PJH Studios

Category: Technology

Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.

  • A physicist solves the City equation

    Geoffrey West, a physicist, set out to study cities and urban growth and find variables for growth and decline. Consuming massive amounts of data, he discovered cities are governed by Laws, just like physics.

    After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars.

    Cities grow like organisms:

    The correspondence was obvious to West: he saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly defined by its infrastructure. (The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.) This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do. After analyzing the first sets of city data — the physicists began with infrastructure and consumption statistics — they concluded that cities looked a lot like elephants. In city after city, the indicators of urban “metabolism,” like the number of gas stations or the total surface area of roads, showed that when a city doubles in size, it requires an increase in resources of only 85 percent.

    Why do people move to cities?

    In essence, they arrive at the sensible conclusion that cities are valuable because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”

  • Kevin Kelly – What Technology Wants

    In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly views technology’s evolution from multiple perspectives–the anthropologist, the sociologist, the evolutionary biologist, the technologist and the futurist. Using these perspectives, he examines his core thesis: technology is an extension of our abilities.

    Broken into four sections, Origins, Imperatives, Choices and Directions he combines ideas from various disciplines with stories, documented history and deconstruction of facts. In Origins, evolutionary biology and anthropology explain humans and human interaction with technology. We began as a very simple species, and we adopted tools as we needed them. As homo sapiens evolved, our needs became more complex.

    Throughout Imperatives, he documents history and science with sociology in mind–how does technology affect us as it progresses? How do we reconcile our needs and abilities as humans adapt and grow into higher order civilizations? Technology comes from lower order needs, desiring of higher order abilities.

    Choices begins with Kelly stating that the Unabomber was right. Quoted at length from his manifesto, the Unabomber disdained technology due to it taking over our lives and growing beyond our control. Kelly points out the flaws in the manifesto somewhat cautiously–humans are incapable of fully living without technology. The Unabomber relied on others for tools and materials.

    The last two chapters consist of Kelly’s futurist, philosopher take on where technology is going. At length, he charts Technology’s Trajectories among 10 different areas: complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, freedom, mutualism, beauty, sentience, structure, evolvability. These areas are the same areas that life itself works within, he states. Lastly, in a nod to James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, Kelly believes that our relationship with technology and ideas will constantly push boundaries and seek ways to grow in order to continue.

    In short, this book is full of ideas and perspectives. One particularly interesting idea he proposes is how many geniuses missed out on fully reaching their potential because they weren’t alive at the right time in history? Further, once a technology is created, in never ceases to exist. It may become rare, but it will serve a niche. If you want to get the most out of What Technology Wants in the shortest amount of time, read the last two chapters. Read the entire book for a synthesis of numerous ideas converging at once.

  • Can technology end poverty?

    Kentaro Toyama worked at Microsoft Research India for several years leading research initiatives but also ICT4D, or Information and Communication Technologies for Development. ICT4D seeks to address global poverty with technology.

    He learned a few things while there.

    Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute.

    Just giving impoverished communities access to technology won’t help those communities. They need skills and literacies to operate the given technology. They heed to be shown how the technology will help them in their own environment with practical day to day uses.

    In every one of our projects, a technology’s effects were wholly dependent on the intention and capacity of the people handling it. The success of PC projects in schools hinged on supportive administrators and dedicated teachers. Microcredit processes with mobile phones worked because of effective microfinance organizations. Teaching farming practices through video required capable agriculture-extension officers and devoted nonprofit staff. In our most successful ICT4D projects, the partner organizations did the hard work of real development, and our role was simply to assist, and strengthen, their efforts with technology.

    How technology can address poverty? Look at how it’s widened.

    1. Access: Increase the access to technologies
    2. Capability: Everyone has the same skill level
    3. Motivation: How to apply the technologies and skills to relevant situations

  • Processed war photography

    Brian Barrel of Gizmodo spots Hipstamatic photos on the NY Times front page.

    When NYT photog Damon Winter went to northern Afghanistan to catalog the efforts of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division, he took all the fancy camera equipment you would expect. He’d shoot video of firefights with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, sure. But he also grabbed still photos using Hipstamatic, an app that lets you choose among a huge selection of filters…

    As he notes, this isn’t the first time a Hipstamatic photograph has been published by a major publication. The publishing of such photos is significant for the following reasons:

    • It’s not the gear you have, it’s the gear you have at the time.
    • Editorializing/editing of photos for publication

    Chase Jarvis preaches that The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You. Sure, you can lug two Canon 5Ds, one with a 35mm prime and another with a 28-200mm 2.8 zoom, and with that weight you’re going to get quality shots. But the iPhone (and other cell phone cameras) with various apps for editing and processing photos, is making the investment in gear moot. In the case of war photography, the thought of a photographer following a platoon with only an iPhone seems comical, however, in a connected era, telling the story as it happens or as soon as it happens becomes paramount. The work flow–take picture, edit as needed, upload to photo desk–to do this now can happen in minutes. Photographers of the Civil War didn’t have that work flow capability.

