Four short links: 22 September 2009

Cities, How Things Work, Stylish Google, EC2 Numbers

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future (IO9) -- a great essay by Matt Jones, based on his talk at Webstock this year. Urban design is how we created alternate realities before we had iPhones, and the new technology lets us choose which science fiction future we want to inhabit. We are now a predominantly urban species, with over 50% of humanity living in a city. The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the "maximum cities" of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal - people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said. Hacking post-industrial cities is becoming a necessity also. [...]
2. How and Why Machines Work (MIT Open Course Ware) -- Subject studies how and why machines work, how they are conceived, how they are developed (drawn), and how they are utilized. Students learn from the hands-on experiences of taking things apart mentally and physically, drawing (sketching, 3D CAD) what they envision and observe, taking occasional field trips, and completing an individual term project (concept, creation, and presentation). Emphasis on understanding the physics and history of machines. (via Hacker News)
3. Google Style Guide -- how Google codes. Useful if you're working on their code, starting a job there, or want to mock them for not specifying K&R braces/four space tabs/<insert One True Way here>. (via Hacker News)
4. EC2 Usage Guessed From Sequential IDs -- The Superseries ID changes so rarely that originally I had assumed it was some kind of checksum. This would have been odd as it limits the total available IDs to 2²⁴ = 16.8 million. Up to very recently, the Superseries ID for all resource types - instances, images, volumes, snapshots, etc. - was 69 (in the us-east-1 region (for eu-west-1 the Superseries ID is 74). These days, new instances use the Superseries ID 68. This subtle change, unnoticed by the industry, may hint at an astonishing achievement: 8.4 million instances launched since EC2’s debut! (Instance IDs are even so 8.4M = 16.8M / 2.) (via mattb on delicious)

Four short links: 31 August 2009

Digital Textbooks Rock, Diagrammed Sentences, Urban Games, Quirky Food

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. CK-12 Textbooks Accepted by State of California -- kudos to open textbook non-profit CK-12 for having many of their textbooks okayed for use in classrooms. Their books did better than those from commercial publishers! (via Slashdot)
2. Diagrammr -- web app to diagram simple sentences. (via brian on delicious)
3. Noticings -- Noticings is a game of noticing things in cities. Snap a photo of something interesting you happen upon, upload it to Flickr, tag it with 'noticings' and geotag it with where it was taken. (via migurski on delicious)
4. White Castle Microwavable Frozen Hamburgers -- Cal Henderson and Joshua Schachter can be bribed with these after midnight. (via direct observation)

Where 2.0 Preview - Building the SENSEable City

by James Turner | comments: 2

Much of the information we have about how cities work (or don't) comes through direct, intentional observation and study--but could we learn as much or more by mining the data that citizens generate in their day-to-day lives, through cell phone traffic and internet usage? That's one of the questions that Andrea Vaccari, a research associate at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, is trying to answer. Andrea will be speaking on the research that the SENSEable City Project is doing at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in May.

James Turner: So why don't you start a little bit by talking about what the charter of the SENSEable City Lab is?

Andrea Vaccari: Sure. The SENSEable City Lab is a recent initiative; a new initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which focuses on studying how digital technologies are evolutionizing the way we live in cities. And, therefore, how we can leverage these technologies; how we can make use of it through understanding how cities are using it; how we can design better cities. And then we can create cities that are more sustainable, more livable and automatically more efficient.

JT: A lot of data that governments gather about cities -- the example I think of is the little things they put across the roads to find out traffic going over a road, but that's almost like just a point source data. Can you compare that to the kind of data that you're able to extract through the records you can get access to?

AV: Sure. The problem with past data in all aspects of the urban planning and social studies is that the data is usually punctual, so it refers to very specific points in space and also in time. And that's because the methods that were used to gather this information were very expensive. They required either to deploy infrastructures or to employ people to count manually cars, people, vehicles. And, therefore, it was impossible to have a real-time flow of information. What we are trying to do is to leverage the pervasive systems that enhance our cities today. And I'm referring to telecommunication networks, wireless networks, transportation systems or any other sort of digital system that interacts on a daily basis -- on a real-time basis -- with the citizens. What happens is that with these systems, interactions between the user and the system creates logs of their activity. And these logs can be used to understand the urban dynamics, to understand how people move in living cities and how cities themselves evolve in time.

JT: Now, you showed me some of the examples of the datasets that you've been playing with, and it seems like largely it's cell phone data and wifi data and then secondarily, things that are more voluntary like Flickr uploads.

AV: Yes.

JT: Wifi data you can pretty much get to a hotspot. And as Google has demonstrated with cell phone data, you can get fairly good positioning. But what kind of resolution do you get out of say cell phone data?

AV: Sure. The resolutions that we get for the cell phone is aggregated at the antenna level. So we don't get information about the individuals because we strongly respect privacy. And what we basically know is how many calls, how many text messages, how much traffic is served by each antenna in a city. And, of course, we know the position of the antenna and we can estimate the coverage of these antennas. So we can fairly understand what are the dynamics going on in the area of coverage. But, again, we don't get information about individuals.

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The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory

by John Geraci | @johngeraci | comments: 15

Guest blogger John Geraci has spent the last six years making life in cities better with the use of web technologies. His latest project, DIYcity.org, has web developers and urban planners all over the world teaming up to create open source tools for residents of cities everywhere. Prior to DIYcity, Geraci co-founded the hyperlocal news network Outside.in.

Back in January, the city of Los Angeles announced a gap of $433 million for their 2009 budget. Instead of just cutting services however, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took the unusual step of posting a survey online for residents of the city to fill out. For each category of city service, the survey asked residents, "what program would you reduce to help balance the budget?", followed by an itemized list of services they could choose from.

It was in one sense a remarkable sign of the new openness and desire for participation sweeping government all over the U.S.

In another sense though it begged a larger question: if you're going to involve city residents in these issues, why stop at asking people which services they would like to cut? Why not go a bit further and ask them for input on how to keep these services, while making them leaner, more efficient, and smarter? And why not then ask for their help in making those changes happen?

These are questions cities everywhere should be asking today, as they find themselves faced with the challenge of gigantic budget shortfalls brought on by the recession. The conversation about the future of our cities should involve the people living in those cities. But it should not be about which services to eliminate, it should be about how to reinvent these services as modern, efficient things, how to make them work at a fraction of their current cost, and, while we're at it, how to make them better than they are now.

Why? Because cities don't have the money to improve, or even sustain these services on their own. Because people have good ideas, often more innovative than the ones coming from the cities themselves. And because increasingly, people have the means to actually build and implement these services - not as centralized, closed, top-down systems we think of as public services today, but as distributed, participatory web-based systems built using data open to all.

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