When I look at Eric Fisher’s twitter visualization, I’m thinking of the article Kenyatta forwarded on about  random quantum walks at sub-atomic speeds in photosynthesis, olfactory processing, and human information processing:

 “Art map master Eric Fischer is back to make cartographic sense of all that location data you’re giving away for free on Twitter. This is New York, with New Yorkers’ trips routed and their geotag density mapped out in “10000 points, 30000 vectors.”” From Animal New York 

fred-wilson:

this is amazing. 

nevver:

Twitter Traffic

Visualizing the Costs of Incarceration in the US

“It cost 17 million dollars to imprison 109 People from these 17 blocks  in 2003. We call these million dollar blocks. On a financial scale prisons are becoming the predominant governing institution in the neighborhood.”

Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams in Metropolis, Jan. 2012

From Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab: Million Dollar Blocks

“The United States currently has more than 2 million people locked up in jails and prisons. A disproportionate number of them come from a very few neighborhoods in the country’s biggest cities. In many places the concentration is so dense that states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to incarcerate the residents of single city blocks. When these people are released and reenter their communities, roughly forty percent do not stay more than three years before they are reincarcerated. 

Using rarely accessible data from the criminal justice system, the Spatial Information Design Lab and the Justice Mapping Center have created maps of these “million dollar blocks” and of the city-prison-city-prison migration flow for five of the nation’s cities. The maps suggest that the criminal justice system has become the predominant government institution in these communities and that public investment in this system has resulted in significant costs to other elements of our civic infrastructure — education, housing, health, and family. Prisons and jails form the distant exostructure of many American cities today. 

The project continues to present ongoing work on criminal justice statistics to make visible the geography of incarceration and return in New York, Phoenix, New Orleans, and Wichita, prompting new ways of understanding the spatial dimension of an area of public policy with profound implications for American cities.

Million Dollar Blocks is the first of a series of projects to be undertaken by SIDL, as part of a two year research and development project on Graphical Innovation in Justice Mapping. The project, generously supported by the JEHT Foundation and by the Open Society Institute activates a partnership between the Justice Mapping Center (JMC), the JFA Institute (JFA), and the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation (GSAPP).

This unique partnership enables the Justice Mapping Center to refine analytical and graphical techniques within the research and teaching environment of the Spatial Information Design Lab, which can then be applied to real life policy initiatives through work with the JFA Institute. Reciprocally, input from state and local leaders is then brought back to the Design Lab for further development. This feedback loop is a valuable tool resulting in new methods of spatial analyses and ways of visually presenting them that reveal previously unseen dimensions of criminal justice and related government policies in states across the United States.

The results of this collaboration have transformed the project into multiple formats and forums for exhibition. 

A Review of several theoretical bases for Smart Cities

reblogggged from Nicolas Nova, Pasta & Vinegar: Theoretical bases for Smart Cities:

A theory of smart cities” by Colin Harrison and Ian Abbott Donnelly offers an overview of the different theoretical bases for the “Smart Cities” trope. As the author mentions, “the current ad hoc approaches of Smart Cities to the improvement of cities are reminiscent of pre-scientific medicine. They may do good, but we have little detailed understanding of why“.

After a quick introduction in which they describe what is hidden behind this term (use of digital sensors, penetration of networks that allow such sensors and systems to be connected, computing power and new algorithms that allow these flows of information to be analyzed in near “real-time”), they highlight two theoretical approaches:

“One of these is work in scaling laws going back to Zipf, but enormously enriched in recent years by theoreticians such as West and Batty to name but two. (…) This body of work provides evidence that although many behaviours of complex systems are emergent or adaptive, nonetheless there are patterns or consistent behaviour at the level of macro observation.
(…)
The second body of work considers cities as complex systems. (…) This approach introduces concepts such as interconnection, feedback, adaptation, and self-organization in order to provide understanding of the almost organic growth, operation, decline, and evolution of cities.“

Why do I blog this? I’m preparing a speech that I’ll deliver at the “Beyond Smart Cities” event in Madrid next week at the BBVA innovation center. My aim is to give a critique of the prediction trope in Smart Cities projects. The aforementioned article offer a relevant starting point for this top happen, even though their perspective is quite partial in terms of academic references. The paper is also interesting to understand the kind of assumptions IBM make when addressing these issues (as attested by the partial list of references).

humanscalecities:

Wow! How many times I needed one of this!

engenderandendear:

yokefellow:

All the tools are still there! Full marks for Brisbane!