    The instant work flow, coupled with the photo editing apps in an iPhone, a photographer can file a photo that has a distinct, editorial feel. Photographers who know their craft can capture photos in camera without any editing, but normally, photos edited beyond basic cropping and dodging and burning receive the note “photo illustration.” So what’s being illustrated? The story or what photographer or the editor wants the story to be or the reader to feel? This is a tricky line, a line that photojournalism has always run against. Photography is an art to evoke feeling, and photojournalism is an art to capture events to evoke feeling. As one Gizmodo commenter, OrtizDupri, states,

    I can guarantee you, nothing I saw in my 16 months in Iraq looked like the view through a Lomo or Holga camera. The reality of war isn’t meant to be vintage colors and soft edges.

  • Long held beliefs eventually disproven

    Richard Thaler, a behavioral economist and research, issued a call for previous held beliefs that were eventually disproved, and for extra credit, why were they held for so long.

    Lots of good examples from a wide array of smart folks (Nicholas Carr, Howard Gardner, Clay Shirky and many many others). Some are obvious (gravity! flat Earth!) while others are arcane (prions/prions?).

  • Light painting with an iPad

    To do light painting well, it takes , planning, coordination and patience. Achieved with long exposures and a bright, glowing source of light moving in front of a camera, cool things can happen. But what if you could program your light source to emit patterns of light? That’s about what you get below.

    Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

  • Lost World’s Fairs

    Lost World’s Fairs show cases how damn awesome HTML5 is in the hands of a capable designer. Initially, the project came about when Microsoft asked the designers to showcase Internet Explorer 9’s support for WOFF.

    Says Jason Santa Maria:

    Today marks the beta launch of Internet Explorer 9. To celebrate the release, Nishant Kothary from the MIX Online team at Microsoft reached out to me to help showcase its support of WOFF.

    Atlantis is the most clever of the trio, using page scrolling to the effect of traveling down, down, down to the ocean floor.

  • The Wilderness Downtown

    The Arcade Fire released their second video for their latest album The Suburbs with, The Wilderness Downtown.  It’s a synthesis of web technology, music and video to create an experience.  It uses HTML 5 to drive much of video so for now Google Chrome or Safari 5 are the only browsers that can play it fully.  (Firefox can, albeit somewhat lacking).

    Before the video begins, you’re asked to enter the street you grew up on, and then the video begins to load.  In the video, multiple screens pop up, one with video of a unisex person running through a suburban street and other windows playing animations.  You’ll write a message to your younger self, and that address you entered will appear as a Google Earth flyover.

    This isn’t their first foray into viral, interactive videos.  With their last album, they released a web video, Neon Biblethat let you interact with Win Butler’s hands.

  • iPad a tool to help those with autism

    Random, assorted specification lists can’t prepare for possibilities like this. A family in California is finding that their son with severe autism may be benefiting from interactions with an iPad.

    So when Leo took it in his small hands as if it were an old friend, and, with almost no training, whizzed through its apps like a technology virtuoso, his mother gasped in amazement.

    Scientific studies are still new but promising.

    So far, only one study is looking at the newer iPad. “Touch Technologies in the Classroom” is under way at Beverly Junior Public School in Toronto. Rhonda McEwen, an assistant professor at the iSchool at the University of Toronto who is running the study, introduced iPods and iPads into six classrooms of autistic students at the school in February.

    McEwen is still gathering data, but she says the feedback from a initial round of teacher interviews has been largely positive. One teacher said students’ attention spans seemed to be lengthening. Another had tears in her eyes when she explained that she had been working with a boy for two years, unsure of whether he understood language. “With the iPod, for the first time, he was able to demonstrate that he did understand,” McEwen says.

  • Susan Orlean discusses the iPad

    Susan Orlean discusses, at length with Glenn Fleishman, her use of an iPad. She candidly describes her use with the insight of an anthropologist–observant not only on the physical, but the social and much broader social contexts:

    And while you can do that with your phone, it is so much more visual, and almost tactile and alive doing through the window, the iPad. And that’s how I feel. I just feel like it’s a window. Literally, it even looks like a window.