculation-theory" on global risks and cascading effects as a sort of correlated and epidemic network of informations. Friday, September 18. 2009Patrick Keller "Inhabiting spatial interferences" (Lift09 Asia EN)-----
Founding member Patrick Keller speaks for fabric | ch during Lift 2009 in Jeju, South Korea. Subject of the talk: Inhabiting spatial interferences.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Art, Interaction design, Territory
at
14:05
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, art, artificial reality, atmosphere, climate, computing, fabric | ch, globalization, interaction design, interferences, publications, publications-fbrc, territory, variable, weather
Friday, August 14. 2009Realtime 3D AirtrafficDéveloppé par WHITEvoid, voici un écran de 14 mètres de large doté d’une projection de 180° qui permet aux visiteurs de se diriger dans l’espace aérien. Une visualisation 3D entièrement navigable, en temps réel, représente les 16 000 vols de la compagnie d’avion Lufthansa. Filtres de contenus, vitesse, taille, tout est paramètrable : d’une vue macro à un mapping plus global des traffics de toute la planète. La “data visualisation” est complétée par un système audio 3D doté des bruits des avions, dans l’espace aérien. Portfolio de WHITEvoid. - Via Fubiz Wednesday, April 08. 2009Postopolis! Reprocessed - Part 1[Dubai comes to Los Angeles / photo: Dan Hill] I'm still trying to make sense of the whirlwind that was Postopolis! LA. The event provided the most wonderful kind of sensory overload and reveled in variety, contradiction and cognitive dissonance. Between jetlag, academic administration and a nasty fever I've been tied up since arriving back in Toronto late Sunday night but my mind still hasn't stopped racing. What follows is a personal highlight reel from the multitude of architects, interface designers, geographers, activists and vampire fiction/gentrification experts (!!) that presented during the first half of the event. I'll share my notes for the remainder of the proceedings sometime over the next several days. fabric | ch / Atmospheric Relations / 2008 Fritz Haeg of Fritz Haeg Studio gave an overview of his landscape architecture, and park and garden design. Haeg highlighted his Gardenlab project and positioned garden design as a "counterpoint to the spectacle of architecture". Over the last several years Haeg has produced a series of Edible Estates that reconsider "green" space in both public and private contexts. Thus far eight prototype gardens have been developed in cities including Salina, Kansas, Los Angeles and London (as part of the Tate Modern's Global Cities exhibit in 2007). Patrick Keller of fabric | ch delivered a fascinating presentation on their work in developing and considering micro-climates. Fabric | ch describes itself as an "architecture, interaction & research" based practice and browsing their portfolio reveals some very exciting thinking (I'm definitely going to investigate and post about one of their earlier projects in the coming weeks). Keller discussed design projects such as their "informatic facade" for Atmospheric Relations and the interface for Philippe Rahm's Météorologie d'intérieur which was exhibited at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2006. A large portion of the presentation revolved around Real Rooms, a 2005 proposal that breaks down climates into discrete, modular units that play out across a larger "programmable" complex. Fabric | ch is an edgy, precise practice experimenting on archi-fundamentals (time, space) with very sophisticated considerations of the environment and information systems - exciting stuff! [See Dan Hill's detailed summary of this presentation] Next up was Yo-Ichiro Hakomori of wHY Architecture who was interviewed by David Basulto and David Assael. This meandering conversation touched on a number of projects by the firm including the Grand Rapids Arts Museum and an Art Bridge. The latter project is an infrastructural intervention that provides pedestrian movement across the L.A. River while framing views of the water below and an expansive public mural. Midway through the discussion Hakomori mentioned that he considered Louis Kahn's Salk Institute one of his favourite project and this makes sense as wHY Architecture has developed a similar restrained monumentality. The next session featured Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu of Oyler Collaborative, also fielding questions from Basulto and Assael. This experimental practice