Via BLDGBLOG

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de noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)

When I walked out to get breakfast this morning, clouds had obscured all but the topmost workings of the 1 World Trade Center site, visible through our living room window—a strange vision of machines, pulleys, cranes, and gears sort of hovering in the sky, like something out of Archigram by way of Hayao Miyazaki.

Via MIT Technology Review

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By Jessica Leber

A man had data mined himself so he can fund an app that helps others sell their own personal data.

Software developer Federico Zannier has data-mined himself, and now he’s raising money on Kickstarter to build an iPhone app and Chrome browser extension so that others can easily do the same.

Fork over $2 to the campaign and you get a day’s worth of the 1.5 gigabytes of text and 30,000 photos he’s collected from his online activities since February. That means a fun-filled 24-hours of websites, screenshots, webcam images, cursor movements, app logs, and GPS locations he’s tracked. 

Is it a bargain? No, not at all—and that’s his point.

Today, companies on the web track him and everyone else and make billions selling the data. By violating his own privacy, as he puts it, he hopes that he can collect some of this value.

“If more people do the same, I’m thinking marketers could just pay us directly for our data. It might sound crazy, but so is giving all our data away for free,” he writes.

Zannier is not the first to dream up such an idea (see “A Dollar for Your Data”). One problem is that the data isn’t worth much on its own to marketers. They want to buy in bulk. That’s why Facebook and Google can make so much money. They can group people together that marketers want to reach.

So though its hard to imagine what his data is good for on its own, already with 68 backers he’s exceeded his modest funding goal of $500 for his project. If he’s successful in getting lots of people to use his data mining app, though, maybe he’ll become the next of the big data brokers.

MIT Technology Review is now exploring the issues Zannier raises in this month’s Business Report series “Big Data Gets Personal.” These articles discuss one important point that gets lost when people like Zannier dicuss their dissatisifaction with giving away their data for free: Though people are giving up more of their data than ever before, they are also getting more and more value back (see “The Data Made Me Do It.”).

fabric | ch - personal comment:

More and more societal questions around data... In this case, a new "business model": opening up one's own personal data (you are the product!), possibly crowd fund a mining system that would gather them from other people who act in the same way and do at best a fraction of the mining job Facebook or others could do, then get financially rewarded for breaking up one's own privacy... Instead of big corps. who do the same.

Via MIT Technology Review

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The creator of the Wolfram Alpha search engine explains why he thinks your life should be measured, analyzed, and improved.

By Antonio Regalado

Personal control: Stephen Wolfram created the search engine Wolfram Alpha

Don’t be surprised if Stephen Wolfram, the renowned complexity theorist, software company CEO, and night owl, wants to schedule a work call with you at 9 p.m. In fact, after a decade of logging every phone call he makes, Wolfram knows the exact probability he’ll be on the phone with someone at that time: 39 percent.

Wolfram, a British-born physicist who earned a doctorate at age 20, is obsessed with data and the rules that explain data. He is the creator of the software Mathematica and of Wolfram Alpha, the nerdy “computational knowledge engine” that can tell you the distance to the moon right now, in units including light-seconds.

Now Wolfram wants to apply the same techniques to people’s personal data, an idea he calls “personal analytics.” He started with himself. In a blog post last year, Wolfram disclosed and analyzed a detailed record of his life stretching back three decades, including documents, hundreds of thousands of e-mails, and 10 years of computer keystrokes, a tally of which is e-mailed to him each morning so he can track his productivity the day before.

Last year, his company released its first consumer product in this vein, called “Personal Analytics for Facebook.” In under a minute, the software generates a detailed study of a person’s relationships and behavior on the site. My own report was revealing enough. It told me which friend lives at the highest latitude (Wicklow, Ireland) and the lowest (Brisbane, Australia), the percentage who are married (76.7 percent), and everyone’s local time. More of my friends are Scorpios than any other sign of the zodiac.

