Friday, June 27. 2014Bracket [takes action] | #interactions
Note: Bracket just announced the line up for the 4th edition of the "bookazine". This time, BRACKET [takes action]!
Via Bracket -----
After reviewing over 170 exciting entries, the jury has selected the projects and articles posted on the Bracket website for [Takes Action]. To view the selected entries, click here. All of the entries made for a great discussion and difficult decision for the jury. Many thanks to everyone who participated in the Bracket [Takes Action] Call for Entries and our jury: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Adam Greenfield, Belinda Tato, and Yoshiharu Tskuamoto. Lastly, a special thanks to Archinect for handling the web interface and creating our new website (which also went live today). We will be in touch with the selected contributors shortly regarding the next phase of the submission. — Neeraj Bhatia & Mason White, Bracket [Takes Action] Editors
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Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society, Interaction design, Territory
at
09:23
Defined tags for this entry: activism, architecture, books, culture & society, interaction design, research, speculation, territory, thinking
Wednesday, June 25. 2014Satellites Are Now Cleared to Take Photos at Mailbox-Level Detail | #monitoring
Via Gizmodo -----
The Department of Commerce just lifted a ban on satellite images that showed features smaller than 20 inches. The nation's largest satellite imaging firm, Digital Globe, asked the government to lift the restrictions and can now sell images showing details as small as a foot. A few inches may seem slight, but this is actually a big deal.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
14:58
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, geography, monitoring, photography, science & technology, surveillance, territory
Experiments in Second Life Reveal Alternative Laws of Physics | #artificial
Note: remember Second Life? Well, here it comes again (as Linden Lab just announced an "Oculus Rift-able" version for 2016), interestingly in this case (below), twisted by Renato dos Santos for educational purposes. ... Somehow, this way of playing around laws of physics makes me think a little bit to what we learned back in the late 90ies when fabric | ch played a lot with shared digital worlds (projects like La_Fabrique, or MIX-m. Home made technologies like Rhizoreality): the fact that indeed, the laws of physics could be scripted or at least customized, like in games. Or the fact that two "persons" (their avatars) could share the same space, "talk" to each other through mediated means, but not see and inhabit the same environment, the fact that things could therefore have several states at the same time (quantum reality?), etc. We certainly learned within digital worlds what drived conceptual appoaches for later projects "in real life", like RealRoom(s), Tower of Atmospheric Realtion(s), Perpetual Tropical Sunshine, etc. Even very recently, a work like Deterritorialized Living is related to that -- DL is about the creation of an artificial troposphere, driven by different rules than a natural one, yet inhabitable too.
----- The ability to modify the laws of physics in the virtual world of Second Life is allowing researchers to experiment with entirely different laws of motion.
Second Life is an online world in which people use avatars to explore and interact with each other and to build more or less anything based on simple geometric shapes. These objects are governed by a set of roughly Earth-like laws of physics that simulate conservation of momentum, gravity, and elasticity in collisions and so on. But Second Life also has a scripting language that allows residents to introduce additional effects. It allows them to buy and sell objects using virtual money, to create textures for clothing as well as animations. And it allows the behavior of objects to be modified in various ways. In other words, in Second Life, the laws of physics are up for grabs. And that raises an interesting prospect. This scripting language allows people to simulate universes in which matter is governed in an entirely different way. Today, Renato dos Santos at the Lutheran University of Brazil in Canoas reveals his efforts to tamper with the laws of physics in Second Life and how his microworlds allow students to study and experience laws of motion that are entirely different from the ones that work in our universe. To begin with, Dos Santos characterizes the properties of matter and the laws of physics that are already at work in Second Life. He points out that the world has some relatively complex laws to govern the weather and the rising and setting of the Sun. “The Second Life ‘Sun’ usually rises and sets each four Earth hours always directly opposite a full Moon,” he says. And the servers compute a simplified solution of the Navier-Stokes equations to simulate the motion of winds and clouds that time-evolve across the entire world. On the other hand, there are no fluids in Second Life. “Water is a mere texture applicable to an object,” he says. Consequently, there is no water resistance or air resistance and no concept of buoyancy. What’s more, light simply exists in Second Life without any physical mechanism involved in its production or propagation. All these factors and others have to be taken into account when designing a microworld in Second Life. Nevertheless, Dos Santos has been able to create a number of interesting simulations. A good example is his simulation of a cannon firing cannonballs to