Underground Wi-Fi

In this post from TechReview - Underground Wi-Fi: Cities may wait, but mines are getting full wireless broadband coverage:

the post discusses how wi-fi is being used underground in mines for the safety of the miners...

"Miners aren't blogging from the tunnels -- yet. In Kiruna, information from drills and trucks -- such as their positions and the weight of their loads -- is relayed via wireless base stations to a computer in a control room above ground. (Weight is an important datum; it tells the operator how good the ore is. The heavier the better.) With Wi-Fi networks, fewer miners have to face the risks of working underground -- and those who do have a more durable link to the outside.

LKAB, the company that operates the Kiruna mine, has experimented with wireless networks before, but Wi-Fi offers cheap standardized components and is the newest tool for boosting mine safety and productivity"

20/03/06 go Digital , the final programme.

The final edition! (before the name-change that is)

"In this the final edition of Go Digital we discuss the progress of the UN's plan to connect every village in the world to the internet by 2015. As a counterpoint we speak to someone who thinks the expansion of digital technology should all be left in the hands of the free market. We talk to an annoying robot - an essential gadget for the future according to our own technology analyst Bill Thompson. Finally we introduce our new programme Digital Planet, which you'll be able to hear on the BBC World Service from next tuesday and download to your mp3 player in the same way as this one."

Download here

Belarus protesters turn to internet

In this post from BBC Online about protesters in Belarus:

"The opposition has very limited media resources at its disposal.

Most of the independent press has been forced out of business. TV is entirely under state control.

The internet has provided an outlet for independent reporting.

Since Sunday, several sites have run eyewitness accounts from the anti-Lukashenko protests. "

Again, mobile flows are aiding bottom-up social movements.

Read full article

Photo project for the marginalised

Here is another project initiative to get individuals to use handheld devices to record injustice and experiences of harrasment:

Photo Project Records Life Along U.S.-Mexico Border

"Handing cameras to the marginalized remains a powerful way to make visible human experiences and the complexities of social injustice that would otherwise go largely unrevealed. We saw it a couple years ago with the documentary film "Born into Brothels" about Kids With Cameras, the organization founded by Zana Briski to help educate the children of Calcutta's prostitutes, and children worldwide, through learning the art of photography."

Read the rest of the post here

Thanks to Worldchanging

Wireless Highway

In this recent piece from MIT Technology Review, in which new wireless technology in cars is being tested in order to enable cars to communicate with each other for safety reasons:

"The vehicles were testing Motorola communications technology as part of a corporate and government push to blanket roads with wirelessly broadcast safety information over the next decade, saving lives by getting cars' computers to talk to each other. To be sure, communications-driven auto safety features have been envisioned for years. But Motorola's tests are part of a new wave of projects that are using such technology in actual vehicles, on public roads, for the first time."

Read here

Spain gears up for record street party

I love this post! From textually.org, it looks as if the Spanish are smartmobbing in innovative ways:

"Spanish youngsters were preparing to answer the call, sent out via the Internet and SMS texting, to hold a "macrobotellon", or mass drink-in, despite health ministry pleas to refrain. ... "Students in the southern city of Granada came up with the idea of beating the record botellon turnout in nearby Seville, where 5,000 people gathered on February 16 to drink into the night. Thanks to the Internet and text-messaging, word has spread across Spain. With politicians wary of the event descending into an outbreak of mass drunkenness, Health Minister Elena Salgado sounded a warning note Thursday."

Read more

Carnival Of The Mobilists No 19

Yes, another week has passed - and Carnival Of The Mobilists No 19 is being hosted over by C. Enrique Ortiz at his Mobility Weblog.


More great news to keep up with!

Interactive Systems

Hans Gellersen is Professor for Interactive Systems at the Department of Computing at Lancaster, and is doing some interesting work concerning ubiquitous computing and physical/digital interfaces. Well....I'll let him explain:

"My research interest is in Ubiquitous Computing and human-computer systems that "take the real world into the loop": context-aware computing, situated user interfaces, augmented everyday artefacts. Specific interests are integration of sensors and perception in interactive systems, interaction with large numbers of networked artefacts, new interaction techniques, and mobile/wearable collaborative applications.