It looks just like a dashboard for your life, which Wolfram says is exactly the point. In a phone call that was recorded and whose start and stop time was entered into Wolfram’s life log, he discussed why personal analytics will make people more efficient at work and in their personal lives.

What do you typically record about yourself?

E-mails, documents, and normally, if I was in front of my computer, it would be recording keystrokes. I have a motion sensor for the room that records when I pace up and down. Also a pedometer, and I am trying to get an eye-tracking system set up, but I haven’t done that yet. Oh, and I’ve been wearing a sensor to measure my posture.

Do you think that you’re the most quantified person on the planet?

I couldn’t imagine that that was the case until maybe a year ago, when I collected together a bunch of this data and wrote a blog post on it. I was expecting that there would be people who would come forward and say, “Gosh, I’ve got way more than you.” But nobody’s come forward. I think by default that may mean I’m it, so to speak.

You coined this term “personal analytics.” What does it mean?

There’s organizational analytics, which is looking at an organization and trying to understand what the data says about its operation. Personal analytics is what you can figure out applying analytics to the person, to understand the operation of the person.

Why have you been analyzing Facebook data?

We are trying to feel out the market for personal analytics. Most people are not recording all their keystrokes like I am. But the one thing they are doing is leaving lots of digital trails, including on Facebook, and that is one of the pieces we’ve been experimenting with.

We’ve accumulated a lot of Facebook data—you’re seeing the story of people’s lives, played out in the level of data. You can see relationship status as a function of age, or the evolution of the clustering of friends at different ages. It’s really quite fascinating to see how all this stuff is just right there in the data.

Social grid: People’s friend networks on Facebook are presented as cluster diagrams.

Isn’t a lot of what you find kind of obvious? Like friends from college aren’t connected to the ones from grammar school?

Yes, but then you get a case where the data analysis is buggy. You get some curve, and your reaction is, “Oh, yeah, I understand why the curve is that way, I’ve got an argument for it.” But then, oops, there was a bug in the analysis and actually the curve is something different. That reminds you things aren’t quite so obvious. If you actually measure it, that’s doing science.

What’s the connection to the search engine you built?

Right now Wolfram Alpha is strong on public knowledge: accumulating and searching the knowledge of the civilization. But what you have to do in personal analytics is try to accumulate the knowledge of a person’s life. Then the two can actually be integrated, and I’ll give a kind of silly example. You might ask: “Who do I know that can go out into their backyard and go and look at the night sky right now?” For that you have to be able to compute who is in nighttime, who doesn’t have cloudy weather, and things like this. And we can compute all that stuff.

What do you see as the big applications in personal analytics?

Augmented memory is going to be very important. I’ve been spoiled because for years I’ve had the ability to search my e-mail and all my other records. I’ve been the CEO of the same company for 25 years, and so I never changed jobs and lost my data. That’s something that I think people will just come to expect. Pure memory augmentation is probably the first step.

The next is preëmptive information delivery. That means knowing enough about people’s history to know what they’re going to care about. Imagine someone is reading a newspaper article, and we know there is a person mentioned in it that they went to high school with, and so we can flag it. I think that’s the sort of thing it’s possible to dramatically automate and make more efficient.

Then there will be a certain segment of the population that will be into the self-improvement side of things, using analytics to learn about ourselves. Because we may have a vague sense about something, but when the pattern is explicit, we can decide, “Do we like that behavior, do we not?” Very early on, back in the 1990s, when I first analyzed my e-mail archive, I learned that a lot of e-mail threads at my company would, by a certain time of day, just resolve themselves. That was a useful thing to know, because if I jumped in too early I was just wasting my time.

What technologies are needed to do personal analytics at a large scale?

It’s data science and the whole cluster of technologies that come with that. Then it’s having computational knowledge about the world and being able to make queries in natural language. Then you need to sense things about the world, whether it’s with sensors or being able to do visual recognition to know what one is seeing. Then the final thing is just all the plumbing infrastructure to get all of these devices to communicate and feed their information to a place where one can do analysis.