study their trajectory. One of the first challenges is to use the Second Life scripting language to introduce a set of initial conditions for the cannonballs—their initial velocity and position, for example. Having done this, it is possible to calculate their position and velocity at any point during their flight. It is also simple matter to calculate their kinetic energy and momentum. Once fired, these cannonballs do not travel in a straight line, however. Instead, gravity pulls them towards the ground and wind can push them off course. Dos Santos says it is possible to build rules into the scripting language that counteract these forces. That’s what makes possible an entirely different set of laws of motion. To demonstrate this, Dos Santos has created two different sets of laws that can be put into operation with the push of a button. The first is Newton’s traditional laws of motion, which lead to the familiar parabolic trajectories. The second set of laws are based on the theory of impetus that was popularized by Jean Buridan, a French priest and medieval scientist active during the 14th century. This theory was an important intellectual precursor to the more modern concepts of momentum and acceleration. Buridan’s ideas were an extension of Aristotle’s theory that “continuation of motion depends on continued action of the force.” Buridan extended this by introducing a property called impetus which he formally defined as weight multiplied by velocity. One of Buridan’s students described impetus in this way: “When something moves a stone by violence, in addition to imposing on it an actual force, it impresses in it a certain impetus. In the same way gravity not only gives motion itself to a moving body, but also gives it a motive power and an impetus …” Buridan’s mathematical formula for impetus allows it to be incorporated into a Second Life simulation, which is exactly what Dos Santos has done. This allows students to experiment with different laws and see their effects. Interestingly, Buridan’s laws result in a cannonball trajectory that is a little like that of a golf ball which travels on an upwards inclination and then suddenly drops due to air resistance. You can watch videos of these experiments here. That’s an interesting approach that has useful potential applications in education. But there is surely much more that can be done in virtual worlds like Second Life. One interesting question is how to devise experiments within the virtual world that tests the particular laws of physics in action and the situations in which they break down. For example, the concept of time might be investigated using experiments involving simultaneity. It might even reveal loopholes that can be exploited for a bit of fun. An approach like that would require significantly more ingenuity and would simulate more accurately the work of physicists in the real world who do not know the laws in advance and have only their observations to guide them. This kind of approach has been tested in virtual worlds such as Minecraft but there is clearly scope for the same approach to be applied elsewhere. The laws of virtual physics are there for the taking, should anyone have the ingenuity and the spare time to pursue them.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1405.6703 : Second Life As A Platform For Physics Simulations And Microworlds: An Evaluation
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology, Territory
at
13:00
Defined tags for this entry: 3d, artificial reality, science & technology, speculation, teaching, territory
Monday, May 19. 2014The internet will have almost 3 billion users by the end of the year, UN report says | #infrastructure #globalVia The Verge (via Computed·Blg) -----
The internet will have nearly 3 billion users, about 40 percent of the world's population, by the end of 2014, according to a new report from the United Nations International Telecommunications Union. Two-thirds of those users will be in developing countries. Those numbers refer to people who have used the internet in the last three months, not just those who have access to it. Internet penetration is reaching saturation in developed countries, while it's growing rapidly in developing countries. Three out of four people in Europe will be using the internet by the end of the year, compared to two out of three in the Americas and one in three in Asia and the Pacific. In Africa, nearly one in five people will be online by the end of the year. Mobile phone subscriptions will reach almost 7 billion. That growth rate is slowing, suggesting that the number will plateau soon. Mobile internet subscriptions are still growing rapidly, however, and are expected to reach 2.3 billion by the end of 2014. These numbers make it easy to imagine a future in which every human on Earth is using the internet. The number of people online will still be dwarfed by the number of things, however. Cisco estimates the internet already has 10 billion connected devices and is expected to hit 50 billion by 2020.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology, Territory
at
10:13
Defined tags for this entry: communication, culture & society, globalization, infrastructure, media, science & technology, tele-, territory
Internet machine | #infrastructure #documentary
At the time we (fabric | ch) are starting a new research project in collaboration with Nicolas Nova and other partners for ECAL and Head (research project entitled at this time "Interfacing & Inhabiting the Cloud(s)") and after visiting some facilities, this documentary by Timo Arnall comes exactly at the right moment!