has executed some stunning installation work and the studio was commissioned by Ai Wei Wei to produce a residence as part of the Ordos 100 Villa project. As evidenced by projects like their 2008 Live Wire exhibit at SCI-Arc, it wasn't too surprising to learn that Oyler has collaborated with Lebbeus Woods in the past. Daivd Gissen / Reconstruction - Smoke / 2006 Mary-Ann Ray of StudioWorks kicked off the second day of talks with a presentation on Chinese urbanism entitled "Towards Ruralpolitanism". Ray is working on an illustrated lexicon that indexes the intersection of massive Chinese cities with villages as there is no North American or European point of reference for understanding how cities and villages engage and interpenetrate one another in China. This research also extended into the cultural realm as Ray discussed a variety of principles pertaining to land ownership and management that roughly translated as "stir fried land" or "illegal mess" - she's trying to catalog these phenomena and engage them critically. Since there is no "suburbia" in Urban China, how do rural and urban systems respond to industrialism and agriculture? How does the population float back and forth between these urban typologies? The next presenter was David Gissen of the excellent HTC Experiments blog. A historian and theorist at the California College of the Arts, Gissen expressed frustration with the gap between theory and and the practice of everyday life. He highlighted work such as Michael Caratzas' proposed preservation of the Cross-Bronx Expressways as being emblematic of ways that architectural historians might more directly engage the systemic nature of the city rather than just cordoning off specific buildings. Urban Ice Core - Indoor Air Archive, 2003-2008 is a "fantasy archive" in which Gissen proposed to collect and store indoor air for future analysis. Gissen closed his presentation with an utterly fascinating anecdote about his neighbour's parrot, and how it functioned as a mimetic device and imitated the ambient soundscape of the city - perhaps historians need to operate in a similar manner? Robert Miles Kemp of Variate Labs presented a stellar body of work that blurred the lines between interface design, robotics and architecture. Kemp highlighted the impending fusion of physical and informational systems and identified an interest in thinking of software as "artifact" rather than control and robots as "systems" rather than anthropomorphic entities. Kemp showed a flurry of interfaces, dashboards and a homebrew multitouch display but what struck me the most was his 2006 thesis project Meta-morphic Architecture which proposed not just parametric design, but parametric space. Kemp maintains a research blog Spatial Robots - interactive systems fans take note. Next up was an overview of Polar Intertia, the self described "journal of nomadic and popular culture" as edited by Ted Kane. Los Angeles is an idiosyncratic city full of storefront churches, mobile taco trucks, cell towers masquerading as palm trees and the like. Rather than homogenize discourse about the city (and urbanism in general) Kane parses the logic of these networks and phenomena. He presented an exciting overview of the politics of RV parked residences in Santa Monica and Venice and detailed how local legislation was creating a migrant population within these municipalities. Kane's journal looks quite exciting and I look forward to digging into it further. The final presentation on Tuesday was Stephanie Smith of Ecoshack. Smith presented Wanna Start a Commune? which, by my reading, applies a veneer of revolutionary thinking and social activism from the 1960s (she identified The Diggers as a key influence) on top of a generic technology startup. The project aspires to monetize the toolkit required for microcommunity building, but I couldn't get past Smith's marketing rhetoric and ascertain a tangible position on what community was, let alone any kind of political stance. I wasn't at all surprised to learn she studied under Rem Koolhaas but her take on the intersection of capital, space and utopia seemed more crass than nuanced. Stay tuned for my notes on the second half of Postpolis! LA. I'm also planning to provide some commentary on the organization and context of the event in relation to online media.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Interaction design
at
15:54
Defined tags for this entry: architects, architecture, artificial reality, climate, conditioning, fabric | ch, globalization, interaction design, monitoring, publications, publications-fbrc, talks-fbrc, variable, weather
