Imran Ali

RoboHash [del.icio.us]

2012-01-26T20:39:49-08:00

Robohash is a easy web service that makes it easy to provide unique, robot/alien/monster/whatever images for any text.

Titus Sal-trail [Flickr]

2012-01-22T13:55:43-08:00

Imran... posted a photo:

Glen Tramway Lived Here… [Flickr]

2012-01-22T13:55:06-08:00

Imran... posted a photo:

Jaume Plensa [Flickr]

2012-01-17T14:34:51-08:00

Imran... posted a photo:

Despair… [Flickr]

2012-01-17T14:34:06-08:00

Imran... posted a photo:

Magdalena Abakanowicz, "Ten Seated Figures" [Flickr]

2012-01-17T14:33:03-08:00

Imran... posted a photo:

The future cannot exist without the past | Bitcoin Media [del.icio.us]

2012-01-17T03:28:02-08:00

How the Internet Gets Inside Us : The New Yorker [del.icio.us]

2012-01-13T18:24:18-08:00

"Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self."

Ten, Eleven, Twelve [del.icio.us]

2012-01-13T18:10:26-08:00

10 games from 2011 that tell you all about 2012.

WVIL - Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens [del.icio.us]

2012-01-13T05:11:45-08:00

It answers the question: “what’s next for camera design?”

All This [del.icio.us]

2012-01-12T18:18:52-08:00

The ten-minute exchange

Inorganic Herbarium | "Botanical Diagrams" by Macoto Murayama [del.icio.us]

2012-01-09T16:36:20-08:00

Cities As Gardens | Conversation | Edge [del.icio.us]

2012-01-09T15:10:44-08:00

"…cities are much more than figurative gardens. It turns out that throughout our history, cities are actually literal gardens of human prosperity. They are the crucible of human civilization."

Frank Herbert by Tim O'Reilly [del.icio.us]

2012-01-08T18:14:24-08:00

PeteSearch: What the Sumerians can teach us about data [del.icio.us]

2012-01-04T12:14:31-08:00

"Gathering data is not a neutral act, it will alter the power balance, usually in favor of the people collecting the information."

"This creature who is part genius, part fool."

2011-11-22T00:08:15+00:00

'The human being is a truly remarkable creature,' he tells us.

'He has discovered fire, built cities, writen magnificent poems, interpreted the world, invented mythologies, etc. But at the same time he has never ceased waging war on his fellow humans, being totally wrong, destroying his environment, etc. This mixture of great intellectual powers and base idiocy creates an approximately neutral outcome.

So when we decide to explore human stupidity, we are somehow paying tribute to this creature who is part genius, part fool.'

From Jean-Phillippe De Tonnac's introduction to This is Not the End of the Book…

Temples For Machine Gods

2011-11-09T03:09:56+00:00

Perhaps its not a good thing for conference programmers to reveal their favourite speakers and sessions, but James Bridle's Where The Robots Work was my personal highlight from our programme at FutureEverything 2011.

James' keynote explored how cities were reorienting themselves around our emerging information infrastructure, notably how the built environment was now as much designed for machine habitation as it is for human occupation.

One of the session's more fascinating anecdotes illustrated how the price of real estate in Manhattan is dramatically affected by proximity to supernodes of connectivity; proximity that can shave fractions of seconds from Wall Street trades.

So it was a nice surprise today to find a short documentary - Ben Mendelsohn's Bundled, Buried & Behind - that relates the story of one of those supernodes, 60 Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan…

60 Hudson Street's art deco motifs underline its role as a communications hub that originates prior to the era of copper lines and early telephony. Its physical architecture is fitting, given its centrality in civilisation past and present.

However, it's somewhat strange that 60 Hudson Street's modern equivalents are so innocuous and prosaic. Given how crucial these facilities are to humanity, shouldn't we beatify and exalt them with the very best in modern architectural practice; aren't they the modern temples of our civilisation?

Though there are pragmatic reasons to avoid drawing attention to these facilities, perhaps their elevation to templehood would put them beyond humanity's destructive impulses. Indeed, could future generations venerate the temples of machine gods as did the surviving humans of Beneath the Planet of the Apes and their veneration of atomic weapons.

Perhaps we wish our machines to remain anonymous and mundane, not only to confine their magic to the Elysian cloud, but also to remind ourselves that humanity remains in charge and they inhabit prisons of our making.

