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Category: networks

Citizen Participation and Urban Monitoring

Two projects on citizen participation in local government, monitoring and maintenance of urban spaces:Fund for the City of New York’s ComNet:”ComNET, a program created by the Fund’s Center on Municipal Government Performance (CMGP), introduces easily operated hand-held computers to community organizations so that troublesome street level conditions can be recorded and tabulated quickly, easily and accurately.”Then reports are produced electronically for the government agencies and other organizations that are responsible for correcting the problems. Community representatives track how conditions change over time.”And exactly the same project in Connecticut:CityScan”City Scan is a project using cutting-edge technology to empower and involve citizens, of all ages, in local government.”In City Scan projects, citizens prioritize desired improvements to the physical environment of their community and gather information on how well government services deliver results.”On city streets, residents—from youth to seniors—collect data about neighborhood conditions (e.g. graffiti, potholes) with handheld computers, custom-designed software, wireless modems, Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receivers and digital cameras.”

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Urban Atmospheres

From their info page:”At the intersection of mobile and social computing, we seek to provoke discussion aimed at understanding this emerging space of computing within and across our public urban landscapes – Urban Computing.”While toting a laptop around a city may seem a like an example of such city computing, Urban Atmospheres research is more deeply concerned with addressing several sub-themes, including (but not limited to):”Place – What is the meaning of various public places?… How will navigation and movement, either throughout an entire city or within a small urban space, be influenced by the introduction of Urban Computing technology?”The single main research challenge of Urban Atmospheres research is to understand how this future fabric of digital and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent within our public urban landscapes.”Street TalkUrban Atmospheres held a good workshop in the summer of 2004, Street Talk.

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Parasitic Computing

From the site:”Parasitic computing is an example of a potential technology that could be viewed simultaneously as a threat or healthy addition to the online universe…. These protocols can be exploited to compute with the communication infrastructure, transforming the Internet into a distributed computer in which servers unwittingly perform computation on behalf of a remote node.

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A few Remote Display/Remote Data Projects

Window display driven by SMS messaging by IDEO TopTrack – identifies any song played at a volume loud enough to be picked up by the cell phone” target=”_other”>Blinkenlights – Architectural scale display using a cell phone to control display on the side of a building.The Internet Plug – a net-controlled AC relayCeiva’s net-connected picture framesSelf-Healing MinefieldsRadio taxi-artBitTaxi – The Bureau of Inverse Technology pubished data on how to reverse-engineer interactive taxi advertising banners…. More info is available on the BitTaxi wiki.

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BodyNet

This IBM research article describes using the human body as a transmission element in a data network (very personal area networking), and seems to pre-date this Microsoft patent by at least four years.There is more on this topic available at MIT, among others. Olin Shivers’ 1993 presentation on bodyNets is the earliest I’ve found so far.

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Air-TiVo?

The basic premise of it is that DAB is just transmission of a digital data stream, so there’s no reason you can’t put a hard drive in the radio (or just a bunch of RAM) and give it the radio a buffer, so you can pause the broadcast…. Would it be possible to combine the technologies in the Bug with a frequency scanner and create a sort of super Air-TiVo, that scans the airwaves for songs you’re interested in, and saves them when they’re played?

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