The continuous enclave : strategies in bypass urbanism

Solar Cementaries

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

View link here

Edushi Maps

http://hongkong.edushi.com/?l=en

I came across this website that has mapped 30 different regions in China. Similar to Google Earth, but the 3D portion is more cartoon like.

If you click the link “citys” it will take you to the other maps. If you get a chance to check out it, it’s pretty interested to look at the construction/growth going on in Chinese cities, like Beijing and Shanghai.

MUM Final (really) research book

Mumbai Final Research book (in spread format…not for printing)

PHARM Streams

By-product of a robust pharmaceutical industry in India.

via BLDGBLOG

Data Projection Across Buildings

Mapping on to existing urban fabric.

via BLDGBLOG

Home Sensors

The Times reports on sensory technologies designed to provide a wide range monitoring technologies. Team London has reported on these types of devices previously as well.

“Bertha Branch, 78, discovered the power of a system called eNeighbor when she fell to the floor of her Philadelphia apartment late one night without her emergency alert pendant and could not phone for help.

A wireless sensor under Ms. Branch’s bed detected that she had gotten up. Motion detectors in her bedroom and bathroom registered that she had not left the area in her usual pattern and relayed that information to a central monitoring system, prompting a call to her telephone to ask if she was all right. When she did not answer, that incited more calls — to a neighbor, to the building manager and finally to 911, which dispatched firefighters to break through her door. She had been on the floor less than an hour when they arrived.”

American urbanism, the crash, and whats to come

The specificity of research, the depth of analysis, and the prescient forecasting in this article is phenomenal. It focuses on the economic landscape’s relation to the urban organization and infrastructure of America over the past century to today and what can be expected in the future. Spatial fixes is another interesting idea brought up in the last half.

How the Crash Will Reshape America

LA Rooftop Garden

Form versus plant growth?

Environmental Data Collector

 

sensory traffic light

See this entry from this year’s Greener Gadgets Design Competition.  

A prototype device that visualizes environmental data collected at various urban nodes.

Computational tree of life

The Times reports on efforts to develop computation models with sufficient complexity to track trends and patterns in genetic codes. Scientists are developing strategies to map the entire genome of plants for instance – updated and fully comprehensive maps of Darwin’s Tree of Life. The problem?

“There’s just one problem. “We have no way to visualize such a tree at the moment,” he said. If they tried, they would end up with a blurry, inscrutable thicket. “It would be ironic,” Dr. Sanderson said. “We’d be saying, ‘We’ve built it, but we can’t show it to you.’ ” 

Enter computer scientists and visualization experts working to bring these trees up to date and to correlate them to the enormous data sets generated by genetic research. ““Just like Google Earth changed the way people look at geography, a sophisticated tree of life browser could really change the way we look at the life around us,” said Mark W. Westneat, the director of the Biodiversity Synthesis Center at the Field Museum in Chicago.”

Read on here.

Los Angeles Growth Logic

GSAPP Spring 09 Events

The calendar of events at the GSAPP/Columbia is now available.

Radiator Exhibition

“The 4th Radiator festival and symposium, “Exploits in the Wireless City”, aims to instigate discussion and debate based on the understanding that the development of digital networks are transforming our notion of (public and private) space.”

Radiator Festival
“radiator going underground”

Sensory Advertising

NPR’s On the Media reports on marketing technology that obtains basic demographic and personal attributes from people who look at advertising and billboards. For instance, facial recognition is used to estimate a person’s gender and other tools measure the length of attention. Input parameters anyone? 

“What if the ads you’re watching are watching you back? A company called Quividi designs software that allows advertisers to guess your age and gender using tiny cameras inserted into billboards and video displays. Quividi’s chief scientific officer Paolo Prandoni explains how the ads work.”

Audio can be found here

Quividi makes their software available for download. A simulation available on their website.

Postopolis | Los Angeles

Postopolis Los Angeles

Google’s Latitude feature now tracks people

“With an upgrade to its mobile maps, Google Inc. hopes to prove it can track people on the go as effectively as it searches for information on the Internet.

The new software to be released Wednesday will enable people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share their whereabouts with family and friends.

The feature, dubbed “Latitude,” expands upon a tool introduced in 2007 to allow mobile phone users to check their own location on a Google map with the press of a button.”

Via Huffingtonpost.com

Bringing the Internet to Remote African Villages

The Times reports on a prototype program funded by Google and administered by the University of Michigan to bring solar powered satellite internet modules to remote parts of Kenya and find that social movements, access to market data, and the like improve lives.