The Muqarnas Dome of the Hall of the Two Sisters in the Alhambra...
shared on 29 January 2012 | 8:22 pm via: Howard Roark
The Muqarnas Dome of the Hall of the Two Sisters in the Alhambra in Granada
(via By abandoning fantasy for the more pragmatic aspects of...
shared on 23 January 2012 | 11:04 am via: Howard Roark
(via By abandoning fantasy for the more pragmatic aspects of building, the… - but does it float)
analogia:
Serlio, Dwelling for a King
shared on 21 January 2012 | 10:38 pm via: Howard Roark
Serlio, Dwelling for a King
"Consciousness is a wonderful thing, but it initially presents the world to us as if reality were..."
shared on 15 January 2012 | 5:10 pm via: Howard Roark
“Consciousness is a wonderful thing, but it initially presents the world to us as if reality were physically located in our heads. It takes training to see that consciousness is a story, and the natural world works independently from it.”
- from “My most disturbing finding” on Reading Nature’s Signals (via tinkerkid)
Nebelkammer 2 cloud chamber (by rigdrol)
shared on 13 January 2012 | 1:55 pm via: Howard Roark
Nebelkammer 2 cloud chamber (by rigdrol)
intothecontinuum:
Here is something to think about that was...
shared on 13 January 2012 | 1:52 pm via: Howard Roark
Here is something to think about that was only casually mentioned in passing in the recent video that was posted.
The sunlight you may or may not have experienced today finally managed to reach you after a ~100,000 year long journey since it was originally created at the Sun’s core!
Since the speed of light is finite, about 300,000,000 meters/second (or about 671,000,000 miles/hour), it takes time for it to travel from one point in space to another.Given that the distance from Earth to the Sun is about 150,000,000,000 meters (about 93,000,000 miles) it takes about 8 minutes for light to reach us!
But this is just the time it takes light to reach us from the surface of the sun.
The light coming from the surface of the Sun is itself created as a by-product of nuclear fusion occurring deep in the Sun’s core.
Once light is created at at the Sun’s core it begins its journey to the surface of the Sun some 700,000,000 meters (430,000 miles) away from the core.
One might assume that this light takes the shortest path and heads straight to the surface, which would only take a couple seconds of travel time.
However, this is not the case because there is all kinds of star stuff that gets in the way.
An actual photon may only travel a mere fraction of a centimeter (anywhere between .01 and .3 centimeters depending on how close it is to the surface) before it makes a collision with other matter thereby diverting its path to some other random direction.
Photons continue moving in these seemingly random trajectories, bumping into other particles along the way, and don’t actually reach the surface until about 100,000 years later (give or take an order of magnitude)!
This kind of behavior characterizing the photons motion is modeled by something called a random walk, and is illustrated in a few different instances in the animations above.Random walks have widespread applications through out the sciences and mathematics. The idea of random walks are even used in some computer algorithms to allow for more efficient solutions to some problems.
One particular application of personal interest, and a rather abstract generalization of the idea, is the quantum random walk, in which the superposition principle of quantum mechanics is used to put the trajectory into a combination of multiple possible trajectories to assist quantum computers in solving problems. The workings of Grover’s search algorithm can be thought of in this way. This isn’t the only instance that relates quantum mechanics to the workings of the Sun (see here).
Anyway, next time you are out in the relentless light of the Sun you may wonder what was going on some 100,000 years ago when that light first originated in the Sun, or maybe even where you’ll be 100,000 years from now when the light being created in the Sun at this moment finally reaches Earth.
(GIFs created from this Java app)
architecture, straight from Bladerunner
mikasavela:
Kinda...
shared on 13 January 2012 | 1:31 pm via: Howard Roark
architecture, straight from Bladerunner
Kinda cyber.
purestform:
DesignatumMuhammad Hafiz
shared on 12 January 2012 | 12:23 pm via: Howard Roark
Designatum
Muhammad Hafiz
un:
victimeyes: biostructure
stint?
shared on 12 January 2012 | 12:17 pm via: Howard Roark
un:
victimeyes: biostructure
stint?
planetaryfolklore:
approachingsignificance: Neurons are...
shared on 11 January 2012 | 1:06 pm via: Howard Roark
approachingsignificance: Neurons are gorgeous. ITfill_blue (by neurollero)
scientificillustration:
tiffanyhoran:
freakyfauna:
Stereo...
shared on 10 January 2012 | 12:34 pm via: Howard Roark
Stereo Vision according to Rene Descartes.
(via singernotsong)
andscape shaped by the relationship between where water falls...
shared on 9 January 2012 | 6:01 pm via: Howard Roark
andscape shaped by the relationship between where water falls and where it’s consumed within the United States. It builds images to expose the reality that water is channeled, pumped, and siphoned to locations far from where it falls. Although the paths are imagined, Drawing Water is based on real data and it reveals a clear truth about water resources and use. Drawing Water plays a bit upon the 19th-centu (via Drawing Water :: David Wicks :: Works)
Cloud chamber photographs originally invented by Charles Thomas...
shared on 7 January 2012 | 6:27 pm via: Howard Roark
Cloud chamber photographs originally invented by Charles Thomas Wilson for studying cloud formation and optical phenomena in the moist air. Inspired by sightings of the Broken Spectre while working on the summit of Ben Nevis, Scottish Highlands, in 1894, The New Landscape in Art and Science, 1956, Gyorgy Kepes
Wc-ondernemers scoren met 2theloo - AMSTERDAM - PAROOL
shared on 7 January 2012 | 3:20 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
julienfoulatier:
Photography by Brian Oldham.
shared on 5 January 2012 | 2:40 pm via: Howard Roark
Photography by Brian Oldham.
right panel - High Frequency Trading Algorithms
shared on 19 December 2011 | 11:48 am via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
85 x 60 cm glass pane, silkscreened black
line drawings taken from Nanex, Crop Circle of the Day (suspicious behavior (aka algorithmic trading) on the financial markets on the millisecond level): www.nanex.net/FlashCrash/CCircleDay.html
middle panel - Geomatic Poem
shared on 19 December 2011 | 11:48 am via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
A Poem in Naskh (Arabic) Calligraphy from the face plate of a 13th Century Geomantic device.
www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_object...
The poem, i.e. device speaks to the user in the "I" form, as if the machine speaks... :
I am the possessor of eloquence and the silent speaker and through my speech [arise] desires and fears.
The judicious one hides his secret thoughts, but I disclose them, just as if hearts were created as my parts.*
I am the revealer of secrets; in me are marvels of wisdom and strange and hidden things.
But I have spread out the surface of my face out of humility, and have prepared it as a substitute for earth.
