I remember when I was working at Logen Bar a couple of years ago. At some point I was going to put some paintings on the wall, but due to a misunderstanding I accidentally drilled a hole in the wrong wall. No big fuzz, it was high up by the ceiling so one would hardly notice. But as time went by I slowly grew a bit fond of that accidental hole. After all, mishap or not, it was my mark on one the finest buildings in Bergen. Working long, stressful nights in the bar I would walk pass it with a stack of dirty, empty beer glasses in my arms and look up at the hole and say to myself; ” you haven’t exactly achieved much in life, but nonetheless, that hole in the wall is yours”.

Some time after I quit working there, my former employer repainted the bar, but took the effort to make sure that the hole still was visible. Which I thought was a very nice and grand gesture.

Originally uploaded by Bent S Olsen.

Their stories begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these ”real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city”. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 97

“G&R Gmail was developed completely by G&R employees, after the founding of G&R in 1982, and first licensed commercially in 1984 as a part of the software system known as GRUS (Gallagher & Robertson User System). GRUS with the G&R e-mail system was used widely in Norway in both the private and public sectors. The product was given the name Gmail in 1989 when the GRUS package was updated to become Server6. As a part of Server6 and other server packages Gmail was licensed under the Gmail name in various countries in Europe and in the Americas. We have marketed and supported Gmail under the Gmail name from then until today. Although we have not formally registered Gmail as a trademark, we have marketed G&R Gmail under the Gmail name for 15 years, and believe that we have common law right to the name, at least in Norway, USA, Great Britain, Sweden, Denmark and other European countries where our distributors actively marketed Gmail. Our right to the name under Norwegian law has been challenged by Google.” via Øyvind Bø

“The voyages of Captain Cook have just yielded a new discovery: the gradual weakening of Earth’s magnetic field is a relatively recent phenomenon. The discovery has led experts to question whether the Earth is on track towards a polarity reversal.

By sifting through ships’ logs recorded by Cook and other mariners dating back to 1590, researchers have greatly extended the period over which the behaviour of the magnetic field can be studied. The data show that the current decline in Earth’s magnetism was virtually negligible before 1860, but has accelerated since then…

Every 300,000 years on average, the north and south poles of the Earth’s magnetic field swap places. The field must weaken and go to zero before it can reverse itself. The last such reversal occurred roughly 780,000 years ago, so we are long overdue for another magnetic flip. Once it begins, the process of reversing takes less than 5000 years, experts believe” read article

The so-called Clipped Tag has a notched antenna that consumers can tear off, much like the end of a ketchup packet. Removing this panel drastically reduces the readable range of the device, from about 30 feet to less than 2 inches, according to IBM.

“It effectively changes a long-range tag into a proximity tag,” said Paul Moskowitz, a research staff member in IBM’s research division.

Via IFTF’s Future Now

“James Van Bokkelen is about to be robbed. A wealthy software entrepreneur, Van Bokkelen will be the latest victim of some punk with a laptop. But this won’t be an email scam or bank account hack. A skinny 23-year-old named Jonathan Westhues plans to use a cheap, homemade USB device to swipe the office key out of Van Bokkelen’s back pocket.

“I just need to bump into James and get my hand within a few inches of him,” Westhues says. We’re shivering in the early spring air outside the offices of Sandstorm, the Internet security company Van Bokkelen runs north of Boston. As Van Bokkelen approaches from the parking lot, Westhues brushes past him. A coil of copper wire flashes briefly in Westhues’ palm, then disappears.

Van Bokkelen enters the building, and Westhues returns to me. “Let’s see if I’ve got his keys,” he says, meaning the signal from Van Bokkelen’s smartcard badge. The card contains an RFID sensor chip, which emits a short burst of radio waves when activated by the reader next to Sandstorm’s door. If the signal translates into an authorized ID number, the door unlocks.” Read article

“Among other things, the guidelines say that consumers should be notified when goods have radio tags, which can be invisibly buried in labels, packaging or the goods themselves. The guidelines also say that it should be clear to consumers how to disable disposable forms of the tags and that it should be easy to do so once items with such tags have been purchased. Businesses are called on to notify consumers about how information gathered from the tags will be used.”

One motivating factor behind the guidelines is a survey showing privacy concern being a barriere to using RFID:

“A survey last year found that 7 percent of 89 retailers and 11 percent of 120 consumer products manufacturers had delayed or scaled back RFID investments because of privacy concerns, according to Christine Overby, who follows the technology for Forrester Research, a market research company based in Cambridge, Mass.”

Read article in NY Times

In recent years the ideas and views expressed by Jacobs has influenced among others Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place.

This blogs category “The uses of sidewalks” is originally a chapter title in The Life And Death of Great American Cities.

NY Times Obituary