Outside the California Academy of Sciences:
via flickr
This is just a note to confirm the obvious: for the next several months I'm working exclusively on my next book, Taming the Digital Monkey: From Perpetual Distraction to Contemplative Computing (forthcoming with the fabulous Little, Brown & Company), and so will not be posting about futures-related things.
I will, though, be writing about the book on my contemplative computing blog, which like this blog I use as a kind of open commonplace notebook.
This is going on in Johannesburg:
Hundreds of [traffic] lights have been damaged by thieves targeting the machines' sim cards, which are then used to make mobile phone calls worth millions of South African rand.
More than two-thirds of 600 hi-tech lights have been affected over the past two months, according to the Johannesburg Roads Agency, causing traffic jams, accidents and frustration for motorists.
The traffic lights use sim cards, modem and use GPRS to send and receive information, a system intended to save time and manpower by alerting the road agency's head office when any lights malfunction. According to Thulani Makhubela, a spokesman for the agency, the robberies have been "systematic and co-ordinated", possibly by a syndicate. An internal investigation has now been launched.
"They know which signals to target," Makhubela added. "They clearly have information."
Wow. Real world, meet ubicomp!
Andy Clark argues:
[W]e seem to be entering an age in which cognitive prosthetics (which have always been around in one form or another) are displaying a kind of Cambrian explosion of new and potent forms. As the forms proliferate, and some become more entrenched, we might do well to pause and reflect on their nature and status. At the very least, minds like ours are the products not of neural processing alone but of the complex and iterated interplay between brains, bodies, and the many designer environments in which we increasingly live and work.
Ann Blair suggests, not so fast:
[We assume] that modern technology is creating a problem that our culture and even our brains are ill equipped to handle. We stand on the brink of a future that no one can ever have experienced before.
But is it really so novel? Human history is a long process of accumulating information, especially once writing made it possible to record texts and preserve them beyond the capacity of our memories. And if we look closely, we can find a striking parallel to our own time: what Western Europe experienced in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention of printing in the 15th century, when thousands upon thousands of books began flooding the market, generating millions of copies for sale. The literate classes experienced exactly the kind of overload we feel today — suddenly, there were far more books than any single person could master, and no end in sight.
Another example of bicycles becoming smarter and more social: Social Bikes.
For those who aren't familiar with how these resource-sharing services typically work, check out our story about the technology behind Zipcar. In a nutshell, there are little car lots (or in the case of B-Cycle, a company that will soon deploy shared bikes in Chicago, bike stations) located all over a city that are locked when not in use. A user can make a reservation online for a car or bike and then pick it up at the designated time.
There is no human interaction required: once the mode of transportation is reserved, the user identifies him or herself to the car or bike either by RFID (Zipcar) or PIN at the cycle station (B-Cycle), which then unlocks the car/bike. When the user is done, he or she returns the vehicle to the same lot so that others can make use of the car. For B-Cycle, users can return bikes to any B-Cycle station, not necessarily the one they rented from.
The SoBi system follows a similar path, but the technology is a bit more advanced than that of services like B-Cycle.... For one, there are no cycle stations: SoBi bikes are parked all over the city (starting in New York City) at regular old bike racks. This means that bikes could, in fact, be anywhere at any given time, and not just at a designated station that could be blocks away. You can pick up any bike that's not already reserved, and drop it off anywhere without having to hunt down a drop-off station....
Like a Zipcar, each SoBi bike is equipped with its own "lockbox" that communicates wirelessly with the SoBi servers via GPS and a cellular receiver (an H-24 module from Motorola, Rzepecki told Ars). When you make a reservation online or via smartphone, you see a map of all the bikes in the area based on their GPS data and are given the option to unlock a specific bike when you click on it....
Since the lockbox contains a GPS module, a cell chip, and a lock that works with a PIN pad, there has to be some way to power it. The SoBi team is still working out the kinks in power consumption, but plans to power the devices with a hub dynamo on the bike's rear wheel. The lockbox is essentially powered by your pedaling—no charging stations required.