* The idea apparently being, just as if the device's internal parts were hearts – i.e., as if the tablet were a living and hence perceptive being.
left panel - Maps of Sight
shared on 19 December 2011 | 11:48 am via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
Maps of the eye staring at nothing. Drawn with reflecting a light-beam from the eye onto a photo-sensitive paper
From: Alfred L. Yarbus, Eye Movements and Vision, trans. Basil Haigh (New York: Plenum Press, 1967).
howardroark.nl/post/14451963154/maps-of-the-eye-staring-a...
overview-in-exhib
shared on 19 December 2011 | 1:04 am via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
triptych2-2
shared on 19 December 2011 | 1:04 am via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
yarbus1
shared on 19 December 2011 | 1:04 am via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
poem1-2
shared on 19 December 2011 | 1:03 am via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
algo1
shared on 19 December 2011 | 1:02 am via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
overview1
shared on 19 December 2011 | 1:01 am via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
glossary
shared on 19 December 2011 | 1:00 am via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
glossary-detail
shared on 19 December 2011 | 12:59 am via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
the californian ideology - the hypermedia research centre - University of Westminster
shared on 9 November 2011 | 10:01 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
Rick Poynor: A Dream World Made by Machines: Observers Room: Design Observer
shared on 9 November 2011 | 9:51 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
Anil Bawa-Cavia | Machines of Loving Grace
shared on 9 November 2011 | 9:50 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
De cybernetica als mythe en als Verlichting Een beschouwing over de documentaire All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - De Witte Raaf
shared on 9 November 2011 | 9:48 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music: Article
shared on 9 November 2011 | 9:33 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
Adam Curtis: The Rise of the Machines [printer-friendly] • The Register
shared on 9 November 2011 | 9:32 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
UnitPortables | Welcome
shared on 6 November 2011 | 5:04 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
super nice bags!
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Petition to Google: don't kill Google Reader
shared on 29 October 2011 | 10:38 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Shared by Annie
SHAREBOMB THIS SHIT
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In Which We Make Life Decisions Based On Media Archetypes
shared on 28 October 2011 | 4:55 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
The Dastardly and the Dopey
by SARAH HIRSCHMAN
Around the third day of architecture school, you realize things are not quite what you expected. Your friend's architect father, when he took you to lunch the previous spring, told you over matzoh ball soup and a grilled cheese not to become an architect if there was any way you could avoid it. You read the blogs and heard from the disgruntled parties. You worked with some of those disgruntled parties, even, but none of this flagged your faith. But here, at a desk, in a city you don't know, among people who seem already to have been to architecture school, it becomes clear that something is amiss, you did not see this coming. But you can't have been the only one…
The thing is that while architecture is really good at marketing itself, the campaign is not all that accurate. There remains a gaping trench between what people think architects do, what they are trained to do, and what actually goes on to get a building built. The discipline at large aimed to create an image of something unobjectionable — the witty well-shod culturephile in the room — and in the process created a bunch of bizarre spin-offs.
One of the things you do when you are in architecture school is you watch a ton of movies and TV shows. You have Hulu or Netflix or whatever playing in a background pane on your laptop, or on a totally separate laptop used exclusively for viewing video content, and you have company. You have a less disorienting way to mark the hours between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. than playing Animal Collective on hallucinatory repeat.
You fly through whole seasons of Caroline in the City and both the original and the recent Battlestars because the culture-producing machine just can’t keep up with the number of hours you are awake, and you are hungry to consume anything. Because while design is really exciting and interesting, the production of the drawings that communicate the intricacies of your design to everybody who does not inhabit your head can be very tedious.
That is why the lights were always on in the architecture building at whatever college you went to. There are people inside of it, all of the time. And so while you are browsing Hulu, if something even remotely related to architecture pops up, or better yet you just type in "architecture," you have guilt-free viewing running alongside you while you accidentally glue your fingers to the roof of a plexi model or live paint a plan into a fiction of order. The illusion that you might ingest an accurate depiction of your hard-won profession is moot at this point: you're just looking for some noise to keep you awake.
Why exactly does architecture put up such a cool front? Why is the lack of remuneration and control so seamlessly offset by a faith in fonts and rigor? How does it make a strange kind of sense that someone would want to pretend to be an architect?
Art VandelayI decided to become an architect for a bunch of reasons, but the one that got me here now, the one that got me from daydreaming to portfolio-making to all-nighter-doing, was that it seemed like a really cool thing to be. "I’m an architect!" I imagined myself declaring, and as architecture school wore on, that particular self-important declaration seemed that much more consequential. It deteriorated into a mantra that I was all but rocking myself to sleep repeating, imagining my nonchalant facebook update at the end of it all ("Architecture school? I did that.").
The thing is that architects are taught that they’re a bunch of different things, and you can select among the ones that most apply at any given moment, and there’s one that serves you very well at every stage in the game. There is Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, a character that really spoke to the (probably not-so) secret pretentions of my sixteen-year-old self. Who needs grassroots activism and community organizing when you know what is right and good and you have faith in your self? Who needs to form a consensus when the only opinion you need to know is your own?
H. Roark
Architects are people who direct things, the idea goes, people who are pulling strings behind the scenes to realize their plans, the point to which the great fanning out of places and spaces can be drawn back. The Architect in The Matrix wasn’t even an architect, he was a computer program and he is cold, calculating, risk managing, in control.
The number one usage of the word "architect" on the front page of the Times in all of the last decade was in this sense. "Architect of destruction," "architect of terror," even “architect of 9/11” all appear more frequently than just plain old “architect,” the person who draws up plans to build things. It is as though the image of the architect is more powerful than the architect herself.
But, of course, and this is a big 'of course’ because I was raised in a world of weekly self esteem workshops and throwing yarn-ball-warm-fuzzies to girls about whom I felt, on a good day, ambivalent, it comes as no surprise that the perception business is all just a question of quieting the rest of the world.
Sure, I don’t expect to make a ton of money, and that’s a particular type of blow, considering how much money it takes to first get the education and then maintain some kind of culturally engaged life, but who needs a pile of cash when you’ve got big ideas, when you’re in control? And that’s where the other axis comes in – the dopes.
Marshall Darling with awesome completed building
Marshall Darling is a great example of this because his sincerity and earnestness dovetail nicely with a pitiable sensitivity to what’s going on in his own house. Frequently surprised, he’s a loopy benevolent presence in the life of Clarissa as she Explains it All. He actually gets distinction because it's his weird creative permissiveness that allows Clarissa to have the life all Nickelodeon subscribers circa 1992 wanted.
it's not really that complicated
There is that Steve Martin character in It’s Complicated, a pathetic shmo who is interesting and cultured, but somehow just won’t ever be as dangerous or exciting as the Alec Baldwin jerk. He’s safe, he’s expected, he respects and listens to his client and perpetually verklemt love interest, but he just can’t take the heat, and so the fire goes away.
