links: April 2009 Archives

links for 2009-04-30

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  • "The How They Got Game Project at Stanford University is currently seeking for papers that explore the connections between mapping, cartographic practices, electronic gaming and virtual worlds for an illustrated book that will be published in 2010. Specifically, we are interested in essays that address the notion of representing spaces in video games and virtual worlds through the aid of maps and mapping tools. Video games and virtual worlds establish new topographies and geographies that - while often making references to preexisting models - create a new understanding of the fictional worlds that we explore. Our goal is to show and explain how digital spaces are being mapped by a new generation of cartographers."

links for 2009-04-29

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  • "The program's ultimate objective is to transform the human-computer interaction experience, so the computer is no longer a distracting focus of attention but rather an invisible tool that empowers the individual user and facilitates natural and productive human-human collaboration."
  • Power Hungry: Reinventing The U.S. Electric Grid Visualizing The Grid

    The U.S. electric grid is a complex network of independently owned and operated power plants and transmission lines. Aging infrastructure, combined with a rise in domestic electricity consumption, has forced experts to critically examine the status and health of the nation's electrical systems.



links for 2009-04-28

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  • "Greenbox is a web-based solution that enables households to track, understand, and manage their home energy usage and environmental footprint."
  • "THIS SITE CONTAINS full text of papers presented at the conference, "Reconceptualizing the History of the Built Environment in North America," which brought together the several generations which have contributed to the field. The conference discussed the current state of built environment studies and set an agenda for future work. Keynote speakers outlined the history and evolution of the field. Three paper sessions followed, each addressing a cutting edge issue in built environment studies. The first panel investigated racial dimensions of the built environment, the second considered the North American built environment in comparative perspective, and the third analyzed how the built environment has been disseminated to public audiences. A final roundtable discussed with the audience the future of built environment studies in the United States."

links for 2009-04-24

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links for 2009-04-23

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  • "We intend to build a conditions-aware planning and advising, web-based software system which we will deploy to our study participants. Using the system, which will use their location in conjunction with weather data to estimate soil composition, temperature, and rainfall, users will be able to plan a garden from the ground up. Alongside user preferences and the time span that the user intends to maintain the garden, the system will provide recommendations on types and number of plants as well as varieties. It will also provide them the necessary information about the amount of light the plant requires, the depth and time of year at which it should be planted, pruning instructions, watering alerts, and other useful advice.... Additionally, the software will assist the users in tracking their environmental impact, and their money saved versus the grocery store, as well as provide them with alerts when their intervention is required."
    (tags: gardens hci)
  • "Pacific Controls is in the forefront of U-City initiatives in the UAE helping to foster the interplay of people, technology and e- Governance, while the concept of U-City is still in its conceptualization stage.

    Pacific Controls is taking leadership and mobilizing its resources and competency in developing Ubiquitous City technologies and is undertaking the implementation of U-City projects. The Dubai (U-City) initiative is currently taking center stage and enjoying strong support from the government and private sector.

    UAE has the potential in leading the way to building U-Cities, which will take on leadership around the world. UAE has been first in many things. It was one of the early adaptors of e-governance, it's the first to use digital multimedia communication technology, it's one of the pioneers of a cashless society, and now it's again leading the pack in U-City. "





  • "Imagine public recycling bins that use radio-frequency identification technology to credit recyclers every time they toss in a bottle; pressure-sensitive floors in the homes of older people that can detect the impact of a fall and immediately contact help; cellphones that store health records and can be used to pay for prescriptions.

    These are among the services dreamed up by industrial-design students at California State University, Long Beach, for possible use in New Songdo City, a large "ubiquitous city" being built in South Korea."