Projects
Smart-Its is a European project I co-ordinate within the Disappearing Computer initiative. The project investigates small-scale embedded devices that can be attached to everyday objects to augment them with sensing, perception, computation, and communication. These "Smart-Its" are enabling technology for building and testing ubiquitous computing scenarios, and are used in the project to investigate collective context-awareness of peer-to-peer ad hoc networked artefacts. This video provides an overview of the ideas and scenarios we explore in the project.
Equator is a collaboration of 8 institutions in the UK for interdisciplinary research on "Technical Innovation in Physical and Digital Life". The project aims to uncover and support a variety of possible relationships between physical and digital worlds, and at Lancaster we are focussing on how sensing and computing infrastructure can be unobtrusively merged with everyday artefacts and structures in domestic environments.
Pin&Play, another EC-funded project, investigates augmentation of common vertical surfaces such as walls and boards with embedded conductive material, to enable them as network bus for objects that become pushpin-attached."

Gellersen's Homepage

The Ambient Intelligence vision

Smartmobs has followed, and commented upon, the ISB (Information Society & Business) Event 2006: AmIGro in the city of Groningen in the Netherlands. They note that:

"According to the Ambient Intelligence vision, devices in our homes , offices, cars and public spaces will be interconnected,adaptative, personalized and context-aware. Most of all, this technology will play an important role in our future daily lives, but stays hidden in the background; it's integrated with our environment. The users personal convenience will be at the absolute centre of the interaction between man and machine."

Find out more here

RFID as virus-vehicles

In a paper that has been doing the rounds on the Net recently, and causing a heated response, is the report "Is Your Cat Infected With A Computer Virus?" (PDF).

Worldchanging has a measured reaction to this report here which discusses some of the implications involved when RFID tags/implants are able to become deliberately infected with a virus which they then pass on through their networking.

As with this technology, increased privacy security is a top issue.

Mobiles in Mongolia

There is a great blog on mobile telephony in unexpected places (Monogolia in -30 degrees) by Jan Chipchase, called 'Future Perfect'.

According to Rich Ling from mobile-society - 'Jan is a great researcher who uses both photos and text to describe mobile phone use around the world.'

Understanding Infrastructure

Alex Steffen over at Worldchanging has made some insightful comments on understanding infrastructure in order to understand cities: meaning physical infrastructures:

"If you want to understand the secret lives of cities, you have to look at the infrastructure that supports them. Infrastructure may not exactly be urban destiny, but the sunk costs we've invested in roads, sewers, pipes and wires exert tremendous influence over the kinds of urban innovations (like smart grids) we in the developed world can, in any realistic way, adopt. In other ways, the lack of established infrastructure in developing world cities both restrains and enables new possibilities.

One of the barriers to change here is that infrastructure is often hidden from our eyes, by choice or inattention. Because of this, resources which open our eyes to the systems which support us are inherently worldchanging. Explaining infrastructure is a form of making visible the invisible.

Geoff Manaugh has posted two excellent pieces illuminating New York's water system and the (heavily engineered)workings of the San Francisco Bay. I've been the San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model he profiles in the second post, and, while I am admittedly a geek for this stuff, I found it both riveting and revealing in a way that many digital tools sometimes are not. GIS-based mapping is obviously a wonderful tool for grokking systems, but there's something about physical models which appeals in a deeply visceral way."

Cooperation Commons

Cooperation Commons is a new site set up by Howard Rheingold and the Institute for the Future (IFTF)in order to study social strategies of cooperation:

"Even a small increase in our understanding of the dynamics of cooperation and collective action could have enormous payoffs in regard to international relations and conflict-resolution, the evolution of economic institutions, and the future of democratic governance and civil society. The Cooperation Project, a collaboration between the Institute for the Future and Howard Rheingold, proposes to catalyze an interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action. We do this by compiling and synthesizing current knowledge, mapping the outlines of the emerging field, convening meetings of the best minds in relevant disciplines, and encouraging ongoing discourse, research, and practice."

The site has some great resources, including articles and video streams from past lectures. A great move: thanks again to HR.

G/localization

Danah Boyd gave a talk at O’Reilly’s Etech 'on how large-scale digital communities can handle the tensions between global information networks and local interaction and culture: “G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide”.

Danah says 'This talk was written for designers and business folks working in social tech. I talk about the significance of culture and its role in online communities. I go through some of the successful qualities of Craiglist, Flickr and MySpace to lay out a critical practice: design through embedded observation. I then discuss a few issues that are playing out on tech and social levels.'

Via Many-to-Many

Google Mars

Google Earth has just gone interstellar - Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility and Google 'teamed up last summer to produce Google Mars,a mapping tool released Monday,which allows users to view and scroll across the surface of the Red Planet,visiting its many landmarks...

