A punto de empezar El Diferencial, dirigido por los encantadores @lalitx y @copondorado (tomada con Instagram en Espai Cultural Caja Madrid)
En cuanto a mi interés por la fantasía, me parece importante subrayar algo fundamental, que a veces se nos olvida: la frontera entre la realidad y la imaginación no es algo fijo. El realismo es sólo una forma más de describir el mundo, y no es necesariamente la mejor ni la más interesante. Yo nací en un país donde la fantasía lo envuelve a uno desde el momento de nacer. La mitología india es de una riqueza portentosa, y no me refiero sólo a las leyendas religiosas, sino a la tradición narrativa que tiene su origen en Las mil y una noches, muchas de cuyas historias surgieron en India antes de traducirse al persa y al árabe. Crecer escuchando la historia de Simbad el Marino, de Alí Babá o Aladino deja una impronta imborrable en la imaginación de un futuro escritor. El realismo no es más que una convención. Si es necesario, recurro a ella, pero no es el único recurso ni mucho menos.
This Guy Has My MacBook
Rather than repeat this over and over, I thought it would be helpful if I published a short timeline of events, from the day my MacBook was stolen, until today when I picked it up.
- My MacBook was stolen on March 21, 2011 from my apartment in Oakland, CA. It happened during the day while I wasn’t home.
- I reported the crime on the same day to an officer from the Oakland Police Department. For verification, the original police report was 11-014180.
- I immediately began to gather photos, network and location information about my stolen MacBook using Hidden.
- I followed up with an investigator at Oakland Police Department on April 25, presenting him with this additional evidence, which was attached to my previous report
- I contacted the investigator twice via email, asking him if he was able to make any progress on my case, but I didn’t hear anything back.
- On Friday, May 27, I decided to set up a tumblelog with photos of the current owner (who may or may not be the thief) in order to get some media attention.
- The tumblelog didn’t receive much attention until I tweeted about it on the morning of Tuesday, May 31. Within a few hours, it was tweeted and liked thousands of times.
- Late Tuesday afternoon, I received a call from Officer Joshi of the Oakland Police Department after she was contacted by Good Morning America. She told me that the Oakland Police Department would be following up on my case immediately.
- On the evening of Tuesday May 31, two officers from the Oakland Police Department arrested the guy who had my laptop. The police used evidence I had gathered using Hidden (an email address which pointed to a cab service) that he was a driver and tricked him into picking them up.
- Later that evening the officers acquired my MacBook from his home.
- I picked it up from the Oakland Police Department on the morning of June 1.
My close friend and collaborator, Sue, had her iPhone stolen earlier this month. The thief had it for 5 days, after which he ransomed it back to her. In the meantime, he had it with him as he drove around LA, presumably looking for other opportunities to be an asshole.
Our phones, clearly, are really personal devices. When we talk about personal data, the mobile phone is as physical an embodiment of this as anything, a data-sensory appendage if you will. What does it mean, then, when we’ve been separated from the device? It feels like identity theft as much as the loss of valuable electronics.
So when Sue got it back, she felt a bit estranged from it. We wondered about the life her device had had away from her, which led her to use OpenPaths to take a look at where it had been. Sure enough, the thief’s home and haunts were pretty readily identifiable.
Sue had also seen the last video Id made with OpenPaths and Google Street View, and we decided to make another one with her data. However, I wanted to take it a bit further. As fun as my first video attempt had been, it’s a bit impressionistic — you just get this blitz of unconnected images. However, Sue’s data had a very clear narrative behind it. We had a collection of points that the thief had visited with the phone, so I thought we should be able to get a smooth path between them.
First, I used the Google Directions API to map the likely route that the thief would have taken between known locations, as well as filling in some intermediary points, which was @blprnt’s idea from our earlier brainstorms. One of the cool things about the Street View panorama data (described by @jaimethompson) is that it shows the linkages between consecutive images taken by the Google car. So by calculating the heading from one point to the next and heuristically choosing links between panoramas headed in the right direction, we can access all the images taken along the way. Again using heading we can point the camera in the right direction, download the tiles we want, and stitch a frame together. Applying this to the thief’s route, we got a complete reconstructed path that plays back much more like a continuous video than my previous experiment (it evens out after the frantic first 30 seconds).