[thanks, Heather]
For a long time, I've been interested in getting an electric bike, especially after I saw the Optibike at the California Academy of Sciences. Via the Daily Dish, I came across an MIT hybrid bicycle project that looks like just the thing: the Copenhagen Wheel. Check out the video:
Not completely clear from the video exactly how it works, but I like how elegantly it attaches to a bicycle (some bike motors look like real kludges), and that it also is a smart device:
Smart, responsive and elegant, it transforms existing bicycles quickly into hybrid electric-bikes with regeneration and real-time sensing capabilities. Its sleek red hub not only contains a motor, batteries and an internal gear system – helping cyclists overcome hilly terrains and long distances - but also includes environmental and location sensors that provide data for cycling-related mobile applications. Cyclists can use this data to plan healthier bike routes, to achieve their exercise goals or to create new connections with other cyclists. Through sharing their data with friends or their city, they are also contributing to a larger pool of information from which the whole community can benefit.
It's called the Copenhagen Wheel because the bike-friendly wants to increase the number of people who cycle, and worked wit the team to
to investigate how small amounts of technology could improve the cycling experience and how the four main obstacles to getting people on bikes - distance, topography, infrastructure and safety – could be overcome. What has resulted is the Copenhagen Wheel: a new type of electric smart-bike which utilizes a technical solution for overcoming distance and topography (a motor and batteries with regeneration capabilities that can provide riders with a boost when needed) and a real-time data network and series of applications to support infrastructure creation and foster a sense of safety.
Trading intelligence for resources; encouraging mergers of people and devices on human terms rather than device terms; bringing information to users in context-- all great examples of an end of cyberspace device.
Outside the California Academy of Sciences:
via flickr
Tweetage Wasteland makes a good point:
The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are:
Let me think about that.
Shirley Sherrod, the former rural development director for the Agriculture Department in Georgia found that out the hard way when she was fired by the Obama administration for her delivery of a supposedly racist speech. The speech was creatively excerpted, political bloggers and cable news commentators blew up the story, it entered the Twitterverse, and boom, Sherrod was asked to resign from her position.
Unfortunately, no one seemed to have time to listen to the whole speech. Once they did, Sherrod was showered with apologies and found herself taking calls from the President.
This story is less about politics and more about pace. It provides a clear example of how our Facebook and Twitter behaviors are bleeding over into the rest of our lives.... When confronted with the realtime web’s constant flow of incoming information, who has time for a full set of facts? We each take a few seconds to consider a one hundred forty character blurb and then hammer out our reactions by way of a Tweet or status update.
I've decided to move the Del.icio.us posts to my main blog, as they're now less exclusively end of cyberspace-related.
Ruth Evans takes an historical perspective on Andy Clark's natural-born cyborgs argument, and that "human cognition is not just embodied but embedded: not mind in body, but both mind and body enmeshed in a wider environment of ever-growing complexity that we create and exploit to make ourselves smarter."
From the abstract:
The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark has argued that humans have always been ‘natural-born cyborgs,’ that is, they have always collaborated and merged with non-biological props and aids in order to find better environments for thinking. These ‘mindware’ upgrades (I borrow the term ‘mindware’ from Clark, 2001) extend beyond the fusions of the organic and technological that posthumanist theory imagines as our future. Moreover, these external aids do not remain external to our minds; they interact with them to effect profound changes in their internal architecture. Medieval artificial memory systems provide evidence for just this kind of cognitive interaction. But because medieval people conceived of their relationship to technology in fundamentally different ways, we need also to attend to larger epistemic frameworks when we analyze historically contingent forms of mindware upgrade. What cultural history adds to our understanding of embedded cognition is not only a recognition of our cyborg past but a historicized understanding of human reality.
This reminds me some of the work of the cognitive anthropology crowd, which I find necessarily speculative but extremely ambitious and interesting.
You could also re-work Paul Saenger's work on word spacing and intellectual history in light of Clark.