Where do you stand on commercializing these ideas?

The personal analytics of Facebook for Wolfram Alpha is a deployed project, and there will be more of those in the personal-analytics space. We think we can do terrific things, but you have to be able to get to the data. That has been the holdup. The data isn’t readily available. Recently we’ve been working with different companies to try and make sure we can connect their sensors to kind of a generic analytics platform, to take people’s data, move it to the cloud, and do analytics on it.

How much better do you think that people or organizations can become with some data feedback?

I think it will be fairly dramatic. It’s like asking how much more money can you make if you track your portfolio rather than just vaguely remembering what investments you made.

Via Slash Gear via Computed·Blg

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We’ve been hearing a lot about Google‘s self-driving car lately, and we’re all probably wanting to know how exactly the search giant is able to construct such a thing and drive itself without hitting anything or anyone. A new photo has surfaced that demonstrates what Google’s self-driving vehicles see while they’re out on the town, and it looks rather frightening.

The image was tweeted by Idealab founder Bill Gross, along with a claim that the self-driving car collects almost 1GB of data every second (yes, every second). This data includes imagery of the cars surroundings in order to effectively and safely navigate roads. The image shows that the car sees its surroundings through an infrared-like camera sensor, and it even can pick out people walking on the sidewalk.

Of course, 1GB of data every second isn’t too surprising when you consider that the car has to get a 360-degree image of its surroundings at all times. The image we see above even distinguishes different objects by color and shape. For instance, pedestrians are in bright green, cars are shaped like boxes, and the road is in dark blue.

However, we’re not sure where this photo came from, so it could simply be a rendering of someone’s idea of what Google’s self-driving car sees. Either way, Google says that we could see self-driving cars make their way to public roads in the next five years or so, which actually isn’t that far off, and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is even interested in developing self-driving cars as well. However, they certainly don’t come without their problems, and we’re guessing that the first batch of self-driving cars probably won’t be in 100% tip-top shape.

Via MIT Technology Review

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New electronic tattoos could help monitor health during normal daily activities.

By Mike Orcutt on March 11, 2013

Electronic tattoo: The image shows a colorized micrograph of an ultrathin mesh electronic system mounted on a skin replica.

Taking advantage of recent advances in flexible electronics, researchers have devised a way to “print” devices directly onto the skin so people can wear them for an extended period while performing normal daily activities. Such systems could be used to track health and monitor healing near the skin’s surface, as in the case of surgical wounds.

So-called “epidermal electronics” were demonstrated previously in research from the lab of John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the devices consist of ultrathin electrodes, electronics, sensors, and wireless power and communication systems. In theory, they could attach to the skin and record and transmit electrophysiological measurements for medical purposes. These early versions of the technology, which were designed to be applied to a thin, soft elastomer backing, were “fine for an office environment,” says Rogers, “but if you wanted to go swimming or take a shower they weren’t able to hold up.” Now, Rogers and his coworkers have figured out how to print the electronics right on the skin, making the device more durable and rugged.

“What we’ve found is that you don’t even need the elastomer backing,” Rogers says. “You can use a rubber stamp to just deliver the ultrathin mesh electronics directly to the surface of the skin.” The researchers also found that they could use commercially available “spray-on bandage” products to add a thin protective layer and bond the system to the skin in a “very robust way,” he says.

Eliminating the elastomer backing makes the device one-thirtieth as thick, and thus “more conformal to the kind of roughness that’s present naturally on the surface of the skin,” says Rogers. It can be worn for up to two weeks before the skin’s natural exfoliation process causes it to flake off.

During the two weeks that it’s attached, the device can measure things like temperature, strain, and the hydration state of the skin, all of which are useful in tracking general health and wellness. One specific application could be to monitor wound healing: if a doctor or nurse attached the system near a surgical wound before the patient left the hospital, it could take measurements and transmit the information wirelessly to the health-care providers.