It’s a bit like if Google was driving the getaway car, starting downtown where the phone was stolen, and traveling over the city until it’s finally given back. Of course, we’re leaving out the pauses when he wasnt moving, and the temporal displacement of Street View images make this a kind of a weird frankendata — while the video retains some relationship to the truth of the human interaction behind it, it remains a kind of data fiction.
Oh, and for those who prefer the written word, theres always the driving directions.
Source: blog.brianhouse.net
Sifteo - The Future of Play
ifteo cubes are 1.5 inch computers with full-color displays that sense their motion, sense each other, and wirelessly connect to your computer. You, your friends, and your family can play an ever-growing array of interactive games that get your brain and body engaged.
Sifteo’s initial collection of titles includes challenging games for adults, fun learning puzzles for kids, and games people can play together.
Sifteo. The future of play.
Coming later this year
- Purchase directly through this website, starting mid-late 2011.
- $149 for a Sifteo pack. Includes three cubes, charging dock, power adapter, and USB wireless link.
- $39 per additional cube. Use up to six at at time!
Sign up for our email list to receive a notification when we re-open for orders!
I got curious what’s now installed in these two historic locations. Inside the 333 Grant building, there’s now a Lulemon Athletica, a store which caters to yoga bunnies. It’s next door to an American Apparel. In New York, whatever once stood at 15 Dey is now gone. In its place stands a Century 21 Department Store at 17 Dey. There is a Starbucks across the street. Point being that technological history is not preserved the way that political and cultural history often are. Our important locations go unmarked, if they are remembered at all.
The Rockefeller Foundation on “the future of crowdsourced cities” | Urbanscale
The Meaning of Crowdsourced Urbanism
In my own thinking and writing, I tend not to use the phrase “crowdsourced”; it’s one of those jargony terms that seems to create more perplexity than light. In this case, however, participants agreed that we were consciously using it as shorthand for some technosocial regime that hadn’t quite yet clarified, but that probably had one or more of the following characteristics:
- The use of data visualization by municipal government to refine the delivery of services, more precisely target interventions, and otherwise realize latent efficiencies;
- The use of data visualization to deepen the collective understanding of the spatial distribution of issues and resources in cities;
- The use of networked informatics to connect citizens directly with municipal government;
- The use of networked informatics to support initiatives in deliberative democracy, and other forms of collaborative problem-solving;
- Most excitingly to me: citizens using networked informatics to coordinate their own activities, and supplant the inadequate measures of underfunded or entirely absent government.
Crowdsourcing vs. Offloading
recourse to “crowdsourcing” dovetails all-too-neatly with the neoliberal retreat from governance, in a process that Laura Forlano forthrightly calls “offloading” (a more felicitous term for what I’ve elsewhere called “responsibilization”). There may well be a thousand points of light in the naked city, but there are a great many worthwhile ends in municipal management that neither the market nor even the best-coordinated activity of voluntary actors can provide for.
The techoutopian assumptions of Visualization
Million Dollar Blocks (a sample from which is visible at left), is built on nothing “networked” or “digital” per se, merely open access to civic data. And yet it stands as an implicit rebuke to an idea widely prevalent in the more techno-utopian discussions around data visualization: that merely bringing a pattern of fact to light will somehow cause communities of interest capable of effective action to crystallize around it.
This may well happen on occasion, but there’s no guarantee that it will always…or ever. As crusading investigatory journalists learned decades ago, however transcendent the truth, it will still need motivated, motivating individuals to act as its agents in the world. If it’s the clear hope of a great many people, myself very much to be numbered among them, that carefully-crafted, well-designed information visualizations may in time furnish our communities with just precisely that kind of motivating call to action, there’s still an uncomfortable amount of daylight between that hope and any evidence of its realization.
A planet of Civic Laboratories
Personally, I was delighted to hear Anthony Townsend’s prognostication of/call for a “planet of civic laboratories,” in which getting to scale immediately is less important than a robust search of the possibility space around these new technologies, and how citydwellers around the world will use them in their making of place. It’s a moment we’re both honored and terribly excited to be a part of.
