Over at N8UR I’ve just posted 2 new tracks I’ve been working on. The first is Into Winter - a heavy electronic piece featuring vocals from Humpasaur Jones that I chopped up considerably. The second is a disco trance track called Disco Assassin.
Here’s a selection of my tweets from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past week. These are the ones I think grab the juicy nuggets from the speaker’s presentations. [In temporal order with the earliest (ie Monday eve) listed first.]
Tim O’Reilly: “We have greatness but have wasted it on so much. ”
We have an unprecedented opportunity to build a digital commonwealth. #etech
Work on something that matters to you more than money. This is a robust strategy. #etech Niall Kennedy: Energy Star rating for web apps? Thinking of clouds & programming like tuning a car for better gas mileage. #etech
Cloud computing: no reasonable expectation of privacy when data is not in your hands. Not protected by 4th amendment. #etech Alex Steffen: Problems with water supply are based in part on our lack of beavers. #etech
Social media for human rights. http://hub.witness.org #etech Gavin Starks - Your Energy Identity & Why You Should Care. see http://amee.com #etech Maureen Mclugh - Consider that technology may be evolving in ways that are not particularly interested in us. #etech Becker, Muller: We have under-estimated the costs and over-estimated the value of our economy. #etech Becker, Muller: We assume economic trade must be the primary framing of value in our lives. Why? #etech
Design Patterns for PostConsumerism: Free; Repair Culture; Reputation Scaled; Loanership Society; Virtual Production. #etech NYT: emerging platforms, text reflow, multitouch, flexy displays, smart content, sms story updates, sensors, GPS localized content. #etech Jeremy Faludi: Buildings & transport have the largest impact on climate change. Biggest bang for the buck in re-design. #etech Jeremy Faludi - Biggest contributor to species extinction & habitat loss is encroachment & byproducts from agriculture. #etech Jeremy Faludi - Best strategies to vastly reduce overpopulation: access to birth control & family planning, empowerment of women. #etech Tom Raftery: Grid 1.0 can’t manage excess power from renewables. Solution: electric cars as distributed storage. #etech
Considering the impact of pluging AMEE (@agentGav) data in ERP systems for feedback to biz about supply chain impacts. BI meets NRG ID. Mike Mathieu: Data becoming more important than code. Civic data is plentiful and largely untapped. Make civic apps! #etech Mike Mathieu: Take 10 minutes today and pick your crisis. Figure out how to create software to help. #etech
What is #SantaCruz doing to make civic data available to service builders? We want to help SC be healthier & more productive. Mark Fraunfelder: “I haven’t heard of anybody having great success with automatic chicken doors.” #etech [re-emerging technology]
Realities of energy efficiency: 1gallon of gasoline = ~1000hrs of human labor. #etech Kevin Lynch: Adobe is saving over $1M annually just by managing energy. #etech
Designing backwards: Think about the destiny of the item before thinking about he initial use. (via Brian Dougherty) #etech
RealTimeCity: physical & digital space merges, people incorporate intelligent systems, cities react in accord w/needs of pub welfare. #etech
Oh my we’re being LIDAR’d while Zoe Keating plays live cello n loops. ZOMG!!! zoe keating & live lidar is blowing my mind at #etech 1.3M points per sec! Julian Bleeker cites David A. Kirby: “Diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage over true prototypes” #etech Julian Bleeker: Stories matter when designing the future, eg. Minority Report. #etech Julian Bleeker: “Think of Philip K. Dick as a System Administrator. #etech Rebecca MacKinnon: Which side are we helping, River Crabs or Grass Mud Horses? #etech Kati London: How can we use games to game The System and how can they be used to solve civic problems? #etech Nathan Wolfe: Trying to fight pandemics only at the viral human level ignores deep socioeconomic causes of animal-human transmission. #etech Nathan Wolfe, re: viral jump from animal to human populations: “What happens in central Africa doesn’t stay in central Africa.” Nathan Wolfe: need to work with % of population w/ hi freq of direct contact with animals for early detection of viral transmission. Nathan Wolfe: Vast majority of biosphere is microscopic, mostly bacterial & viral. Humans: very small piece of life on Earth. #etech
The New York Times will not go quietly into the dark knight of new media. Amidst constant rumors of the death of traditional news, the much-respected industry stalwart is moving quickly to build a compelling and forward-looking solution that redefines “the newspaper as platform”, as ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick notes.