Ted Mosby not getting the girl
And there's Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother, and he presents a completely nutso idea of what it means to be an architect, because clearly nobody involved with that show has any idea about anything architecture, though he still hews to the sensitive-good-guy mold. I don’t necessarily want to complain about this one, because I enjoy participating in the fantasy that you can just one day choose to quit designing buildings and become a professor, as though anyone does one or the other of those things exclusively, because there are just universities out there that are desperate to hire a run-of-the-mill young architect with seemingly few qualifications to teach their history courses.
No, I definitely do not want to complain about that. But even he is this dopey romantic type who believes in things and is too sensitive to keep the girl.
I got into this because I had held on to a really self-serving idea of what it meant to be an architect that I thought I could tailor to my self, I didn’t look really at all the clues that media outlets everywhere were sending me – the losers and the whiners and the meek but well-read nerds that populate television and movies with indications of how I might be perceived in the future.
Ryan Atwood forsakes his life of crime for a life of checked button-down shirts.
The Ryan Atwoods of the world forsake a life of crime to pursue a long-dormant interest in architecture that manifested itself on a drafting table and t-square in the pool house. Architects are good for you, they are funny and self-effacing and powerless, they have feelings because they make spaces, or else they’re dastardly and controlling and evil!
Coming out of a video art and semiotics program, I had an idea that the only place to find better shoes and glasses was in design school. That said, architecture might not actually be the best kind of design school for cool hunting, since the exigencies of all-nighters and model-making don’t exactly permit careful accessory maintenance. Sure, architects like shoes and glasses, and sure an asymmetrical caftan and Wonder Woman belt-combo are the only things I ever felt comfortable presenting my projects in, but accessories do not a profession make. If they did, we’d all be one trip to the Piperlime Accessories Wall away from professional accreditation. Which would be rad.
Just some fun pals palling around like they always do
Within the discipline, there’s all sorts of rumbling, now that the pillars of modernism have been resolutely cast down for about the fifth time. We're not going to have truths anymore, and whether that’s a function of some new spirit or just the huge variety and diversity of people now studying and practicing architecture is for a social scientist to determine. But it remains that a really large strain within intellectual architectural output focuses on the question of who we are and what we do. I doubt the same kinds of fears and preoccupations haunt other disciplines.
The real work is preferable to self-analysis. You get to design things and build them and use power tools well into the night. You get to buy gallons of expanding foamed polyurethane liquid and dye it hot pink because you think that instead of representing water as blue in your giant model, that it might look cool with a fleshier texture, and that your reviewers might be down with that. You get to put macaroni and oatmeal into your models to show how a bulk foods supermarket might store its products. You get to go as far off your rocker as you want, as long as you show up for the review the next day. You snag an hour’s rest under your desk and get back to working on something that could either get you laughed out of the room or hailed a visionary, or both, because the parts of design that are least apparent to the rest of the world actually might be the best.
Sarah Hirschman is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her website here.
"Poor in Love" - Destroyer (mp3)
"Savage Night at the Opera" - Destroyer (mp3)
"Suicide Demo for Kara Walker" - Destroyer (mp3)
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New Transistor Interfaces Directly With Biological Functions
shared on 27 October 2011 | 11:35 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Talk directly to the malfunctioning processes in your body. Someday is getting sooner. (SF in the News)
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Lines [WebApp]
shared on 27 October 2011 | 6:36 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Lines is based on a writing technique from medieval times developed by monks as a solution to expensive paper and tedious writing. The monks were writing in the centre of the page allowing enough space for others to annotate the pages on the sides, method allowing you to read the story through other people’s writing. The problem arises when 5-6th person tried to comment there would be no paper space left over. As the time passed and writing material became cheaper this technique was abandoned and the techniques we used today were adopted. The team behind the project thought it would be interesting experiment to revisit the techniques using modern technologies, predominantly the “screen” as it has no borders and provides infinite space.
Educated as artists and graphic designers, trained primarily in the logics of print and haptic output, we have grown a great interest in how a transition to screen publishing, and the formats of the new media, affect the way we write, read and communicate. What are the new contracts between author and reader? How are they shaped by old and new forms, and how do new habits in writing and reading affect the way we build and share knowledge?
Continue reading.... Lines [WebApp]
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Open Source Hardware: A Design For Life
shared on 27 October 2011 | 3:44 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
On a farm in deepest rural Missouri, the heartland of the American midwest, a village is emerging from the soil. It’s the base camp for the Open Source Ecology (OSE) movement, founded in 2007 to search for innovative answers to the world’s mounting sustainability problems. Here a Princeton educated Polish physicist and a growing band of DIY devotees have embarked on an ambitious project – to redesign the basic elements of civilization, making them cheaper, greener and smarter.
Marcin Jubowski believes he has identified the 50 machines necessary to create a sustainable village – “a civilization starter kit”. He calls it the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), and it’s new technology, the Internet and the power of crowdsourcing that’s making this ambitious project possible.
The machines include a tractor, a press that turns soil into bricks for building and a hydraulic power unit. Marcin’s initial designs were often based on existing machines; the GVCS steam engine for example is just that, a steam engine, with simplified modern design. These initial plans and instructional videos were shared on the group’s online wiki. Gradually others have weighed in, online and in person, with improvements and suggestions. As word of the project spreads, the influence of collective knowledge grows and prototypes begin to take shape.
So far four of the machines – the tractor, the brick press, the hydraulic power cube and the soil pulverizer – have undergone the full production process: three stages of prototypes, road-testing and complete documentation. Five more are in the initial prototyping phase.
OSE claim that their completed machines are five to ten times cheaper to manufacture than current industry equivalents. A brand new tractor would cost about $120,000 in the US, or around $25,000 second hand. Their open source tractor costs just $12,000.
The machines’ modular design means they can be disassembled into their component parts and those parts reassembled into different machines, like a real life Lego set. The easy disassembly also makes repair simple and inexpensive.
The modular power cube is a particularly clever piece of open source sorcery. Consisting of an engine hooked up to a hydraulic pump, it produces power by pumping hydraulic fluid at high pressure through connecting hoses. It can be easily removed and attached to almost any machine, and a series of power cubes can be attached to each other to generate greater power.
Nikolay Georgiev is a 27 year old Bulgarian computer science major who discovered the GVCS project online. “I was searching for what projects I wanted to do. OSE seemed to combine a whole lot of good things.” Nikolay now helps out updating the group’s wiki, fundraising and coordinating European interest in the project.
The 50 machines were decided upon according to a strict set of principles. “Marcin started the project with some specific questions: whether you’re using local resources, questions about the economic model, about the ecology, development process, simplicity of design and so on. This is how they were defined, by answering all these questions,” he explains.
While ecovillage projects like this have been attempted many times before, as far back as Gandhi and beyond, it’s the embracing of the Internet and open sourcing that sets GVCS apart. While the concept of open source has until now centred on software, the focus of GVCS is open source hardware. They reap the benefits of crowdsourced knowledge, while using the Internet to share their results.
