Yule Heibel's Library tagged wired_magazine → View Popular

Filter:
All
Annotated

01 Feb 09

LimeWire Creator Brings Open-Source Approach to Urban Planning | Epicenter from Wired.com

Mark Gorton, software entrepreneur, turns to urban planning (transportation, specifically), using opensource to revolutionize planning.
QUOTE
You might call it a "P2P-to-people" initiative -- these efforts to make cities more people-friendly are partly funded by people sharing files.

That's not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton's vision for livable cities. The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.

Gorton's open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area.

"99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards... [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."
UNQUOTE
Yes!

blog.wired.com/...mark-gorton-ceo.html - Preview

wired_magazine mark_gorton open_source local_government urbanplanning cities limewire transportation

"P2P-to-people" initiative
The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.
3 more annotations...
- "99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards... [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."
- San Francisco, whose MUNI bus system is a frequent target of criticism, could be next to get the treatment. Gorton says he's in talks with the city
  to supply transit routing software for MUNI that will do
  a much better job of keeping track of where people are going and
  figuring out how best to get them there. San Francisco "overpaid
  greatly" for a badly-supported proprietary closed-source system that
  barely works, according to Gorton, putting the city under the thumb of
  a private company that provides sub-par support.
  - Yes! - on 2009-02-01
  Add Sticky Note
- The quest to bring open-source software to real-world urban planning continued, following the clearance of a key hurdle: Before you can build a transportation model, you need to know where the roads are.
  
  While public, that data was locked by private software used by public organizations and suffered from an overall lack of standards. Thus was born GeoServer, an open-source, Java-based software server that lets anyone view and edit geo-spatial data. Road information can now be painstakingly imported once from proprietary systems or entered from scratch, double-checked by other users, and rolled out to anyone who needs the data.
  
  "It didn't really exist before," said Gorton. "Most of the data was run on software from a company called Esri. Government agencies have this data, but it's all running on proprietary systems and you couldn't get access to it, or it was very hard to get access to it." GeoServer now runs in thousands of places around the world for all sorts of reasons, according to Gorton, whenever an online app needs to know where roads are.

03 Oct 08

Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York

Andrew Blum's article describes Cellophane House, a 5-storey prefab going up in Manhattan at the corner of 53rd and Sixth.

www.wired.com/...st_prefab - Preview

prefab wired_magazine andrew_blum architecture nyc

Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.
Prefab is "modernism's oldest dream," curator Barry Bergdoll says. Since the industrial revolution, architects have been in thrall of the idea that houses could be built in factories, like any kind of widget. But reality hasn't been extremely cooperative. Whether because of conservative public tastes, unachievable economies of scale, or designers' less-than-stellar business acumen, their utopian visions have mostly remained fantasies.
1 more annotations...
- But the strange subdivision next door to the museum suggests that prefab's time has finally come. The difference now is bits, not bolts. "Digital fabrication has become one of the key flash points for architects thinking about the way things are made," Bergdoll says as we tour the houses. On an upper floor of Cellophane, two riggers saw a crossbeam amid a flurry of sparks. (It was fabricated too long.) Nearby, a team of MIT students hammer at a cottage made of computer-cut plywood with grooves and joints ready to be fit together like puzzle pieces.

Plant Tweak Could Let Toxic Soil Feed Millions | Wired Science from Wired.com

UC Riverside scientists have a breakthrough that would allow genetic engineering to enable plants to become tolerant of aluminum toxicity. Apparently, much of the world's potentially arable land has that aluminum toxicity, and therefore can't be used for food production. Ths would circumvent that problem, and possibly signal a breakthrough into the second wave of a Green Revolution. (The first one has kind of reached its limits.)

blog.wired.com/...plant-tweak-cou.html - Preview

wired_magazine agriculture bioneering genetic_engineering food crops paul_larsen

"Aluminum toxicity is a very limiting factor, especially in developing
countries, in South America and Africa and Indonesia," said biochemist Paul Larsen. "It's not like these
areas are devoid of plant life, but they're not crop plants. Among
agriculturally important plants, there aren't mechanisms for aluminum
tolerance."
There's no more room for farms in the developed world; demand for cropland is fueling deforestation in the rain forests of Latin America and Africa; and the limits of the Green Revolution, which increased global food production through the use of pesticides and industrial farming techniques, have been reached. Another revolution, say agronomists, is needed.
2 more annotations...
- There's no guarantee that the tweak will prove successful and safe -- but if it does, it could provide food for millions.
- "I don't expect to make any money off it," he said. "I'd like it to trickle down to the people who need it.
  