Today the NYT announced that 2.8 million articles will be exposed to the digital world through the site’s API, allowing anyone to link, annotate, mashup, and crawl the data for meaning. This opportunity to construct data visualizations that abstract patterns & trends from within the articles is perhaps the most interesting element that immediately adds human value to what is otherwise an overwhelming amount of information (2.8 articles).
The recent Twitter Superbowl visualization, as well as other visualization experiments at NYT.com, are indicators of how the company is gathering data and parsing it in meaningful ways. A list of Twitter posts related to the Superbowl is just a long index table. Even reading the Summize Search feed for such a huge event is dizzying. But a geo-located, timeline mashup of tweets & key terms with a map of the US is immediately valuable to anyone trying to get a bead on trends. Their implementation is simple & entertaining, and you can derive substantial meaning at a glance.
These experiments are proofs of concept that point the way towards more advanced viz mashups now further enabled by opening the NYT information archives and building a coherent API on top. Imagine, for example, sections of NYT.com dedicated to serving all outgoing comm from a particular region, say Gaza & Jerusalem. Imagine seeing seeing real-time visualizations of the thoughts and feelings of average citizens free from the carefully structured statements of the vested power interests hurling rockets and armor at each other. Or imagine crawling the news reports of the last 8 years looking for instances of the words “Bush”, “Abramoff”, and “Florida flight school”…
Of course, this is another big win for the information transparency movement - information wants to be free, after all - and you can expect many others to get the message and follow suit. But it also wraps the current events of our world as reported by NYT in a searchable and re-configurable layer establishing a protocol for interfacing with these vast data stores. This open approach certainly cries out for some sort of semantic layer and I suspect the Reuters/Calais folks are paying very close attention to this announcement.
This is the prevailing trend of this current phase of digitizing culture and communication. Data is accumulating at an ever-increasing rate requiring open standards for archiving, interrogating, & visualizing the meaning held within. The tools are evolving to sort the signal from a vast sea of noise. More and more information archives will be exposed and more and more tech will be created to interface with it and draw out meaning from the morass. The global sharing of information and communication is feeding the pool of innovation that continues to radically alter the face of our world with each new discovery.
Whether or not information wants to be free… We certainly need it to be.
[This is a reply I left recently to a Global Futures question about the near-future of the web. It goes a little off-topic at the end but such is the risk of systems analysis. Everything's connected.]
Within 10-15 years mobile devices will constantly interact with the world around us, analyzing objects, faces, signage, locations, and anything else their sensors can engage. Camera viewfinders will identify visual sources using algorithms to match them up with cloud data repositories. Bluetooth and GPS will interact on sub-channels silently exchanging relationships with embedded sensors across devices and objects. A user’s mobile device will become their IP address hosting much of their profile information and mediating relationships across social nets, commercial transactions, security clearances, and the array of increasingly smart objects and devices.
Cloud access and screen presence will be nearly ubiquitous further blurring the line between desktop, laptop, server, mobile devices, and the objects in our world. It will all be screens interfacing between data, objects, and humans. Amidst the overwhelming data/content glut we will outsource mathematical chores to cloud agents dedicated to scraping data and filtering the bits that are pertinent to our personalized affinities and needs. These data streams will be highly dynamic and cloud agents will send them to rich media layers that will render the results in comprehensible and meaningful displays.
The human sensorium and its interaction with reality will be highly augmented through mobile devices that layer rich information over the world around us. The digital world will move heavily into the natural analog world as the boundaries between the two further erode. This will be readily apparent in the increasing amount of communication we will receive from appliances, vehicles, storefronts, other people, animals, and even plants all wired to the cloud. Meanwhile, cloud agents will sort through vast amounts of human behavioral information creating smart profiles and socioeconomic and environmental systems models with incredible complexity and increasing predictive ability. The cloud itself will be made more intelligible to agents by the standardization of semantic web protocols implemented into most new sites and services. Agents will concatenate to tie services together into meta-functions, just as human collectives will be much more common as we move into increasingly multicellular functional bodies.