Via Elasticspace (Timo Arnall) -----
Internet machine is a multi-screen film about the invisible infrastructures of the internet. The film reveals the hidden materiality of our data by exploring some of the machines through which ‘the cloud’ is transmitted and transformed. Installation: Digital projection, 3 x 16:10 screens, each 4.85m x 2.8m. Medium: Digital photography, photogrammetry and 3D animation.
Internet machine (showing now at Big Bang Data or watch the trailer) documents one of the largest, most secure and ‘fault-tolerant’ data-centres in the world, run by Telefonica in Alcalá, Spain. The film explores these hidden architectures with a wide, slowly moving camera. The subtle changes in perspective encourage contemplative reflection on the spaces where internet data and connectivity are being managed. In this film I wanted to look beyond the childish myth of ‘the cloud’, to investigate what the infrastructures of the internet actually look like. It felt important to be able to see and hear the energy that goes into powering these machines, and the associated systems for securing, cooling and maintaining them.
What we find, after being led through layers of identification and security far higher than any airport, are deafeningly noisy rooms cocooning racks of servers and routers. In these spaces you are buffeted by hot and cold air that blusters through everything.
Server rooms are kept cool through quiet, airy ‘plenary’ corridors that divide the overall space. There are fibre optic connections routed through multiple, redundant, paths across the building. In the labyrinthine corridors of the basement, these cables connect to the wider internet through holes in rough concrete walls.
Power is supplied not only through the mains, but backed up with warm caverns of lead batteries, managed by gently buzzing cabinets of relays and switches.
These are backed up in turn by rows of yellow generators, supplied by diesel storage tanks and contracts with fuel supply companies so that the data centre can run indefinitely until power returns.
The outside of the building is a facade of enormous stainless steel water tanks, containing tens of thousands of litres of cool water, sitting there in case of fire.
And up on the roof, to the sound of birdsong, is a football-pitch sized array of shiny aluminium ‘chillers’ that filter and cool the air going into the building.
In experiencing these machines at work, we start to understand that the internet is not a weightless, immaterial, invisible cloud, and instead to appreciate it as a very distinct physical, architectural and material system.
Production
This was a particularly exciting project, a chance for an ambitious and experimental location shoot in a complex environment. Telefónica were particularly accommodating and allowed unprecedented access to shoot across the entire building, not just in the ‘spectacular’ server rooms. Thirty two locations were shot inside the data centre over the course of two days, followed by five weeks of post-production.
I had to invent some new production methods to create a three-screen installation, based on some techniques I developed over ten years ago. The film was shot using both video and stills, using a panoramic head and a Canon 5D mkIII. The video was shot using the Magic Lantern RAW module on the 5D, while the RAW stills were processed in Lightroom and stitched together using Photoshop and Hugin.
