lilasguevara

Good piece on monochrom about past, present and future of #hackerspaces

So to start off we would like to organize some workshops in the hackerspaces where we can learn about the philosophical, historical and other items that we need to get back in our lives. Theory is a toolkit to analyze and deconstruct the world.
Plus, we need to reflect and understand that the #hackerspaces of today are under the “benevolent” control of a certain group of mostly white and male techno handicraft working nerds. And that they shape a practise of their own which destines most of the hackerspaces of today. (It is hard to understand that there are hackerspaces in certain parts of the US that don’t have a single African-American or Latino member.
But we’d like to keep our European smugness to ourselves. We have to look at our oh-so-multicultural hacker scene in Europe and ask ourselves if hackers with a migrant background from Turkey or North-African states are represented in numbers one would expect from their percentage of the population. Or simply count your women representation and see if they make 50% of your members.)
As such, we find today’s hackerspaces excluding a lot of ethnical and social groups that don’t seem to fit in or maybe feel so and are scared by the white male nerd dominance, their (maybe) sexist or exclusionist jokes or whatever might be contributed to them. Or perhaps they don’t have the proper skills to communicate and/or cooperate with the packs of geeky guys (or at least they might think so).
What is needed is the non-repressive inclusion of all the groups marginalized by a bourgeois society just as it had been the intention of the first hackerspaces in countercultural history. If we accept the Marxian idea that the very nature of politics is always in the interest of those acting, hackerspace politics are for now in the interest of white middle-class males. This needs to change.

▻http://www.monochrom.at/hacking-the-spaces

#timewarp Nigel #Thrift, géographe, professeur à #Warwick, était invité l’année dernière de la FING. Il a parlé des #villessensibles en le liant au #réalismespéculatif.

Aujourd’hui, les villes et les régions métropolitaines représentent 2 % de la surface de la planète et 53 % de la population. En 2050, 75 % de la population mondiale vivra en ville. Les villes participent de 20 % de la production mondiale et de 75 % de la production de CO². Cet assemblage de gens, d’objets, de flux de transports produit un nouvel environnement urbain qui se distingue des précédents par un changement d’ordre qualitatif et quantitatif. “Les mégalopoles mondiales sont devenues un énorme conglomérat d’objets que nous avons du mal à nous représenter, tant et si bien que dans ces villes, l’être humain ne semble plus le seul acteur réel et le monde des objets commence à y occuper une place centrale. A mesure que les villes se sont agrégées les unes aux autres, des effets ont émergé qui ne sont pas seulement la somme des parties.”

Les villes sensibles sont nées dans les années 20, dans l’esprit d’auteurs de Science Fiction comme Wells et Lovecraft, estime Nigel Thrift, qui les premiers ont montré ce que pouvait être une ville douée de sentiments. Et prolongé par une autre vague d’auteurs de SF des années 70, qui ont interrogé les architectures urbaines parallèles. Ces villes sensibles sont caractérisées par 5 tendances communes à tous les écrivains qui se sont intéressés au sujet, estime le géographe :

La prévalence des données. Les informations sont en croissance exponentielle. Pourtant, ce n’est pas leur richesse, mais l’intensité analytique qu’elles produisent qui est capitale, même si jusqu’à présent ce sont plutôt les gens du marketing qui les ont le plus exploité.
L’autoréférence. Les règles d’associations entre les données produisent d’autres données et calculs hybrides animés eux-mêmes de leur propre vie.
L’interaction machine machine. Les processus d’activités se passent désormais des humains. Brian Arthur a parlé de deuxième économie, qui constitue “la couche de neurones de l’économie physique”. “Certes, l’économie numérique ne va pas faire mon lit ou me servir mon jus d’orange, mais c’est elle qui exécute les opérations bancaires, les calculs de conception, guide désormais les opérations de chirurgie…”
La profusion des capteurs. Non seulement il y a de plus en plus de capteurs, mais ceux-ci évoluent également. Le signal ou le mouvement ne sont plus qu’un des multiples domaines sensoriels par lesquels les objets captent notre environnement.
“La croissance d’un environnement qui propose de créer des retours d’information créant sans arrêt des contenus permet de créer pour chaque objet des cartes qui évoluent sans cesse”. Les quatre éléments précédents créent de véritables systèmes opérationnels urbains qui permettent d’envisager demain de produire des villes intégrées d’information, des modèles urbains exportables partout, à l’image des projets de villes intelligentes…

►http://www.internetactu.net/2012/10/11/les-villes-sensibles-seront-elles-animees-de-sentiments

http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img/upload/2013/02/05/times_square/largest.jpg

Sur le « pouvoir » des cartes : Dr. Mark Graham (PHD au OII, Oxford Internet Institute) explique comment l’Internet renforce les inégalités existantes dans le monde.