  • "As maps have become more complex, they have become our native medium for analyzing environments and societies, essential parts of the decision-making process in policy making. Climatologists, biologists, epidemiologists, transportation engineers, urban planners, community groups, and many others rely on geographic information systems (GIS) software (such as ESRI'sArcGIS) to understand data and to make arguments. To take a vivid example from this election year, the red-and-blue map that depicted a divided country in 2004 has given way to the "magic map"—based on Jefferson Y. Han's Perceptive Pixel multi-touch screen technology—on which CNN's Jeff King illustrates the complex interrelationships in American voting patterns, breaking down the political landscape county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct. "


links for 2009-04-21

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  • "For Ma Cheng and millions of others, Chinese parents’ desire to give their children a spark of individuality is colliding head-on with the Chinese bureaucracy’s desire for order. Seeking to modernize its vast database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with color photos and embedded microchips. The new cards are harder to forge and can be scanned at places like airports where security is a priority.

    The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report. The result is that Miss Ma and at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards — unless they change their names to something more common."



links for 2009-04-20

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  • "This is an on-going project to rediscover the work of cybernetician Gordon Pask and reconsider Pask's relevance to the construction of "interactive environments" by producing new embodiments that richly explore the human meaning of "interaction" and "conversation" in an actual built space.

    We will develop a conceptual framework for building interactive systems that deals with the natural dynamic complexity that "environments" must have without becoming prescriptive, restrictive and autocratic. As such, the work also functions as a critique of conventional ubiquitous computing practices which ignore the poetries of interaction that architecture (in its widest sense) affords."





  • "Borrowing its name from a class of marine invertebrates, Siphonophora consists of a collection of small reactive devices that float in one of Gunpowder Park's lakes, tracking light, temperature, audio, pH levels and other pond life activity. We are researching ways to enable the population of devices to evolve their behaviour organically in response to specific site conditions including the local bird population, insects in and around the water and human interaction from visitors who come to see it from the existing bird hide."




  • "Natural Fuse harnesses the carbon-sinking capabilities of plants to create a city-wide network of electronically-assisted plants that act both as energy providers and as shared "carbon sink" circuit breakers. By sharing resources and information between the plants energy expenditure can be collectively monitored and managed."




  • Largely academic case studies.

    "Ubiquitous Computing: Design, Implementation and Usability highlights the emergent usability theories, techniques, tools and best practices in these environments. This book shows that usable and useful systems are able to be achieved in ways that will improve usability to enhance user experiences. Research on the usability issues for young children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly is presented, with different techniques for the mobile, ubiquitous, and virtual environments."



links for 2009-04-19

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  • "A central challenge in interaction design has to do with its diversity. Designers, engineers, managers, marketers, researchers and users all have important contributions to make to the design process. But at the same time they lack shared concepts, experiences and perspectives. How is the process of design-which requires communication, negotiation and compromise-to effectively proceed in the absence of a common ground? I argue that an important role for the interaction designer is to help stakeholders in the design process to construct a lingua franca. To explore this issue, which has received remarkably little attention in HCI, I turn to work in urban design and architecture."
  • "There is burgeoning population of 'effectively invisible' computers around us, embedded in the fabric of our homes, shops, vehicles, farms and some even in our bodies. They are invisible in that they are part of the environment and we can interact with them as we go about our normal activities. However they can range in size from large Plasma displays on the walls of buildings to microchips implanted in the human body. They help us command, control, communicate, do business, travel and entertain ourselves, and these 'invisible' computers are far more numerous than their desktop cousins ...Shall we be able to manage such large-scale systems, or even understand them? How do people interact with them and how does this new pervasive technology affect society? How can non-computing people configure and control them? What tools are needed for design and analysis of these constantly adapting and evolving systems? What theories will help us to understand their behaviour?"

links for 2009-04-18

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links for 2009-04-17

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  • "The small, US$3000 ($5150) robots, which move through the garden on a base similar to a Roomba vacuum, are networked to the plants. When the plants indicate they need water, the robots can sprinkle them from a water pump. When the plants have a ripe tomato, the machines use their arms to pluck the fruit."
  • "Environmental art or ecological art (a.k.a. ecoart) has evolved from the earth-art and land-art movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, and has been greatly influenced by the work of Joseph Beuys and his environmental actions "in defense of nature," defined by him as social sculpture. Ecological art now provides a context for environmental education, and is achieved hand-in-hand with communities. Ecoartists seek to gain access to and become advocates for communities, working as both co-learners and co-creators. Their work is collaborative and supports both natural and social ecosystems. Ecoartists can be thought of as midwives for the earth, facilitators of environmental education, consultants for environmental restoration and visionaries for transforming ecological communities."