The footage was then converted into 3D scenes using camera calibration techniques, so that entirely new camera movements could be created with a virtual three-camera rig. The final multi-screen installation is played out in 4K projected across three screens. There are more photos available at Flickr. - Internet machine is part of BIG BANG DATA, open from 9 May 2014 until 26 October 2014 at CCCB (Barcelona) and from February-May 2015 at Fundación Telefónica (Madrid). Internet Machine is produced by Timo Arnall, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona – CCCB, and Fundación Telefónica. Thanks to José Luis de Vicente, Olga Subiros, Cira Pérez and María Paula Baylac.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society, Interaction design, Science & technology, Territory
at
09:50
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, culture & society, data, infrastructure, interaction design, media, science & technology, territory
Wednesday, May 07. 2014Vanishing Ice | #photo #bookMonday, May 05. 2014Swarm of drones | #cloudThursday, April 17. 2014Air pollution now the world’s biggest environmental health risk with 7 million deaths per year | #air #health
Following last month catastrophic measures in Paris. Not a funny information, yet good to know. Air quality will undoubtedly become a very big (geo)political issue in the coming years, certainly an engineering one too.
Via Treehugger -----
CC BY-ND 2.0 Flickr
The World Health Organization (WHO) released a report last year showing that air pollution killed more people than AIDS and malaria combined. It was based on 2010 figures, which were the latest available at the time. There's now a new study which looked at 2012 data, and it seems like things are even worse than we first believed. “The risks from air pollution are now far greater than previously thought or understood, particularly for heart disease and strokes,” says Dr Maria Neira, Director of WHO’s Department for Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health. “Few risks have a greater impact on global health today than air pollution; the evidence signals the need for concerted action to clean up the air we all breathe.” The WHO found that outdoor air pollution was linked to an estimated 3.7 million deaths in 2012 from urban and rural sources worldwide, and indoor air pollution, mostly caused by cooking (!) on inefficient coal and biomass stoves was linked to 4.3 million deaths in 2012. Because many people are exposed to both indoor and outdoor air pollution, there is overlap in these two numbers, but the WHO estimates that the total number of victims from air pollution in 2012 was around 7 million, which is tragic since it would take relatively little in many of those cases to save livesFlickr/CC BY-SA 2.0 And it's not really a question of money, since the health costs and lost productivity caused by air pollution are higher in the long-term...
Here's how the health impacts break down for both indoor and outdoor air pollution: Outdoor air pollution-caused deaths – breakdown by disease:
Indoor air pollution-caused deaths – breakdown by disease:
There are lots of big obvious things we can do, such as replace inefficient and pollution small stoves in poorer countries with better stoves or even better, electric cooking. Many countries, like China, could also do a lot to cut pollution at their coal plants and over time phase out coal (which isn't just a problem for air pollution, but also for water and ground pollution and global warming). There are all these low-hanging fruits that would make a huge difference. To see how dramatic the improvement could be, just look at these photos showing how bad the situation was in the US not so long ago (China is just repeating what has gone on elsewhere...). One thing we can do to help: plant more trees! Recent studies show that they are even better at filtering the air in urban areas than we previously thought.
© Michael Graham Richard
Related on TreeHugger.com:
Tuesday, March 18. 2014Airships and atmosphere | #airship #satellite
-----
Airships can patrol the upper atmosphere, monitoring the ground or peering at the stars for a fraction of a cost of satellites, according to a new report. All that’s needed is a prize to kick-start innovation.