(incidentally Life-Art-Us has a great summary of James' talk)

DIYBio UK Summit

2011-10-29T16:36:51+01:00

This weekend sees the UK's first DIYbio summit take place at Manchester's Madlab, founded my good friends - Hwa Young and Asa Calow.

The DIYbio movement intends to democratise biology and enable "citizen scientists, amateur biologists and biological engineers who value openness and safety" and the summit is part of Manchester's Science festival and includes speakers from Genspace, Hackteria and Transit Lab.

I've been following the work of synthetic biologists like Drew Endy and the Open Wetware Lab for many years, but it was back in Spring 2009, when Asa and I attended the Real Hackers Program RNA workshop at ETech in San Diego, that I saw that Asa had the bio bug too. Over the course of a couple of hours, we were taught how to hack E.Coli into various bio applications, by Ginkgo BioWorks' Reshma Shetty.

Through Hwa's been running various DIYbio meetups recently - includng an octopus dissection workshop! - it's great to see high impact work like the summit being concieved and delivered by the Madlab crew. Indeed, as Monica starts to formulate the 2012 edition of LSxJunior, Asa and I are keen to run a workshop on 'genetics and DNA sequencing for kids'.

Find out more about the DIYbio Summit at the Madlab site.

I wonder if any of the outputs from the DIYbio summit will find their way across town to ian Forrester's Last Weekend Dining Club…

The Dreamers

2011-10-25T12:56:41+01:00

My good friend Matt Maude has been shortlisted for the Virgin Media Shorts 2011 prize, with his piece The Dreamers…

A woman rises from her bed in the middle of the night. As she crosses the city, we see other sleepwalkers congregating to one place.

Matt tells a great story, with few words and some lovely expressive actors - but his talents aren't limited to the screen; check out the story of how he cleared the rights for the use of Sigur Rós in The Dreamers.

Booktrails… the story of 22 used books

2011-10-08T21:51:39+01:00

Over the last few months, I've been progressively upgrading the print editions of my books to digital editions; selling the print copies on Amazon to finance their electronic offspring. Uhuh, replacing atoms with bits.

With almost daily trips to the post office to despatch these used books, I began to wonder about the journey each book was taking to its new home. Were there any patterns or correlations in the places they were headed? Here's a simple BatchGeo map of their destinations…

Unsurprisingly, most titles (largely graphic novels) ended up in London, with the furthest (Y: The Last Man - Safeword) travelling 240 miles to Londonderry, and the closest (Head First HTML) travelling 16 miles to Oldham. Curiously, most of the comics headed South, whilst textbooks and novels headed North!

Really, I should have spimed every title by adding it to BookCrossing and hopefully been able to trace it's lifetime of ownership. Sadly, my nerd prescience wasn't so acute.

What's to be learned from this? There's no social graph here, or recommendation algorithm, just some geo-sprayed representation of my tastes.

However, it returns me to the notion of books as social objects, objects that have lives beyond a single owner. How do we gift or sell ownership of digital artefacts to others when we no longer own, but are simply blessed with access; access mediated by corporations that won't always have your interests at heart. The only reason I'm comfortable buying Kindle editions, is because I know I can break the digital locks if I need to - illegal yes, but by no means immoral.

Stallman was prophetic. Choose your data jailor wisely. DRM is now in your clouds…

Shelf Life

2011-10-06T19:00:22+01:00

Eventually, Everything is Bits. Even you.

And Everything has a shelf life, even shelves.

My shelves are experiencing an accelerating half life - a shelfular singularity if you like. Books, photos, movies, music and games now inhabit the clouds, pixellated, digitised and discless. My media genome is now scattered across many heavenly shelves…

Moving pictures took almost two years to turn from these…

into this: (their corporeal forms now grace the shelves of charity stores)

--

Then came the kindling of the pages, turning most of these…

…into things that could be in many places, but mostly in two.

Those that couldn't make the journey, remain neither wholly binary or atomic.

Along the way, I started foresaking these…

…and adopting their etheral brothers, though some still remain in limbo:

The most precious, began as atoms, then light, before becoming embalmed in silver hallide…

… and now existing as blocks of light, coarsing through slices of silcon, behind sheets of glass:

My shelves will soon be emptied and no longer required. I don't own those in distant clouds, but I do own those in the computers that belong to me. I have one, where I own none of the contents, nor the shelf itself… and it hurts when it's altered without consent.