links for 2009-04-16

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links for 2009-04-11

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  • "So far the investigation of spatio-temporal patterns of people mainly rendered a quantitative understanding of the city. In our study, we intend to leverage implicit spatio-temporal data (i.e. latitude, longitude and timestamp) with the richness of people-generated information. Our approach is to consider that uploading, tagging and disclosing the location of a photo can be interpreted as an act of communication rather than a pure implicit history of physical presence."
  • "We are doing this breeding work and releasing this material into the public realm for everyone. Thus, you may only request this seed if you agree to not patent, legally protect or apply for breeders rights over the resulting varieties. Nor will you in any way restrict anyone else saving seeds of your variety for their own home or farm use." (link from Amanda Williams)

    We see food plants as part of our common human heritage. And we do not think it is correct to patent them.

    So, we are doing this breeding work and releasing this material into the public realm for everyone.
    Thus, you may only request this seed if you agree to not patent, legally protect
    or apply for breeders rights over the resulting varieties.
    Nor will you in any way restrict anyone else saving seeds of your variety for their own home or farm use.





  • "The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people's willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining it's destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot."




  • "this is all everyday technology - embedded in, propped up against, or moving through the street, carried by people and vehicles, and installed by private companies and public bodies. Each element of data causes waves of responses in other connected databases, sometimes interacting with each other physically through proximity, other times through semantic connections across complex databases, sometimes in real-time, sometimes causing ripples months later....

    Yet how much of this activity is obviously perceptible on our streets when viewed through conventional means?"



links for 2009-04-10

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  • "Vast quantities of energy are required to heat or cool buildings to provide what are now regarded as acceptable standards of thermal comfort. Paradoxically, likely responses to global warming, such as greater reliance on air-conditioning, threaten to increase energy demand and emissions of CO2 and exacerbate rather than mitigate climate change. This project examines the link between global warming and the technologies and conventions of indoor environmental management. Starting from the proposition that concepts of comfort are socially and technically constructed, it examines the ambitions and approaches of practitioners and policy makers currently involved in specifying the indoor climates of the future. What assumptions of human 'need' are constructed and embedded in the built environment and with what consequences for conventions of 'normality' and associated patterns of resource intensity?"
  • "Green the Grounds was created to bring attention to the other changes that need to be made on these highly prominent landscapes - starting with the White House but including governor's mansions and official residences of mayors, in ciites that have them. "

links for 2009-04-09

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  • "Oh, the possibilities. You can document the growth of just about any plant and make a cool time lapse video. Or you can find out exactly what goes on in the garden when you’re gone. Who’s been snapping the buds off your hellebores? Or worse, stealing your tomatoes? It needs to happen from dawn to dusk though, at which point the camera switches off automatically. I found it via Neatorama and Hammacher Schlemmer, which is still a great place to find cool stuff."

links for 2009-04-03

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  • "BakerTweet is a way for busy bakers to tell the world that something hot and fresh has just come out of the oven. It's as simple as turning the dial and hitting the button. All of the baker's followers get a Twitter alert to tell them that it's bun-time. Or bread time. Or whatever." RT from @kickerstudio
  • "Weeds Aliens and Other Stories began as a sketchbook of drawings and ideas exploring the English obsession with the garden and irrational relationships between people and their plants. We wanted to encourage people to play out their eccentricities within their urban homes, homes with very little or no garden at all. These unacknowledged behaviours become legitimised through new types of furniture. (In collaboration Michael Anastassiades)"

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This page is a archive of entries in the links category from April 2009.

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