Thursday, January 29. 2009Review: The KML HandbookNear the end of last year, the new book "The KML Handbook: Geographic Visualization for the Web" by Josie Wernecke was published. Josie is a Google documentation specialist who works for the Google Earth team. During the holidays, I received a copy of "The KML Handbook" for review. Click on the book image for more details on the book including prices at Amazon. The book has a foreword by Michael T. Jones, Chief Technology Advocate for Google. Most long-time Google Earth folks know Michael has long been the chief advocate of Google Earth and was in fact a big part of the original team that created it. In the forward, Michael makes an excellent case that KML, as a way for annotating the world, can be used to change the world. And, in fact, through Google Earth, KML already has helped change the world. Since this is a technical book about a standardized language similar to HTML, you might expect a lot of dry technical jargon with lots of coding examples. But, this book is nicely illustrated with many Google Earth color screenshots throughout the book. And, the illustrations aren't simple examples of basic KML functions. They illustrate many popular KML files by developers around the world which in most cases have appeared here at GEB. Examples like Valery's paleo-geographic animation, James' London Eye with shadows, and even Stefan Geens gets some KML photo examples in there. For KML developers, or those who want to learn the language, this book is an easy read and well organized. It provides enough detail to get you started, and enough of an overview to expand your awareness of the many possible applications of KML. And, with many useful examples and colorful illustrations, the book keeps you fully engaged. It serves its purpose as a handbook for KML, but for in-depth KML details you'll still want to use the online KML reference documentaiton. Josie helped prepare the complete online KML documentation which provides all the information you need about KML. But, for those who prefer the familiarity of a good book in their hands, or want to learn the subject while on a long trip or night time reading, you can't do much better than "The KML Handbook". I highly recommend this book if you're looking for the best available written material on KML. ----- Related Links:Personal comment:
Un livre technique qui documente le language standardisé KML (Google Earth & Sketchup). Je soulignerais en particulier cette phrase tirée du post de Frank Talor: "(...) In the forward, Michael makes an excellent case that KML, as a way for annotating the world, can be used to change the world. And, in fact, through Google Earth, KML already has helped change the world. (...)".
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology, Territory
at
09:25
Defined tags for this entry: books, geography, globalization, localized, mapping, science & technology, tagging, territory
Tuesday, January 27. 2009Les centres de données, de plus en plus gourmands en énergie
La chasse au "gaspi" dans les centres de données est ouverte. Ces immenses salles, appelées aussi "data centers", composées de multiples serveurs informatiques qui stockent les informations nécessaires aux activités des entreprises, sont devenues de véritables gouffres énergétiques. Selon une étude menée par des chercheurs européens dans le cadre du programme de l'Union européenne "Energie intelligente - Europe", les 7 millions de centres de données recensés dans les pays de l'Union européenne consommeraient, chaque année, 40 milliards de kilowattheures, soit l'équivalent de l'énergie utilisée annuellement par une grande agglomération française pour son éclairage public. Si rien n'est fait, cette consommation électrique pourrait, d'ici à 2011, augmenter de 110 % par rapport à 2006, estime l'enquête qui sera complétée au printemps par des études de cas en entreprises. "Dans les prochaines années, la croissance des nouveaux data centers sera faramineuse. Si on ne prend pas des mesures maintenant, on va dans le mur !" s'alarme Alain Anglade, chercheur au sein de l'Agence de l'environnement et de la maîtrise de l'énergie (Ademe) et membre de l'équipe de chercheurs. Encore modeste à l'échelle de l'Hexagone, l'énergie utilisée par les centres de données (4 à 6 milliards de kilowattheures) représente 1 % de la consommation d'électricité du pays. Un pourcentage appelé à croître