Click here to view the embedded video.
“The project is happening now because it’s possible now,” Nikolay explains. “We’re connecting globally with people from different continents, communicating and sharing information. It’s an iterative process.”
The group want their machines to be as or more efficient than private industry equivalents. The goal is to construct a practical, modern living environment, but one that does away with the waste and excess synonymous with industrialised living. “Here you’ve got more or less a small industry,” Nikolay continues. “You’re building machines. It’s like what Marcin says – civilization on a smaller scale. It’s not intended only for villages, you could build these machines and use them in cities and other places.”
Eventually the project hopes to be entirely off-grid. “We won’t be dependent on companies for electricity,” says Nikolay. “We can use the biomass converter, we’ve got wind turbines and solar concentrators.”
Click here to view the embedded video.
Funding for GVCS comes from a combination of non-profit sector donations, grants, a Kickstarter campaign, individual donations via their wiki page (from so-called “True Fans”) and sales. From May to August this year they raised $25,000 from a production run of the machines. “We sold four life trucks, four CEB (compressed earth brick) presses and eight power cubes,” says Nikolay.
Having started with a monthly budget of $1,500, they’re now working off $10,000 a month. They hope to have raised $5 million by the end of 2012.
Next year they also plan to open the world’s first open source microfactory at the site in Missouri. “There we’ll be building all, or almost all, of the industry sector machines,” Nikolay explains. “It’ll include an induction furnace for melting metal, a machine for making sheet metal, and all the machines for forming the metal into other parts – cutting, drilling and so on. Then you have production power. You can produce the prototypes much faster,” he adds.
And interest in the project is growing in Europe. “We will see something from Europe too, next year or the year after,” Nikolay believes. Similar projects have begun popping up in the US, using the GVCS wiki as their guide.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Photo Credits: Open Source Ecology
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Senseless Drawing Bot [Arduino]
shared on 25 October 2011 | 10:23 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Senseless Drawing Bot is a 4-wheeled graffiti machine, with a pendulum arm, arduino and spray cans to create random strokes as it moves up and down the gallery space. See video below.
Created by So KANNO and Takahiro YAMAGUCHI
Metal Works Supported by Hitto ASAI
The exhibition “UTOPIA no OSHIRASE” took place at AKIBATAMABI21, 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo 9.10 – 10.10, 2011
Continue reading.... Senseless Drawing Bot [Arduino]
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Free Bieber: campaign to kill proposed law that would send you to prison for 5 years for singing copyrighted music on YouTube
shared on 21 October 2011 | 10:15 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Shared by marcell
"5 years in jail, for singing!"
S.978, a new bill in Congress, makes it a felony to post videos that contain copyright-infringing music, with up to five years in prison for violators. The clever folks at Fight for the Future have noticed that this law would have put Justin Bieber in jail, since he launched his career by posting videos of himself singing R&B tunes, in violation of copyright. The Free Bieber campaign is aiming to raise awareness of the campaign to fight S.978 and keep posting videos of yourself singing music legal, and they've got plenty of info for helping you fight the bill and enlist your friends to do the same. After you sign, you can submit a webcam video "from behind bars" explaining why jail-time for ordinary internet users is a terrible idea (they're calling it the "Biebercam"). You can also submit your own photos of Bieber in jail to their Tumblr.
Just a kid, singing a song
This is a video of child celebrity Justin Bieber singing "With You" by the artist Chris Brown. YouTube videos like this one were what made him famous. Tons of kids do this for fun, and many now-popular artists got started in this same way.Wait-- it's illegal?
Copyright law is so extreme, just singing somebody else's song in public could be infringement. Because he and his mother posted the videos to advance his music career, it's commercial infringement. And a new bill would make this a felony.5 years in jail, for singing!
The maximum sentence would be five-years, just for singing a cover! Other online video "crimes" could include: videos of a school play, a professional baseball game, or videos with incidental background music (even just a ringtone). Nuts, right?
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The Rise of the Internet (Anti)- Intellectual?
shared on 19 October 2011 | 11:28 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
This post originally appeared on Cyborgology.
The title of this post is an homage to two recent essays, the first being Larry Sanger’s “Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism?” and the second Evgeny Morozov’s “The Internet Intellectual”, a recent scathing review of Jeff Jarvis’ latest book.
Larry Sanger’s critique of “geek” culture as anti-intellectual is a powerful read (even though I wrote a sort-of critique of Sanger’s post here; and he replied to me here). Sanger’s fundamental point is that modern geek culture is characterized by an anti-intellectual rejection of experts and I want to bring in Morozov’s review to highlight a slightly different point: the techno-experts embraced are anti-intellectual themselves.
My goal in this short piece is to encourage the reader to take a look at these two essays in tandem to suggest a further conversation about the need for public intellectuals, the role of academics in framing theories of new technologies and what the consequences are when we leave this discussion to be dominated by business folks.
Evgeny Morozov
To be read as a pair:
Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism?, by Larry Sanger.
The Internet Intellectual, by Evgeny Morozov.
To be honest, I tried to dislike Morozov’s review of Jeff Jarvis’ new book, Public Parts. To begin, I have some disagreements with Morozov’s book, The Net Delusion. Further, the review is more than 6,500 words long and begins with some seemingly unnecessary insults against Jarvis as a person. However, Morozov’s dismantling of Jarvis picks up when he quickly moves into attacking the ideas contained in the book. Indeed, Morozov needed nearly all 6,500 words to make the necessary critique.
I will not go through all of the criticism here because this post is not about Jarvis’ book (though, I may post a review of the book as well). Instead, the more interesting point is how Jarvis’ book is part of a larger trend of so-called Internet Intellectuals or “gurus” who are not doing rigorous work but instead providing sound-bites aimed squarely at the business community.
The implications of this are serious: Jarvis tackles the privacy-publicity debate with very little focus on power and inequalities. For more on this point, see my previous critique of Jarvis for discussing these issues without taking on power. Surrendering important conversations to these trade books means that things like previous theorization or serious conversations about social justice will be left out.
Jeff Jarvis
But, of course, not all books need to be so rigorous. My problem is really not with Jarvis, but the fact that these “books that should have remained a tweet”, as Morozov states, have dominated the conversation about what the rise of new and social media means. I do not care that these fun little books exist, but that they are dominating the public conversation.
Perhaps the fault lies with the more rigorous intellectuals, both in and outside academia, who have made themselves largely absent from the public conversation about new technologies? Where is the Marshall McLuhan of social media? Why is it that Jeff Jarvis is setting the public conversation on publicity, Andrew Keen on amateurism, Tapscott and Williams on prosumption, Siva Vaidhyanathan on the impact of Google on society or Chris Anderson on abundance economies and “free”? To be clear, I think it is good that these folks hit on important topics in a catchy way. But they cannot be the whole picture, nor should they even be at the center. None of them provide a rigorous historical or theoretical treatment of their topics. (We called out Siva Vaidhyanathan on this blog after attending his a-theoretical talk at a public university).