Yay, Brisbane! 

designalenz:

Check out BBC’s series “How Big Really” to compare magnitudes to your own familiar places, e.g. the size of Rome under Augustus vs. your hometown!

humanscalecities:

From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen
Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement

(Source: urbaninformatics.net)

Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments

hautepop:

“Within the next few years an important threshold will be crossed: For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders—every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.

Plummeting digital storage costs will soon make it possible for authoritarian regimes to not only monitor known dissidents, but to also store the complete set of digital data associated with everyone within their borders. These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine, enabling state security services to retroactively eavesdrop on people in the months and years before they were designated as surveillance targets. This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution.

"

The problem of course is that the “power” of big data to help answer challenging questions relies upon the quality of that underlying data. And by “quality,” I don’t simply mean whether the data is accurate (which we will see is a fraught term in itself), but instead I am concerned with what sorts of assumptions are present in the collection of that data, what’s being left out, and how does the process of data collection influence the results?

What I am trying to demonstrate is that data, like science, is not as purely objective as we typically think it is. By assuming the objectivity of the underlying data, we set ourselves up to make large-scale decisions without properly challenging them because they are based on data, and that data “can’t be wrong”. The solution however is not to rid the data of all subjective intrusions because at a certain point this is not possible. What I am advocating is to approach big data with a healthy skepticism and an awareness of the ways in which it is lacking or only presenting a part of the picture.

"

Massive, crucial point, beautifully expressed - and by an undergrad no less (by name of Evan Freedman).

Comment on The Limits of Big Data by Klint Finley on RWW, June 2011

(via hautepop)

"You know what I’d really like to see interaction design wrestle with? I would love to see a rigorous, no-holds-barred examination of the complexities of the self and its performance in everyday life, and how these condition our use of public space (and personal media in public space). I would love to see the development of ostensibly “social” platforms informed by some kind of reckoning with issues like vulnerability, dishonesty, the fact of power dynamics. In other words, before we deign to go about “helping” people, wouldn’t it be lovely if we understood what they perceived themselves as needing help with, and why?"

Towards a Newer Urbanism: Talking Cities, Networks, and Publics with Adam Greenfield | UgoTrade

Adam, this is why interaction designers need to work with sociologists! All we sociologists do is examine the self in everyday life and people’s needs/wants. 

Adam Greenfield’s reflections on Everyware

I love Adam Greenfield’s reflections on his first book Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Adam wrote Everyware in 2006, and this interview, Towards a Newer Urbanism: Talking Cities, Networks, and Publics with Adam Greenfield, with Tish Shute was conducted in 2009. 

“So, first, I think it’s important to cop to all the places in Everyware where I just outright got things wrong. There’s a passage in Thesis 50, for example, where I unaccountably mock the idea that “the mobile phone…will do splendidly as a mediating artifact for the delivery of [ubiquitous] services.” OK, this was admittedly written in a pre-iPhone world – and was correct for that world – but you can really see my parochialism showing here. It took the iPhone to make the proposition as blazingly self-evident to me in North America as it had been for quite some time to folks in Europe and Asia.

Having said that, though, I think I’m justified in taking a little pride in what the book got right. The broader trends the book set out to discuss – the colonization of everyday life by information processing – well, take a good look around you. And so one of the points of departure for the new book is taking everything posited in Everyware as a given: the urban environment, and most everything in it as well, has been provisioned with the kind of abilities you mention. So what now?

How do you go about designing informatic systems so they don’t undermine the wonderful things about cities? How do you design cities so they can incorporate networked informatics to greatest advantage? How, especially, do you accomplish these things when the disciplinary communities involved barely speak the same language? And how do you keep everyone’s eyes on the prize, which is the ordinary human being asked to make sense of these new propositions? These are the questions The City Is Here For You To Use sets out to address.”

picture credit: from Dan Lockton’s wonderful review of Everyware