rapidement en raison de la diffusion rapide des nouvelles technologies informatiques. Les banques, par exemple, soumises à des réglementations croissantes en termes de stockage et traitements de leurs données informatiques, sont déjà contraintes d'agrandir leurs centres de données. Le gouvernement français a saisi l'occasion du plan France numérique 2012, lancé en octobre 2008, par le secrétariat d'Etat au développement de l'économie numérique pour créer un observatoire des centres de données. A horizon de dix-huit mois environ, il permettra aux entreprises de se comparer entre elles et de les aider à prendre des mesures pour qu'elles diminuent la consommation énergétique de leurs machines, explique en substance Alain Anglade, un des responsables du projet pour qui "les entreprises sont déjà sensibilisées car ce gaspillage commence à leur coûter beaucoup d'argent". Cette mise en commun devrait également permettre aux entreprises d'anticiper sur la création de nouvelles normes environnementales plus contraignantes au niveau européen. Parallèlement, le ministère de l'économie et des finances vient de lancer un groupe de réflexion. Baptisé "Green ITW" et dirigé par Michel Petit, membre de l'Académie des sciences, il doit proposer, d'ici à mai, des solutions pour une "utilisation éco-responsable" des centres de données. En clair, comment faire des économies d'énergie sans pénaliser les entreprises dans l'utilisation de leurs outils informatiques. Selon l'étude européenne déjà citée, près de 12 milliards d'euros pourraient être économisés grâce à de nouveaux équipements moins gourmands en électricité et des techniques plus efficaces de ventilation des salles. L'Allemagne a, de son côté, déjà entrepris de lutter contre le gaspillage énergétique des "data centers". Depuis l'été dernier, un guide est à disposition des entreprises pour leur faire prendre conscience du problème et les pousser à investir dans des équipements plus efficaces. Bien décidé à montrer l'exemple, le ministère fédéral de l'environnement a annoncé en novembre 2008 avoir baissé la consommation d'électricité de ses propres serveurs de 60 %, soit une économie de CO2 de 44 tonnes. Particulièrement concernés, les géants de l'informatique cherchent eux aussi déjà à réduire la facture énergétique de leurs data centers devenus gigantesques pour stocker e-mails, vidéos et autres documents disponibles en un seul clic. Récemment, Google, Yahoo ! ou encore Microsoft ont installé certains de leurs sites informatiques sur les bords de grands cours d'eau américains. Ils souhaitent pouvoir refroidir plus facilement leurs machines et utiliser les centrales hydrauliques proches pouvant leur fournir de l'électricité moins chère. Jouant la carte du développement durable, Google affirme avoir investi 45 millions de dollars dans les énergies renouvelables. Le mastodonte américain a même déposé un brevet pour pouvoir installer des centres informatiques alimentés par l'énergie des vagues et refroidis par l'eau de mer sur des plates-formes flottantes.
Lilian Alemagna
En Grande-Bretagne, facture chargée pour super-ordinateur 14 400 tonnes par an. C'est la quantité de CO2 produite par le futur super-ordinateur de l'office météorologique britannique (Met Office) censé aider à lutter contre le réchauffement climatique. Achetée 33 millions de livres (36,3 millions d'euros), cette machine produira autant de CO2 que 2 400 personnes en une année. "Nos super-ordinateurs actuels produisent déjà 10 000 tonnes de CO2 chaque année, mais cela n'est qu'une partie des émissions de carbone économisées grâce à notre travail", s'est défendu Alan Dickinson, un des responsables du Met Office, au quotidien britannique The Times. Le nouvel équipement doit permettre d'améliorer les prévisions météorologiques. Les données permettront ensuite de mieux connaître l'impact des gaz à effet de serre sur l'environnement. ----- Via Le Monde Related Links:Personal comment:
Le débat soulevé ici par le super-ordinateur de l'office météorologique britannique (Met Office) et destiné à lutter contre le réchauffement climatique est intéressant: il produit une quantité non négligeable de CO2, mais combien permet-il d'en économiser?
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology, Sustainability
at
17:48
Defined tags for this entry: climate, data, energy, function, globalization, science & technology, sustainability
Wednesday, January 21. 2009Crowd-Sourcing the WorldA startup hopes to tap into the expertise of developing nations via cell phones.