The Naval Air Engineering Station in Lakehurst New Jersey must be one of the most famous airfields in the world. If you’ve ever watched the extraordinary footage of the German passenger airship Hindenburg catching fire as it attempted to moor, you’ll have seen Lakehurst. That’s where the disaster took place. Despite its notorious past, Lakehurst is still a center of airship engineering and technology. In 2012, it was home to the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, an airship designed and built for the U.S. military to use for surveillance purposes over Afghanistan. The vehicle is colossal—91 meters long, 34 meters wide, and 26 meters high, about the size of a 30 story office block lying on its side. And it is designed to fly uncrewed at about 10 kilometers for up to three weeks at a time. (Last year, the program was canceled and the airship sold back to the British contractor that built it, which now intends to fly it commercially.) This ambitious program and a few others like it mostly funded by the U.S. military, have attracted some jealous glances from scientists. The ability to fly at 20 kilometers or more for extended periods of time could be hugely useful. Fitted with cameras that scan the ground, sensors that monitor the atmosphere or telescopes that point to the stars, these observatories could revolutionize the kind of data researchers are able to gather about the universe. Today, Sarah Miller and few pals have prepared a report for the Keck Institute of Space Studies in Pasadena suggesting that scientists have unnecessarily ignored the advantages of airships and that the time is right for a new era of science based on this capability. The problem, of course, is that airships capable of these missions have not yet been built. Most of the well-funded development has come from the military for long duration surveillance missions. But with the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the downsizing of the U.S. military machine, this funding has dried up. But Miller and co have a suggestion. They say that innovation in this area could be stimulated by setting up a prize for the development of a next-generation airship, just as the X-Prize stimulated interest in reusable rocket flights. The goal, they say, should be to build a maneuverable, stationed-keeping airship that can stay aloft at an altitude of more than 20 km from least 20 hours while carrying a science payload of a least 20 kg. That’s a significant challenge. One problem will be carrying or generating the power required to propel the airship. This increases with the cube of its airspeed and so will be the biggest drain on the vehicle’s resources. Another challenge is to handle the thermal loads at this altitude, where temperatures can vary by as much as 50 °C and where there is little air to carry heat away. But none of these problems look like showstoppers. Given the right kind of incentives, it should be possible to put one of these things in the air in the very near future, perhaps based on the technology developed for vehicles like the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle. All that’s needed is a sponsor willing to cough up a few million dollars for a prize. Anybody with a few bucks to spare?
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1402.6706 : AIRSHIPS : A New Horizon for Science.
Related Links:Personal comment:
In regard of the now necessary needs to monitor our man transformed atmosphere... (and not only to have universal Internet access provided by private companies), a fully artificial need, the creation of such blimp-drones would be interesting. Yet I totally disagree with the fact that this should be a private initiative. It is capital to my understanding that it remains public, in the hands of the public and driven by public technology (including the monitored data). Monday, March 17. 2014Air public | #atmosphere #health #public
Via Le Monde, via Philippe Rahm Architectes ----- Par Philippe Rahm
A quelques semaines des élections municipales, il n'a jamais fait aussi beau à Paris. Le soleil brille, il fait chaud et pourtant on nous déconseille de sortir dehors à cause de la pollution de l'air qui atteint des sommets. Mauvaise nouvelle pourdéjeuner en terrasse. C'est assez paradoxal, ce beau temps qui ne l'est en réalité pas. Cela ne va pas de soi et il nous faudra réviser à l'avenir nos critère du beau et du laid, ne plus se fier au perceptible, au soleil, à la température et au ciel bleu, mais plutôt à l'invisible et se dire le matin qu'il fait beau seulement quand le bulletin météo annoncera pour la journée un taux bas de particules fines dans l'air.