  He does worry that the technique could be used as an excuse to clear
  rain forests from currently aluminum-toxic soil. Instead of this, said
  Larsen, already-cut land could be made more productive.
  
  "If we can make use of the land that's available now, maybe we can make
  it so we don't have to cut forests down in the future," he said.

26 May 08

Prefab-ulous: New Development in England Goes Up Green — and Fast

Brief article by Andrew Blum about Oxley Woods, a development of "90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres." The key aspect? They're all pre-fab, relatively cheap to build, can be built quickly, and have in-built green features.

If Canada had a federal housing plan/ strategy, this would be something the Feds (and the Province) could take a closer look at. It sounds like it could be a reasonable (if partial) solution to our affordable housing crisis.

www.wired.com/...pl_home - Preview

andrew_blum wired_magazine prefab green_buildings green_technologies oxley_woods affordable_housing

northwest of London, British developers are pulling one off on a scale that Americans are still only mocking up in Photoshop. The site, dubbed Oxley Woods, already features 90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres. The factory-made dwellings make good on prefab's promise of low cost and quick construction. They take as little as $118,000 and seven days to erect: five in the plant and a day and a half onsite, where crews slide and screw together the modular pieces. (Electrical, plumbing, and other finishing work takes another four weeks.) Manufacturing the major components offsite reduces waste and makes it easier to use green materials, like insulation from recycled paper and lumber harvested from sustainably managed forests.
But the biggest advantage is improved build quality. The same precision manufacturing that makes an Ikea bookshelf easy to assemble makes the Oxley Woods homes nearly airtight. But that doesn't mean they aren't well-ventilated. Each abode has an environmentally responsible cherry on top: A self-contained unit called an EcoHat controls circulation with a tiny 10-watt fan, pushing out stale air and drawing in fresh stuff, which is then solar-heated to warm the house.

02 May 08

Home Tweet Home: Energy-Savvy House Broadcasts on Twitter | Wired Science from Wired.com

Wired Magazine article by Alexis Madrigal on "wired" homes, including http://twitter.com/andy_house, by IBM "master inventor" Andry Stanford-Clark who "rigged up his home to twitter its energy use." See The House That Twitters Its Energy Use by Katie Fehrenbacher (http://earth2tech.com/2008/04/30/the-house-that-twitters-its-energy-use/).

Compare to Wired Mag's recent "Peak Water" article, which pointed out that many London households aren't even on water meters, making consumption monitoring impossible.

In addition, consider too the New Scientist article, "City road networks grow like biological systems" (4/23/08).

All this relates to infrastructure -- and to how we're just beginning to understand it from new angles. (See also Doc Searls' continuing investigation of infrastructure in Linux Journal.)

blog.wired.com/...online-homes-br.html - Preview

twitter infrastructure data architecture housing consumption energy wired_magazine

This revolution is being led by infotech guys like the Google engineer we wrote about, or the creator of the Twitter system, Andy Stanford-Clark, who works for IBM's Pervasive and Advanced Messaging Technologies team. And as Katie Fehrenbacher noted over at Earth2Tech, the creators of Flash are now hard at work on an energy monitoring and automation system called Greenbox.
As we've noted before, the convergence of IT and green tech is beginning as hackers turn the environment we've built and the one that naturally surrounds us into data that can be recorded, analyzed and used to reduce resource consumption.
- The data becomes part of the infrastructure... - on 2008-05-02
Add Sticky Note

28 Apr 08

Peak Water: Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry. How Three Regions Are Coping

- interesting article, w/ some useful visuals that show just how disproportionately much water we use for agriculture. I'd like to use this article together with some relevant ones on Victoria's sewage treatment issues to connect some dots re. infrastructure capacity; capturing engery from waste (sewage); using biowaste not corn or soybeans for ethanol/ biofuels; capturing water for agriculture from sewage; and producing agriculture locally especially in the face of rising food prices.