Rogers says his lab is now focused on developing and refining wireless power sources and communication systems that could be integrated into the system. He says the technology could potentially be commercialized by MC10 (see “Making Stretchable Electronics”), a company he cofounded in 2008. If things go as planned, says Rogers, in about a year and half the company will be developing more sophisticated systems “that really do begin to look like the ones that we’re publishing on now.”

Via MIT technology Review

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As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself. 

Here’s an interesting idea. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. That has produced an exponential increase in the number of transistors on microchips and continues to do so.

But if an observer today was to measure this rate of increase, it would be straightforward to extrapolate backwards and work out when the number of transistors on a chip was zero. In other words, the date when microchips were first developed in the 1960s.

A similar process works with scientific publications. Between 1990 and 1960, they doubled in number every 15 years or so. Extrapolating this backwards gives the origin of scientific publication as 1710, about the time of Isaac Newton.

Today, Alexei Sharov at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore and his mate Richard Gordon at the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, have taken a similar to complexity and life.

These guys argue that it’s possible to measure the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish and finally mammals. That produces a clear exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law although in this case the doubling time is 376 million years rather than two years.

That raises an interesting question. What happens if you extrapolate backwards to the point of no complexity–the origin of life?

Sharov and Gordon say that the evidence by this measure is clear. “Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago,” they say.

And since the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, that raises a whole series of other questions. Not least of these is how and where did life begin.

Of course, there are many points to debate in this analysis. The nature of evolution is filled with subtleties that most biologists would agree we do not yet fully understand.

For example, is it reasonable to think that the complexity of life has increased at the same rate throughout Earth’s history? Perhaps the early steps in the origin of life created complexity much more quickly than evolution does now, which will allow the timescale to be squeezed into the lifespan of the Earth.

Sharov and Gorden reject this argument saying that it is suspiciously similar to arguments that squeeze the origin of life into the timespan outlined in the biblical Book of Genesis.

Let’s suppose for a minute that these guys are correct and ask about the implications of the idea. They say there is good evidence that bacterial spores can be rejuvenated after many millions of years, perhaps stored in ice.

They also point out that astronomers believe that the Sun formed from the remnants of an earlier star, so it would be no surprise that life from this period might be preserved in the gas, dust and ice clouds that remained. By this way of thinking, life on Earth is a continuation of a process that began many billions of years earlier around our star’s forerunner.

Sharov and Gordon say their interpretation also explains the Fermi paradox, which raises the question that if the universe is filled with intelligent life, why can’t we see evidence of it.

However, if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with humans, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilisation in our galaxy. And this is the reason why when we gaze into space, we do not yet see signs of other intelligent species.

There’s no question that this is a controversial idea that will ruffle more than a few feathers amongst evolutionary theorists.

But it is also provocative, interesting and exciting. All the more reason to debate it in detail.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381: Life Before Earth

Via MIT Technology Review

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Smart grid technology has been implemented in many places, but Florida’s new deployment is the first full-scale system.

By Kevin Bullis on May 2, 2013

Smart power: Andrew Brown, an engineer at Florida Power & Light, monitors equipment in one of the utility’s smart grid diagnostic centers.

The first comprehensive and large scale smart grid is now operating. The $800 million project, built in Florida, has made power outages shorter and less frequent, and helped some customers save money, according to the utility that operates it.

Smart grids should be far more resilient than conventional grids, which is important for surviving storms, and make it easier to install more intermittent sources of energy like solar power (see “China Tests a Small Smart Electric Grid” and “On the Smart Grid, a Watt Saved Is a Watt Earned”). The Recovery Act of 2009 gave a vital boost to the development of smart grid technology, and the Florida grid was built with $200 million from the U.S. Department of Energy made available through the Recovery Act.