Le nuage de pollution à Paris, jeudi 13 mars. | AP/Christophe Ena
Mais si le bulletin météo classique nous informait de l'état du ciel selon des forces naturelles qui nous dépassaient et contre lequel on ne pouvait choisir que de prendre ou pas son parapluie, le problème de la pollution des villes est une conséquence des activités humaines. Et parce qu'il nous concerne tous, parce qu'il définit la réalité chimique de nos rues et de nos places, parce qu'il menace notre santé, il est éminemment politique. J'affirmerai même qu'il est la raison d'être fondamentale du politique: celle de nous assurer à tous une bonne santé. Le politique est né de la gestion sanitaire de la ville et de la définition de ses valeurs publics que l'on retrouve inscrit aujourd'hui dans les règlements et les plans d'urbanisme: avoir de la lumière naturelle dans toutes les chambres, boire de l'eau potable, évacuer et traiter les déchets et les excréments. En-dessous de son interprétation culturelle, l'Histoire de l'urbanisme et du politique est finalement celle d'une conquête physiologique, pour les villes, pour les hommes, du bien-être, du confort, de la bonne santé. Et respirer un air sain en ville ? Ne pourrait-on pas penser que c'est finalement cela que l'on demande aujourd'hui au politique ? La demande n'est pas neuve. Au début du XIXe siècle, Rambuteau, préfet de Paris, avait tracé la rue du même nom au coeur du Marais pour faire circuler l'air pour éviter le confinement des germes. Dans sa suite, le préfet Haussmann traçait les boulevards dans un même soucis d'hygiène, y plantait des arbres pour les tempérer, créaient des parcs (les Buttes-Chaumont, le bois de Boulogne, etc.) comme Olmsted avec Central Park à New-York, conçues à la manière de poumons verts pour rafraîchir la ville en été, absorber les poussières et la pollution, améliorer la qualité de l'air, parce qu'à l'époque, on mourrait réellement de tuberculoses et des autres maladies bactériennes dans les villes. Mais toutes ces mesures sanitaires ont perdu leur légitimité avec la découverte de la pénicilline et la diffusion des antibiotique à partir les années 1950. À quoi cela servait-il encore de raser les petites rues sans air et obscures du Moyen-Âge, de déplacer les habitations dans de vastes parcs de verdure si l'on pouvait chasser la maladie simplement avec un antibiotique à avaler deux fois par jour durant une semaine. Etait-ce vraiment raisonnable d'élargir les petites fenêtres des vieilles maisons en pierre, d'enlever les toits en pentes pour en faire des toits terrasses, si en réalité, on pouvait éviter la maladie avec un peu de pénicilline ? Si l'on a arrêté de démolir les vieux quartiers des villes européennes à partir des années 1970, si on a commencé à trouver du charme aux ruelles tortueuses et aux vieilles maisons étroites du Moyen-Âge, aux intérieurs sombres et humides des centres villes, si les prix des arrondissements historiques que tout le monde désertait jusqu'aux années 1970 ont commencé à grimper, si des mesures de protections du patrimoine ont été votées, si ces vielles pierres sont devenues des témoins de notre civilisation et un atout touristique et économique, si l'on est revenu habiter les vieux centres historiques, on le doit peut-être autant aux théories post-modernes de Bernard Huet, l'architecte des la place Stalingrad et des Champs-Elysées dans les années 1980, qu'à la découverte médicale des antibiotiques. Mais les antibiotiques ne peuvent rien contre la pollution aux particules fines d'aujourd'hui. Cela veut-il dire que nous allons assister au même phénomène que durant la première partie du XXe siècle, celle d'une désertion des centre-villes, d'une perte de valeur immobilière des quartiers centraux de Paris, au profit des banlieues et des campagnes où l'air n'est pas polluée ? La ville que l'on a réappris à aimer et à habiter à la fin du XXe siècle va t-elle retombée dans la désolation ? On peut tenter de croire, dans un monde globalisé, que la mission de la politique locale est aujourd'hui de réduire le chômage ou de diminuer les impôts. Mais plus profondément, le politique se doit aujourd'hui de reprendre en main sa mission fondamentale, celle d'assurer la qualité de nos biens publics, celle de nous offrir en ville, après l'eau et la lumière, un air de qualité, seule garantie pour la prospérité sociale et économique future.
Philippe Rahm construit en ce moment un parc de 70 hectares pour la ville de Taichung à Taiwan, livré en décembre 2015 qui propose d'atténuer la chaleur, l'humidité et la pollution de l'air par l'emploi du végétal et de technologies vertes.
Philippe Rahm (Architecte et enseignant aux Universités de Princeton et Harvard (Etats-Unis))
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Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society, Territory
at
08:48
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, atmosphere, culture & society, health, politics, public, territory, thinking, weather
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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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