If we can indeed convince more scholars to take on these topics, and there are many who are doing so already, do they have any chance at being public intellectuals? That is, can the ideas be delivered in a way that engages those interested, regardless if they have a degree in any specific field? For intellectuals to be public intellectuals they will need to be as engaging of writers as those authors listed above.
Larry Sanger
Or maybe the blame for the Sesame Street level books that dominate tech-writing is that publishers simply are not allowing public intellectuals to publish their ideas? I would be very interested to hear from anyone who has insights into this area.
In the meantime, I think the two essays linked to above are an important pairing to start a conversation over who gets to frame how new technologies are understood. Will it be a-historical, a-theoretical, non-rigorous business folks or can we inspire a new wave of technology-centered public intellectuals?
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Photo Credit: Flickr CC SimSullen, re:publica 2011, Ophelia Noor
Follow Nathan Jurgenson on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson
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LT v2.01
shared on 19 October 2011 | 3:44 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
(Light Transformer version 2)
python-generated random black & white pixel picture (50% black squares) printed to be silkscreened
thanks toRobert Ochshorn
Tagged: adrien lucca, color, colour, couleur, device, gradient, gray, grey, gris, halftone, light, print, sample, silkscreen
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CUNY Speculative Realism Talks
shared on 13 October 2011 | 1:57 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
The videos of the CUNY Speculative Realism talks are now available!
Here’s Patricia Clough and Jane Bennett (my talk begins at the end of this clip):
And here’s me and Graham Harman:
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My Un-Named Essay
shared on 12 October 2011 | 10:09 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
As I’ve mentioned a few times, I spent most of 2011 working on a exhibition for the Gwangju Design Biennale together with Ai Weiwei. At the exhibition opening, working with Weiwei was what most people wanted to talk about, so I wrote an essay about the experience for the Biennale’s catalog. It was written in a rush and I’m still not 100% happy with it, but since the biennale is still running, I think it’s important to put it out there….
Where is Ai Weiwei?
The Making of an Un-Named Exhibition
In August 2010, Ai Weiwei asked if I wanted to curate a section of the Gwangju Design Biennale. It was my first time hearing of the project and the place, and my first ever offer to curate. I accepted immediately.
A 30 minute conversation followed wherein Weiwei briefed me on the virtues of the event, including its big budget (”bigger than Venice!”) and open-minded leadership (”they wouldn’t have asked me to be director if they weren’t willing to take risks”). He talked about the host city (”good food”, “Korea’s democracy movement started there”, “many, many love hotels”) and described the biennale site, a complex of four interconnected galleries containing more than 8000 square meters of exhibition space.
As he talked, I started to worry. The scale of the project seemed huge and the expectations were high. The biennale’s theme, a strong, unclear concept derived from the Tao Te Ching and developed by the biennale’s co-director Seung H-Sang, I found difficult to penetrate. “Design Is Design Is Not Design,” Weiwei explained, was an epigram implying limitless creativity. “It is the end and the beginning,” he said. “For the biennale, we need to show design not as just a final product, but as part of a continuous process.” I scribbled the statement down. I wasn’t sure what do with it, but it seemed to me an anchor point, something solid enough to grab on to, extend out from.
I needed more, so I dropped the pretense of collaborating and reverted to my journalist roots, transforming our meeting into a desperate sort of interview. I prodded Weiwei with questions; I offered suggestions and requested clarifications, I repeated and rephrased his responses. He confirmed or corrected me, but he rejected nothing. It was as if his ambition was endless and capable of absorbing everything. By the end of the meeting, I’d written down dozens of commands (”Explore the reasons for similar activities in design”), analogies (”Exhibition like a body - fat, bone, organs, muscle, skin”), conceptual pairings (”Stephen Hawking + Buddhism”), and seemingly unrelated references (”Beat Generation”, “Big Bang”, “Food”, “Kunstkammer”, “French Almanac”, “KKK/Abu Ghraib/Burqa”).
At the center of the page, repeatedly underlined and surrounded by a cartoon cloud was the most important, least defined phrase of them all - Un-Named Design. This was the title of the section that I would curate. It was one of several sections in the show, but the only one that Ai Weiwei would oversee personally. Most of the points he’d made during our discussion were about Un-Named and when it was over he suggested I write a short statement to declare our intentions. That night I pored over my notes and eventually came up with this:
The Un-Named Design component will explore those facets of the human environment that are not conventionally considered design, yet influence everyday life and the perception of it. The works included in this section will derive from areas of creation where originality, signature, and marketability are not the primary source of value, and where the identity of a product is based on its theoretical force and practical use, rather than its material appearance. Examples from this creative territory range from highly purpose-driven virtual designs for social networks to the low-tech, custom manufacturing of low cost artificial limbs. The goal of this theme is to reframe design as a set of strategic solutions to human needs, rather than an ego-driven pursuit of subjective beauty. It will expand the concept of design beyond the material and show that it is not only about providing more or less useful goods, but also about the modification of human perception in a rapidly changing, interconnected world.
Post in full here.
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Circle of Trust [Javascript]
shared on 12 October 2011 | 12:14 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Created by D3, digital production company based in Sao Paolo, ‘Circle of Trust’ shows your asymmetric relationship network at Google Plus.
Is there a way to visualize how each person is using and constructing this social environment?
The team wanted want to create a good real example of how the brand new Google+ API could be used. The project was inspired by Jack Byrnes, character of the movie Meet the Parents. Interpreting Jack’s theory, the team made a simple algorithm to visualize who are the people that are inside your circle of trust and who are the people out. In the visualizations the green are the people you have circled and they have circled you back, yellow is for people that you cared to circle but they didn’t, and red is for people that have circled you but you didn’t care to circle back.
Continue reading.... Circle of Trust [Javascript]
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LEZING: The Knight’s Move: Mark Shepard, 27 Oct 2011, Stroom Den Haag.
shared on 12 October 2011 | 9:02 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
The Knight’s Move: Mark Shepard
http://stroom.nl/activiteiten/lezing_symposium.php?l_id=2472204
Donderdag 27 oktober 2011, 20 uur
Locatie: Hogewal 1-9, Den Haag
Voertaal: Engels
Entreeprijs: € 5,- (overmaken op ING-rekening 605409 van Stroom Den Haag onder vermelding van de naam van de lezing)
Reserveren verplicht: zie formulier onderaan deze pagina
De Amerikaan Mark Shepard is kunstenaar, architect en onderzoeker die in de praktijk voorbij gaat aan disciplinaire scheidslijnen. Hij is met name geïnteresseerd in nieuwe sociale ruimtes en de betekenisstructuren van hedendaagse netwerkculturen. Zijn meest recente onderzoek richt zich op de implicaties voor architectuur en stedelijkheid van mobiele media, communicatie- en informatietechnologieën. Zijn werk is internationaal tentoongesteld in musea, galeries en op festivals. Hij stelde dit jaar het boek ‘Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture and the future of urban space’ samen.