Dozens of utilities are building smart grids—or at least installing some smart grid components, but no one had put together all of the pieces at a large scale. Florida Power & Light’s project incorporates a wide variety of devices for monitoring and controlling every aspect of the grid, not just, say, smart meters in people’s homes.

“What is different is the breadth of what FPL’s done,” says Eric Dresselhuys, executive vice president of global development at Silver Spring Networks, a company that’s setting up smart grids around the world, and installed the network infrastructure for Florida Power & Light (see “Headed into an IPO, Smart Grid Company Struggles for Profit”).

Many utilities are installing smart meters—Pacific Gas & Electric in California has installed twice as many as FPL, for example. But while these are important, the flexibility and resilience that the smart grid promises depends on networking those together with thousands of sensors at key points in the grid— substations, transformers, local distribution lines, and high voltage transmission lines. (A project in Houston is similar in scope, but involves half as many customers, and covers somewhat less of the grid.)

In FPL’s system, devices at all of these places are networked—data jumps from device to device until it reaches a router that sends it back to the utility—and that makes it possible to sense problems before they cause an outage, and to limit the extent and duration of outages that still occur (see “The Challenges of Big Data on the Smart Grid”). The project involved 4.5 million smart meters and over 10,000 other devices on the grid.

The project was completed just last week, so data about the impact of the whole system isn’t available yet. But parts of the smart grid have been operating for a year or more, and there are examples of improved operation. Customers can track their energy usage by the hour using a website that organizes data from smart meters. This helped one customer identify a problem with his air conditioner, says Brian Olnick, vice president of smart grid solutions at Florida Power & Light, when he saw a jump in electricity consumption compared to the previous year in similar weather.

The meters have also cut the duration of power outages. Often power outages are caused by problems within a home, like a tripped circuit breaker. Instead of dispatching a crew to investigate, which could take hours, it is possible to resolve the issue remotely. That happened 42,000 times last year, reducing the duration of outages by about two hours in each case, Olnick says.

The utility also installed sensors that can continually monitor gases produced by transformers to “determine whether the transformer is healthy, is becoming sick, or is about to experience an outage,” says Mark Hura, global smart grid commercial leader at GE, which makes the sensor.

Ordinarily, utilities only check large transformers once every six months or less, he says. The process involves taking an oil sample and sending it to the lab. In one case this year, the new sensor system identified an ailing transformer in time to prevent a power outage that could have affected 45,000 people. Similar devices allowed the utility to identify 400 ailing neighborhood-level transformers before they failed.

Smart grid technology is having an impact elsewhere. After Hurricane Sandy, sensors helped utility workers in some areas restore power faster than in others. One problem smart grids address is nested power outages—when smaller problems are masked by an outage that hits a large area. In a conventional system, after utility workers fix the larger problem, it can take hours for them to realize that a downed line has cut off power to a small area. With the smart grid, utility workers can ping sensors at smart meters or power lines before they leave an area, identifying these smaller outages.

And smart grid devices are helping utilities identify problems that could otherwise go misdiagnosed for years. In Chicago, for example, new voltage monitors indicated that a neighborhood was getting the wrong voltage, a problem that could wear out appliances. The fix took a few minutes.

As more renewable energy is installed, the smart grid will make it easier for utilities to keep the lights on. Without local sensors, it’s difficult for them to know how much power is coming from solar panels—or how much backup they need to have available in case clouds roll in and that power drops.

But whether the nearly $1 billion investment in smart grid infrastructure will pay for itself remains to be seen. The DOE is preparing reports on the impact of the technology to be published this year and next. Smart grid technology is also raising questions about security, since the networks could offer hackers new targets (see “Hacking the Smart Grid”).

fabric | ch - personal comment:

This is a good news! As many countries are now looking to build smart grids, let's hope that the first outcomes of this implementation will be positive.
Smart grids try to do for energy what the internet did for information, meaning that potentially everybody could produce clean energy and "share it" (if in excess or at certain times) through the grid. And monitor the usages, for the good and for the bad. We'll certainly see some sort of Google thing in the energy sector very soon. This might have huge impacts, especially for the renewable energies. The big problem with the "clean" approach remains about the way to efficiently store excess energy when it is not used, so to use it later when it will be.
Jeremy Rifkin describes in his last book, "The Third Industrial Revolution", how a more horizontal society that will be both based on information networks and energy networks could look like and though it is certainly a bit simplified in many aspects or omits counter examples, it is very exciting nonetheless!