On these maps of digital information, a familiar trend is emerging. Some places are covered much more densely with information than others (Manhattan compared to upstate New York, Europe compared to Africa). But that information density bears no direct relationship to the density of human populations. And the gap between these two metrics provides a new way of looking at old questions of inequality.

Every technological innovation today around a new smart-phone app or web platform improving quality of life in cities comes with a caveat. What about the people who can’t access those tools? What about the people on the other side of the digital divide who lack access to home computers, Internet connections, unlimited data plans? These are the people who go “unmapped” in the geoweb.

Researchers like Graham struggle to measure this effect, in part because our concept of a static map is disappearing. Today, online maps are dynamic: They appear differently depending on when you view them, or where you view them from, or whether or not you’re logged into gmail while you do it. It’s increasingly hard, Graham says, “to get the sort of God’s eye view that you traditionally have when looking at a map of what’s out there and what’s being both produced and represented."

Graham and University of Kentucky researcher Mathew Zook (among the academics behind the excellent Floating Sheep blog) have been trying to find ways to capture what’s out there – or, at least, Graham says, “what’s codified, indexed and out there.”

►http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2013/02/how-internet-reinforces-inequality-real-world/4602

Internet lore: The great GIF debate | The Economist
▻http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/02/internet-lore #GIF #GIFs #format #image

The main question seems to be whether an acronym’s coiner has the right to determine its pronunciation. Most of the time, speakers are happy to defer to inventors. The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format, designed to avoid patent and other disputes in the 1990s, stipulates in its specification document that its phonetic form is “ping”. Members of the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which spawned JPEG, have always insisted it be pronounced “jay-peg”. No one minds.

Except that JPEG is not the format’s proper name. In fact, the acronym refers to the compression algorithm, not the encapsulating file type, which is correctly known as JPEG Interchange Format. Or JIF.

Alors qu’une note du gouvernement américain vient de paraître et autorise l’usage des drones sur le sol américain pour lutter contre le terrorisme lié à Al Qaida, Asher J. Kohn, un étudiant en droit et artiste, a inventé un concept de ville ("Shura City") résistante aux attaques de drones.

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/51124b356bb3f78a75000026-400-254/screen-shot-2013-02-06-at-7.18.40-am.jpg

If we built communities designed to counter surveillance and targeted drone strikes, then all the new and upcoming, super expensive drones would be worthless hunks of metal.
Kelsey Atherton of Popular Science describes “Shura City” basically as a possible end to the current, and for the foreseeable future, preferred means for often unaccountable leaders to wage war.

From PopSci:
[Shura City’s] design [is] for the warfare of our time, in which the United States favors sending robots, over people, to hunt down small groups or individuals.
Kohn imagines a few simple ideas aimed at preventing a “lock” on target. Just about any American has watched an episode of cops where infrared technology helped police find that elusive night-time runner — well Kohn’s design renders drones blind.

▻http://www.businessinsider.com/drone-proof-community-shura-city-asher-j-kohn-law-student-2013-2
#drones #shuracity #USA

New York Times Infographics and data visualizations | Small labs Inc.
►http://www.smallmeans.com/new-york-times-infographics

Il y a des trésors dans cette collection.

New York Times Infographics An overdose of numbers.

Very few newspapers have a team dedicated to data visualization and information design. Even fewer roll them out as consistently and on a tight schedule as the The New York Times. Being an infovis nut (and much less of a news junkie) I rarely visit NYT’s front page and found my self stumbling upon these graphics long after they were published. I created this page as a resource to satiate my data visualization hunger (and hopefully, yours too).