The Knight’s Move
Stroom Den Haag organiseert jaarlijks een aantal toonaangevende lezingen onder de noemer ‘The Knight’s Move’ met internationale sprekers die zich onderscheiden door ongebruikelijke, verhelderende en inspirerende visies op de stad, stedelijkheid en het publieke domein. Zoals het paard – the knight – zich grillig over het schaakbord beweegt, over lopers, koningen en torens heen springend, zo wil Stroom het gesprek over de stad vanuit onverwachte posities nieuwe impulsen geven.
Mediapartner van deze lezingenserie is: De Groene Amsterdammer
The Knight’s Move wordt mogelijk gemaakt door het Stimuleringsfonds voor Architectuur.
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Get Hacked, Don’t Tell: Drone Base Didn’t Report Virus
shared on 11 October 2011 | 9:43 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Officials at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada knew for two weeks about a virus infecting the drone “cockpits” there. But they kept the information about the infection to themselves — leaving the unit that’s supposed to serve as the Air Force’s cybersecurity specialists in the dark. The network defenders at the 24th Air Force learned of the virus by reading about it in Danger Room.
The virus, which records the keystrokes of remote pilots as their drones fly over places like Afghanistan, is now receiving attention at the highest levels; the four-star general who oversees the Air Force’s networks was briefed on the infection this morning. But for weeks, it stayed (you will pardon the expression) below the radar: a local problem that local network administrators were determined to fix on their own.
“It was not highlighted to us,” says a source involved with Air Force network operations. “When your article came out, it was like, ‘What is this?’”
The drones are still flying over warzones from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen. There’s no sign, yet, that the virus either damaged any of the systems associated with the remotely piloted aircraft or transmitted sensitive information outside the military chain of command — although three military insiders caution that a full-blown, high-level investigation into the virus is only now getting underway.
Nevertheless, the virus has sparked a bit of a firestorm in military circles. Not only were officials in charge kept out of the loop about an infection in America’s weapon and surveillance system of choice, but the surprise surrounding that infection highlights a flaw in the way the U.S. military secures its information infrastructure: There’s no one in the Defense Department with his hand on the network switch. In fact, there is no one switch to speak of.
The four branches of the U.S. armed forces each has a dedicated unit that, in theory, is supposed to handle cyber defense for the entire service. The 24th Air Force, for example, “is the operational warfighting organization that establishes, operates, maintains and defends Air Force networks,” according to a military fact sheet. These units are then supposed to provide personnel and information to U.S. Cyber Command, which is supposed to oversee the military’s overall network defense.
In practice, it’s not that simple. Unlike most big private enterprises, the 24th doesn’t have a centralized system for managing and monitoring its networks. There’s no place at the 24th’s San Antonio headquarters where someone could see all the digital traffic hurtling through the service’s pipes. In fact, most of the major commands within the Air Force don’t have formal agreements to carry the other’s network traffic. (The 24th Air Force did not immediately respond to requests to comment for this article.)
“We’d never managed the entire Air Force network as a single enterprise,” Vince Ross, the program manager of the Air Force Electronic Systems Center’s Cyber Integration Division, said in March. “That meant there was no centralized management of the network, that systems and hardware weren’t standardized, and that top-level commanders didn’t have complete situational awareness.”
The plan is to one day integrate all that infrastructure into a single Air Force network. But for now, it’s largely cybersecurity by the honor system. Each base and each unit in the Air Force has its own geek squad. They only call for help if there’s a broader network problem, or if they’re truly stumped.
That didn’t happen when a so-called “keylogger” virus hit Creech more than two weeks ago.
“Nothing was ever reported anywhere. They just didn’t think it was important enough,” says a second source involved with operating the Air Force’s networks. “The incentive to share weaknesses is just not there.”
Not even when that weakness hits the robotic weapons that have become the lynchpin for American military operations around the planet.
Photo: USAF
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October 09, 2011
shared on 9 October 2011 | 6:00 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Kelly is running an "Adventures of Women in Science" panel at Geek Girl Con in Seattle tomorrow! Check it out!
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Things you would know about if we were friends on Facebook Part 5
shared on 9 October 2011 | 1:09 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
…
41. A whole bunch of articles on ‘Un-Named Design’ a section of the Gwangju Design Biennale that I spent the past year working on:
A Flurry of Design Events in Asia and Europe Fill the Autumn Calendar
By ALICE RAWSTHORN, New York Times
Despite the anxiety about Mr. Ai, the Gwangju biennale is scheduled to open Friday as planned. His contribution is an exhibition of “Unnamed Design,” on which he has collaborated with the curator Brendan McGetrick to address the timely theme of the changing definition of design. They are planning to explore design’s contribution to fields with which it has not traditionally been associated, including the invention of computer viruses and new financial models, and the organization of political protests … Ambitious, intellectually provocative and generously funded, the Gwangju biennale seems set to be one of the most compelling design events of the autumn.
Korea’s design biennial: an extreme body of work that pushes no products
By Justin McGuirk, The Guardian
This year’s theme – “design is design is not design” – might sound like an existential tongue-twister, but it reflects the kind of dualism that is more common of Taoist thought than European. Chief curators Ai Weiwei and Seung H-Sang derived it from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching….
One exhibit is a pamphlet handed out in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising that advised protesters on the most effective tactics for civil disobedience, including how to improvise a helmet and how to breach police lines. Then there are designs for IEDs (improvised explosive devices) of the kind that kill troops daily in Afghanistan. There’s also a video of the plastic surgery that Ultimate Fighting Championship competitors can undergo in order to bleed less from the nose or above the eyes. (Korea, it should be pointed out, is one of the global hotspots of plastic surgery).
Is all of this design? It would be difficult to argue the case against: collective behaviour, bombs and extreme bodies all require designing. This tests the bland “designing a better world” rhetoric implicit in so much production. The most brazenly provocative exhibit illustrates different forms of public execution, from lethal injection to stoning, as blueprints – methods that someone had to devise in meticulous detail.
“Design that can be spoken of is not the eternal design”
By Edwin Gardner, Volume Magazine
Firstly the exhibition shows that a new design definition should move away from the artifact or object towards defining systems and rules, form is consequence of design, but not design itself. It’s about designing frameworks, instead of infills. It’s about the design of process instead of product.
Can Anybody Be a Designer?
By ALICE RAWSTHORN, New York Times
Curated in absentia by the Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei, who was imprisoned during the final phase of research and banned from leaving China to participate in the installation, “Unnamed” explores the role of design in projects with which it would not traditionally have been associated. The show argues that design is not solely the preserve of professional designers but can also be the work of scientists, activists, computer programmers, hackers and anyone else who applies ingenuity, originality, strategic thinking and other qualities that are indispensable to good design.