Following the previous post about  Strange Utility: Architecture Toward Other Ends, the sympoisium organized in Portland, here is an interesting call for proposals that adresses similar questions, by Storefront fr Art & Architecture (for the AAA) in NYC: a competition of competitions.

As explained on Storefront's website:

"Given competitions operate in a confined space for experimentation, they have perpetuated and sometimes repeated ad nauseam a series of programmatic and social needs – from Museums to Concert Halls - without actually asking what needs of society architecture should aspire to serve.

This competition claims that the true desires of our present society are outside of the current taxonomy of competition briefs and that architects should be participants in the construction of the questions they are asked to answer."

And while we are speaking about NYC, another event that promiss to be interesting in the city: Ideas City 2013 with this year's theme Untapped Capital (organized --among others-- by Storefront for Art & Architecture, The Architectural League NY, The Cooper Union and The New Museum).

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Via Storefront for Art & Architecture

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COMPETITION OF COMPETITIONS

Redefining Briefs, Clients and Agents.

by Storefront for Art and Architecture for the AAAI!

“Association Against Architectural Irrelevance!” is a fictional association still to be founded that defends the role of architects in contemporary society. Via Storefront

Via MIT Technology Review

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By David Talbot on April 16, 2013

Storing video and other files more intelligently reduces the demand on servers in a data center.

Worldwide, data centers consume huge and growing amounts of electricity.

New research suggests that data centers could significantly cut their electricity usage simply by storing fewer copies of files, especially videos.

For now the work is theoretical, but over the next year, researchers at Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs and MIT plan to test the idea, with an eye to eventually commercializing the technology. It could be implemented as software within existing facilities. “This approach is a very promising way to improve the efficiency of data centers,” says Emina Soljanin, a researcher at Bell Labs who participated in the work. “It is not a panacea, but it is significant, and there is no particular reason that it couldn’t be commercialized fairly quickly.”

With the new technology, any individual data center could be expected to save 35 percent in capacity and electricity costs—about $2.8 million a year or $18 million over the lifetime of the center, says Muriel Médard, a professor at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, who led the work and recently conducted the cost analysis.

So-called storage area networks within data center servers rely on a tremendous amount of redundancy to make sure that downloading videos and other content is a smooth, unbroken experience for consumers. Portions of a given video are stored on different disk drives in a data center, with each sequential piece cued up and buffered on your computer shortly before it’s needed. In addition, copies of each portion are stored on different drives, to provide a backup in case any single drive is jammed up. A single data center often serves millions of video requests at the same time.

The new technology, called network coding, cuts way back on the redundancy without sacrificing the smooth experience. Algorithms transform the data that makes up a video into a series of mathematical functions that can, if needed, be solved not just for that piece of the video, but also for different parts. This provides a form of backup that doesn’t rely on keeping complete copies of the data. Software at the data center could simply encode the data as it is stored and decode it as consumers request it.

Médard’s group previously proposed a similar technique for boosting wireless bandwidth (see “A Bandwidth Breakthrough”). That technology deals with a different problem: wireless networks waste a lot of bandwidth on back-and-forth traffic to recover dropped portions of a signal, called packets. If mathematical functions describing those packets are sent in place of the packets themselves, it becomes unnecessary to re-send a dropped packet; a mobile device can solve for the missing packet with minimal processing. That technology, which improves capacity up to tenfold, is currently being licensed to wireless carriers, she says.