The goal here is to bring Mars to the general public, to give them access to a tool that lets them explore Mars in the same way that Google Earth lets you explore the Earth':

The site includes three different presentations of the Martian surface:

* Elevation - A shaded relief map, generated with data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. This map is color-coded by altitude, so you can use the color key at the lower left to estimate elevations.
* Visible - A mosaic of images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. MOC is like the digital camera you have at home. Basically, this is what your eyes would see if you were in orbit around Mars.
* Infrared - A mosaic of infrared images taken by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft. Warmer areas appear brighter, and colder areas are darker. Clouds and dust in the atmosphere are transparent in the infrared, making this the sharpest global map of Mars that's ever been made.

Thanks to Worldchanging

Read full article here at NewScientistSpace

13/03/06 Go Digital CBIT, Jamaican HDTV

This weeks programme examines the new ideas and gadgets revealed at CBIT the European technology fair. We also see how Jamaica is updating TV education with mobile phones. In addition we discuss the changes planned for this very programme; why Go Digital is to be renamed Digital Planet.

Download here

Seeing the World

As I've commented on before, mapping and mash-ups are on the rise, and new maps are appearing quicker than British colds. Worldchanging is also following this trend and commenting upon it. Here is an edited extract from their latest on this:

"We're not alone in this appreciation of spatial displays of information, and the variety of maps out there -- either novel designs or "mash-ups" using Google Earth -- keeps growing at a pleasingly rapid pace. Here are some of those that have caught our eye over the last couple of weeks, but I want to start with some thoughts as to where the trend may go.

The Earthtop Interface: Imagine something like Google Earth (or something very similar) as your main computer interface. You connect to email, voice over IP calls, web pages, even work tools through a geographic metaphor instead of a desktop metaphor.

The Earthtop Interface may not be the most efficient user interface design, but that's okay; it would be worth trying out, if only as a tool for virtual organizations and remote collaboration.

Poverty Mapping: Poverty Mapping collects indicators of economic and social development around the globe.

Stopping Extinction 6.5: Biologists often talk about the "sixth extinction," the wave of species deaths ongoing today, largely attributed to human activity.

Daily Disaster Maps: Budapest, Hungary-based Havaria Information Service has assembled an AlertMap of global disaster events.

GeoNews: GeoNews mashes up RSS-driven news reports and Google Maps, resulting in a geographic display of where major events are taking place.

Making the News: Word of novel uses of online mapping tools has started to hit the mainstream."

Read full post here

Participatory Media and Collective Action

Over at Smartmobs there is talk on the resources developed from the classes recently taught on "participatory media and collective action." - a wiki was made and now they're making the wiki public as a resource for others, and plan to add to it in the future:

"This is a collectively built resource space on two closely intertwined topics: Participatory Media and Collective Action. This project came out of the Seminar Class: Participatory Media of the School of Information Managment and Systems, University of California at Berkeley.

In addition to class readings and discussion on this wiki, the students of this class have collected a collection of readings and documents under different themes. The class also produced four projects. They are:


Class Projects:

1. Cyberactivism in China: Public opinion, censorship, and Technology
2. Political campaign: 2004 election USA - Dean campaign, bloggers v Dan Rather, bloggers v Swift Boat Vets
3. OhMyNews
4. Flashmobs and other forms of participatory-mediated, self-organized entertainment

Find the wiki here

Carnival of the Mobilists 18

This week's 'Carnival of the Mobilists' is being hosted at Martin's Mobile Technology Page - as ever, there are some interesting postings about on the mobile from all around the web, including RFID on phones in Japan and phones being used as house keys - to De Waele's continuing series of interviews with women in mobile.

The Carnival just keeps getting better....

Blogjets and connected things

Worldchanging has a post on which it discusses a recent paper from Julian Bleecker about networked objects and the oft-talked about 'Internet of things':

"Julian Bleecker's paper A Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things (PDF) -- also known as Why Things Matter -- should be required reading for every WorldChanging participant, contributor or reader.

The essay looks at the rise of what Bleecker calls "blogjects" (objects that blog), precursors to Bruce Sterling's more complex "spime" concept. Simply put, these are networked objects that document on an ongoing basis their locations, their histories, and their purposes -- in essence, telling us their stories. On the surface, Bleecker focuses on the evolution of this technology, but in reality, he's really talking about a catalyst for bringing about the Bright Green future."

The future of connected 'things', whereby objects will be allocated a URL in an increasingly pervasive physical-virtual network, has much still to be discussed and I feel will be a major topic in the overhaul of the Net and social ties.