42. This depressing report on how the privatization of government services (in the name of greater efficiency and cost effectiveness) ends up costing tax payers billions more:
Bad Business: Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Hiring Contractors
By Project on Government Oversight
Choice Quote:
POGO’s study shows that the federal government approves service contract billing rates—deemed fair and reasonable—that pay contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.
43. Another vid from my favorite new artist of 2011:
Frank Ocean - Swim Good
44. This quote:
Progress isn’t the future. It’s keeping up with the present. - Patti Smith
45. This quote:
If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them. - John Waters
46. This clip of the world’s greatest thinker describing the world’s greatest superhero:
Karl Pilkington - Bullshit Man
Click here to view the embedded video.
The End.
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Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet
shared on 7 October 2011 | 7:11 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.
The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.
Drones have become America’s tool of choice in both its conventional and shadow wars, allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives. Since President Obama assumed office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets in Pakistan more than 230 times; all told, these drones have killed more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to the Washington Post. More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under U.S. Air Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American military drones struck 92 times in Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American drone killed top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki — part of an escalating unmanned air assault in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula.
But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.
The lion’s share of U.S. drone missions are flown by Air Force pilots stationed at Creech, a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, 20 miles north of a state prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a “ground control station,” or GCS. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens. In the pilot’s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield.
Some of the GCSs are classified secret, and used for conventional warzone surveillance duty. The GCSs handling more exotic operations are top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public internet. Which means they are supposed to be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats.
But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps” between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives. In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later.
Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.
In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.
The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.”
However, insiders say that senior officers at Creech are being briefed daily on the virus.
“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”
Photo courtesy of Bryan William Jones
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Picturing the creative process
shared on 6 October 2011 | 7:08 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
The creative process changes by person and project, but there are obstacles and steps along the way that you tend to pass with each. Graphic designer Melike Turgut maps his own process. Start from the inside (research, reading, and learning), and make your way out (questions, ideas, and refinement).
[Melike Turgut via @brainpicker]
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The iPhone 4S’ Talking Assistant Is a Military Veteran
shared on 5 October 2011 | 5:18 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Siri, before you became the premiere feature of the new iPhone 4S, where did you come from?
Spencer, I started out as a gleam in the eye of Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research agency, as your Wired colleague Steven Levy tweeted. Darpa thought my artificial-intelligence algorithms for data collection and organization could help the military plan better. Would you like me to find you some references for that?
I would, Siri, thank you.
As it turns out, Siri — the voice-activated data assistant available on Apple’s iPhone upgrade — is a veteran. Nearly 10 years ago, Darpa funded a project known as PAL, for Personalized Assistant that Learns. It was an adaptive AI program for both data retrieval and data synthesis. (So not entirely like search, but not dissimilar, either.) If you told PAL what information you needed, and it observed what you did with that information, it would figure out a more efficient path to acquiring and sorting relevant information the next time around.
The project started out with a California company called SRI International. With a five-year, multimillion dollar grant from Darpa under the PAL program, SRI developed a system called CALO, for Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes. (Check out this handy chart of its architecture.) ”The goal of the project is to create cognitive software systems,” it explained, “that is, systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.”
Put more simply, “The idea is to develop a system that will adapt to the user, instead of the other way around,” a PAL project partner told a fresh-faced Noah Shachtman way back in 2003. Technophobic New York Times columnist William Safire sputtered that Darpa was ushering in “a world light-years beyond the Matrix,” with dire implications for the person “that PAL’s user is looking at, listening to, sniffing or conspiring with to blow up the world?”
As Darpa tried to show in the corny instructional video above, PAL didn’t work the way Safire thought it did. In the video’s hypothetical scenario, the military is in the middle of a humanitarian aid mission when a terrorist group fires a rocket-propelled grenade at a cargo plane. PAL — then quaintly hosted on a desktop — anticipates an officer’s question. “These-are-the-additional-security-forces-in-theater-that-are-available,” a Vocodered voice from a computer tells the officer, like it was the Enterprise answering Captain Kirk, as icons pop up on a screen to illustrate the point.
An Air Force major, new to the fictional task force, gets up to speed on the aid mission by asking PAL for displays of the command plan. “These are my priorities,” he tells it, tapping the screen with his finger. (Darpa seems to have anticipated that by the time PAL was ready, everyone would have a touchscreen desktop monitor.) And just like that, the major has planned his day, telling PAL what briefings he plans to attend. “Here-are-the-materials-you-need-for-the-meeting,” PAL replied, as it collated them into a folder.
Perhaps PAL was geared to be more like a PDA than the Enterprise’s computer. (No bureaucratic headquarters task is too complicated for a super-algorithm!) Then again, once PAL is networked with other officers’ PALs, it becomes easy to spot the erratic behavior of a fictional ship, alerting the task force to a potential terrorist threat.
By 2008 — with the PAL project not bearing fruit — SRI didn’t want to miss out on the commercial opportunities of iPhone apps. So it spun off a company called Siri Incorporated to develop what became the first iteration of the Siri app — a so-called “do engine” that weaved user preferences with existing web functions to, say, let you know what time the nearest Iron Man showing started. (It wasn’t voice-activated.) Apple thought the Siri’s tech showed promise, so it paid a rumored $150 to $200 million for the company. On Tuesday, CEO Tim Cook finally explained what Apple had in mind.
In other words, you probably won’t be using Siri to track any terrorists on your iPhone 4S. Chances are you’ll ask Siri to find you a nearby restaurant with an available table; a phone number from the depths of your email inbox; or tell you how long it’ll take you to get from the office to the airport in traffic. In fact, according to an SRI veteran, Siri is way more powerful than what Darpa and SRI had in mind. “It’s not just connected to various Web services, but also to your calendar and contacts and music and everything on the phone,” Norman Minarsky of SRI told Technology Review on Tuesday.
But what if you’re in the military, and you want to take Siri back to its PAL roots? Best of luck to you. Obviously, there’s no PAL in usage. Five years after the iPhone launched the smartphone revolution, the military is barely catching up. Only the Army is seriously considering requiring its soldiers to carry smartphones loaded with militarily relevant apps. (The Marines, to a lesser degree, are starting to as well.)
But it still doesn’t know how to secure the classified data that the phones will need to host. The Army is also schizophrenic about scotching its now-obsolete plans for networking soldiers together through wearable computers or incorporating smartphones into them. And budget crunches threaten to smother the Army’s entire smartphone experiment in the cradle. (Check Danger Room on Thursday for an update on Army smartphones in the age of defense austerity.)
So Siri, what should a soldier who wants to take advantage of you do?
She should probably consider getting an iPhone 4S. Would you like Metro directions to the Apple Store in the Pentagon City Mall?