Between the electricity needed to power computers and the air conditioning required to cool them, data centers worldwide consume so much energy that by 2020 they will cause more greenhouse-gas emissions than global air travel, according to the consulting firm McKinsey.

Smarter software to manage them has already proved to be a huge boon (see “A New Net”). Many companies are building data centers that use renewable energy and smarter energy management systems (see “The Little Secrets Behind Apple’s Green Data Centers”). And there are a number of ways to make chips and software operate more efficiently (see “Rethinking Energy Use in Data Centers”). But network coding could make a big contribution by cutting down on the extra disk drives—each needing energy and cooling—that cloud storage providers now rely on to ensure reliability.

This is not the first time that network coding has been proposed for data centers. But past work was geared toward recovering lost data. In this case, Médard says, “we have considered the use of coding to improve performance under normal operating conditions, with enhanced reliability a natural by-product.”

fabric | ch - personal comment:

Still a link in the context of our workshop at the Tsinghua University and related to data storage at large.
The link between energy, algorithms and data storage made obvious. To be read in parallel with the previous repost from Kazys Varnelis, Into the Cloud (with zombies).
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In the same idea, another piece of code that could cut flight delays and therefore cut approx $1.2 million in annual crew costs and $5 million in annual fuel savings to a midsized airline...

Via ArchDaily

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Taking place April 26-27, the ‘Strange Utility: Architecture Toward Other Ends’ Symposium will explore the following provocative questions: How is architecture’s use value defined, and by whom? How can turning to other disciplines’ unexpected utilization of architecture expand our perception of its utility? And what are the future utilities of architecture? Today, the idea of architecture’s utility is perhaps more diverse than ever, as architecture commonly mingles with other disciplines, and as new typologies of building design emerge almost daily. Organized by Portland State University School of Architecture, three keynote speakers—Philippe Rahm, Jimenez Lai and Jill Stoner—as well as eleven notable architects, artists and academics will participate. More information after the break.

Grouped into three sessions, the symposium begins on Friday, April 26 at 4 pm in Shattuck Hall Annex with an exploration of architecture and the arts, with a keynote speech by Jimenez Lai, Leader of Chicago-based Bureau Spectacular, an architect and graphic novelist. Discussions of the role of art and design in the alternative utilization of architecture will follow. The evening concludes with a reception to celebrate the work of MacArthur award winning artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. The reception for Manglano-Ovalle’s exhibition, entitled “Always After (The Glass House)” will be held 7pm to 8:30pm at the Littman Gallery in Neuberger Hall. This exhibition will feature Always After (The Glass House) (2006), a film shot entirely on location at Crown Hall, Mies van der Rohe’s school of architecture on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus. The film-based work explores the complex legacy of Modern architecture through the artful manipulation of footage from the 2005 dedication of the building’s renovation, when the architect’s own grandson broke the windows of the iconic building with a sledgehammer.

The event continues the next day, April 27, at 9am with a session on the origins and history of utility in architecture, with a keynote presentation by Jill Stoner, Associate Professor at University of California, Berkeley, an architect, author and editor of Toward a Minor Architecture and Poems for Architects: An Anthology. The third and final session focuses on the unexpected utility of architecture in the urban setting, culminating in a keynote presentation by architect Philippe Rahm. Based in Paris, Rahm’s firm is internationally recognized and praised for their innovative approach to sustainable energy in the built environment, often to unexpected and artful ends.

Strange Utility: Architecture Toward Other Ends begins at 4pm Friday, April 26 and continues until 5pm Saturday, April 27, in the Shattuck Hall Annex at SW Broadway and Hall Street, Portland, Oregon. Tickets ($15 advance; $25 from April 23 onward) are available through the PSU Box Office.

For a full schedule, to register, and more information, please visit here.

fabric | ch - personal comment:

Very interesting symposium today and tomorrow in Portand, about "stange utility" in architecture.