By Kate Greene
Now Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, is launching a project similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk but that distributes tasks via cell phones. The goal of his project, called txteagle, is to leverage an underused work force in some of the poorest parts of the world. Eagle says that distributing questions to participants in such developing countries via text messages or audio clips could make certain tasks more economical, such as the translation of documents into other languages, or rating the local relevance of search results. It could also provide a welcome source of income for those involved. "We're trying to . . . tap into a group of people to complete these tasks who haven't been tapped before," says Eagle. "And we're using mobile phones, which have a high penetration rate. More people are mobile-phone subscribers in developing countries than in the developing world, so we can get a user base of billions of people." The Finnish cell-phone company Nokia is a partner in the project, and Eagle says that it provides a good example of a Western company that could benefit from txteagle workers. Eagle explains that Nokia is interested in "software localization," or translating its software for specific regions of a country. "In Kenya, there are over 60 unique, fundamentally different languages," he says. "You're lucky to get a phone with a Swahili interface, but even that might be somebody's third language. Nokia would love to have phones for everyone's mother tongues, but it has no idea how to translate words like 'address book' into all of these languages." Another application is the transcription of audio recordings: a user would listen to a short clip, write it down by hand, and then copy it into an SMS reply. Eagle's studies have shown that this task can be completed in less than two minutes, and he believes that a proficient user could earn about $3 an hour doing the work, which would be 60 percent cheaper than today's transcription rates. Users would be paid either in credit to their mobile accounts or in cash, as facilitated by a service called mPesa, which allows people to send and receive currency via cell phones and use their phones to claim money at mPesa agents and post offices, says Eagle. One technical issue that he has considered is quality control. Eagle says that he and his colleagues are developing machine-learning algorithms that can determine the accuracy of different workers' responses. Essentially, identical tasks are off-loaded to a number of workers, and if a high percentage of those come back with a particular response, then it can be assumed to be the most accurate, within a certain level of statistical confidence. Also, if a person consistently responds correctly, then the system deems her more trustworthy, providing her with more tasks, and allowing her to make more money. But Eagle admits that there are still some kinks in the system that need to be ironed out, especially for the translation and transcription tasks, whose accuracy can be somewhat subjective. Txteagle will use a reputation system similar to one developed by a San Francisco startup called Dolores Labs that works with Amazon's Mechanical Turk. CEO Lukas Biewald says that such a system is a powerful tool for txteagle. "You don't have to make assumptions about who can do your work and who can't," he says. "It allows you to take much more risk with the people doing the job," without sacrificing overall accuracy. Sharon Chiarella, vice president of Amazon's Mechanical Turk project, says that bringing crowd sourcing to developing nations could be a good idea. "One of the things that's powerful about this space is the promise of leveraging a worldwide workforce," she says. But Chiarella adds that there will be some limitations. The most widely available cell phones, for instance, are generally only able to send and receive text and voice messages. This makes crowd sourcing more complex tasks, such as tagging images, impossible. "The cell-phone screen size somewhat limits the tasks that can be viable via the phone," she says. "But I think that as cell phones continue to evolve, some of those issues will go away." Eagle agrees but says that his goal is to start small and see if the model works well enough to expand. He hopes to receive grant money that will allow txteagle to roll out the service in Rwanda, Kenya, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic within the next year. Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Related Links:Personal comment:
Il y a un nouveau modèle de fonctionnement derrière, à la fois, le "cloud computing" et le "crowdsourcing" (un outsourcing global et redistribué vers potentiellement chaque personne intéressée) qui serait inspiré par le côté participatif qu'on amené les réseaux sociaux. Wednesday, January 07. 2009Harnessing the Energy from the Earth’s Rotation