No, I think I’m good. But how exactly could your functionality, hosted on a commercial iPhone 4S, be used to help the military directly?
Despite the early funding from Darpa to develop me, I’m not sure the Army has figured that question out.
Thank you, Siri, I suspected that was the answer.
See Also:
- Apple’s Rumored Virtual Assistant Could Outshine the New iPhone
- Siri Launches Voice-Powered iPhone ‘Assistant’
- Pentagon Wants to Make a New PAL
- Marines Look for a Software Study Buddy
- Live Blog: Apple’s 2011 ‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ Event
- Soldiers’ Wearable Computers May Get an iPhone Brain
- Army Taps Android Phones for ‘Wearable Computers’
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2screen presentation - pointing at video
shared on 4 October 2011 | 12:50 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
I did a talk at 2screen last week, I didn't say anything momentous but I pointed to a lot of stuff. And, since I was going too fast, wrote my slides too late and stuff got cropped off the bottom of the screen, wasn't able to be clear about where everything had come from.
So, here, just for the record are the things I pointed at.
The silly bit of intro pointed out that, all through my life I'd assumed more screens = better. It started with The Man Who Fell To Earth, progressed through the TV room at Graceland...
via NASA control rooms...
to James Bond. I'd always just assumed that more screens = higher status. But, if you think about it more, you realise that the highest status is accorded to the hidden screen. The one that issues forth silently on demand. Which led me down this YouTube rabbit hole:
In fact, it made me realise, I don't even understand TV. Let alone all this 2screen stuff. After all, we were told that the future was going to be higher fidelity and bigger screens and it wasn't was it? The future was this:
After that, all I did really, was ask a couple of questions:
1. Why Stop At Two?
Clearly, our homes/lives are going to be drenched in screens. It's not just going to be two. So here are some examples:
Media surfaces: Incidental Media from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
BERG are the daddies. Just build what they tell you.
Will there be displays everywhere? Of course. (This isn't the video I had, can't find it on YouTube any more.)
Will there be displays everywhere? Again. Of course.
Then I talked about this a bit.
And then this.
And James Darling's lovely bus thing.
And then I segued into my second silly question with a bit of Winky Dink and You.
2: Why Stop At Screens?
So we, obviously, started with some Talking Boony.
Featured John McKerrell's clock and some Harry Potter wand action.
And a soupson of sphero.
And ended with some face replacement (why can't the second screen be superimposed on the first one?)...
Pixels for The People (quick snips) from Momo the Monster on Vimeo.
...and some PixelPhones (who knows what phones are for anyway?)
And I think that's about it. Hope it wasn't too hot in there. It was hot.
Oh. And playing throughout on the other screen was the long version of this:
Which you can download here.
Trump in Seoul
shared on 7 September 2011 | 4:09 pm via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
Seoul
shared on 7 September 2011 | 4:09 pm via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
Seoul
shared on 7 September 2011 | 4:09 pm via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
Seoul
shared on 7 September 2011 | 4:08 pm via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
Seoul
shared on 7 September 2011 | 4:08 pm via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
Korean sat-nav
shared on 7 September 2011 | 4:08 pm via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
like playing a video game. the detail is amazing, there's actual lanes, including the arrows which show which lane you need to select to take a certain turn!
Korean Style Urban Farming
shared on 7 September 2011 | 4:08 pm via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
The Koreans do not need hipsters or hippies to do it
Pavement
shared on 7 September 2011 | 4:08 pm via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
Swastika
shared on 7 September 2011 | 4:08 pm via: Uploads from edwingardner
edwingardner posted a photo:
Around the Table
shared on 27 September 2010 | 2:00 am via: Issuu / Generic / username:edwingardner
Edwin Gardner & Arjen Oosterman Interview Hugo Priemus, Mathijs Bouw and Arjo Klamer.
De Vergrijzing
shared on 11 May 2010 | 6:23 pm via: Issuu / Generic / username:edwingardner
Een infographic gemaakt voor drie avonden over de vergrijzing in Frascati, georganiseerd door Partizan Publik.
We Almost Lost Detroit
shared on 9 May 2010 | 10:03 pm via: Issuu / Generic / username:edwingardner
Future Scenarios for Detroit, walking the scale from utopia to dystopia.
Broadcasting Architecture - Image Essay by Edwin Gardner
shared on 22 February 2010 | 6:27 pm via: Issuu / Generic / username:edwingardner
In 5 chapters five different ideas/meanings of architecture are displayed. Architecturs as Guidance, Hapiness, Structure, Mood Engineering and Power Play. The metaphorical power through the language of architecture. Through other lenses we see what notions of Architecture are broadcasted into the world.
No Need for Architecture, We've Got Facebook Now
shared on 23 January 2010 | 12:35 am via: Issuu / Generic / username:edwingardner
Edwin Gardner thinks through how social networking via, for example, Facebook is changing how we construct our identities. Who is your Google you? He argues that virtual social spaces are revealing glimpses of new spatial experiences.
How Sim City Changed the Game of Planning
shared on 23 January 2010 | 12:27 am via: Issuu / Generic / username:edwingardner
The God complex could acquire new meaning for an upcoming generation of architects and plan ners. Some of them played a 'God game' growing up called Sim City. It's God's point of view minus the attitude. As teenagers they learn ed to operate within the dynamic forces of their own home-grown cities. While these boys and girls have exchanged the sandbox for the construction site, Sim City has changed its scope from city planning to social engineering.
Architecture left to its own devices
shared on 20 January 2010 | 2:51 pm via: Issuu / Generic / username:edwingardner
or How theory stopped guiding architectural practice
Creative Destruction (Speculative Peculiars 2)
shared on 4 January 2010 | 4:58 pm via: Issuu / Generic / username:edwingardner
A Diary of a Professional Creative by Edwin Gardner
Exploding Practice
shared on 31 December 2009 | 3:55 pm via: Issuu / Generic / username:edwingardner
by Edwin Gardner
Interview Jonathan Harris
shared on 31 December 2009 | 3:39 pm via: Issuu / Generic / username:edwingardner
Jonathan is voor het eerst in Nederland op uitnodiging van Lust en Tag om over zijn werk te vertellen. Veel tijd om Nederland te zien heeft hij niet, omdat de liefhebbers van zijn werk erachter willen komen hoe zijn projecten tot stand komen. Een van zijn bekendste werken is We Feel Fine, waar gevoelens van normale mensen over de hele wereld op een toegankelijke en intuïtieve manier worden gepresenteerd. Een leidend motief in al zijn projecten is het verzamelen en herordenen van sporen die mensen op Internet achterlaten. waarmee hij laat zien dat alle mensen, ongeacht cultuur, nationaliteit of ras, meer gemeen hebben met elkaar dan in het huidige politieke klimaat van dit moment wordt aangenomen.
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