Is this Better Than Owning? Perhaps.

The absence of atoms isn't problematic, but my senses can't yet fully appreciate and comprehend all the bits in all those new places…

"Just a lamp, a cup of tea, and a computer" (1955 - ∞)

2011-10-06T13:17:12+01:00

“This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.”

Here's to the Crazy One.

You changed our world; helped us to see everything a little better; let us taste things we never knew could exist… Thank you Steve, your works and words will resonate for generations.

‎Designed by Apple in California… the Story of Steve is the ultimate triumph of liberalism over conservatism; of liberal arts, religion, multiculturalism and counterculture over mediocrity.

We saw that we could win; that we could beat them.

Your Social Graph Is Autistic

2011-10-04T01:14:49+01:00

Much has been made of social graphs as filters for discovering new content, to the extent that many are now challenging the view that a social filter is even remotely indicative of interest - "…who you know doesn't always translate into what you like"

I'm not convinced that there's such a thing as an "interest graph" - as suggested in the recent Social Graphs Vs. Interest Graphs - but I do believe there are useful intent or interest models, that can be extrapolated from an individual's behaviour.

Flipboard, ShowYou and others aggregate media based on your friends' articulated sharing; this can result in many false positives, with inferences drawn from a semi-autistic social model; our articualted social graphs are driven by liquid affinities and etiquettes.

What's perhaps more insightful is the notion of aggregating media, based on what you own and use… collected artefacts thoroughly riddled with your tastes, memories, aesthetic choices and emotions.

The recently launched Bandito for iOS is an useful illustration of this - Bandito examines the content of your iTunes collection and suggests news items based on your tastes. Curiously, Bandito is a collaboration between a music licensing marketplace and music data provider - suggesting some novel, emerging value chains for the music industry.

Conversley, the wonderfully serendepitous and sublime Shuffler.fm aggregates music from curated news sources into musical genres which also present the news item in its original context along with each track. "Playing" music blogs as continuous mixes implies a kind of social graph, but that's a contrivance - it's simply a collection of editorial and an act of curation. Curation is a little more deliberate than shotgun sharing.

Whether acquired though piracy, digital stores or signals rippling through your social graph, what you collect - not who you know - defines your media genome. Your social graph - as it stands today - is autistic, lacking the subtlety, nuance and fidelty to articulate what you like; indeed, it simply broadcasts what others like.

I have a hypothesis that time and place can be as influential as a collection… but more on that another time ;)

Uniqlo Calendar…

2011-08-05T15:54:33+01:00

Lovely…

Advocating for a .leeds domain

2011-08-05T15:50:51+01:00

In late June, I wrote to the CEO and CIO of Leeds City Council, advocating that the city should invest in the creation of a top-level domain for Leeds. There's nothing particularly sensitive or confidential, so I thought I'd share the letter publicly and whether it's an idea that resonates with the city's other residents…

ICANN, the global body that regulates the Internet's global domain name infrastructure has just announced plans to allow the creation of new top-level domains, such as .google, .bbc and others. I've long been interested in the possibility of city-based domains such as .leeds as platforms for metropolitan culture and commerce… and indeed future revenue. Imagine for a moment…

www.arena.leeds
www.cityregion.leeds
www.festival.leeds
www.gov.leeds
www.headingley.leeds
www.carnegie.leeds
www.cornexchange.leeds
www.guardian.leeds
tom.riordan@cityregion.leeds
dylan@gov.leeds
imran@oldbroadcastinghouse.leeds

This possibility is now before us - for an application fee of £114000 (gulp!).

However, I think there's a strong possibility of creating a sustainable component in many future value chains here - for local, international and national brands and organisations - as well as ongoing revenue for the authority that operates .leeds.

With LCC as governing registry, other registrars can be authorised to sell .leeds domains globally, with a portion of those revenues flowing back to LCC on an annual basis. With LCC's position as a broadly-based and non-partisan representative of healthcare, communities, academia, business and government - a local council is a perfect host for governing a metropolitan domain that would be valuable to all parts of society that wish to be digitally addressable.

I imagine this wouldn't be a huge priority for LCC - given cutbacks and other more pressing civic priorities, but for a small investment, the city could accrue a valuable piece of digital real-estate and enable long term, broad-based revenue.

Imagine the commercial and cultural value of a .barcelona or .milan domain to those cities… Do we believe that .leeds is worth something?