www.wired.com/...ff_peakwater - Preview

aquifers wired_magazine water peak_water

This is not to say the world is running out of water. The same amount exists on Earth today as millions of years ago — roughly 360 quintillion gallons. It evaporates, coalesces in clouds, falls as rain, seeps into the earth, and emerges in springs to feed rivers and lakes, an endless hydrologic cycle ordained by immutable laws of chemistry. But 97 percent of it is in the oceans, where it's useless unless the salt can be removed — a process that consumes enormous quantities of energy. Water fit for drinking, irrigation, husbandry, and other human uses can't always be found where people need it, and it's heavy and expensive to transport. Like oil, water is not equitably distributed or respectful of political boundaries; about 50 percent of the world's freshwater lies in a half-dozen lucky countries.

Freshwater is the ultimate renewable resource, but humanity is extracting and polluting it faster than it can be replenished. Rampant economic growth — more homes, more businesses, more water-intensive products and processes, a rising standard of living — has simply outstripped the ready supply, especially in historically dry regions. Compounding the problem, the hydrologic cycle is growing less predictable as climate change alters established temperature patterns around the globe.
One barrier to better management of water resources is simply lack of data — where the water is, where it's going, how much is being used and for what purposes, how much might be saved by doing things differently. In this way, the water problem is largely an information problem. The information we can assemble has a huge bearing on how we cope with a world at peak water.
9 more annotations...
- - - one of the biggest discrepancies btw resource and consumption is for Asia -- how come? Also, N.America: that might be skewed, given Canada's vast water supply, yet relative sparse population density. - on 2008-04-28
  Add Sticky Note
- London's infrastructure has a more fundamental problem: It's creaking with age. "Charles Dickens was the best-selling author when most of our pipe work went in," says John Halsall, director of water services at Thames Water, the private company that provides water to greater London. Thames Water maintains more than 300 reservoirs, 99 treatment plants, and more than 20,000 miles of pipe. The city's water system was a triumph of 19th-century engineering, but one-third of the mains are more than 150 years old, veterans of such scourges as Hitler's bombs and corrosively acidic soil. Thames' system leaks 180 million gallons a day, 30 percent of overall flow. To fix a leak, which the company does some 82,000 times a year, it has to shut down traffic and dig up the streets in one of the most congested cities on Earth. A brief walk around the West End turns up a half-dozen work crews digging up Victorian mains, scooping through layers of history to repair the pipes one segment at a time.
  
  Replacing all the Victorian pipes would cost an estimated $3.6 billion. The conundrum facing Thames Water is how to upgrade the crumbling system without tearing up the city or bankrupting the company. There are two sets of solutions: On one hand are small, local, high tech projects. On the other are traditional large-scale civil engineering initiatives that have been a staple of water management since the Roman Empire. Tompkins favors the small-scale approach. In particular, he likes metering. There's no way to measure the water flowing through much of the underground infrastructure, which makes it hard to identify leaky sections. Likewise, not even a quarter of the city's households are metered, and that makes it difficult to encourage conservation. If consumers understood exactly how much they were using, Tompkins reasons, perhaps they would change their behavior, like a dieter motivated by the scale readout every morning.
- Michael Tapia shows me a device called iStaq. Tapia is CEO of Qonnectis, iStaq's manufacturer. Barely the size of a hardcover book, the unit can be tucked away under a manhole cover and transmit measurements of water level, pressure, flow, and other variables. "The system itself is intelligent," Tapia says. "It will send you an email or text saying, You have a burst pipe.'" Qonnectis has a $400,000 contract with Thames Water to help detect leaks.
- - - Re. my question from the previous image: seems that most of the water in Asia is being used to grow food...? - on 2008-04-28
  Add Sticky Note
- Research shows that installing a meter in a house so people can see how much water they're using can reduce consumption by 10 percent.
- Thames Water's most controversial project is a $400 million desalination plant called the Thames Gateway. The proposed facility could take in seawater, filter out the salt, and deliver 35 million gallons of drinking water a day during drought emergencies. Desalination would essentially drought-proof the city, the company claims. It's an appealing solution. The ocean is practically limitless, and the plant would run on biodiesel, giving it a green imprimatur. The project was moving through the approval process in 2006 when London's tough, left-leaning mayor, Ken Livingstone, blocked it.
  