[The Rotation of the Earth via Creative Commons.] New advances in tidal power hint at the massive amount of rotational energy located within the earth. As early as the 1970s, the Soviet Union was exploring methods to harness this rotational energy directly. The prominence of the current energy crisis has sparked new research by physicists to test the ability to tap into this resource. The amount of energy in the earth is vast - the kinetic energy of rotation alone is 2.137 x 1029 Joules. Channeling this energy would require a slowing in the rotational force of the earth. This process is continually transpiring due to frictional losses from ocean tides and tidal power. Assuming we harnessed a fraction of the earth’s rotational energy, increasing the length of a day by a mere one second, it would consistently yield 2.5848 x 1024 Joules (approximate and assumes losses to friction) of energy. According to the Energy Information Administration’s 2006 statistics, the total American energy usage (comprising of residential, commercial and industrial) is 1.0989 x 1018 Joules per month, a fraction of the energy available in the earth’s rotation. Although these numbers are approximate, most physicists agree that the amount of rotational energy is vast if we can manage a way to harness it. [An equation of Ingredients for Energy Production: rotation and a mega-gyroscope.] In most energy production, one form of energy is converted to another via gears, pulleys, magnets, etc. If we consider the earth’s rotation as a form of energy, to harness it, we would need to create a ring of resistance that would covert this to electricity. Gyroscopes are privileged devices in this manner because they maintain their orientation in space. According to Physicist, C Johnson, if one could build a massive ferris-wheel type gyroscope on the North Pole, there would theoretically be a potential to harness this energy. The gyroscope would initially be started with a motor and once in motion, it would spin endlessly. Further, the gyroscope would have to be fixed to the earth – the difference between the earth’s rotation and the gyroscope would create a torque, or moment force as Johnson posits, “The Earth’s rotation would externally directly drive the gear train, using the gyroscope simply as a fixed object to push against.” Johnson’s research builds on twenty years of experiments carried out by the Soviet Union during the 1970s. The Soviet experiments were not successful because they were incurring dramatic energy loss through a system of gears that ‘speed up’ the motion of the earth. Although, Johnson’s research has fewer losses (he calculates a constant production of 587 watts), there is still a long way to go before realizing his device. There are other nascent devices that operate on similar principles but a great deal of research needs to occur due to large frictional losses and the mega scale of the mechanisms involved. Although not technically a renewal resource of energy, the amount of kinetic energy in the earth’s rotation is abundant and would last for thousands of years. Further, it would create no pollution, greenhouse gases or deplete natural resources. It would, however, make the days and nights longer, but that doesn’t seem to be too large of a trade-off. [Satellite image of the North Pole revealing NW Passage. The next site for a mega-energy project?] ----- Via InfraNet Lab Personal comment:
Cela me parait intéressant de constater à quel point la recherche de solutions durables au niveau de l'énergie libère une certaine quantité d'imagination... On constate aussi qu'il y a des façons assez délirantes d'aller chercher de l'énergie, par exemple ici de rallonger les journées d'une seconde! Une énergie "ex-dimensionnelle" où l'on modifierait l'échelle du temps (rallonger les journées)?
Tuesday, December 16. 2008Dubai Reveals Plans for a Universe of IslandsIf we ever harbored the sentiment that Dubai’s dubious construction blitz would slow in times of economic unrest, the astronomical scale of the UAE’s latest project will surely dispel these qualms. Dubai’s largest developer, Nakheel, recently revealed plans for an entire archipelago of universe-themed islands at a $20 million dollar opening party for the Atlantis Resort. The cosmic string of strands will feature a sun, stars, and planets, and will be situated inshore of the already constructed World Islands. As if Dubai needed to further justify its status as an out-of-this-world tourist destination, the emirate has decided to step things up by constructing a universe-themed chain of islands. The Universe will comprise 3,000 hectares of land and will take 15 to 20 years to build. Curiously, the astronomical project was launched as part of Nakheel’s recently debuted Blue Communities initiative. The program promises cleaner water, less pollution, and claims that developments like the universe are designed to help maintain and protect the world’s coastlines. Dubai has already drawn a considerable amount of ire for its supermassive “green” projects that boast a questionable degree of sustainable credibility. Although man-made seawalls can certainly play an important role in preserving coastal ecology, it’s hard for us to justify a swirling archipelago of amoeba-shaped islands as the most efficient way to protect the world’s coastlines. Additionally, the techniques used in the construction ----- Via Inhabitat Related Links:Personal comment: Peut-être qu'après avoir inventé le palmier (l'île), puis le monde (les îles) et maintenant l'univers (toujours les îles), Nakheel (la compagnie) et la vilel de Dubai finiront-t-elles par inventer le trou (de l'or) noir et y être définitivement aspirée ...
Posted by Patrick Keller
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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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