The sense of self and our philosophical paradigms will be iterating and revising on an almost weekly basis as we spread out across the cloud and innumerable virtual spaces connected through instantaneous communication. Virtual worlds themselves will be increasingly common but will break out of the walled-garden models of the present, allowing comm channels and video streams to move freely between them and the social web. World of Warcraft will have live video feeds from in-world out to device displays. Mobile GPS will report a user’s real-world location as well as their virtual location, mashing both into Google Maps and the SketchUp-enabled virtual map of the planet.
All of this abstraction will press back on the world and create even greater value for real face-to-face interactions. Familial bonds will be more and more cherished and local communities will take greater and greater control of their lives away from unreliable global supply chains and profit-driven corporate bodies. Most families will engage in some form of gardening to supplement their food supply. The state itself will be hollowed out through over-extended conflicts and insurgencies coupled with ongoing failures to manage domestic civic instabilities. Power outages and water failures will be common in large cities. This will of course further invigorate alternative energy technologies and shift civic responsibilities to local communities. US manufacturing will have partially shifted towards alternative energy capture and storage but much of the real successes will be in small progressive towns rallying around local resources, small-scale fab, and pre-existing economic successes.
All in all, the future will be a rich collage. Totally new and much the same as it has been.
I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of Justin Boland’s excellent Humpasaur Jones vocal tracks. Honestly, I think he’s one of the best and most entertaining rappers I’ve heard and I’m stoked to work with his tracks.
Here’s the first track to come out of the project:
Well I lagged on getting my Radiohead remix up in time for the first contest. So I’ve cheated and uploaded it to the new contest for Reckoner. I’ll eventually do a remix of the new one too but who knows if it’ll be in time for the current contest.
I’m really stoked about this mix. It took me a long time (I did _a lot_ of chopping and re-timed the entire piece) but it’s finally done and has gotten some very heartwarming feedback.
Hyperpolitics: American Style
It is as though we have all been shoved into the same room, a post-modern Panopticon, where everyone watches everyone else, can speak with everyone else, can work with everyone else. We can send out a call to “find the others,†for any cause, and watch in wonder as millions raise their hands. Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule.
…These newly disproportionate returns on the investment in altruism now trump the ‘virtue of selfishness.’
…Sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing.
A photo snapped on my mobile becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible. No wonder she’s nervous: in my simple, honest and entirely human act of sharing, it becomes immediately apparent that any pretensions to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power have already collapsed into shell-shocked impotence.
This is simply awesome. I love it! I hope it gets mirrored everywhere before The Mouse buries it.
Srsly, Diznee: this is exactly what you want kids doing with your content. Make it hip and cool. Give to the commons so we want to give back. Seeing this makes me want to rent/buy the animated classic.
I’ve been enjoying the playful edge of the bleeding digital arts scene vicariously through we make money not art for some time now, but I have to give them renewed props for their site design. Love the aesthetic!
This was a great conference and the most consistent collection of speakers and topics I’ve ever experienced. Very fun and inspiring. Lots of hip 30-somethings trying to dream up tomorrow and make it real. It was a a very balanced, yet cutting-edge talk aimed at an eager (and surprisingly mixed-gender)crowd. I noticed that most folks were using Mac laptops - this part of the edge seems to prefer Apple - and it was fascinating to watch many who were blogging the talks while pulling up references dropped by the speakers, tweeting out to Twitter, and snapping/downloading/posting photos in real-time. As speakers dropped references I was pulling them up on my laptop and dropping links into my blog notes.
In the lobby a team was showing off a data viz video mapping real-time communications connecting NYC to the rest of the world. Andrea noticed that a surprising number were with an Italian city called Perugia. Maybe next year they could map the live feed of all web traffic from ETech. Imagine the bitstreams rising off such a gathering of digiterati.
Maybe it was just the Sudafed coursing through our virus-ridden veins (thank you Portland) but ETech was a total intellectual turn-on, from ambient objects, Asian mobile media, green policy and sustainability, hardware hacking & drone building, Austrian post-Situationists, neuroengineering, and the digital salvation of Democracy itself.
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