  Livingstone argued that the plant was too expensive and that desalination is too energy-intensive. Stripping seawater of its salt is a pricey way to obtain freshwater, cost-effective only for high-end uses like drinking, but not bathing or watering gardens. And the mayor questioned the proposal's environmental cred: Biodiesel emits carbon, and desalination's super-salty byproduct is toxic to marine life. Thames Water would do better, he insisted, to repair London's decrepit labyrinth of pipes.
- - - interesting that the graph predicts Canada will remain "very high" even in 2025 - on 2008-04-28
  Add Sticky Note
- - - I'll never shop for jeans guilt-free again... - on 2008-04-28
  Add Sticky Note
- In Peter Gleick's view, we have to move away from the "hard path," the massive civil-engineering projects and exploitation of untapped sources that defined the 20th century. Instead, we must turn to a "soft path," making the most efficient use of what we already have. Technology can help, and some new infrastructure will be necessary, Gleick believes. But the larger issue is conceptual: We must view efficiency itself as a source of water and tap this hidden wellspring. Americans already use 20 percent less water per capita than they did a generation ago. Gains in industrial use are even more impressive: A ton of US steel manufactured today requires just 2 percent of the water it did in the 1940s. Still, we are using more than we have. Can we change enough, and soon enough? "The whole point of peak water," Gleick says, "is that we have to fundamentally rethink who gets to use water for what."

11 Mar 08

Gamers Get Their Kicks From Dying - Wired Magazine

Via Regine (WMMNA), an article in Wired Magazine by Clive Thompson, "Gamers Get Their Kicks From Dying."

He writes: "In 'The Psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic Emotional Responses to Violent Video Game Events' -- published in this month's edition of the journal Emotion -- [Niklas] Ravaja [a scientist who has done pioneering research into the emotions of gamers as they play] reaches an amazingly counterintuitive conclusion: Gamers don't like shooting their opponents, but they're suffused with pleasure when they themselves are shot dead."

What's also interesting is that this presents some alternative evidence that one doesn't become desensitized to violence just because one plays violent online or computer games.

www.wired.com/...gamesfrontiers_0310 - Preview

clive_thompson death gamers gaming violence wired_magazine

I can't even count the number of ways I've died. Like most gamers, I've been slaughtered by AK-47-wielding terrorists, poisoned by eldritch spiders and blown up with alien frag grenades. I've also been impaled on medieval swords, ripped limb from limb by dinosaurs and impassively stomped by 20-story-tall, walking war machines that barely noticed my existence.

Yet here's the thing: It's possible that these deaths have been among my most enjoyable game experiences.
This is the fascinating argument of a new paper by Niklas Ravaja, a scientist who has done pioneering research into the emotions of gamers as they play. In "The Psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic Emotional Responses to Violent Video Game Events" -- published in this month's edition of the journal Emotion -- Ravaja reaches an amazingly counterintuitive conclusion: Gamers don't like shooting their opponents, but they're suffused with pleasure when they themselves are shot dead.
5 more annotations...
- When people killed an opponent, their electrodermal activity shot up, while their faces registered distress. "That is, instead of joy resulting from victory and success, wounding and killing the opponent elicited anxiety, anger or both," Ravajas said. When gamers themselves were killed, in contrast, the sensors detected "positively valenced high-arousal affect," he said.
- Ravajas isn't entirely sure why gamers feel this way, though he has theories. If we feel distress when we kill an in-game opponent, it may be because it violates our ingrained sense of morality; we know killing is bad, even when it's virtual.
- His much weirder experimental result, though, is our thrill at dying. Ravajas thinks this might occur because getting killed is "transient relief from engagement"
- I may not want to die; but for the sake of my mental health, I probably need to.
- Most shooters execute this third-person shift, of course. But Bungie has made it into an experiential tone poem. You could think of it as "the architecture of death," and game designers ought to pay more attention to it. Because one thing's for sure: We're all going to die.