Golan Levin during the “Computer vision in interactive arts” workshop. Photo courtesy of Resonate

 

A view of the Building Kluz, where many of the festival's performances took place. Photo courtesy of Resonate

 

Debate participants during the second day of the festival: Memo Akten, Rainer Kohlberger, Eno Henze and Shane Walter. Photo courtesy of Resonate

 

A view of Memo Atken's "How I learnt to stop worrying and love the drones" workshop. Photo courtesy of Resonate.

 

fabric | ch - personal comment:

A little report by Roberto Arista on Domusweb about the last and good Resonate conference that happened in Belgrade last March. With the talk of Alain Bellet that is head of the very good bachelor in Interaction Design at the ECAL, in Lausanne Switzerland (and occasionally, my "boss" too, as I'm teaching there as well)!

fabric | ch - personal comment:

Though we are not really in this line of thinking regarding what digital technologies means/will mean for architecture, an interesting "archeological" exhibition next May at the CCA about the rise of computation and algorithmic tools in architecture back in the late 1980ies and early 1990ies.
And an interesting discussion as well between Peter Eisenman and his former "apprentice", Greg Lynn.

Via Computed.Blg via Open Compute Project

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fabric | ch - personal comment:

The Open Compute Project is definitely an interesting one and the fact that it comes with open data about centers' consumption as well. Though, PUE and WUE should be questioned further to know if these are the right measures about the effectiveness of a data center.
I'm not a specialist here, but It seems to me that these values don't give an idea of the overall use of energy for a dedicated task (data and services hosting, remote computing), but just how efficient the center is (if it makes a good use or not or energy and water).
To resume it: I could spend a super large amount of energy and water, but if I do it in an efficient way, then my pue and wue will good and it will look ok on the paper and for the brand communication.
That's certainly a good start (better have a good pue and wue) and in fact all factories should publish such numbers, but it is probably not enough. How much energy for what type of service might or should become a crucial question in a close future, until we'll have an "abundance" of renewable ones!

Via Architecture Source via Archinect

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soundscraper. Source: eVolo 2013 Skyscraper Competition

Soundscrapers could soon turn urban noise pollution into usable energy to power cities.

An honourable mention-winning entry in the 2013 eVolo Skyscraper Competition, dubbed Soundscraper, looked into ways to convert the ambient noise in urban centres into a renewable energy form.

Noise pollution is currently a negative element of urban life but it could soon be valued and put to good use.

Acoustic architecture, or design to minimise noise, has long been an important facet of the architecture industry, but design aimed at maximising and capturing noise for beneficial reasons is an untapped area with great potential.

The Soundscraper concept is based around constructing the buildings near major highways and railroad junctions to capture noise vibrations and turn them into energy. The intensity and direction of urban noise dictates the vibrations captured by the building’s facade.

Covering a wide array of frequencies, everyday noise from trains, cars, planes and pedestrians would be picked up by 84,000 electro-active lashes covering a Soundscraper’s light metallic frame. Armed with Parametric Frequency Increased Generators (sound sensors) on the lashes, the vibrations would then be converted to kinetic energy through an energy harvester.

soundscraper. Source: eVolo 2013 Skyscraper Competition

 

The energy would be converted to electricity through transducer cells, at which point that power could be stored or sent to the grid for regular electricity usage.

The Soundscraper team of Julien Bourgeois, Savinien de Pizzol, Olivier Colliez, Romain Grouselle and Cédric Dounval estimate that 150 megawatts of energy could be produced from one Soundscraper, meaning that a single tower could produce enough energy to fuel 10 percent of Los Angeles’ lighting needs.

Constructing several 100-metre high Soundscrapers throughout a city near major motorways could help offset the electrical needs of the urban population. This form of renewable energy would also help lower the city’s CO2 emissions.

The energy-producing towers could become city landmarks and give interstitial spaces an important function. The electricity needs of an entire city could be met solely by Soundscrapers if enough were constructed at appropriate locations, also helping to minimise the city’s carbon footprint.